Féar Gortha: The Irish Hungry Grass

There's no-one like the Irish for telling ghost stories. Or, for that matter, any tale at all. 

Maybe it's in the soft brogue that leaves the listeners willing to believe anything.  Maybe it's in the haunting landscapes they are describing.

I just know that those with a real gift of the gab can leave a whole room spellbound, until the story is told.

It was in such circumstances that I first heard about the Hungry Fields.  The speaker was an old man, who only kept with the stories as long as his pint glass was full. He had begun just talking to me, but one by one everyone in the pub garden stopped their conversations to listen too.

A crowd of English and Welsh, not one of us had physically been to Connemara, but we were there now.  Young and old, all entranced enough to put down our smartphones and PSPs and pay attention to a true storyteller.

Most tales were told with a twinkle in his eye.  They weren't meant to be believed.  But when he got to this one, something changed in his aspect.  We had chills and the story has remained with me to this day.

That was a couple of decades ago. I've since quietly asked various Irish people about what he told us that night.  The really frightening part is that with the barest bit of prompting, the details have been repeated back to me - from a lady from Cork; a man from Kilkenny; a woman whose father came from Galway; and an English couple now living in Meath. 

They might tell a good story, the Irish, but when the conversation moves to the Féar Gortha, it all feels very real indeed.

The old man swore that this had happened to his grandad's brother.  We all smiled. It was quite amazing the breadth of things that had assaulted his family in his stories so far.

He caught our knowing expressions. But instead of meeting them with the usual wink of collusion in willing gullibility, he grew serious.  "No, really. It happened."  He seemed uncomfortable suddenly, in the midst of an English pub, far across the Irish Sea. Whatever the truth, it was certain that he believed this one.

His great-uncle, as a young man, had been out walking after a day at work. He was heading home for his tea, but he was in no great hurry. It was a pleasant late afternoon, settling into the long shadows of encroaching evening.

He was quite alone on that quiet country lane.  All around him the miles stretched out over a peat bog wilderness, ending in distant mountains. Pools of water glistened here and there, growing darker as he approached, reflecting more the soil beneath than the sinking sun above.

It had felt peaceful, but then an eerie sensation passed through him.  He wasn't sure why he'd wanted to be in there; but now he really wanted to move on.  He couldn't say what was making him uncomfortable, maybe the memory of tragedy implied by the location. But it was time to go.

He couldn't find the gap where a gate might have been.  Half-laughing at himself, calling himself all manner of fool, he finally applied some reason to the bizarre situation.  The field wasn't so big, nor the grass so tall that he couldn't see over it, but he patently couldn't see the way out.  He would simply follow the wall instead. It had to eventually lead to the gate, didn't it?

The sun slipped behind the horizon and he hadn't come home. It was quite late before his wife raised the alarm, having spent some time getting past her annoyance at a spoiled meal in order to ascertain that he wasn't in any of the local pubs.

Finally his eldest brother grabbed him by the arm, as he staggered by the gap in the wall.  He looked at them with haunted eyes and gabbled words about hunger.  So much hunger.  He was famished.  Then he collapsed.

He was carried home and nursed by his worried wife. He appeared aged and frail, shocked to the core. His weariness far out-stripped that expected of any healthy man in the prime of his life, even one who'd been walking all night. 

And he was so hungry, always hungry, in a way which no food could abate. He never recovered and died within the week. 

We asked his great-nephew what the cause had been, but the Connemara man just shrugged and said, "Something like general debility."  Then he shivered and reached for his pint. It was a story that he'd been told by his grandfather and he believed it. 

Right then, in that place and time, looking at his expression, so did we.

All of the locals knew about the cursed area south of the town, but it wasn't something that was told to the tourists.

One night an English man was out walking alone. He must have seen the lights in the distance and thought that a trek across the bog would be a nice short cut.

He was spotted by a passing police car, arms limp and panting, his eyes wild with despair. He was staggering around and around the enclosure. 

