HOME Tales From The Spirit Boreen

There are roads running past both sides of our house. One is a main road, reasonably wide and straight, with the hedges well trimmed, the other is a minor road, or boreen, much narrower, twisting more, dominated by trees and bushes. The travellers, who used to camp there many years ago, referred to it as the Spirit Boreen. They used to talk about "lights and things", and of a headless man running around a field that bordered the boreen and our own property. In was only in later years that I began to wonder why they continued to camp there, if the place was haunted.  But there are a few other stories connected with the boreen that are unconnected with the travellers.  My father used to tell us, when we were children, that one evening he was walking along it with a friend, when, suddenly the friend stopped and said to him, "Did you see who just walked between us?" My father said, he hadn't seen anything. "It was Molly — ," said his friend, naming a woman who had died some weeks previously.  We had a dog, a mongrel, terrier in appearance, who had found us many years ago by following my youngest sister home from school one day. Although timid at first, as though it had been mistreated, the animal soon became as much a part of the family as any of the rest of us. A good many years later, it died one hot Summer afternoon, and I, being the only one around at the time, had to bury it. Some weeks after that, one of my older sisters, who had been lately married and was living temporally a in a caravan where the road and the boreen intersected, walked down the boreen one evening to visit us, and, as she approached the steps that led into our land, she saw the dog, Sandy, waiting for her, wagging its tail. Perhaps, living apart from the rest of us, she had forgotten Sandy's death, because she thought it nothing unusual and spoke to the animal as she climbed in over the steps, Sandy following her. She came to our house and opened the door, standing aside to let the dog in. There was no sign of Sandy, even, though she called. It was only then she remembered.  The same sister – it can't have been too long after this, for she and her husband were still living in the caravan – were on their way back there one evening. As they came towards the entrance to our place, they saw two women approaching them. The women were strangers to her, so they looked curiously at them as they passed by. As they looked, the two women vanished. My sister and her husband ran the rest of the way to the caravan and locked themselves in. When I asked my sister, later, what kind of clothes the women were wearing, she couldn't remember, so I suppose they couldn't have been much different from what was being worn by everyone else at that time.  Taken all in all, I suppose that is a paltry amount of ghostly happenings in a short stretch of roadway that was once called "The Spirit Boreen"!