December’s post is a departure from the normal subject matter of this blog. Instead of concentrating directly on a monster or theme from Celtic folklore, I’m going to be taking a look at an important writer in the field: Irishman Elliot O’Donnell (1872-1965), who has been described as Britain’s greatest ghost hunter. O’Donnell was a mysterious character indeed: he claimed to have seen a ghostly apparation covered in spots when he was five, and also to have been near-strangled by a phantom in Dublin later in life. But what’s really odd is how little information survives on the internet about this amazingly prolific and popular writer. I can’t even find a photograph of him online, although he lived until 1965…
O’Donnell was born in Ireland but travelled to the U.S. to become a police officer in Chicago, and was involved in the Chicago Railway Strike of 1894, at age 22. He later served in WW1. In the meantime he travelled widely in the British Isles and Ireland seeking out haunted places, and began to publish books of stories and articles, primarily on ghosts and phantoms in Celtic countries, in 1904. He and continued to publish on an almost yearly basis throughout the war and then at a slightly slower pace up until 1939. After Ww2 he had a brief resurrection of his career, before publishing his final work in 1958. A full list of titles is here:
- For Satan’s Sake (1904)
- Unknown Depths (1905)
- Some Haunted Houses (1908)
- Haunted Houses of London (1909)
- Reminiscences of Mrs.E. M. Ward (1910)
- Byways of Ghostland (1911)
- The Meaning of Dreams (1911)
- Scottish Ghost Stories (1912)
- The Sorcery Club (1912)
- Werewolves (1912)
- Animal Ghosts (1913)
- Ghostly Phenomena (1913)
- Haunted Highways and Byways (1914)
- The Irish Abroad (1915)
- Twenty Years’ Experience as a Ghost Hunter (1916)
- The Haunted Man (1917)
- Spiritualism Explained (1917)
- Fortunes (1918)
- Haunted Places in England (1919)
- Menace of Spiritualism (1920)
- More Haunted Houses of London (1920)
- The Banshee (1926)
- Ghosts, Helpful and Harmful (1926)
- Strange Disappearances (1927)
- Strange Sea Mysteries (1927)
- Confessions of a Ghost Hunter (1928)
- Great Thames Mysteries (1929)
- Famous Curses (1929)
- Fatal Kisses (1929)
- Rooms of Mystery (1931) London: Philip Allan & Co. Ltd.
- Ghosts of London (1932)
- The Devil in the Pulpit (1932)
- Family Ghosts (1934)
- Strange Cults & Secret Societies of Modern London (1934)
- Spookerisms; Twenty-five Weird Happenings (1936)
- Haunted Churches (1939)
- Ghosts with a Purpose (1952)
- Dead Riders (1953)
- Phantoms of the Night (1956)
- Haunted Waters, and Trees of Ghostly Dread (1958)
The three books in bold are the ones I have read so far. In particular I have been looking at Werewolves from 1912, owing to an interest in a story about the Werewolves of Langavat, which I keep coming across on the internet, but whose source remained obscure until recently. (Suffice to say, it isn’t in O’Donnell’s book, but in a much more recent work called Scotland’s Ghosts and Appparitions by Terence Whitaker. More of that in February’s post.)
So, what’s O’Donnell like as a writer, then? Well, some of his works are pseudo-scholarly, in that delightfully amaetuerish antiquarian mode that only the British and Irish are able to pull off. Other works are straightforward books of short stories, but often written in the first person to suggest that Elliot, our man of the haunted road, was there in person to witness the horror and the mystery. If you like M.R James, or Thomas Crofton Coker, you’ll like this writer. Here’s some of Werewolves…
Here is another account of this type of haunting narrated to me some summers ago by a Mr. Warren, who at the time he saw the phenomenon was staying in the Hebrides, which part of the British Isles is probably richer than any other in spooks of all sorts.
“I was about fifteen years of age at the time,” Mr. Warren said, “and had for several years been residing with my grandfather, who was an elder in the Kirk of Scotland. He was much interested in geology, and literally filled the house with fossils from the pits and caves round where we dwelt. One morning he came home in a great state of excitement, and made me go with him to look at some ancient remains he had found at the bottom of a dried-up tarn. ‘Look!’ he cried, bending down and pointing at them, ‘here is a human skeleton with a wolf’s head. What do you make of it?’ I told him I did not know, but supposed it must be some kind of monstrosity. ‘It’s a werwolf!’ he rejoined, ‘that’s what it is. A werwolf! This island was once overrun with satyrs and werwolves! Help me carry it to the house!’
If you don’t like that, there’s little for you on this blog….
Anyway, O’Donnell’s works are mostly in the public domain and some of them have been put online at Project Guteneberg and elsewhere. But strangely, only a few of them are online, the same ones repeated in numerous places. I’ve indicated these in italics.
So, what’s up? Why have only a handful of these works been reproduced? Is it possible that his pre-ww2 work is his best, and that no-one is really bothering to reprint or archive the later works in the 20s and 30s? Or do I just need access to a better library?
Anyway, here are some links to get you started.
