Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/149

Rh lifted up, and he didn't know where he was going till he was on the top of Faughart Hill. And in the morning when the half-past five horn blew he was lifted up and dropped twenty perches from his own door. And one of the other workmen says to him, 'Where were ye the morning, Jemmy?' And he says, 'I was on the top of Faughart Hill with the gentry—[H. McIntee.]

—This anecdote, which I took down immediately after- wards, as far as possible in his exact words, was related by McIntee in the course of a conversation I had with him some years ago. He stoutly maintained the existence of the fairies, while denying that of ghosts. Faughart Hill lies about two miles to the east- ward of Kilcurry; on it are a holy well and ruined church dedicated to Saint Brigid, as well as a fort marking the site of her nunnery.

7. Beside the road from Dundalk to Kilcurry stands a farmhouse, called from the surrounding townland Sportsman's Hall. It is a modern two-story brick house, built on to a much older cottage which is unoccupied, the doors and windows being nailed up. The people around say that the cottage contains the ghost of the farmer's father, which they say haunted the family so constantly after the old man's decease that they were obliged to have it shut up there. Prayers were said to prevent the ghost from escaping from its prison.—[T. Curtis.]

8. A woman, now dead, but whose daughter still lives in Kilcurry, was once carried off by the fairies. She was walking one night beside a stream, when she saw what appeared to be a woman sitting on the opposite bank, wailing and "batting the water with its hands." On crossing to the other side, the woman was seized and carried off to a fairy fort, where she remained several days, but she would neither eat nor drink, and prayed so hard to be sent back to her children that in the end they had to let her go.—[T. Curtis.]

9. Directly a man's spirit leaves his body it has to travel over all the ground he travelled over while alive, and during this time it is visible.—[T. Curtis.]

All the souls in suffering are released for forty-eight hours yearly, commencing on Holy Eve (October 31) and including All Saints' and All Souls' Days.—[T. Curtis.]

10. "If the first lamb you see in the season be white it is lucky, but if it be black you will die within the year."—[Margaret Collins.]