It wasn't a big field either, barely a paddock. The wall was tumbledown enough that he could have stepped over it at any point.  But he didn't, because he couldn't.

The officers pulled up and climbed out of their car.  They waited alongside one of the walls, fully aware of the legend, but mindful of more prosaic explanations too. Drink, drugs, some kind of exercise or meditation, mental illness, they had a bigger check-list than most.

The smallness of the field also gave them plenty of chances to observe him as he passed by.  He didn't look at them. He wouldn't answer their questions.  He was wheezing, terrified and in tears.

Eventually, he was pulled free right over the wall (which wasn't even a foot high there), where he fainted clean away.

The English tourist was taken to the hospital, where he was admitted. That's where we lose track of the story, as it was told by the policemen in the pub, and my friend's father heard it.

"They're not called the Hungry Fields," The lady from Cork told me, "It's the Hungry Grass, if we're going straight from the Gaelic."  She nodded grimly, as she moved about her kitchen making us both a nice cup of tea. "But sure, it's real enough."

I could have expected some tall tales from a man in a pub, telling stories for beer, but not from her. As practical and down-to-earth a woman as I'd ever met, she never struck me as the sort to countenance anything beyond the here and now.

"I heard about it a lot, when I was growing up."  Sugar was ladled into bone china cups. "There was one not far from me."

I was intrigued. "Did you go there?"

"No."  She laughed like that was an absurd idea. I thought she was going to say that she hadn't believed it enough to check the field out. But no.  "My mother would have tanned my behind for even thinking about it. Lots of people got trapped up there. Just walking around, until they collapsed and died of exhaustion." 

She hadn't known any of them personally though, nor could she recall any specific stories. 

I wondered if there had been something else dangerous in that field - a pool or a sudden drop - which rendered the Hungry Grass a cautionary tale to keep children away.  She shook her head. "It was a perfectly ordinary field."

"What happens to them?"  I asked.  "What makes people get stuck in the field?"

She seemed surprised. "Didn't you know?  It's the famine dead. They're still there digging for food. Poor things."

A well-known Wiccan high priestess lives in County Meath now, but she used to live in Mayo.

She confirmed to me that the hungry ghosts are heard about in stories told in her present location. But it was back in Mayo, where she'd encountered them herself.

The main roads into Western Ireland all pass through seemingly endless miles of bog land. It can be stunningly beautiful, but not so much late at night, when all you want is to be home.

The priestess and her late husband were driving through it, chatting about their day to stave off boredom and to keep themselves awake. It didn't help that the weather was against them. Driving conditions were hazardous enough without that extreme concentration.

Suddenly her husband glimpsed a woman standing at the side of the road. It had been a mere flash, unseen until they were actually passing her.

This was the middle of nowhere, in the early hours of the morning, with rain lashing down. He second guessed his own sight, twisting for a double-take. There was no sign of her in the rear view mirror. Nevertheless, they had to reverse to check.  She wasn't there.

By now, their sensibilities tingled with a feeling that they weren't alone. It wasn't a nice sensation. The atmosphere felt laden with desperation and despair. Debating pareidolia versus an actual ghost sighting, this feeling gave credence to the latter. What was to happen next confirmed it all. 

"They were everywhere!"  The priestess told me, several years later. "In families, alone, some of them not even able to hold their form. They were all around the car!"

Her husband had battled the instinct to close his eyes, as he had to keep on driving.  Going around them was not an option, so they drove on through. 

But this was no hit and run massacre. The people they were seeing had been dead a long time. Starved and trudging, these were the famine victims forced to leave their homes. They hadn't made it past this narrow country lane over a hundred and fifty years before.

The experience shook the couple, but somehow it seemed worse when they'd finally passed through. Now the darkness seemed watchful, menacing and with the threat that something terrible could step out at any time.

It was a very long journey back to their Mayo home.