Spectres Across the Atlantic, c.1820-1940: Communicating with the Dead Over Space and Time

ABSTRACT

In Irish tradition it was believed that both the living and the dead might in certain circumstances appear at a distance from their bodies. This article considers occasions where such supernatural visitations happened close to the moment of the death. Deathbed apparitions or ‘crisis apparitions’ were reported widely in Europe and America, but have not been much explored by historians. In crisis apparition stories, the dying or just-dead person visited a neighbour, friend or close relative and a key feature was that the percipient would declare what they had seen, even before confirmation had arrived of the death. Accounts dating from between about the 1820s and 1940s provide the basis for an exploration of the crisis apparition both as reported in Ireland and among Irish people abroad. That many crisis apparitions communicated across the Atlantic reflects the anxieties of ‘exiles’ and their friends and families about death far from home, and this article also considers their role in bridging gaps in conventional communications. Accounts of supernatural leave-taking also travelled across time, offering insights about how storytelling assisted the processing of grief and the handing down of the dead over generations that are relevant to other contexts far beyond Ireland’s shores.

KEYWORDS:

• Omens
• apparitions
• emigration
• memory
• emotion

In April 1938, Mrs Higgins, aged 60, of Lisconney, Riverstown, Co Sligo, told Brighid M. Ní Ghamhnáin a story, ‘a perfectly thrue wan, for I know the people mesel that it happened to’. Brighid tried to represent Mrs Higgins’ way of speaking in her transcription for the Irish National Folklore Collection:

It seems this girl went to America, an' she didn’t part on too good a terms wit her mother, for the mother was never very anxious for her to go. So it was agin her will she went.

The girl it seems didn’t like writin’ home is long is the anger was up, so after a few yhears a’ not hearin’ from her people, she forgot about them altogether an’ she got married afther awhile.

She wasn’t long married anyway, when wan evenin’ is she was comin home, comin in on her own dure, she saw this auld woman sthandin in the hall, a very ould woman, wit a frilled cap, an’ a check apron on her, an’ the girl thought that she looked exactly like her mother. She went to move is far is her ta spake to her, but on the spot the ould woman vanished.

The girl decided to set aside her vexation and wrote home to ‘find out how her mother was’. A few weeks later she received a letter

tellin’ her, that her mother was dead, an’ they gave the date o’ the death an’ all, which was on the very day that the girl saw the old woman sthandin inside her dure, an’ they also tould her that the ould woman had wished a while before she died, that she could see her daughther wance agin.

An’ it seems her wish was granted.¹

This is an account of communication by and with the dead, but communication of a very particular kind. In Irish tradition it was widely believed that both the living and the dead might in certain circumstances appear at a distance from their bodies, either going about their own business, or looking to interact with members of their families and communities. This article considers occasions where such supernatural visitations happened close to the moment of death. These were not omens as such, since they did not forewarn, and not quite ghosts, in that they neither ‘haunted’ nor spoke, or at least spoke only very tersely (Irish ghosts tended to be quite vocal about what they wanted). Instead point-of-death, leave-taking or deathbed apparitions ‒ nineteenth-century ‘psychical researchers’, interested in probing reports of paranormal encounters, called them ‘crisis apparitions’² ‒ visited a neighbour, friend or, most likely, a close relative at around what was subsequently found to be the time of their death. They usually appeared at a time when the percipient (the person experiencing the visitation) believed they had been awake, though some dream-visions were also reported.³ A feature of many such stories was that the percipient would declare what they had seen to a friend, even before confirmation had arrived of the death. Given the period covered here, which is about 1820–1940, confirmation usually came in the form of a letter or telegram.

This article considers crisis apparitions reported in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publications and the Irish folklore collections. During these years there was growing interest, for reasons discussed below, in recording folklore and supernatural memorates, and therefore the period is productive of plentiful and rich accounts. It was also a time of large-scale Irish emigration, especially to Britain and America, but communication between emigrants and their families remained difficult, and only very few emigrants expected to return. That many crisis apparitions communicate beyond Ireland’s shores reflects the anxieties of ‘exiles’ and their friends and families about death far from home. The article attends to some of the distinctive features of Irish apparitions and the context of their telling. However, crisis apparitions were far from being just an Irish phenomenon, and as a distinct category of apparition they have received less attention than they deserve. It is hoped therefore that the article will also help elucidate the workings of the crisis apparition and its relationship with omen and ghost belief. Moreover, accounts of supernatural leave-taking by the just-dead (especially the distant just-dead) can provide insights about the role of storytelling in the processing of grief and the handing down of the dead over generations that are, appropriately, relevant to other contexts far beyond Ireland’s shores.

Crisis apparitions were associated with the time of physical death but apparitions of the soon to die might also be reported in Irish folklore. As was the case elsewhere in Europe as well, belief in omens and premonitions of death was very strong among the Irish of all religious denominations. A variety of premonitory experiences appear in the sources. Most striking, and perhaps most well known over many centuries, is the banshee (bean sí, ‘fairy woman’). The banshee’s ‘frightful cry’ might be heard before a death, or she might be seen in the form of a woman, sometimes combing her hair or clapping her hands. Banshees were believed to ‘follow’ particular families, and other omens of death might be similarly discerning. The ‘death knock’ was a loud knock or blow on the front door of a house or a window. It might happen just once or three times. The behaviour of animals might also be interpreted as bringing tidings of imminent death: a robin knocking at a window, a raven alighting on a roof, the sound of the ‘death watch’ beetle, or the cackling of hens or crowing of a cock at unusual times all might be cited in relation to the phenomenon of ‘knowing’ in advance that a death was imminent.⁴

The wraith, fetch or double was another type of presentiment of death, and was commonly reported throughout the Irish and British Isles and beyond. Catherine Crowe, an English novelist who made an extensive collection of accounts of ‘ghosts and ghost seers’ in the 1850s, described the wraith as follows:

in the moment of death, a person is seen in a place where bodily he is not. I believe the Scotch use this term also in the same sense of the Irish word Fetch, which is a person’s double seen at some indefinite period previous to his death, of which such an appearance is generally supposed to be a prognostic. The Germans express the same thing by the word Döppelganger.⁵

