Halloween Haunts: Mass Grave by Colum Sanson-Regan

The Irish countryside is alive with spirits. On Halloween, the Celtic New Year, the thin veil between this world and the next slips. For the Celts, the year was divided in two, the bright half and the dark half. Halloween marks the beginning of that half of the year when the spirits hold dominion. The fruits of the last summer harvest were offered to the spirits so they would treat the living well during the coming dark months.

In recent history, the weight has shifted and the ranks of unquiet and malign spirits has grown. The Great Famine is barely behind us, and the torment and anguish from those deathly and diseased years is still fresh in the soil. More than a million died, while grains and crops were exported on ships from the harbours and surplus was kept in warehouses. Food within sight but not within reach.

Some of the poor built roads. But the money earned couldn’t buy food, because the price was too high. And these were roads that were not needed. They went from nowhere to nowhere. Families, men women and children, died on these roads. They were buried in shallow graves by the roadside only to be dug up again and eaten by dogs and cats and rats. Graveyards were full. Communities dug mass burial pits. In parts of the country, there was not enough wood to bury the dead. Those that walked were marked with dark patches on their pale skin, brittle protruding bones and bleeding mouths. They were wracked with fever and delirium. That was only one hundred and fifty years ago. The poor houses that were eventually built to house the worst of the diseased and the poor are still standing. The inmates were fed on old meat and bone soup, and the treatments were blood-letting and exposure to heat. In many of these workhouses, mass graves were dug on the property. They were called Death Houses. Everyone knew once you went in you would never come out alive.

As a teenager in the 1990s I had a friend who moved to Wexford. One weekend, the last weekend in October, me and Duffy visited him. This is what happened on the way back.

The building was abandoned. Ivy snaked out from the pitch black upper windows and crept across the crumbling masonry. We peered through the gates. The rain was getting heavier and the darkness was getting thicker by the minute. Duffy shook his head.

“No way.”

“Well should we just walk all night? At least let’s get some shelter.”

I pushed the gates. An old chain and huge rusted lock held them together. I threw my bag over and started to climb.

“It’s locked for a reason,” Duffy said.

“We’ll be dry at least, come on.”

He cursed me as he threw his rucksack over the gate and climbed over.

The building loomed over us as we approached; two bedraggled figures coming in from the lonely Irish midnight road.

The front doors were sealed and the windows boarded up. A blue plaque declared “Poor Law 1838-1923 Workhouse”. We searched around the side for an entry point. There was a large bay window boarded up by two wood panels. One was hanging loose.

Inside it was black, but it was dry. The rain beat and rattled the roof. Duffy rummaged in his rucksack. In the darkness, I could just make out the shape of an open doorway on the other side of the room. Duffy’s torch flashed a thin beam across the wall. Wallpaper drooped and hung from the cracked plaster like an old discarded skin. The floor was covered in rubble and wood. The inky black square of a fireplace was in one of the walls, and there were two chairs positioned around it.

“We’re not the first,” I said.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he whispered.

The torch beam found the emptiness of the doorway on the other side of the room. The darkness swallowed the thin string of light. There was a sharp scuffling and scraping from the corner. Duffy swung the beam around, but there was nothing there, just a build-up of rubble and dust.

“Rats,” I said. “Find something dry. Let’s use the fireplace.”

Duffy was right of course. We shouldn’t have been there. We should have been back in Cork, dressed up and drinking our way through a Halloween party. But getting back from Wexford had not gone according to plan. Two missed buses and two hitchhike lifts had left us in Lismore. We had walked for hours in the darkness, thumbs to the road, passing houses with hollowed out turnips shining from the windows, age old totems to keep the malign spirits roaming the night at bay.

There were a few pieces of dry wood, some scraps of material, some old wallpaper and we piled them into the fireplace on top of the ash and burnt scraps. When the flames finally took, the room was revealed.

The walls were tattered and mottled, like a diseased hide. There were scratch marks in the plaster, as if clawed by a trapped fevered animal. The shadows shifted, swelled and shrank and gathered in the corners.

Heat started to come through and we moved our seats as close as we could to the flames. It felt good. The calming sound of the fire joined the hammering of the rain and I started to relax. Even in this abandoned place, I wished I could sleep. I pulled out my sleeping bag.

