Only Batman can save us from walking dead

LOCAL sweep Michael Murphy did such a ‘grate’ job cleaning our stove that the house is now toasting up brilliantly. In fact, our chimney is puffing out so much pure white vapour that neighbours are making jokes about papal announcements.

I’d be glad if it was ‘holy smoke’, as Robin used to exclaim, or if Batman was around to protect us. For we’re fast approaching ‘all Hallowtide,’ as the Celts called it, when the dead revisit the mortal world.

Perhaps it’s possible to laugh at such netherworld notions if you live in a city, with its nonstop artificial brightness. Though some might argue that Halloween lasts all year for urban dwellers, with hobos and drug addicts wandering the streets like ghosts or the undead.

But there’s no escaping this season’s eeriness in the country. Bare branches spike spookily, transforming the woods surrounding this town into a set piece from that horror movie The Blair Witch Project. While darkness falling earlier every day makes places beyond the main street pitch black with bloodcurdling possibilities.

So how much scarier it must have been for my father, growing up in a rural Ireland with little electricity but plenty of imagination, without MTV to pass the time. He used to tell us spine-chilling stories about ‘Jack O-Lantern’, who would lure you ever deeper into the bogs, till you were lost forever.

For otherworldly things were very much accepted where he grew up, he says. For most people, a supernatural spectre lay over the land.

It made accompanying his father on a thriceweekly visit to share a pipe with his friend Stephen Dunne into a veritable fright night. Dunne’s farmhouse was less than a mile from my father’s home in Ballycrystal, a hamlet of only five houses. But it wasn’t short on skincrawling company, for ghosts were regularly seen at its crossroads.

It also had at least two fairy forts where my father feared to tread, not least because leprechauns were also purported to live there. No promise of a pot of gold could tempt anyone to mess with these mini-monsters.

Once my father got over these heebie-jeebies, there was still a graveyard to contend with that made him quake.

For ghosts could appear at any time. My father used to enjoy collecting hazelnuts in October and November, until the time a black dog appeared beside the Lacey’s house, which was opposite a lovely forest. He “ran like hell” the threequarter mile home, absolutely terrified.

Where it seems likely that the bogeyman lived too, in the form of his much older brothers. They would send him to sleep with the knee-trembling thought that something more sinister than a potty was under his bed.

In the end, their parents warned them not to tell my father any more ghost stories.

And with that the fog lifted, as did his spirits.