William Carleton noted that when a person’s fetch was seen at night ‘l[e]ase of life, let them be sick or in health, is always short’. He like Crowe considered ‘fetch’ to be the ‘more national’ term, associating ‘wraith’ with the north of Ireland and Scotland, but wraith is also later extensively used in Ireland.⁶ Seeing a wraith/fetch was not always fatal: many in Ireland considered that the fetch might appear far from the body they represented with no apparent ill-effects. For example, an informant of the Schools Folklore Collection (discussed below) described how Michael Dunne of Grange (now 80 years old in 1935) was out walking in the fields when he was a young man. Suddenly in the bright noon day he saw his brother Simon beside him so plain that he addressed him. Simon at this time was in USA and had been for some years. Simon lived for 25 years after.⁷ More often, however, the fetch or wraith might provide some sort of forewarning or foreshadowing of the death of the person who was believed to have been seen. In Co Cavan,

An omen of Death which the old people in this locality believed in was called the ‘Wraith’ which they pronounced ‘Wrath’ For instance a person would be seen out walking through the fields or travelling along, the road used by another person. That other person might chance to visit the house of a person whom they thought they saw out in the fields a short time before and find out the said person had not left their house for some hours before. The … person whose Wraith was seen, (it was generally believed) would die in a short time afterwards about from six to twelve months usually.

Unlike ghosts (but like our crisis apparitions), the informant said, wraiths might appear at any time of the day or night, and were usually silent, whereas it was believed that ghosts might speak if questioned.⁸ Augusta Gregory’s 1920 collection of Visions and beliefs in the west of Ireland includes several such ‘warnings’, including one described by ‘J. Hanlon’ who said: ‘once going to a neighbour’s house to see a little girl, I saw her running along the path before me. But when I got to the house she was in bed sick, and died two days after’.⁹ Ray Cashman’s informant, Packy Jim McGrath, of Aghyaran, Co. Donegal, in the early 2000s, understood wraiths to be ‘a ghost of a person you see afore they die … The spirit moves away from the body, some fashion or another … if the wraith’s walking away from you, their death’s supposed to be close’.¹⁰ Cashman and the other prominent anthropologist who worked on the Irish border, Henry Glassie (who lived in and collected the folklore of a Fermanagh community), both largely class wraiths as a separate phenomenon to ghosts. However, they use the term to incorporate both omens of death in human form and crisis apparitions.¹¹

This article attempts to preserve the subtle difference between phantasms that foretell death and those that announce it. While fetches and wraiths communicate across time portents of forthcoming death to the local community and sometimes to the dying person themselves, crisis or leave-taking apparitions communicate across space the fact of death. Poised between the omen and the ghost, these spectres of (usually) recognisable selves are not projected forward and have not come back: they are checking in briefly on their way, bearing messages of love and regard across miles of land and sea. They therefore also allow us access something of the emotional history of loss (though emigration as well as through death). Though the encounters described may have been brief, they lasted long in personal and community memory. As stories, crisis apparitions also travel across time, even across generations, encapsulating memories of people and emotion, and breaking down the distance between places, between past and present, and between the long dead and the living.

Using Irish folklore

The kinds of narratives recounted here are memorates, stories relating personal experiences at first or second hand.¹² Memorates contain memories at their kernel, but are also shaped by wider belief systems ‒ the ways of seeing and cultural habits of thought by which communities make sense of the world (and in this case how they make sense of grief and loss, especially loss experienced at a distance). Henry Glassie notes that ‘in telling stories of the other world, of fairies and ghosts, people winnow past experience to separate fact from delusion and discover truths worthy of belief, for truth is what one sincerely believes in the light of the facts’.¹³ The analogy of ‘winnowing’ is an apt one: oral historians understand remembering as an ‘active process through which a narrator creates meaningful stories’.¹⁴ Lynn Abrams describes it as ‘a practical and active process of reconstruction whereby traces of the past are placed in conjunction with one another to tell a story’. Moreover, ‘one person’s memory operates within a wider context that includes memory produced and maintained by family, community and public representations’.¹⁵ Gillian Bennett argues that ‘once recounted, supernatural experiences start to become subject to cultural processes. The event enters the public domain and social expectations are brought to bear on it’.¹⁶ Such experiences are understood in relation to what is believed to be possible, and what is believed to have happened before.

These examples come from the Irish manuscript folklore collections, and from other types of sources, such as printed folklore compilations. Interest in Irish folklore increased in the nineteenth century, leading to regular publications of anthologies of stories and snippets of traditional belief in journals and in book form (Augusta Gregory’s Visions and beliefs, already mentioned, is deservedly the most famous). The foundation of a number of US and European folklore societies in the later 1800s also provided outlets for the publication of articles on Irish folklore and folk life. The creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 gave new impetus to the collection of folklore as a nation-building project that was deemed vital to the preservation of traditional lore and customs in the face of emigration, changing settlement patterns, and the decline of the Irish language. Professional full- and part-time collectors, most of them men, travelled to remoter areas in what was envisaged as a rescue mission, with the inevitable result that primacy was given to male tellers of certain types of material. There are greater numbers of women informants in other parts of the archive. Schoolchildren were roped in to interview members of their families and communities, leading to the creation in the late 1930s of the extraordinary Schools Folklore Collection that, along with the ‘Main’ collection, is housed in the National Folklore Archive in University College Dublin. The archive has been further supplemented by questionnaires on various topics and the efforts of new generations of collectors who have brought different methods and questions.¹⁷

In Ireland as elsewhere, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a growth in interest in spiritualism, ‘the occult’ and theosophy.¹⁸ The establishment of societies for psychical research, whose members explored the intersection between supernatural encounters and scientists’ attempts to understand the workings of the human mind and the physical world, led to close attention being paid to accounts believed to attest to supernatural communication by the dead and between the living. For example, one of the first publications of British Society for Psychical Research was two volumes of Phantasms of the Living, many of which described crisis apparitions, as was also the case in the subsequent ‘Census of Hallucinations’. The accounts were gathered from a variety of informants, some of them Irish.¹⁹ When St John Seymour, an Anglican clergyman from Limerick, and Harry Neligan, a Royal Irish Constabulary (police) officer with Kerry links, put out a call for ghost stories, they received enough for a book within a month, most of the informants being middle class protestants. True Irish Ghost Stories was published in 1914. Seymour’s conclusion reflected on some of the theories regarding supernatural encounters then current (for example he suggests ‘telepathic communication’ as a possibility for cases when someone ‘sees a ghost’ of a dying person). He believed explanations for ghost sightings would eventually be forthcoming.²⁰ Most of his informants and readers were probably less interested in rationalising these phenomena than he was. Collections like Phantasms of the Living and True Irish Ghost Stories thus indicate that, while for some the study of folklore is necessarily the study of the ‘folk’, understood as the ‘lower classes of society’ or ‘the subaltern’,²¹ the folklore of the middle and upper classes can also be found.²² In Ireland (as was also the case elsewhere) stories of crisis apparitions and ghosts were told and listened to across all social ‒ and religious ‒ groups.

