SPEAKING OF German words with no English equivalent, as we were recently, I was reminded of another this week: poltergeist. It means “noisy ghost”, from the verb poltern, “to crash” or “to rant”. But why English should have to resort to German for the term is a mystery, because the alleged phenomenon is at least as common in these islands as it is there.
In fact, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable still cross-references its definition with the story of the “Sampford Ghost”: a particularly notorious example of the genre from the 19th century. Sampford Peverell is a village in Devon, wherein for three years from 1809, a poltergeist was reported resident in a house owned by a Mr Talley but let to a Mr Clave.
A Reverend Colton was also mixed up in the business, which is said to have involved the usual unexplained noises and flying plates, but also included violence done by unseen hands to people in their beds (especially female people – the poltergeist had a misogynistic streak). In another reported incident, a visible but detached arm threw a “folio Greek Testament” across a room.
But the local newspaper, the Taunton Courier, was suspicious from the start. Among other things, it reported that the supernatural activity dated from a row between the tenant and the landlord, in which the former was threatened with eviction. And that, on a fact-finding visit, Mr Talley had discovered a mop handle with a battered end, as well as marks on the pantry ceiling consistent with vigorous beatings from said handle.
Journalistic fingers were even pointed at Rev Colton, who had vouched for the poltergeist’s authenticity, and who in return wrote an outraged pamphlet replying to the slanders of the muck-raking press.
But the debate was never fully settled. Whatever the story’s truth, the ghost continued his campaign for two years after the newspaper’s apparent expose, during which period nobody claimed a £100 reward offered by the Reverend to the first person who could prove natural causes.
I WAS reminded of “poltergeist” by a man I know who is currently overseeing a North-South peace project in which local people devise and lead walking tours along the Border. The next one, he told me, would be in an area near the Clogher Valley, where Monaghan, Fermanagh and Tyrone all meet.
The attractions here are mostly natural, in every sense of the word. But, my friend suggested, they might also include the “Cooneen ghost-house”. “The what?” I asked. “The Cooneen ghost-house,” he repeated (pronouncing it “Coon-yin”, as the Fermanagh locals apparently do). The story had somehow passed me by until then. But as I’ve learned since, the house in question is at least as famous in Ireland as the one in Sampford once was across the water. It’s a more recent story too: dating from the early 1900s. And the other way it differs from the Devon case is that, amid the many and conflicting accounts, I have yet to hear of anyone who, like the Taunton Courier, attempted a logical explanation.
In any case, the targets of the supposed haunting were a family called Murphy: a widow, her son, and six daughters. Their house was, as it remains (although now a ruin), in a remote wooded area, near Brookeborough. Indeed, a popular explanation for the Murphys’ problems was that the widow’s son had one day found a book in the forest, dealing with the occult, which in turn led him to invoke an evil spirit.
Certainly, if you were a poltergeist looking for a place to live, you could hardly choose a better location, one that almost guarantees eerie sound effects for the camera crews and thrill-seeking teenagers who still visit regularly.
But latter-day phantom seekers may be missing the point. After all, one of the things that distinguishes the Cooneen poltergeist is that it seems to have been the only Irish ghost that ever emigrated.
After two attempted exorcisms by a local priest, the family abandoned the house in 1913 and took the boat to America. Unfortunately, the poltergeist took it too, making such a racket on board as to cause problems with the captain. In some accounts, the haunting did not continue in the Murphys’ new home (suggesting the ghost was detained at Ellis Island, perhaps due to lack of documentation). In others, it did.
I don’t know. The Murphys were real, anyway. You can find them in the 1911 census, when the widow’s son was 21 and her six daughters were aged from 18 down to 3. In contrast with a famous case in Britain, some years later, Mrs Murphy did not list the poltergeist as a house guest.
When he wrote for this newspaper in the 1970s, the late Benedict Kiely occasionally alluded to the Cooneen ghost. As a Tyrone man, he was familiar with the saga, although it was before his time, so he didn’t offer any comment on its veracity.
Mind you, a mention of it once led him to digress into the story of a visit he himself had made some years before to the home of an eccentric family. “Pixilated” was the word he used about his hosts. But while he was visiting, he claimed (with an apparently straight face), “a plate of food took off from the range, flew the length of the room, and made a perfect landing on the table”.
On which note, I wish readers, as they say in America, a happy Halloween.