This is wonderful, haunting, sad, frightening......

It reminds me a bit of Yeats.

The Unappeasable Host.

....

For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies

With heavy whitening wings and a heart fallen cold;

I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast

And hear the narrow  graves calling my child and me.

...

But it also has an old, old feeling to it. Brings back memories of my grandmother warning me of spirits from the Otherworld stealing children and leaving changelings that appear as birds.

Outstanding John! I'm going back and reading it again.

John, I don't know if the classical spooks and specters moved me quite as much (or in general move me quite as much--"get out of the car," I was thinking, "flip Ghosty McTailgater right off, whydoncha?")  as the sense of presence you evoked with teh birds and the trees.  Your glimpses of the famine hospital are chilling to the bone.  The flashed-back horrors, the grim inevitability...it complemented the looming natural sense well: deep judgments, long memories.

It's the sheerest coincidence that I wandered across this short excerpt from The Cherry Orchard, not five minutes ago.  After both, I might need a vodka or two just to get back down to "sober".

"Oh, it’s awful, your orchard is terrible; and when in the evening or at night you walk through the orchard, then the old bark on the trees sheds a dim light and the old cherry-trees seem to be dreaming of all that was a hundred, two hundred years ago, and are oppressed by their heavy visions. Still, at any rate, we’ve left those two hundred years behind us. So far we’ve gained nothing at all–we don’t yet know what the past is to be to us–we only philosophize, we complain that we are dull, or we drink vodka."

K (the whole play is "on the list" of course, like so many other things)

Thanks all.

Fever Hospitals did exist during and after the Famine. First, they served as hospices for the famished who were beyond recovery; then they were later used as sanitoriums for TB patients; and lastly during the Flu pandemic. My dad tells a story about an old man he met in 1939, when he was a boy, who claimed to have been buried in one of these mass graves. Funny thing about that story. Half those present say it never happened; the others believed it was real. Here it is, partially:

It was here in the summer of 1938 that my father encountered one of the strangest personae from his childhood. A group of them had just retired to the wall that makes the perimeter of the Famine graveyard, when they noticed a very old man hobbling towards them. He came upon them and joined them on the little wall. They got into conversation when he announced,

"You see that graveyard? I was buried there."

He could see he had startled the wits out of the boys, so he explained,

"Don't be alarmed, boys. Let me explain how it was. Beside the graveyard here, literally butressing right up to it, was the old 'Fever Hospital' www.workhouses.org.uk/index.html. It is gone now. But during The Great Famine it was a mighty factory of death. It was here the town and country people came to die, and it was here I was brought as an infant in my mother's arms. There was a chute directed out of the second story window straight into a mass grave below and the dead were so numerous they simply cast them out the window into that massive pit.

My mother died and, rather than pry me from her rigor mortis grip, they flung both of us down the chute. They figured I was as good as dead anyway. Things were so desperate nobody could spare anything for an orphan. Yet, a kind neighbour who happened to be passing at that moment saw a movement from me below in the pit. He rescued me and raised me as his own; otherwise, I would have died beside my mother. That was in the final year of the Great Hunger, and I will be 90 years old this year."

My father shared this story with the local council when they built the famine memorial at the cemetery. The Graveyard is still there and, while fallen into disrepair, it still stands as a poignant testament to a tragic and not too distant past. That history lives side-by-side with us, we are surrounded at all times by revenants.

Maria, These are tall orders indeed. Trevor comes from roughly the same part of the country as myself: Mitchelstown [though in Co. Cork] is juust down the road, really. I love the haunting violent beauty of some of his stories. He has captured the macabre essence of rustic Ireland in ways that resonate. I couldn't read anything of his, though, after Felicia's Journey. Don't know why. Yeats, one never tires of ...

Your pieces are always an education for me. Wish I had the wherewithal to avail of some of your keener insights. I hope switters lives out his dream, which would be mine too if I were so placed.

This is the story I remember you telling, yes?  I sure as hell can't forget the hillside photo, which, under the circumstances, is saying something.

...

A few years ago RTE adapted Trevor's Short Story 'Events at Drimaghleen' [it's now out on DVD]. That movie is one of the scariest things I've ever seen, and the bleak landscape, the way they caught that pale light in the farmyard, the luminescent greens against the mottles greys is the scariest part of it.