- Project Gutenberg Page for Elliot O’Donnell
- Elliot O’Donnell at the Internet Speculatuive Fiction Database
- Elliot O’Donnell Online Books Page
None of that gets me any closer to a copy of Banshees. Or a photograph of O’Donnell so I can see what sort of man I am dealing with. Was he a rakish fop, a befuddled antiquarian, a canny entrepreneur who preyed upon the gullible, or a hard-minded man of the people?
If anyone has a photo, let me know?
S.J. McKenzie.
Just a quick note to say I’ve had some signs of encouragement lately – two of my stories have made it through the slush-filters to be shortlisted for publication in the two premier Australian fantasy magazines: Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (‘Great Hand’) and Aurealis (‘The Smith and the Waterhorse’).
Nice to know that someone is interested in folklore stories. Judging by the number of defunct magazines in this area I’d say the genre has been on the outer for quite some time.
Anyway, I’ll be sending more stories to these publishers in the coming days.
Steve.
Humor me while I ramble, it is late at night where I am…
One of the tales in my collection The Blue Men of the Minch concerns the well-known Loch Morar Monster, Morag, whose visitations were thought to presage death for a member of the MacDonald family. Not to give too much away, but here’s a sneak peek…
The MacDonalds of Morar were once prosperous, a branch of Clanranald, and the holders of many lands in Lochaber and the Western Isles. Then, their misfortunes began; an heir was killed while hunting, the next young laird was struck witless after an accident, and so on it went, until within one hundred years of the building of the clan house at Arisaig, the Morar line came to an end. The descendants scattered and the family lands were sold to incomers, in the years just before the West Highland Line reached Mallaig and the new century began.
We may put it all down to the passing of the old times in the Highlands, and convince ourselves that the family’s demise was a normal affair, provided that we do not consider the case too closely, and seek the reason why so much ill-luck occurred to one family in so short a span of years; and provided also that we never travel to Loch Morar by Sworldland, where the water is clear and deep, and catch sight of something, large and serpentine, moving about just below the surface.
Anyway, I had known about the existence of other monsters besides Nessie for some years, but became even particularly interested in the Morar area as a base for a ‘water-monster’ tale after reading the accounts of Loch Morar and the Grey Dog of Meoble over at Mike Dash’s blog at the Charles Fort Institute. What got me hooked was the notion that there should be so much folklore in such a small remote area; there were not one but two death harbingers for the Macdonald’s, the Monster and the Grey Dog, within an area the size of my suburb in Adelaide.
And that’s just the tip of the (deep loch-forming) iceberg for this area; a bit more scouting around revealed a villain called Evil Donald who was followed about by a monster in the shape of a giant toad, a headless witch or ghost who terrorized the area, and a charmed dappled Bull that eventually killed the clan hero (Ronald MacDonald, no less) after he had put paid to the rest. All of it good stuff, and all of it connected to the MacDonald clan, who, judging by the account up here, were indeed a very unlucky family in the nineteenth century.
It is in the deep water near Swordland where many of the monster sightings seem to have occured, so that is where I decided to set the tale. The name, by the way, besides being the name of innumerble sword and sorcery constructions, is a Gaelic feudal concept meaning “lands granted for service in battle”, i.e. “Airbertach won swordlands in the lands of the Norsemen, including Mull and Tiree.”) Clearly, the land around the lodge was the spoils of battle at some point in the past.
According to Wikipedia (Loch Morar):
Although the only road along the loch extends no more than four miles along the north shore, both sides of the lake were inhabited along their length as late as the early twentieth century. Emigration and the introduction of sheep farming and sporting estates in place of the traditional cattle farming, however, led to the abandonment of all settlements on the south shore and of those on the north east of Bracorina. Kinclochmorar, at the head of the loch, was last inhabited around 1920 and Swordland Lodge, at the midway point on the north shore and level with the deepest part of the loch, has been no more than a summer home since 1969.
Further investigation found a Geograph photo of the lodge (at the top of this page), as well as lots of references to it as a hiking destination. The lodge is only accessible by boat, but if you are too lazy to walk along the north shore you can take a boat from Mallaig, twalk over the ridge to Tarbert from the lodge, then boat back to Mallaig through the Kyles on the other side.
That’s about all. Other than a few business and real estate pages, the internet is remarkably quiet on Swordland Lodge.
Hmmmm. A Victorian hunting lodge on the edge of a famous loch, with it’s own monster just nearby, but it hasn’t been permanently occupied since the 1960s, and not accessible by road!
Are the Scots totally mad? In a more populous region a place like that would be fairly swarming with tourists. In Morar, it’s uninhabited most of the year. Even though my story was set in the 1870s, I decided Swordland seemed interesting enough to visit one day if I ever make it back to Scotland, to see if I could find out who really lives there….