There is great variability in the supernatural memorates included among the folklore collections and publications like Seymour and Neligan’s. Some narrators provided extensive details about times, protagonists and places, and looked to conjure emotion and atmosphere. Other stories, especially those told at second- or third- hand, are essentially ‘plot summaries’,²³ providing no more than the key details of the reported event. Both kinds of narratives are considered here, but I dwell in particular on certain more detailed stories, in some cases recounting them at greater length than is usual in academic articles, in an attempt to draw out common elements.

In light of the underrepresentation of women generally in the folklore collections, my examples consciously predominantly draw on the testimonies of women. Men also told stories of crisis apparitions, though the nature of the sources (geographically uneven, dependant often on the questions asked, and partial towards male accounts) precludes a meaningful comparison of who told them most often and in most detail. But women are certainly prominent tellers (and subjects) of vivid accounts of these phenomena. This may in part relate to the nature of stories like that told by Mrs Higgins, which are frequently about family connections and emotional relationships. Women often are and were guardians of family and community memory, and proactive in ‘keeping in touch’ with family. I have elsewhere considered the ‘worry work’ of Irish mothers, and the idea that maternal labour in looking after and looking out for their children continued after death, with ghost mothers a common feature of Irish folklore.²⁴ It might be suggested that other forms of largely female-coded work also informed assumptions about the activities of the dead. Anthropologists and sociologists sometimes use the terms 'kin work' or ‘kin-keeping’ to refer to the practical labour and ‘emotion work’ necessary to sustaining, compiling and remembering family connections. For Micaela di Leonardo, ‘Kinkeeping, in broad terms, involves the effort or work undertaken to encourage family connections across households … [It] provides the glue to hold extended families together’.²⁵ As Andrea Roberts points out, kinkeeping has a role in preserving and ‘articulating connections’, not just between people, but ‘between people and place’.²⁶ Kin-keeping is to a large degree gendered ‒ Patricia de Santana Pinho notes that ‘Normatively, kinkeeping tasks … have been assigned to women. Women have also served, traditionally, as bridges between generations’.²⁷ As prominent tellers and subjects of lore about fetches, ghosts and crisis apparitions, and as ‘kin-keepers’, Irish women ‘kept in touch’ with the dead as well as the living. And the dying and dead might reciprocally be expected to keep in touch with them.

‘I never saw him at all’: Emigration and communicating death

Family, distance and place are central to the themes and ongoing retelling of stories about crisis apparitions. Irish crisis apparitions frequently had an international dimension, connecting the diaspora back ‘home’. It was said in Moyvoughly, Co. Westmeath, in the 1930s that ‘The old people of this district have belief that the spirits of the departed return to their former places of abode around the time of their deaths’. Crisis apparitions were commonly reported during the First World War, not just in Ireland.²⁸ Three stories told about crisis apparitions in Moyvoughly dated to the war and related to named people. When John [Jack] Ward died in battle in France in 1918, ‘his people “saw” him, gathering shirts off the bushes in Wards’ garden’. In another account he was seen ‘lifting sheets off the ground in the garden’. His brother, Peter, went home and asked had John come in, and his mother replied ‘I never saw him at all’. At that point ‘a man came in to Wards with a “wire” [telegram] saying John was killed a few hours ago’. In a second case, Eric Russell’s father saw him appearing to ‘pass into’ their house. The third story was of Mickey Deignan, who ‘came home the same night’ he was killed in France. A noise was heard outside the house where he used to play cards and ‘Just when the noise was ceasing what felt like a huge bird fluttering around the room like the spirit flying away. Then when the news and the date of the boy’s death came they believed it was he’.²⁹ Another World War I apparition was recorded by Sheila St Clair in Co. Down in 1954. One evening in July a woman saw her soldier fiancé coming towards her house: ‘He looked so tired, and there was mud on his uniform … he looked glad to be home’. When she ran to the back door he had disappeared, and a knock came to the little-used front door but there was nobody there. ‘We got news a few days later that our Billy had been killed when a trench that he was digging collapsed … I dare say that was why the mud was on him, for he was always neat and tidy’.³⁰

Peter Berta has argued that Romanian and Hungarian peasant communities ‘regard expiration not as a irreversible event but one that (a) is reversible in certain situations and (b) sets in within a longer time interval’. Before the moment of death (which Berta reminds us is difficult to pinpoint), the soul might already be understood to be on a journey, and it was believed that in the several hours following the corpse only ‘gradually loses the ability to sense or perceive’. Crying was discouraged for about three hours following a death, for fear the soul might be interrupted or called back.³¹ Similar prohibitions against crying for the dead or preparing the remains for burial for a few hours prevailed in Ireland, and some spirits ‒ especially those of parents of young children ‒ were believed to linger around their homes for especially long periods after death.³² Beliefs that the spirit of a person close to death or at the time of death might for a period of time be unmoored from the constraints either of the body or the afterlife and might thus be free to appear across shorter or longer distances may help explain why the idea of crisis apparitions, and the wider category of fetches/wraiths, fitted easily within Irish worldviews.

In the Moyvoughly stories and Sheila St Clair’s account, the individuals perceived at the time of their deaths were away at war: stories of crisis apparitions were perhaps rendered more ‘memorable’ the more impossible the knowledge they brought might be considered to have been. Emigration often features in crisis apparition accounts like the one told by Mrs Higgins, the percipient or subject of the communication being an emigrant. Poverty, dearth and underemployment all contributed to extremely high levels of migration from Ireland, especially to Britain, North America and, later, Australia.³³ Emigrants often assisted their relatives and friends to follow them, and provided vital financial support to family members, especially parents, who remained in Ireland. While by the mid-twentieth century emigrants might have greater opportunities to visit Ireland for shorter or longer periods, earlier generations usually had to reconcile themselves to the unlikelihood of ever returning: some communities called their farewell parties for departing emigrants ‘American wakes’, to indicate the permanence of their loss.³⁴ Communication was difficult, hampered by the slow speed of the post and by the limited literacy of many emigrants and their family members. However, large numbers of letters and, latterly, telegrams still traversed the globe. Death is a frequent theme, writers often expressing fears that their correspondents might have died in the interval in their communication, or envisioning the possibility of their own deaths far from their loved ones: the lack of knowing is often highlighted. Mary Garvey, writing from New Jersey to her mother in Ireland in October 1850 enquired after the health of various people and said ‘I feel very uneasy about you all for fear that you may be sick or dead or that you may be suffering for the want of the comforts of life’.³⁵ Bridget Burns Benson, writing from Co Sligo in 1849 to her parents and siblings who had emigrated to New York, also spoke of her uneasiness and fears for their safety. She asked them to send her locks of their hair, saying ‘when I die I would like to have it in the coffin’.³⁶

