All in the head, or a visit from the dead?

When I was little I was obsessed with ghost stories; reading them, hearing them, making them up. My younger sister only recently informed that I did, in fact, scar her at an early age with my tales, both true and imaginary. I had no idea she ever took them seriously, but there you go. Anyway, one of my favourite books back then was True Irish Ghost Stories by St. John D. Seymour and Harry L. Neligan, (1914). I don’t have a copy of it anymore and I’d actually forgotten all about it until I came across it online the other day.  It’s now free from copyright, apparently, and in the public domain.  It really is great reading for the spooky inclined, I’d highly recommended it on a dark October evening.

Once I stumbled upon it myself I abandoned what I was doing and ended up engrossed in it once again. I don’t really like reading at length from a screen, though, so I’ve been coming back to it all week. This afternoon I got to this chapter, ‘Apparitions at or After Death’, which got me thinking about a couple of eerie little tales of my own I’d like to share with you.  Considering this is the time of year when the dead like to come back for a wee visit, I thought they were kinda appropriate.  They're 100% true, too. I’m sure a lot of you out there have had or heard of similar experiences, it seems this type of phenomenon’s really quite common. I'd love to hear about them!

Visitor I

My mother grew up in Lanarkshire in Scotland, but she always had family here in Ireland including a  great-aunt whom she was named after. One night when she was about ten she woke up and her aunt was sitting on the edge of the bed smiling at her. My mum just presumed she’d arrived over for a visit and wanted to come in and say hello. Apparently they proceeded to have a wonderful conversation, after which my mother went back to sleep and dreamt the most vivid dream of her life. It was about a man running down a hill pushing a wheel. Anyway, the next morning she got up and went to the kitchen expecting her aunt to be sitting there.  Instead, she found her family all upset. And when she asked after her aunt’s whereabouts she was told that they’d just got word from Ireland that she had passed away during the night. Confused, she told them about her visit. Her sisters laughed and said it was a dream and that she’d been talking in her sleep all night. It was only when she told her mother about the dream she actually did have that she was taken seriously. You see, at the very same time as her aunt was dying my mother also had a cousin being born in a house just down the hill from her aunt’s in Ireland. The child was coming into the world just as her aunt was leaving it, and for some reason my mother knew all about it over in Scotland.

Visitor II

My fiance has a similar but spookier story. His grandfather, Jack, was the gravedigger for their local parish, and as you’d imagine he had no shortage of tales to tell. This one didn’t happen in the churchyard, though it’s almost creepy as the one that involved coffins moving in the earth. (Don’t ask, it’ll freak you out!) Anyway, one afternoon Jack was sitting at home when there was a knock on his door.  It was a man, not an old one but not young either, and he was there to make arrangements for a burial. The man was quiet but friendly and quite specific about the grave he wanted dug. That was all grand and everything was sorted out so Jack sat himself down to enjoy the rest of his day off. Then, about an hour later, he got a phone call from the local hospital. The person on the other end wanted to organise the burial of a relative. In such a small community it was rare for Jack to have two bookings, as it were, in the one day. He quickly realised, though, that the person on the phone was arranging the same funeral as the man at the door had been and so informed them that everything had already been taken care of. The caller insisted that he must be mistaken, but when Jack described the man at the door he was met by stunned silence from the other end of the line. “That’s impossible,” said the stunned caller, “You’ve just described the deceased man, and he only died 15 minutes ago.”