I even found a website posting by a similarly intrigued tourist by the name of Ozneil:
I took a boat from Morar up Loch Morar for about 7-8 miles to Swordland Lodge, a magnificent Victorian hunting lodge accessable only by water. From there we walked across a low saddle, sorry dont know Scot’s term, about a mile to a little hamlet, Tarbert, on Loch Nevis where we were picked up by another boat which took us back to Mallaig & thence by train back to Morar. For pristine scenery with no sign of man it was magic. I never found out who owned Swordland lodge…
Well, Ozneil, I just found out. I think the Special Operations Executive own Swordland lodge. The SOE (formed by Winston Churchill in WW2) closed off much of Lochaber for training purposes and also requisitioned many other large houses in the region. I have this list from SECRET SCOTLAND:
- STS21 – Arisaig House, Arisaig, Inverness-shire – Finishing School
- STS22 – Rhubana Lodge, Morar, Inverness-shire
- STS22a – Glasnacardoch Lodge, Morar, Inverness-shire – Foreign Weapons Training
- STS23 – Meoble Lodge, Morar, Inverness-shire
- STS23b – Swordland Lodge, Tarbet Bay, Morar, Inverness-shire
- STS24a – Inverie House, Knoydart, Mallaig, Inverness-shire
- STS24b – Glaschoille House, Knoydart, Mallaig, Inverness-shire
- STS25a – Garramor House, Morar, Inverness-shire
- STS25b – Camusdarach Lodge, Morar, Inverness-shire
- STS25c – Traigh House, Morar, Inverness-shire
The site says that it was used for training commandos in WW2 but its specific function is now unknown. Right.
Anyway, I’m calling that my post for October. None of this really affected my story, which employed a fairly generic hunting lodge setting and in fact, could have been set anywhere with the ingredients: ‘loch’, ‘monster’ and ‘lodge with history of hunting accidents’. However, the idea of a mostly abandoned building in a haunted area being used for a training excercise has a lot of potential for a future story.
So, I might have to set another tale in Lochaber, the place where the people aren’t…
SJM.
As promised, this month’s post – just in the nick of time, on Halloween or Samhain to you purists – concerns the relationship between the Redcap of Scots Borders folklore (discussed last month) and the Red Man (Far Darrig, Fear Dearg), a solitary fairy of Irish folklore. Was the Redcap merely a translation of the original Irish character into a new setting across the Irish Sea? The short answer: probably not, unless you are prepared to look at very general Indo-European fairy prototypes..
W.B. Yeats Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry is a key source for the Red Man and is encyclopedic in nature: The Far Darrig (fear dearg), which means the Red Man, for he wears a red cap and coat, busies himself with practical joking, especially with gruesome joking. This he does, and nothing else.
That’s pretty much all Yeats had to say on the subject, and that’s what you’ll find paraphrased all over the internet, with additional details (such as the fact that farmers consider meeting him very lucky) added here and there, often for the purpose of using him in role-playing games. There are no stories in Yeat’s text about the Red Man, except for the curious Far Darrig in Donegal, an amusing tale of fairy deception that makes no specific reference to red men, red caps or any other identifying features of this type of fairy, and so we must assume that it was the nature of the deception that promoted Yeats (or his source) to call the tale by this name.
The Red Man also appears in the work of that other luminary of Irish folklore, Thomas Crofton Coker. In the Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland he states that the Red man and Red cap are probably the same, but also draws parralels between the red cap worn by the Merrow, to Robin Hood, Robin Goodfellow (aka Puck), and to the German Hobgoblin and Kobold, and to the Norman English ‘Follet’. Following the logic of this passage, pretty much any trickster figure wearing a red hat in medieval or early modern thought could be said to be a counterpart of the Far Darrig. (It is noteworthy that the Redcap of Borders lore is also called Robin).
Few internet sites mention a direct link between the two creatures, and those that do cite no original reference. I suppose it is easy enough to say that the Redcap is the Scots equivalent of the Irish Fear Dearg without a direct reference, because the two sound similar in some characteristics; both are wizened men wearing red cap who delight in playing tricks. But there are many differences, too – the Fear Dearg wears a green cloak, has no association with churches or castles, and is not said to dye his cap in blood, and so on.
Should we be looking more at similarity than difference?
I think the only real conclusion to be drawn here is not regarding a translation of the Red cap from Ireland to Scotland, but of the general prevalence of the colour red in both Celtic and Germanic folklore as a symbol of the otherworld, and often, of deceit.
The story-teller, wishing to alert his audience to the fact that the character in question was a trickster spirit or a death messanger, would include the detail of a red cap, possibly stained with blood or made of an otherwordly plant, in order to make sure his listeners got the point. I suggest that the use of the red cap in this way is much the same as a modern spy character wearing a dark cloak and sunglasses; it sets them up as a ‘type’, but it does not necessarily mean that one such usage of the ‘type’ is a direct memory or translation of the other.
NOTE: Another type of Far Darrig, The Red-Headed Man, is described in various tales of humans trapped in fairy-land. It is with his help that they escape. Examples are found in Examples are to be found in Lady Wilde’s ANCIENT LEGENDS OF IRELAND, VOL. I, ‘Fairy Music’ and ‘Fairy Justice’. This is taken from the Encyclopedia of the Celts. I think we can rule out this character as being quite a different trope to our Red Man of deceit.
Happy Samhain,
S J. McKenzie.