Emigrants like Bridget faced burial far from the jealously-guarded and much-turned-over family graves that would have awaited them at home.³⁷ Irish people in North America often hankered after burial back in Ireland. For example, in 1895, Fanny Bergin, an American folklorist, published some ‘burial and holiday customs’ from two ‘Irish girls from County Cork’. Commenting on Cork traditions where married women might choose to be buried either with their husbands’ families or their own kin, and children might choose interment either with their father or mother, she said, ‘My own servant tells me that she has often wished that when she comes to die it might be possible for her to be buried with her own mother’.³⁸ In west Co. Cork, Seán Ó Suilleabháin reported several accounts of ‘fairy funerals’ (socraidh sídhe), where a funeral would be seen before an unexpected death was reported. In one story, a man was surprised when his wife told him she had seen a funeral on the road near the field he was working in, when he hadn’t spotted it at all. She insisted it was the funeral of Sheáinín Cruhúir ‘tháinig ó Mheirice’, come from America, and the following day a letter arrived to say ‘go raibh sé marbh agus curtha’, that he was dead and buried.³⁹ Going one better than the spectral funeral, in Co Sligo in the 1930s there was even a ‘ould tradition about our Irish exiles who die in foreign lands’, that the remains of those with ‘a great love for Ireland’ would be magically transported at night ‘in a fog’ to their family graveyard ‒ one should take measures not to be out too late, because those meeting the fog ‘never did a day’s good after’.⁴⁰

In the first volume of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Richard Hodgson, who had an interest in the psychology behind visions and precognition, reported on a case from New York. In April 1888 he received a letter from a woman he called Miss A. describing how ‘A young woman in our household, North Irish by birth, Mary B.', while sleeping in a room with her elderly mistress, had had a dream in which ‘she saw distinctly the sister of her mistress ‒ whom she has not seen in a year, and then only in a passing sort of way ‒ standing on the threshold of the door, in a long black gown and her hands folded in front of her’. The next morning Mary told her story to a member of the family, ‘and said impressively, “I am sure something is going to happen”.’ Half an hour later a telegram arrived, stating ‘that Mrs. D. of ____ had been taken suddenly ill and was not expected to live. This was the lady (the sister of her mistress) whom Mary B. had seen in the night’. Later that day the news arrived of her death.⁴¹

Several further communications between Miss A. and Hodgson ensued, in which it was clarified that Mary had no knowledge of her mistress’ sister’s illness and had announced her prophecy before the telegrams arrived. Mary was closely questioned, and supplied further details. Miss A. reported that this was not the first time Mary had had ‘dreams of this nature, which have been followed by death or illness of the person she has dreamed of’. Mary provided an example:

My father had been ailing, but was better. My mother was dead. I dreamed on January 6th that my father came and called me. I recognized his voice. I saw my mother’s grave opened right up, and my father was there, and I thought it was he opened it up; and then my father disappeared in the grave alongside of my mother. I told Miss C. in the morning, and said I should hear bad news. Father died the same night, January 6, 1888.

Hodgson, having met Mary, assessed her as ‘a thoroughly honest, but emotional girl, with strong faith in a certain class of dreams perhaps amounting to superstition; but I see no reason to doubt the main facts of her story’. He was not convinced that her accounts amounted to precognition, being inclined instead to place them in the category of ‘pseudo-presentiments’, which he defines as ‘hallucinations of memory, which make it seem to one that something which now excites or astonishes him has been prefigured in a recent dream, or in some form of some other warning’.⁴² His informants likely continued to hold different interpretations of their experiences, and these divergent representations of the case hint at the cultural, gender and class dynamics at play in young, working-class female emigrants’ telling of their stories, and how they were heard and understood in different contexts.

The authors of True Irish Ghost Stories provided several accounts of apparitions who communicated the fact of their death or its imminence across varying distances. An especially detailed account was provided by Mrs Mary Murnane in a letter to her brother, Richard Hogan (it is not clear if she had written the details at the time, or in the 1910s, when the call for submissions was issued by the book’s authors):

On the 4^th of August 1886, at 10.30 o’clock in the morning, I left my own house, 21 Montrose St, Philadelphia, to do some shopping. I had not proceeded more than fifty yards when on turning the corner of the street I observed my aunt approaching me within five or six yards. I was greatly astonished, for the last letter I had from home (Limerick) stated that she was dying of consumption … [O]ur eyes met, and she had the colour of one who had risen from the grave. I seemed to feel my hair stand on end, for just as we were about to pass each other she turned her face towards me, and I gasped, ‘My God, she is dead, and is going to speak to me!’ but no word was spoken, and she passed on … She held a sunshade over her head, and the clothes, hat, &c., were those I knew so well before I left Ireland. I wrote home telling what I had seen, and asking if she was dead. I received a reply saying she was not dead at the date I saw her, but had been asking if a letter had come from me for some days before her death. It was just two days before she actually died that I had seen her.⁴³

Mary Murnane’s experience lurks somewhere between an omen and a crisis apparition: she formed an opinion that the woman she had seen was dead, but it was later clarified that her aunt had died a short time after her spectre was witnessed. It could be argued that the recollection of crisis apparitions ‘does’ similar things to recollections of omens. Peter Berta sees death omens as functioning in part to ‘prepare all the affected members of the community for the approaching loss’. He suggests their subsequent role in ‘grief work’ derives from their reshaping in retrospect: ‘Through retrospective meaning attribution the close relatives partly rewrite their memories of the dying process, unconsciously adapting it to the prerequisites of successful grief work by comprehending the process of departure in a manner more rational and foreseeable than reality ‒ thus facilitating the coping with loss’.⁴⁴ Ellen Badone, analysing Breton memorates of ‘precursors of death or intersignes’, likewise concludes that ‘In describing experiences with intersignes, the narrator both reconstructs and reinterprets his or her personal history’. Using the example of a woman she called Marie, who had lost her son in an accident, Badone described the process whereby Marie attempted to make sense of her loss by assembling various accounts of what in retrospect she interpreted as significant events that had occurred before her son’s death. She referred to the fact of having ‘heard the old people recount all that sort of thing before too’. For Badone, intersigne narratives ‘concretise the folk belief that the future exists as an objective reality and that one cannot, therefore, alter the pattern of one’s life’. Events ‘are fitted together after the fact, to build up structures of significance’. She ends, ‘It is in the telling and re-telling of events that the narrator attempts to bridge the gap between her desire to find a reason in the inherent unreason of her loss’.⁴⁵ (Hodgson was getting at something similar with his diagnosis of ‘hallucination of memory’). However their memories of events before and at the time of a person’s death were shaped, believing that a death was inevitable helped in reconciling families and communities to it. Those far from their loved ones must have derived some comfort from the idea that they might have been in the thoughts of the dying person in some way that allowed communication or reunion between them across even vast distances. As discussed in more detail below, like omens, crisis apparitions informed the grief work of the bereaved as they attempted to make sense of and work through their loss.

