Banshees and such
Nov. 28th, 2014 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileFor some Halloween-y reading, I decided to read a book that I'd picked up over the summer in Maine: True Irish Ghost Stories, by St. John D. Seymour and Harry L. Neligan. It is now, as you can see, nearly December. This is because of NaNoWriMo. The most embarassing thing here is that True Irish Ghost Stories is barely a hundred pages long.
A thing I did not realize at first is that this book is a reprint of a work that was originally published shortly after the turn of last century, when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. Once you start reading it, it's wildly obvious, because it's written in such an earnestly Edwardian manner. The book is a collection of short anecdotes, organized into categories, interspersed with a lot of arguments about why they are credible and that the fashionable skepticism about their validity is arrogance, arrogance I tell you. The two men who compiled this were obviously smart and well-educated men, who are actually quite vocal in their defense of the Irish populace from charges of "superstition" (a popular anti-Catholic stereotype), but who are entirely convinced that it makes prudent scientific sense to believe in "psychical phenomena" and stuff. It's really kind of adorable. The stories themselves are sometimes sort of short and weird--like "there was a Mrs. S and she lived in this house and saw a figure, and then her sister came to visit and she saw it too" and nothing else really happens--but some of them are quite imaginative and interesting, particularly the ones that are less generically haunted-housey and get into banshees and the like. The banshee stories are particularly awesome. Most of these stories aren't that scary, although there are one or two that feature images that managed to get weirdly under my skin anyway, but that may be because I am a highly suggestible wimp (a bad trait for a Goth, but oh well).
I'd really only recommend this to people who are particularly interested in weird folklore; the lack of a narrative thread and the pseudo-scientific tangents would probably make it a bit of a dry read for people who prefer reading regularly-structured books.
A thing I did not realize at first is that this book is a reprint of a work that was originally published shortly after the turn of last century, when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. Once you start reading it, it's wildly obvious, because it's written in such an earnestly Edwardian manner. The book is a collection of short anecdotes, organized into categories, interspersed with a lot of arguments about why they are credible and that the fashionable skepticism about their validity is arrogance, arrogance I tell you. The two men who compiled this were obviously smart and well-educated men, who are actually quite vocal in their defense of the Irish populace from charges of "superstition" (a popular anti-Catholic stereotype), but who are entirely convinced that it makes prudent scientific sense to believe in "psychical phenomena" and stuff. It's really kind of adorable. The stories themselves are sometimes sort of short and weird--like "there was a Mrs. S and she lived in this house and saw a figure, and then her sister came to visit and she saw it too" and nothing else really happens--but some of them are quite imaginative and interesting, particularly the ones that are less generically haunted-housey and get into banshees and the like. The banshee stories are particularly awesome. Most of these stories aren't that scary, although there are one or two that feature images that managed to get weirdly under my skin anyway, but that may be because I am a highly suggestible wimp (a bad trait for a Goth, but oh well).
I'd really only recommend this to people who are particularly interested in weird folklore; the lack of a narrative thread and the pseudo-scientific tangents would probably make it a bit of a dry read for people who prefer reading regularly-structured books.
