Illustration © Mhairi Braden
The Haunting of Lily McShane
This is a true story, the events were related to my mother by her good friend Lily McShane, as they happened, one after another.
Lily and my mother had been great friends for a while. They had grown up in the County Down, in the north of Ireland, although didn’t meet until much later, as wives and mothers of school-aged daughters. The trouble began with the sudden and violent death of Lily’s brother, Tommy, who worked as an oil man, that is to say, he delivered oil to people’s houses for their oil-fired heating systems.
It was a suffocating August day, the day he died. A rare one in the north of Ireland, but a true dog day. Tar blistered on the roads, you could see madness in people’s weighted sleepless eyes, and something was prowling the air, waiting. Just waiting.
“They told me,” Lily says to my mother at the funeral, “he felt nothing, it was over in a moment. One minute he’s got the hose in the tank, next, kingdom come. My Tommy, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. Not saying goodbye. Not saying anything.”
Three days after they laid what remained of Thomas McShane in the ground, he woke Lily in the middle of the night.
“It wasn’t a dream,” she said to my mother in a hushed voice less I hear them, as I lurked in the kitchen, pretending to be busy. “I know it wasn’t a dream. He woke me up, he was sitting at the end of the bed wearing his old blue boiler suit and he said to me, Help me Lily I am cold, I am so cold. When I reached out for him, he disappeared, but there was a dent in the bedspread, where someone had been sitting, where he’d been sitting. I stared at it for a long time until it too disappeared.”
Lily, my mother said, was still in shock.
A few months passed. Life seemed to settle, there was no more talk of Tommy. Autumn had struck and the evenings were now dark at five. Lily said she was at the kitchen sink, scrubbing potatoes. The lights were on and she could see her reflection in the window. Without warning, three loud, violent knocks beat out a warning against the glass. Lily said, “I fell onto the floor, my hand over my mouth, too scared to make a sound.”
Lily’s husband worked as a prison officer and in the north of Ireland, this job could attract the wrong kind of person, the kind who wanted revenge on screws for what was happening in Long Kesh. “Now remember,” Lily said to my mother, “that the new house has a gravel path around the sides. If anyone left, they made no sound. They’d have to have run down the end of the garden and scaled the fence.” The other side of the house was impassable due to a garage and if it had been her husband playing a joke on her, well, he’d waited a whole hour and half outside in the cold before he came in. That was the amount of time Lily said she lay on the kitchen floor, chilled to the bone, from the inside out.
By now my mother was thinking things that were never said aloud, not in this day and age. So she kept them in and said nothing. Tommy phoned Lily a few weeks later, while she was asleep and said Goodbye. At least, that was what she thought he said, the static on the line was so bad. This she took as a sign that finally Tommy’s spirit had moved on.
One Sunday, at lunch, my mother related the whole story to her own mother. My grandmother was the toughest bird you ever met. She was practical, grounded, and had survived everything life had thrown at her, from her father’s death at Gallipoli to raising four kids on her own after abandoning her husband and working, working, working to provide. What came out of her mouth as she shovelled apple pie into it, shocked me more than what had happened to Lily.
“Is this Lily McShane you’re talking about, the one with the fancy new house at Thornleigh?”
“Yes.”
My grandmother’s eyes, glassy and hard, turned towards my mother.
“Well,” she pronounced, “what did she expect ? Built that house over fairy trees. They’ll want their pound of flesh for that.”
The Lagan Banshee
My grandmother, who grew up in the County Down, in what could be described as a place that contained a few streets, a canal and an old lock keeper’s house (supposedly haunted), told me this story from the 1950s or 1960s, she couldn’t quite remember the exact date, and swore it was true. She said it had been mentioned in the papers and years later when I recalled the story, I found out that it had, indeed, been in the local papers.
There was a banshee who had roamed the land where she grew up, she’d been keening and sorrowing for almost two hundred years but as the 20th century progressed, people heard less and less of her and soon she fell into the domain of stories you told to the children to scare them half to death just before they went to bed.
But she had never truly gone away, perhaps people had only lost the ability to hear her over the din of modern life.
There was an all-Ulster meeting of boy scouts in the grounds of a former ‘big house’ near the Lagan River, now given over to the public. Its grounds featured miles and miles of lush greenery, a beautiful lake, secret gardens, rose gardens and bandstands and of course, our favourite spot, the peaceful walled garden where the family had interred their beloved pets beneath slabs engraved with loving words.
It was July, a glorious day, not a cloud in the sky. People picnicked as they watched their sons enjoy athletic games, bathing their pale skin in tree dappled sunshine. At precisely 3pm, during a swimming race in the lake, a strange, freezing mist descended out of nowhere. As the skies darkened and the shade turned to an iron fist against the throat, a high, ear splitting wail floated through the mist, a keening that tore the air apart. People stared wildly around for an explanation but they could scarcely see their own hands because of the thick, swirling air. A few moments later, it was all over. The mist lifted and a child lay drowned in the middle of the lake.
Years later, in 1969, something similar happened in Belfast when a woman’s scream rippled off the Lagan River and ricocheted across the whole city. Numerous people reported it to the police but nothing ever came of it. Except a week later, when The Troubles began. In hindsight, people believed it had been an omen.
Basia O'Neill, who also writes as Basia Wolf, is an Irish-born writer and journalist who previously worked for Channel 4 and the London Press Service. Her work has also been published in various magazines and newspapers in Ireland, the US and Australia. Always a writer (she wrote her first novel aged 9), she is now devoting her life full time to writing and is working with her mentor Molly Aitken on a novel about her extraordinary ordinary great-grandparents, a novel steeped in Irish folklore, rebellion, war and love. She has also been published in several zines, including Funny Pearls, Paragraph Planet and Mythic Picnic. Her short story 'Light Bodied, Lingers' will feature in a new ebook to be published by Funny Pearls with all proceeds going to Breast Cancer UK.