Physical communications had a part to play too. Conventional communications regularly enter our stories to confirm what the apparitions had already intimated. Mary Murnane and the vexed daughter whose story started this article both were prompted to write to enquire fearfully about the subjects of their visions. Letters and telegrams are frequently a feature of even brief crisis apparition accounts. Mrs Feeney of Carramore, Co Mayo, remembered

There was once a woman and she had a son. The son went to America and he got killed there.

The night he was killed he came to Ireland and lay beside his mother. His mother spoke to him and said:

‘Are you Michael’.

‘I am’, he said.

Then he vanished. After a week she got a letter saying her son was dead.⁴⁶

In the age of the telegram, accounts of apparitions or confirmation of their unspoken news could arrive all the more quickly (and all the more tersely), as in the case of the deaths of John Ward and Mrs D. One Kerry schoolmaster recalled that shortly after the death of a Mrs Meara in the 1890s, ‘a cable [telegram] arrived from America from a son. It read, “How is Mother. I saw her here”.’⁴⁷ Maggie Curran of Mountstuart, Co. Waterford, recounted the story of an apparition seen by a neighbour, Matt Sullivan: ‘It was my aunt who died in America that night. They were great friends before she went to America … A few days after we got a telegram to say she was dead’.⁴⁸ Shane MacCorristine points out that, ‘In the Victorian era, with a reliable postal service and telegraph system connecting the world, news of the death of loved ones could become swiftly known and the intervention of such epistolary confirmations of ghost-seeing served to further accentuate the uncanny nature of modern communication and notions of community’.⁴⁹

Written communications of bad news were uncanny in and of themselves. After all, even the most detailed letter gave no compensation for not being with a loved one when they were dying and allowed deaths and funerals to be experienced only in an inadequate and partial (and temporally and emotionally distanced) manner. The most speedy communication still left a gap between a death and its announcement. To communities as concerned as the Irish about the proper and prompt accomplishment of the customary rituals and (for Catholics) prayers on behalf of the dead, this hiatus during which normal expectations of emotion and action were inadvertently not being met by the families of the dead was dreadful in itself. And while communications were increasingly efficient, some, especially emigrants, might still fear being ‘left out of the loop’ when bad news circulated. An unnamed elderly Galway woman in the 1930s remembered how her daughter, Ellen, had written from America, ‘in great grief and anxiety owing to a dream in which she saw her dear school companion dead’. She dreamed her friend Tessie had ‘died in England on August 14^th’, and on enquiring the woman found that ‘The school friend had died on the date mentioned’. Ellen ‘though unaware that her school friend had been living in England and not [having] been told of her illness, gave her mother full particulars of her friend’s illness and death’.⁵⁰ Faith in the possibility of supernatural notification of a death gave people hope they would ‘know’ when the death of a distant friend occurred, despite the deficiencies of conventional communications.

‘She was dead and put in a coffin’: Viewing and passing down the dead

Ellen had apparently seen Tessie dead: observations of the bodies and behaviour of apparitions were often offered as corroborating evidence of the news they brought. In several of the other accounts already mentioned the apparitions’ appearance held hints that they were dead. Mary Murnane’s aunt ‘had the colour of one who had risen from the grave’; Mary B. saw her father disappearing into her mother’s grave; the woman who lost her fiancé, Billy, noted the mud on his uniform; and Jack Ward, in his strange action of rummaging among the family’s clothes or sheets drying in the garden, may have implied that he was looking for a shroud.⁵¹ ‘A midwife’ told Augusta Gregory: ‘I dreamt one night I was with my daughter and that she was dead and put in the coffin. And I heard after, the time I dreamt about her was the very time she died’.⁵² The ‘Census of Hallucinations’ included the 1891 account of a Miss S. R. R., who testified to having seen her sister at the time she died in Dublin in 1877. As Miss R. lay down in bed ‘I plainly saw her dead beside me, with her arm outside the [bed]clothes … I scarcely slept at all that night, and there my sister lay beside me, and I was glad to have her, knowing too well what the contents of the telegram would be the next morning’.⁵³

Mary Carbery of Castle Freke in Co Cork kept a journal of events and observations between 1898 and 1901. An Englishwoman in her early thirties who had married the lord of the manor, she had just been left widowed with two young sons. She felt a strong affinity with West Cork and its inhabitants, and the journal provides vivid insights into her ‘inner world’ and her interactions with the local people, whose supernatural beliefs strongly interested her. She told the story of ‘Chapel Mary’, caretaker of the local Catholic church, ‘a jovial creature who might have stepped out of a Rowlandson drawing’. Arriving to visit one day, Carbery found Mary in deep distress. Mary reminded Carbery of a pair of stockings with a difficult snail pattern going ‘round and round the leg’ that she had made for her son Dan in America. Coming downstairs that morning she had seen a figure lying on the kitchen table (like a body laid out for a wake):

'It was me son who lay there, an’ him dead', she cried in a loud high voice. 'Someone had dressed him in his dark clothes, an’ on his legs the stockin’s I knitted for him in the snail pattern. I tell ye, me lady, I saw me boy as clear as I see ye! His hands be his sides, his eyes not so shut but he seemed to see his mammy lookin’ down on him … Me son is dead', she said helplessly.

She ran for a neighbour but when they returned the vision had vanished. Two weeks later Mrs Duggan, wife of one of the Castle Freke gardeners, came to tell Carbery that a letter had arrived from America, confirming Dan’s death. His landlady, a West Cork woman, reassured Mary that Dan had been waked and buried respectably, and was laid out for his wake wearing the snail-patterned stockings. Mrs Duggan also believed in ‘warnings’. She told Carbery that, when she was seven, her five-year-old brother had drowned in a lake and she had been sent to tell their family.

