Féar Gortha or Hungry Grass and Fear Gurtha or Hungry man.

Féar Gortha (fear gur-tha) or Hungry Grass origans can be traced back to the Irish famine, its a  patch of cursed grass that make a person hungry once they cross it. Oral traditions say that these patches of ground were created when a famine victim died on that spot. but it was only the victims that did not recieve absolution before they died, then faeries then plant the hungry grass on this spot.

It is not just that it makes you hungry as you step on it, but if you did not get something to eat immediately you could drop dead on the spot and it doesn't make a difference if you had just eaten a meal.

Then there is the Fear Gurtha (far Gur tha) the Hungry man, he travels the road with the disguise of a tramp with rags for clothing begging for alms. If you were kind and gave him alms then you will be lucky for the rest of your life. On the otherhand if you ignored him, you were guaranteed to suffer some disaster and would spend the rest of your life in poverty and hunger. There is a tradition when eating outside in certain parts of the country of sprinkling crumbs on the grass after eating, to show the faeries that you are not a mean person.

So when a sign says Keep of the Grass, there might be a reason in Ireland.

Dullahan, the Faerie Headless horseman

The Dullahan is one of the most terrifying of Irish faerie creatures, a headless cloaked man riding his large black steed at night, using a human spine as a whip to urge his horse along the road. He holds his slightly rotten glowing head in his hand and can see clearly at night through its black eyes with supernatural eyesight. He was once the fertility God Crom Dubh, who demanded human sacrifice of his followers. With the coming of Christianity people stopped worshipping Crom Dubh, but he still has a demand for souls every year so he rides out at night along country roads usually in the months of Autumn and November. Sometimes he rides out at night in a funeral carriage with wheel spokes made from human thigh bones and lanterns made of skulls. The carriage is driven by a team of six black steeds that move so fast that they cause sparks to fly from their feet as the charge along and cause bushes and trees to catch fire.

Unlike the Banshee he is not particular what family you are from and he as rides out to claim a victim , the grinning skull can be heard calling out the name of his victim as he races along the road. When he gets to the house of the victim he stops at the front door and he roars out the name and the person dies on the spot. There is no protection from the Dullahan, if you see him as he thunders along the road he throws blood at people or maybe blind them in one eye, the only thing that he is afraid of is gold.

Changelings, faeries stealing infants and baby Killers

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild 

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

For anyone that has seen the start of the film 300, one thing sticks in the mind of most people is the beginning, where the helpless naked baby is being inspected, while the narrator tells us of the Spartans strife for perfection and we then see all the skeletal remains of the dead babies who never made it. Most people talked about how cruel this was and how it was a tough if not an evil race of people that could do such a thing, yet in Europe a lot worse things happened to infants.
Ireland like many in many places in Europe had a terrible fear of Faeries or bad spirits stealing  new born babies from cribs at night time and leaving a changeling in its place. There were two reasons for theft of babies, first was to bring new blood to prevent too much inbreeding in the faerie population. The second was probably the more common reason was that faeries had great difficulty with childbirth and faerie babies often died or were deformed, these were either replacements for the faeries or used as servants in the otherworld.

When a mortal child was born in Ireland it was dangerous to compliment it too much or this could put it in the faeries power, if a child was praised a blessing had to be said afterwards to counteract any power that the faeries might have. Also precautions like a mans suit left at the foot of the bed and a cross at the top of the bed would prevent a child being taken. If a child was taken it was replaced by one of three things, first a sickly deformed faerie child, second a senile or older faerie or finally a piece of wood.

Unlike human babies, faerie babies would only eat solids and they had a huge appetite, eating you out of house and home yet its hunger was not satiated, worse still the baby never put on weight. Changeling brought discontent into the house, they cried all the time with a wail that was piercing and nonstop .  These babies were physically deformed or not as mentally quick as other babies and generally do lot live for many years. Sometimes an inanimate object was placed in the crib, usually a piece of wood that had a magic spell put on it, this only lasted weeks. Senile faeries that were left in the place of infants also disrupted the household and lived out the remainder of their lives in relative comfort being pampered by their human carers (faeries were the ones to invent nursing homes) .

