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CORMAC MACCONNELL

Gather 'round the campfire: November is Ireland's Month of the Dead

By
Cormac MacConnell

Published Wednesday, November 4, 2009, 11:33 AM
Updated Wednesday, November 4, 2009, 11:50 AM


Ghost stories are a November Irish pasttime
Ghost stories are a November Irish pasttime
Photo by Caty Bartholomew

November is still the official Month of the Dead in Ireland.

People go to their chapels and visit the peaceful graves of their dead, say a certain ritual of Hail Marys and Holy Marys and gain for the dead a plenary indulgence which releases them instantly from Purgatory and into Paradise like a shot.

As a child that was a powerful feeling to have walking home afterwards. We used to parcel out our dead relatives and neighbors between us and free them all from their sufferings. Many of you did the same thing.

As the November evening began to fall, I remember, the graveyard would get colder and a bit eerie too. The butty spire of our chapel would starkify itself against a white sky.

The benches would be sibilant with all the whispered prayers. If you looked upwards you could almost see the freed spirits streaking happily towards St. Peter. We called them the Holy Souls.

It was because of that connection between this mortal world and the afterworld, and because the clocks were turned an hour backwards so the evenings were longer and darker, that November was also the traditional time for telling ghost stories around the parochial firesides.

The connection was strengthened by the simple Halloween games and pranks that started the month off. There were no pumpkins then (what were pumpkins for God's sake?), but mostly houses hollowed out a big turnip and put a candle within so that the grinning visage overlooked the fortune-telling  and the blind-mans-buff and the dipping of faces into the tin basin to catch the floating apple between your teeth.

Later there was often the first of the ghost story sessions that would keep going on many' s the night through the long dark winter. They were special. 

They happen so rarely now. It's years and years since I was part of one such session.

One school of thought is that they perished because no man walks home along haunted roads any more with a few drinks taken the way he used to.  He   drives home behind powerful headlights which have banished all the dark coaches with saturnine drivers that used be met about every wet dark night.

And the Headless Horsemen seem to know better than to challenge Mercs and BMWs and Saabs. They have disappeared too.

And because the men who used tell ghost stories are driving the homing cars, they don't hear the strange rustling sounds from the hedges that used start off so many of the yarns.

And the engines are too loud as well for them to hear the haunting wail of any banshee that has survived into this New Ireland. (They are out there all right, have no doubts about that, but few have time to hear them any more).

I do often feel sorry for them! They are still out there foretelling the passing of O's and Mac's like myself, but they've been sorta disconnected from the modern consciousness. More's the pity.

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Gather 'round the campfire: November is Ireland's Month of the Dead | Irish News | IrishCentral


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Posted by kentuohy on Nov 09, 2009, 12:48 PM EST
Cormac is the pot at the end of the rainbow - may it always be overflowing.






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