The Stories That Haunt The House

You'll come to learn that ghosts aren't frightening if they're your own people.

In my last newsletter I was a bit iffy about when you’d be getting the next edition of the Real Story, owing to the holidays and everything. You’ll have one this coming weekend, and it’ll cover a lot of ground. It’ll be a corker, and you’ll want to get past the paywall for it. For now:

It was a lovely and quiet Christmas and no great bother to hold the fort at my columns in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen. Because of all the snow and mayhem on the roads I didn’t get to make that round of visits I’d planned. I’m determined to pop in on my ma in the coming days, no matter what happens. Especially now, because there’s been a death in the family. Which I’ll come to.

This is Biddy’s Ruin. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to have an auntie put the fear of God in you and have a great laugh at your expense in the bargain.

Last week’s column was a look in the rear-view mirror at 2022: The year democracy struck back. In today’s print editions I’m on about what to expect in 2023. I’m loathe to engage in clairvoyance, but some things that seem certain: Russia's disastrous war; the threat of Iranian theocrats and Taliban tyrants; China's COVID chaos: the world needs some luck this coming year.

The bit about China’s Covid Chaos is a reference to the rapidly-developing farce that’s repeating the tragedy of 2020: The World Health Organization’s complicity in Beijing’s unpardonable disinformation and outright lies about the plague that arose in Wuhan and was then allowed to spread to the four corners of the earth.

Canada was distinctly deferential to both Beijing and the WHO through it all, and history appears to be repeating itself. I’ll have more on all this in this coming weekend’s newsletter. For deep-dive backgrounders on how Beijing allowed Covid to run riot across the planet in the first go-round, here’s some of the work I was assigned to undertake for Maclean’s at the time. Beijing's credibility deficit makes the coronavirus crisis much worse and Footprints of the coronavirus: How it came to Canada and went around the world.

Anyway, my Auntie Angela is gone. The news came from my cousins in County Clare in the middle of night after Boxing Day. Within hours, her brother John died as well. “It’s like they were waiting for each other,” my cousin Douglas said to me. Angela will be buried beside her husband, my Uncle Tony, in a grave just over the way from ma’s old family farm, a wooded place at An Casaoireach, sometimes called the famine field. It’s a mass grave from the time of An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger. Uncle Tony died in April, 2020, during the depths of the Covid Emergency.

During our back-and-forth this morning Douglas reminded me of a sort of prank his ma played on me once a long time ago on a windy and rainy afternoon on a wooded, haunted hill above Kilbarron Bog, not far from the farm at Coolreagh. There’s an old cottage on that hilltop known as Biddy’s Ruin, and there’s quite a story in it. I wrote about it a few years ago in Lost Magazine.

Biddy Early was the last woman in Ireland to be tried for witchcraft. She was famous for her long red hair and her beauty, and for her eyes, which were said to be green, and sometimes red, with elliptical pupils like a cat's. She was born in County Clare, in Lower Faha, between Feakle and Gort, in 1798. . .

You can read it here if you like. The way Angela comes into it is this bit:

Half my life ago, during a visit with my mother's family, I spent the day with my Aunt Angela, traveling with her as she made her rounds for the social services department, looking in on the old people up in the far hills, in their little stone houses, to see how they were getting along. We'd spent the day sitting for tea with this old man and with that old man, and with their dogs at their hearths, and with old couples at their kitchen tables and the bare plaster walls with pictures of the Blessed Virgin taped to them.

Driving home at the end of the day, it was windy and raining fiercely, and Angela said, there's one last old girl, up that little road. I'll wait. Just go up, and call out. The road, which was more of a path, led up a steep hill. At the top was a stone cottage, and the thatched roof had fallen in on one side. There was a broken window, and inside there was a rocking chair overturned on the floor, and I was filled with dread. I called out and no one answered. I hurried back down to the road at the bottom of the hill, but before I could explain, Angela said:  Quick then, in you get. And she put the car in gear and sped away, and she was laughing uproariously. That was Biddy's, she said.

The thing is, the love of family and a good bit of what they call the craic are the things that get you through to the warmth and brightness down the road. Sometimes you can take it too far, which is I suppose what you’d say if you were an old miseryguts about the prank the Dubliner Shay Bradley played on his family at graveside back in 2019, after his death.

Well played, granddad. Well played:

We could all use a bit of a laugh at the moment.