Her mother stood in the doorway with a white face. ‘Ye need not tell me’, she cried, 'haven’t I seen him? He came to me, he was here with me, wet, with the green weed clingin’ to him, the water runnin’ over him. He is drowned'.⁵⁴

As in the case of the accounts of omens described by Badone, these were living, ongoing documents: told and retold. Among the stories collected by the psychical researchers was that of Lady F. E. Miles, who wrote to them in 1885. Her mother, Lady Frances Roche, of Croom, Co. Limerick, was, according to Lady Miles, very close to her cousin, the Hon. John Vandeleur

and at the moment of his death he came to say good-bye to her. She woke from sleep at 4 a.m., and saw him, wrapped up in something black, standing near the lower curtain of her bed. She woke her husband, and said, ‘Why, there is the Hon. John at the bottom of the bed!’ Sir David told her she was dreaming, and to rub her eyes; but, as she still affirmed it, he got up and pulled the curtain away, lit the candles, and stood where she said the appearance was. She said, ‘I see him now, standing next you, waving his hand in farewell to me’. He faded away, and disappeared. It was afterwards known that this gentlemen died 50 miles off, of a paralytic seizure.

In response to a request for further information, Lady Miles wrote that

She saw him a few minutes after his death [which the researchers confirmed happened in 1828]. She was living at a house in Limerick, and he died at Kilrush. I heard the account from my father and mother dozens of times when a girl. My mother was not an imaginative woman, or inventive. She died in 1841 … everyone knew about it at the time.⁵⁵

Her stress on her mother being an unfanciful woman helped ‘prove’ the apparition as proceeding from something truly notable and strange ‒ evidence of the trustworthiness of percipients is built into some of our other examples as well. Notably, despite now living far from Limerick in the magnificent surroundings of Leigh Court in Somersetshire,⁵⁶ Lady Miles clearly still found the story meaningful enough to offer it for inspection forty-four years after her mother’s death, and nearly sixty years after the apparition had allegedly occurred.

Gráinne Bhrianaí Doohan of Tory Island, Co Donegal, reported several stories of omens to the American folklore collector Dorothy Harrison Thurman, in the early 1980s, as well as this crisis apparition, which dated to before her birth in 1916. ‘My mother’s brother was drowned, when my sister was only a baby’, she said. Her uncle visited her mother every night.

So this night he didn’t come. And my father was down at the village. So she was sitting in at the fire and she was rocking my sister to sleep.

And she had a line of clothes up, hanging in the kitchen. And this sheet came down as somebody would pull it. And threw it over her head.

And she was wondering what happened. She got up and folded the sheet. And she went outside. And she saw this man coming.

And she said to him, ‘Aren’t ye late tonight? What kept you?’

Nobody answered her. So she came in and she left the door open. And he came as far as the door, and she could hear his steps, at the door. But she went out and there was nobody there …

At that time her brother was drowned but she didn’t know. He was drowned the time the sheet came down.

Mrs Doohan gave a vivid account of the subsequent events. Her father did not know how to tell his wife her brother was dead, so the next morning he brought her down to her own mother, who broke the news, upon which ‘My mother collapsed’. The body was not found for five days. On the last day of January ‘they were saying Devotions in the house for the body to come ashore’. A young child saw a woman in a white gown and shawl outside the window: ‘my mother didn’t see nothing. But they were saying ’twas St Brigid’ (perhaps because St Bridget was believed to travel around Ireland on the eve of her feast). The next morning, St Bridget’s Day, the body was found.⁵⁷

Stories of ‘experiences’ gained and imparted meaning in the context of comparison and remembering. In invoking her mother’s recollections of an event that had happened about seventy years earlier, Gráinne Doohan reminds us how far apparitions may travel across time as well as space. Other of the stories recounted above also come to us across significant temporal distances, the very fact of their longevity in personal or community memory demonstrating the noteworthiness of the original experience. Their continued importance lay in their strangeness, but also in their familiarity ‒ Gráinne Doohan and her community believed in a variety of death omens and other uncanny events that might happen at times of bereavement. They may even have half-expected them and have been on the lookout. Thus in talking through potentially significant events, older examples may regularly have been marshalled for comparison. Chapel Mary’s vision of her son laid out on the kitchen table prompted Mrs Duggan to tell the story of her mother’s vision of her own unexpectedly-lost son to Mary Carbery. In Kathleen Chaplin’s beautiful essay ‘The Death Knock’, a loud knock on the door of her sister Antoinette’s Boston house in the middle of the night in 1982, coinciding with their uncle’s death in Ireland, introduces a reflection on memory, family and loss. Chaplin says:

It is a very human need, the need for signs, however small or capricious they might be, indicating that some transcendent power superintends the losses that mark our lives. The family lore was full of stories about death portents and deathbed visions. These stories made death—and therefore life—part of an orderly narrative, and the fact of one’s existence part of a bigger mystery.⁵⁸

Badone’s Breton informants on the subject of omens had ‘heard the old people recount all that sort of thing before’. Deaths, even sudden and shocking ones, were given context by family and community stories, and were rendered ‘orderly’ in a manner that may have helped the process of getting through times of crisis and making sense of disaster.

These accounts also can be viewed as acts of kin-keeping, articulating and preserving connections across time and in some way keeping in touch with and handing down the dead. In passing the story of her brother’s apparition on to her daughter, Gráinne Doohan’s mother also passed him on, conjuring him into being long after his death via the story of his loss, and creating a snapshot of him as vivid as any portrait in an album. In the process the story also communicates over decades echoes of emotion, impressions of relationships, and snippets of insight: the sister so close to her brother that he would visit her every night; the husband’s (loving, fearful) reluctance to tell his wife the extent of her loss; the hope and grief of the family gathered to pray for the return of a corpse, so that they might have the consolation of a decent funeral. Lady Roche likewise passed on the image of her cousin, wrapped in black, incongruously waving goodbye to her from the end of the bed, the account of the vision (told ‘dozens of times’) holding within it a glimpse for posterity of their loving connection. Her daughter, Lady Miles, carried the story with her long after she had emigrated to England.