To test if a baby was a faerie there were a few things that you could do, each more gruesome than the next. A baby would be thrown onto the fire, if the baby was not a faerie he would be saved by god, if it was a faerie it would reveal its age and escape up the chimney. The picture on the left is of Fourknocks pasage grave county Meath, there is a strong oral history in the area of babies being burned in here in the past, because they were changelings.
Another way was to put the child into boiling water with the same results expected as the fire, with the faerie escaping up the chimney. Some infants were left in a manure pit overnight, if they survived the morning they were not faeries! One of the ones that I thought was the cruelest and was common in Ireland was foxglove poisoning which left the infant with severe stomach pains and took some for it to die. Leaving the worst till last, what I thought was the cruelest thing that could happen to an infant was a red hot poker up the anus, similar to the fire if the child was a faerie its insides would boil on the inside and the faerie spirit would disappear up the chimney, if not a faerie the child was spared.
It is obviously a form of Eugenics killing of a sickly or handicapped child that would take up a lot of time of the family, this practice was more common in the rural regions, were where everyone was needed to work the farm.  There are other cases of older people and animals being taken by the faeries, these will  follow again.
Credit for some of this information comes from a colleague Sean, thanks.

Halloween tradtions, their history rooted in Ireland

Did you know that a lot of the American traditions for Halloween like the carved pumpkin, dressing in costume and calling door to door, were taken from Irish traditions. It died out here, but isnow again returning again due to American influences on TV, the funny thing is that people don't realise that their history.

Halloween was a Celtic festival called Samhain or the feast of the dead, though there is traditions in other cultures celebrating the end of the harvest.

On this night in Celt's believed that the dead walked around amongst the living, to avoid detection Irish people dressed up in costumes of the spirits and faeries so that they would not be carried away to the otherworld. If they were detected they also had the backup of taking the dust from their shoes and throwing it at the spirits. There was a tradition of leaving out gifts of food for the fairies, during Samhain people dressed up called around to neighbours house and got those gifts.

The Jack'o'Lantern has its roots here too, Jack was by all accounts a wicked miserly evil man who was destined for hell. One night he had stolen from his neighbours and making his escape met the Devil on the road. The devil was there to collect his soul, but Jack being cunning managed to trap the devil with a cross so that the Devil lost his power. In order to gain freedom the devil said that Jack would never go to hell and when he died he was not sent to hell, yet he was too evil to go to heaven. The Devil laughed at him and threw an Ember of coal from the fires of hell at him to give him light. Jack placed this into a hollowed out turnip and now wanders the roads of Ireland.

Other stories that have a celtic origin are the headless horseman, the borrowers and swanlake, but stories for another day.

Happy Halloween/Samhain

Faerie tree's

There is a fairy tree opposite where I grew up and I have always been fascinated about it as a child growing up. That faerie tree is a Hawthorn tree and there is a tradition in Ireland that a single Hawthorn  growing in the middle of a field is a faerie tree, as the Hawthorn was seen in Celtic mythology as a gateway to the otherworld. I know from the picture that it looks like two trees but its all from the one root.

Irish faeries or 'Sidhe' in Irish, differ completely to the Hollywood vision of Leprechauns, they are not all small, dress in green and are cute with an Oirish accent. There are also many different types of  faerie or little people, some of them are good and some not so good, that and more  I will get into another time.

I was told when I was very small that if I wanted to see the faeries and get their gold I had to go to the tree at midnight. But I was to be very careful, as they are cunning magical beings and would trick me with their magic and I would be left without my pot of gold and could be dragged off to their world in the morning. I remember trying to stay awake until  midnight when I was five or six but I always fell asleep before my parents went to bed, once I did make it to the front door one night in my pyjamas after my parents had gone to bed, but was foiled by the height of the front door latch.  But you just cannot just arrive at the tree at midnight with one hand as long as the other*, you have to come armed with a hand-made three legged stool made from an Ash three. When I was young I had not the means to make myself such a stool and by the time I would have been able to fashion a stool I had gone past the stage of believing in faeries.
It is bad luck to cut down a faerie tree or damage it in any way, it is said that you will never know a good nights sleep again for the rest of your life.  The ill fated DeLorean car company that was the iconic symbol of the 1980's was built in a factory on a plot of ground where a faerie tree was said to stood. The tree was cut down to make way for the factory and folklorists contend that this is the reason for the companies failure, nothing at all to do with its finances or dodgy owner. More recently the Ennis bypass was delayed for a number of years due to a faerie tree on the chosen path of the moterway, the road eventually opened going around the faerie tree. This tree was said to be the meeting point of the faeries when they were on their travels, it was fenced off and the roadworks continued, but the poor faeries still have to cross a motorway.

* 'One hand as long as the other' is a way of saying , coming empty handed, as in if you had something in one hand it would not be as long as the other ;-).