348 Collectanea.
and mysteriously. One evening the kitchen-maid brought up some beer, and fancied she saw "a black shadow hanging over" the nurse. The latter was much alarmed at hearing this, and took her chair over to the inner window, where she could see into the kitchen. Next morning, when the girl brought up the breakfast, the beer stood untouched, and the old woman sat leaning back with a look of appalling horror on her face and with her hands resting on the table. The other servants ran up at the maid's shrieks and lifted the nurse, who was stone-dead, with a deep cut on the back of her head. There was a small patch of blood on the wall, and ever since it comes out as a dark spot on the wall about the anniversary of the nurse's mysterious death.18
The second house, now a dismantled ruin in a lonely valley in the eastern hills, had a far worse reputation. It brought mis- fortune on anyone who rented it, and a heavy doom lay on its actual owners ; certainly, when my family rented it for the shoot- ing, its reputation was maintained by the falling on us of a subsequent heavy trouble. Its most ghastly legend will be told later, and relates to a skeleton found buried under a peat rick in the yard, when the rick was removed owing to scarcity of peat; according to another version, told at Tulla, the rick was set on fire, and, when the white ashes blew away, the un- consumed skull of a murdered man remained.^^ One room was fastened up with iron clamps, tradition said, because its floor was soaked in ineffaceable blood. Another legend, (which I never heard locally or, indeed, in Eastern Clare at all), told how long ago a detachment of a Scottish regiment, quartered there, was poisoned by the owner. The drummer boy escaped the poison, but only to be brutally murdered as he tried to escape from the window. My informant (in the far west of the county), says that " the boy's ghost has been seen by many credible witnesses." There was some vague tale of a light on the lake, where dredging yielded a vast quantity of bones, said to be human and mainly of children, but I distrust profoundly the dicta of Clare people on comparative anatomy. The stories I give next were told me by
18 So Mrs. O'Callaghan of Maryfort. " So the late Mrs. Spaight of Affock.