“We can’t sleep here, there’s no way we can sleep here,” Duffy insisted.

“I just want to put something between me and this chair,” I said.

I unzipped it. He was shaking his head.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t get in. As soon as we are dry and we hear the rain stop, we’re going.”

I was tired. We had walked for miles. “In the middle of the night? In the middle of nowhere? Where are we going to -?”

Another sharp scraping sound split the air and stopped me. We both froze.

Then the only sound was the fire and the rain. I exhaled slowly. It was nothing, just maybe rats, or the old house falling apart.

I was just about to speak again when from above our heads there was a clang.

Something falling. Thump.

Silence.

Then the sound of something being dragged, like a bed or a heavy table, across the floor right above our heads. We both leapt from our chairs.

I froze where I was. My heart swelled and I felt choked. In the corner of my eye, I saw something come into the room from the dark doorway and it moved into the shadows.

Duffy screamed.

He was at the window with one foot on the ledge but his head was back, looking at the ceiling and he screamed again.

There was a crash from the room above like furniture being overturned I heard the sound of someone whispering close to my ear.

Panic shot through me like an electric shock.

I ran to the window and pushed Duffy out. He tumbled through the frame and as I went to follow I felt a pressure on my throat. A thumb on my windpipe. I froze. Behind me the darkness was moving.

I pushed against the invisible hand.

I fell out of the window. The ground was hard and my hands and knee were torn. Duffy was gone. The rain was thick. I gagged and coughed. I felt like I had been punched in the throat. From the ground I saw the light of Duffy’s torch, moving quickly away. I scrambled, gasping, to my feet and ran towards the shaking beam.

I ran along the side of the building past windows with iron bars and faces made of shadows leering at me from within. The workhouse wasn’t empty now. It had taken a life. It pulsed and shook in the corner of my eye.

The torch light disappeared.

My knees collided with cold wet stone and I was on the ground again. This time the ground was soft. I didn’t move. I was face down in mud and grass with the rain on my back. Slowly, slowly I lifted my head. I was on a mound bigger than a king size bed. Tangles of briars and piles rubble were scattered around me. Beyond that the darkness was solid, like another wall.

Duffy was gone. I didn’t shout for him. Whatever had him would get me next if I shouted. I stayed were I was. I put my face to the ground. Rain was soaking through my clothes, running down my neck.

I started to sink.

I opened my eyes and snapped my head around. I hadn’t moved. The ground was not moving, but the sensation of being drawn down into the soft earth overwhelmed me. I tried to raise myself onto my arms. Something was holding me, like straps on my shoulders and hands, or hands reaching up from the ground, pulling me down.

Frantically I tried again. My legs, my waist, were gripped to the descending earth. The darkness started sliding over me, a black terror, like shadows of the dead covering me.

They brought a low buzzing which droned all around, louder than the falling rain. A weight suddenly pressed me down, sinking me further into the ground and in my ear, right next to me, I heard a spitting and sucking, a spitting and sucking. I screamed. The scream flooded my body, freezing every cell. I was rigid, like a corpse in rigor mortis. There was a beast poised on my back, preparing to feed.

A light flashed. Duffy was there, next to me.

“Come on, come on.” He pulled at me. I was stiff, fixed with fear. I couldn’t move. He crouched down and pushed at me. “Get up, get up, get up.” He pushed again, turned me over then grabbed my arm and pulled at me.

His torch shone in my eyes and my limbs unlocked with a jolt and I scrambled to my feet. We started to run. The light was still in my vision, I was blind.

“I can’t see, I can’t see!” I shouted and Duffy took my hand and he dragged me back past the old stone building, and down the driveway. By the time we reached the gate the glare had faded to little spots in my eyes and I clambered up, fear pushing me over like a gust of wind lifting a paper bag . Without looking back, we ran down the country road into the dark November night as fast and as far as we could from the Lismore Workhouse.

As far as I know it still stands today. http://www.abandonedireland.com/LismoreWorkhouse_1.html

COLUM SANSON-REGAN is an Irish-born musician and author. His first novel, ‘The Fly Guy’, follows the life of fictional author Martin Tripp as the lines between his fantasies and reality blur. ‘The Fly Guy’ is available for pre-order here, and ships in early 2015.