Accounts of supernatural leave-taking overcame gaps in conventional communications. Crisis apparitions were understood to have the power to impart knowledge that could only belatedly and partially arrive by other means. ‘This girl’ who went to America, and the other bereaved people whose stories are told here, knew without knowing that something was wrong. ‘How is Mother?’ came the enquiry from America. ‘I’m sure something is going to happen’, announced Mary B. ‘impressively’. ‘Me son is dead’, said Chapel Mary. There may have been some comfort, relief and orderliness in the visitations they recounted. Miss R., speaking of her vision of her dead sister beside her in the hours before a telegram confirmed the fact, reported that she was ‘glad to have her’. When considered as snippets of experience shaped by reference to cultural systems of understanding the world, the many stories of crisis apparitions told and retold in Irish communities in Ireland and far away from it can allow us insights into both the structures of supernatural beliefs, and the worries and uncertainties of life and death that sustained them. Belief in crisis apparitions might actually dispel the sense of crisis and assist the work of grieving. Turned over in memory, they reassured the tellers and hearers of the endurance of bonds of love and blood. They insisted that distances (emotional, spatial and temporal) between friends and family, and between exiles and home, could be bridged. And they offered the possibility that the dying might snatch enough time to reach out and wave goodbye, and that those left behind might have the presence of mind to wave back.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clodagh Tait

Clodagh Tait is a lecturer in history in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. She has written extensively on early modern Irish social and cultural history, including the history of death, violence, martyrdom and protest; pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing; religious devotion; ideas about the supernatural; and the history of emotion. Her recent research also uses the Irish nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklore collections to consider motherhood, family, the household, work, and ghosts. She is working on an anthology of women’s folklore, and a book on cursing and blessing in Ireland over 400 years. She is joint editor of Irish Historical Studies.

Notes

1. National Folklore Collection [NFC], Main Manuscript Collection [MMC] Ms 485, pp. 191–2, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbe/9000657/7230752.

2. Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge, 1968), 160; William H. Harrison, Spirits Before our Eyes (2 volumes, London: W.H. Harrison, 1879). See “Apparitions and After-Death Communications,” https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/types-of-cases. ‘Deathbed apparitions’ is also the term applied to the visions sometimes experienced by the dying of their dead relatives, which is why crisis apparitions is preferred here. See Jens Schlieter, What is it Like to be Dead? Near-Death Experiences, Christianity and the Occult (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 145–6.

3. Peter Moore, Where are the Dead? Exploring the Idea of an Embodied Afterlife (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 33, p. 157.

4. Patricia Lysaght, The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death Messenger (Dublin: O’Brien, 1996); Patricia Lysaght, “Irish Banshee Traditions: A Preliminary Survey,” Béaloideas 42/44 (1974–1976): 94–119; Helen Frisby, ““Them owls know”: Portending Death in Later Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England,” Folklore 126, no. 2 (2015): 196–214. For some idea of the range of Irish beliefs around the forms taken by ‘signs of death’, see the collection by the students of Caherlustraun, Co. Galway, ‘Signs of death which have been shown to people’, NFC, Schools Folklore Collection [SFC] Ms 22, pp. 517–26, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4562128/4561968. On Irish prophecies, omens, divination, and apparitions at times of broader social crisis, see Benjamin Ragan, “The Supernatural in the Irish Revolution 1916–1923” (unpublished PhD thesis, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, 2023).

5. Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature: or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (London: Routledge, 1852), p. 110.

6. William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (London: William Frederick Wakeman, 1852), 232; W. Sayers, “A Hiberno-Norse Etymology for English Fetch: 'Apparition of a Living Person',” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 3, no. 4 (2017): pp. 205–9.

7. NFC, SFC Ms 837, p. 111, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4770049/4769171/501497. See Paul Meehan, The Ghost of One’s Self: Doppelgangers in Mystery, Horror and Science (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2017).

8. NFC, SFC Ms 977, pp. 5–9, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5044834/5042622.

9. Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (London, 1920, repr: Colin Smythe, 1970), p. 175.

10. Ray Cashman, Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), pp. 144–8.

11. Henry Glassie, The Stars of Ballymenone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 325–6.

12. Though note that as they are retold they can become more closely related to legends ‘as they become more removed from direct experience’. Frank J. Korom, “Close Encounters of the Numinous Kind: Personal Experience Narratives and Memorates in Goalpara, West Bengal,” South Asia Research 20, no. 1 (2000): p. 25.

13. Glassie, The Stars of Ballymenone, p. 375.

14. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, “Part III Interpreting memories,” in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks and Thomson, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 297.

15. Lynn Abrams, Oral history Theory (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 79.

16. Gillian Bennett, ‘Alas, Poor Ghost!’ Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999), p. 5.

17. For an overview, see Patricia Lysaght, “From 'collect the fragments…' to 'Memory of the World'. Collecting the Folklore of Ireland, pp. 1927–70: Aims, Achievement, Legacy,” Folklore p. 130, no. 1 (2019): pp. 1–30; Patricia Lysaght, “Collecting the Folklore of Ireland: The Schoolchildren’s Contribution,” Folklore 132, no. 1 (2021): pp. 1–33. See www.duchas.ie.

18. See Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); A. Sommer, “Psychical research in the history and philosophy of science. An Introduction and Review,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48 (2014): pp. 38–45; Peter Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

19. Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living (2 volumes, London: Trübner and Co., 1886); Charles Sidgwick, Alice Johnson, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, and Eleanor M. Sidgwick, “Report on the Census of Hallucinations,” Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research 10 (1894): pp. 25–411. See Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-seeing in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

20. St John D. Seymour and Harry L. Neligan, True Irish Ghost Stories (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1914), especially pp. pp. 259–71.

21. See Vito Carrassi, “Yeats as a Folklorist: The Celtic Twilight and Irish Folklore,” Studi Irlandesi 13 (2023): pp. 157–67, especially pp. 157–8.

22. On the complexity of ‘class’ in Ireland, see Maura Cronin, “Class and Status in Twentieth-century Ireland: The Evidence of Oral History,” Saothar 32 (2007): pp. 33–43, at 34.

23. Glassie, The Stars of Ballymenone, 84.

24. Clodagh Tait, “Worry Work: The Supernatural Labours of Living and Dead Mothers in Irish Folklore,” in Mothering’s Many Labours: Past and Present Supplement 15, eds. Sarah Knott and Emma Griffin (2020): pp. 217–38.

25. Micaela di Leonardo, “The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship,” Signs 12 (1987): pp. 440–53.

26. Andrea R. Roberts, “Count the Outside Children! Kinkeeping as Preservation Practice among Descendants of Texas’ Freedom Colonies,” Forum Journal 32, no. 4 (2020): pp. 64–74.

