Dublin Folktales Read Free Page B

Sack-’em-Ups in operation any more.
    Another story told about the robbers relates how a Peter Harkan, a well-known Dublin surgeon and teacher of anatomy, died in Bully’s Acre in the early 1800s while ona corpse-stealing exhibition. He was spotted in the cemetery by a party of watchmen who chased him and his assistants. The assistants crossed the perimeter wall in time but Harkan was caught by the legs by the watchmen. Harkan’s pupils pulled his upper body to free him but such was the counter force used by both parties that the grave robber Harkan died in the graveyard that he had come to rob.

    Some say it was a fitting end for him, others argue that Harkan and the resurrectionists performed a public duty in expanding the knowledge of the human body. It would have been nice, however, if they had asked permission of the bereaved before digging people’s bodies up again and spiriting them into the Dublin night while they were freshly dead and not yet at their eternal rest.
    When you die that should be the end of it. Otherwise, what’s the point of death?

3
B LOOD F IELD
    Ghost stories were told aplenty in olden times in Ireland. They were told with such conviction that people believed them. Many things that seem in darkness to be real, may in daylight seem more a fancy of the night. Nonetheless, people paid attention when the storyteller told the tale, for who knew what might befall them on the dark roads when night fell?
    Reports of ghostly appearances and hauntings died away when rural Ireland was electrified in the twentieth century under a scheme that brought connection to the national grid for most houses, however remote and inaccessible. Dancing candle and shadows thrown by paraffin lamp gave way to a steadier light.
    The wandering spirits also began to disappear to the detriment of ghostly storytelling, but to the greater peace of local inhabitants. Reports of strange shapes and appearances in darkened rooms fell away. However, a working clairvoyant relates a twenty-first-century story concerning a house in County Dublin in which Michael, a six-year-old boy, lived with his parents and family.
    A frightened Michael told his parents that he was seeing visions at night of soldiers from an army of long ago, moving towards and away from a battle. They were passing along the road outside their home. Some of the warriors hadeven passed through their semi-detached home, he said. His parents rationalised the stories as the imaginings of a child. While not entirely dismissing the boy’s stories, they were content when he went asleep each night, for his dreams were waking dreams and all the more unsettling for that. While he slept, silence settled on the upper floors of the small home on a modern estate in the suburb of Clondalkin in the west of the city.
    However, the clairvoyant was called in by Michael’s father when he, the father, encountered an armed soldier on the stairs of the house, giving credence to the boy’s story and frightening the adult man as much as it terrified the child. The soldier passed by without a word and seemed to pass out of the building without touching the closed, locked and secured door. The father then fervently agreed with his son that there was indeed something stirring in their home.
    The clairvoyant came to the house and did what she could for the dark curly-haired boy and his family so that calm could be returned. She sat with the boy and talked about what they could both see. She helped him draw in his special dreams until they were finally closed off to the boy’s vision.
    Before the window closed down, the clairvoyant gazed at the visions with Michael and through him they saw an encampment of a time from long ago, on the streets and roads where the new houses now stood. There were tents and weapons stacked together and defences raised around the encampment against sudden attack by the opposing army.
    In the distance, at night, there were red and yellow bonfires