fairies but not in ghosts. I have never met the converse, though I have met a man in Co. Roscommon who denied both, but believed in water-horses.
(7.) A ghost has to go anywhere it is sent; but if you send it to an unpleasant place, you have to do your own penance there when you die. My uncle's old servant again.
(8.) Am greatly interested in the fairy "batting the water with her hands." A man at Ballesodare, Paddy Flynn, used the same phrase about the Banshee.[1]
(9.) I never heard this about the soul travelling where it had gone in life. It is very interesting.[2]
(10.) I have heard of the fairies putting a black lamb into a flock as a warning to a Sligo relation of my own who had cut a fairy bush. In a couple of days the lamb vanished. I suppose therefore that black lambs are uncanny.
(11.) I have a friend whose family (an old Kerry family, I think) has this death-warning.
- ↑ Mr. Jones writes: "As far as I can remember, Curtis thought the figure sitting by the water was the Banshee."—Ed.
- ↑ Mr. Jones writes that he has never heard of the belief elsewhere in Ireland, but refers to a note in Morris' Saga Library, vol. ii., The Saga of the Ere-Dwellers, p. 282, where the translator says: "To this day the belief exists in Ireland that the spirit of the dead visits all localities on earth where the person has been, before it passes to its final destination. This journey is supposed to take a miraculously short time."—Ed.
