Haunted Dublin had barely reached the editor's desk
at Nonsuch Ireland,
and I was already under interrogation by friends and acquaintances; 'so... do you
believe all this stuff?'. It is, I suspect, a fair question - and the answer is
'no'. While it's well known that I've spent the last decade sporadically
producing articles on bizarre topics, including UFOs and lake monsters, it still
may not be clear that I eshew the shoehorning of phenomena into simplistic
black and white, either/or, true/false, reality/fantasy dichotomies.
While I am inclined to take a sceptical approach
to the paranormal, but even the world 'sceptical' is often misundertood - it
means critical,ratherthan dismissive.
While I would never spurn a story out of hand, but I am entitled to ask questions,
and to exist in a state somewhere between belief and non-belief, entertaining
both premises equally. The poet John Keats defined this concept of 'negative
capability' in 1817, in a letter to his brothers:
'Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason.'
I have
little doubt that Haunted Dublin will
itself draw criticism - from the true believers camp on one side, complaining
that I'm too sceptical, and the ultra-rationalists on the other, telling me off
for promoting gobbledygook. Well, they can feck right off, the lot of them.
Haunted Dublin does not claim that the ghosts it
documents are 'real'; nor is within the book's remit to prove that ghosts don't
exist. Instead, I am more interested in celebrating the stories of Haunted Dublin; what they tell us about
the era in which they were recorded, about the people who experienced them, and
about our own reactions, whether it be fear or laughter.
'The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to
have another fly wide open' - Charles Fort, in The Book of the Damned, 1919
In a sense,
maybe all of the apparitions and creatures described are real. Not necessarily in a physical, measureable way, but by
virtue of having become integrated into Dublin's
urban folklore. This includes even the 'fake' ghosts, like the Scooby Doo
villains that were unmasked at the close of every episode (if it weren't for
those pesky kids...). Somebody, somewhere in this city believed, and continues to
believe these ghost stories, sometime. Is Haunted
Dublin, instead of merely documenting ghost stories, guilty of further
proliferation? Probably. Folklore is not a thing of the past.
For
hundreds of years, through generations of Dubliners, toe-curling tales have been
passed on in Dublin
pubs, around fires, growing with the telling all the time. Constantly re-engineered
to suit their audience, and mixing in with Dublin's rich mythic web of history;
Vikings, the Battle of Clontarf, the Norman invasion, the 1798 uprising, Robert
Emmet, the 1916 Rising, the pages of the Evening
Herald and last Monday's pub talk; and the overlay of deliberate fiction by
the likes of James Joyce's Ulysses,
Flann O'Brien, Brendan Behan and dozens of others, picked from the city's army
of writers, each trying to connect with the soul of the city. Anyone who
attempts to write a book proclaiming the non-existence of ghosts is, quite
frankly, pissing in the wind.
It doesn't
matter a damn if any of ghost these stories are true. On O'Connell Bridge,
there's a plaque dedicated to a Father Pat Noise, 'who died in suspicious
circumstances when his carriage plunged into the Liffey in 1919'. When it
turned out that the plaque had appeared as recently as May 2006, some members
of Dublin's
City Council wanted to replace it with something dedicated to a 'real person'.
I found this terrifically amusing - this is a city that once had a public monuments
dedicated to Anna Livia - personified
as a bronze statue of an improbably serene and ethereal woman on O'Connell St.,
known more coarsely as the 'Floozie in the Jacuzzi', or the 'Hoor in the
Sewer'. While an Anna Livia Plurabelle turns up as a character in Ulysses, and we're all very fond of
Jimmy Joyce, I don't think we can claim Anna
Livia as a real person, any more than we can claim that Molly Malone, whose
statue is a popular tourist draw at the bottom Grafton St. ('The Tart With The
Cart'), existed outside the lyrics of a popular song. And don't forget that
every year, on 16th of June, Dublin
officially celebrates the original Bloomsday, which although pinned to the year
1904, never actually happened beyond the pages of Joyce's Ulysses. Instead, June 16th 1904 was the date of Joyce's
first romantic (and possibly erotic) outing with his future wife, Nora
Barnacle. So much for reality.
For me,
what is interesting about Dublin's
stories - and in particular, Haunted
Dublin's ghost tales - is why they exist at all. Whether or not the paranormal
events objectively happen in a 'real' or 'measurable' sense doesn't matter; the
fact is, somebody has had the
experience, and somebody was
compelled to talk or write about it.It's
possible that paranormal experiences involving the apparition of a loved one
who has 'passed' may articulate a need for closure. Others situations seem
stress related - many modern poltergeist stories involve troubled adolescents,
or other family issues; whether these can actually manifest as physical
poltergeist activity or are faked occurrences driven by personal issues is open
to suggestion.
There's a
rough pattern to many of the stories in Haunted
Dublin, and in Irish ghost stories in general. Many of the tales that come from
the 'big houses' tend to have a finale, backed up with a beginning that doubles
as a dubious explanation. For example, a 'white lady' is seen a castle A. She
must have been the daughter/wife/sister of Lord B; she committed suicide, died
of disease C or fell from a horse; her love for D is never consummated, thus
she wanders the halls of her family mansion forever, seeking closure. These
stories seem to have arrived through layers of romantic storytelling, often
filtered via Victorian values or even Spiritualism. And there's often a moral
to the cautionary tale, with some damned soul committed to an eternity in limbo
for their crimes.
The ghost
stories of Dublin's
streets seem less clearcut, more chaotic, and seem to be largely informed by an
older, more rural form of storytelling that celebrates an absolute terror of
the unknown, without looking for an explanation. Haunted Dublin's tales of black
dogs, black pigs, huge cats, suburban monsters with glowing eyes, and apparitions
of goats seem to evoke the Púca, the
terrifying shape-shifter of Celtic mythology. While the English puck comes across as merely mischievous
character or prankster, the Irish Púca's
motives are obscure, and definitely more frightening. That said, an encounter
with the Púca is rarely fatal, and is
often instructive or helpful; at worst it will leave you confused, in a ditch
somewhere.
I'm not saying that the Púca, Scaldbrother, the Dolocher or the Banshee are out stalking on
the streets of Dublin
at the moment. But that's no reason not to be scared.
Haunted Dublin: Chilling accounts of the supernatural in the city
Only € 14.99 + P&P! By Dave Walsh Paperback: 93 pages, including 40 photographs Publisher: Nonsuch Publishing Published October 2008
Haunted Dublin, by author and journalist Dave Walsh, gathers together in one succinct volume, well-known legend with rare and chilling accounts of the supernatural in the city. With poltergeists and apparitions, lore, myth and the downright scary, this fascinating work will delight and unsettle those brave enough to explore this hidden world.