27. Patricia de Santana Pinho, Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 164. See Carolyn J. Rosenthal, “Kinkeeping in the Family Division of Labor,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 47 (1985): pp. 965–74.

28. Daniel Cohen, The Encyclopedia of Ghosts (Waltham Abbey: Fraser Stuart Books, 1984), 173–7, 196–8. See Owen Davies, A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith During the First World War (Oxford, 2018), especially pp. 73–4

29. NFC, SFC Ms 743, pp. 65–6, 129, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009110/4987638; www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009110/4987639; www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009110/4987702. The source claims Russell ‘was shot for disobedience to Army orders’, but this does not seem to have been the case.

30. Sheila St. Clair, Unexplained Encounters: Exploring the Paranormal in Ulster (Belfast: White Row Press, 2001), 29–30. St Clair may have expanded on the story, and the words spoken by her interviewee may not be exactly represented. The Battle of the Somme, in which thousands of Ulstermen were killed and injured, is implied by the July dating.

31. Peter Berta, “Two Faces of the Culture of Death: Relationship between Grief work and Hungarian Peasant Soul Beliefs,” Journal of Loss and Trauma 6 (2001): pp. 83–113. Note that Irish ideas about activities of the dead were also informed by beliefs that some of the dead were not dead, but had been taken away by the fairies.

32. For one of very many examples, see NFC, SFC Ms 269, p. 152, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4921567/4880370. Shane McCorristine, ‘Introduction: When is Death?’, in Shane McCorristine (ed.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings: When is Death? (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 1–10; Tait, “Worry Work.”

33. There is a large literature on Irish emigration: for introductions, see chapters by Brian Gurrin, Liam Chambers, Patrick Griffin, Barrie Crosbie and Kevin Kenny in The Cambridge History of Ireland 3, 1730–1880, ed. James Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Mary E. Daly, “Migration since 1914,” in The Cambridge history of Ireland 4, 1880 to the Present, ed. Thomas Bartlett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and the articles in “Part III Emigration, Immigration and the Wider Irish World,” in The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland, eds. Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

34. Eileen Metress, “The American wake of Ireland: symbolic death ritual,” Omega – Journal of Death and Dying 21, no. 2 (1990): pp. 147–53.

35. Re-Imagining migration, https://reimaginingmigration.org/mary-garvey-writing-from-hightstown-new-jersey-to-her-mother-in-ireland-october-24–1850.

36. Paul Burns, “A letter from Bridget Burns Benson to her parents Thomas and Mary Burns in America,” The Corran Herald 52 (2019/2020): pp. 23–4, https://issuu.com/ballymoteheritagegroup/docs/the-corran-herald-issue-52–2019–2020.

37. Niamh Nic Ghabhann, “Gothic Ruins and Remains: Disorderly Burials and Respectable Bodies in Irish Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings, 1824–1900,” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 16 (2017): pp. 41–66. See also Nicholas Evans and Angela McCarthy (eds), Death in the Diaspora: British and Irish Gravestones (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

38. Fanny D. Bergin, “Burial and Holiday Customs and Beliefs of the Irish Peasantry,” Journal of American Folklore 8, no. 28 (1895): pp. 19–20.

39. NFC, SFC Ms 32, p.316, www.duchas.ie/en/cbe/9000030/7024084/9098760.

40. Sean Ó Dhuibhir, Killadoon, Co Sligo, collected by Bríd Ní Ghamhnáin, 1938, NFC, MMC Ms 485, p. 106, www.duchas.ie/en/cbe/9000657/7230667. On deathbed scenes and burial in Irish-American fiction, see Christopher Cusack and Lindsay Janssen, “'Tis yourself is a skeleton': Deathbed Scenes and Ethnic Identity in Irish-American Short Fiction, 1895–1910,” Irish Studies Review 30, no. 1 (2022): 1–15; Christopher Cusack, “'Here at least and at last is reality!’: Catholic Graveyards and Diasporic Identity in Irish North American Fiction, 1859–92,” in The Graveyard in Literature: Liminality and Social Critique, ed. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2022),pp. 159–173.

41. “Report of the Committee on Phantasms and Presentments,” Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (1885–89): pp. 417–22.

42. “Report of the Committee on Phantasms and Presentments,” pp. 417–22.

43. Seymour and Neligan, True Irish Ghost Stories, 96.

44. Peter Berta, “Omens,” in Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, ed. Robert Kastenbaum (New York, 2003), via www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Omens.html. For more on the psychology of the construction of meaning in grief, see for example, Robert A. Neimeyer, Dennis Klass and Michael R. Dennis, “A Social Constructionist Account of Grief: Loss and the Narration of Meaning,” Death Studies 38 (2014): pp. 485–98.

45. Ellen Badone, “Death Omens in a Breton Memorate,” Folklore 98, no. 1 (1987): pp. 99–104.

46. NFC, SFC Ms 101, p. 448, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4427863/4351686.

47. NFC, SFC Ms 1073, p. 108, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4493627/4405050/4514443.

48. NFC SFC Ms 643, p. 175, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4428120/4379974/4546531.

49. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self, 3.

50. NFC, MMC Ms 415, p. 81, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbe/9000901/7263000.

51. Seeing a sheet/shroud hanging where it should not be was a sign of death in some places: one story told of women who sent her servants to collect a sheet she had seen hanging in the garden, but it couldn’t be found: the family later discovered the woman’s brother had died in Malta at the time she had spotted it. C. J. Hamilton, ‘Tales of the supernatural’, Weekly Irish News, October 28, 1905, 7.

52. Gregory, Visions and Beliefs, 177.

53. “Report on the Census of Hallucinations,” 234–5. Miss R. says she was ‘at home’ at the time of her sister’s death, but the collection doesn’t reveal where ‘home’ was.

54. Jeremy Sandford, ed., Mary Carbery’s West Cork Journal 1898–1901 (Dublin: Lilliput, 1998), 123–5; Mary Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur (London, 1937; new edition, Cork: Mercier Press, 1973).

55. Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, vol. 2, pp. 480–1.

56. Alice Miles, Every Girl’s Duty: The Diary of a Victorian Debutante, ed. Maggy Parsons (London: Andre Deutsch, 1992).

57. Dorothy Harrison Thurman, Stories from Tory Island (Dublin: Country House, 1989), pp. 141–2.

58. Kathleen Chaplin, “The Death Knock,” New England Review 34, no. 1 (2013): 153. See Cashman, Packy Jim, p. 145.