Where better to wake the dead than the history-steeped, Georgian streets of Armagh? Where many a scoundrel and scallywag once roamed!
It’s a city renowned for its spiritual heritage and rich folklore. We know most of the stories… The Green Lady, Margorie McCall and the Woman in White of Armagh Gaol. But, if you dig deep enough, there’s no end to the uncanny, inexplicable and bizarre.
Nowadays, children dress up in all manner of costume to ring in the spooky season. But ‘back in the day’, it was a sheet or a bin bag! Boys were ghosts and girls were witches and if you were particularly crafty, you might have papier-macheed a mask from newspaper for something ghoolish.
So let’s travel back to that time when witches were en vogue. For, there may have been a real witch or two in our midst… at least such was the belief of the Armagh folk in the early 1900s.
According to the writings of Armagh County Museum’s first curator, TGF Paterson – ‘The Armachiana Vol XII’ – a local from the Tandragee/Tassagh area [we aren’t sure why these two places were conjoined in the writings] was able to recount one such story.
The unnamed individual proclaimed to the historian, “Witches there were in days bygone! There’s fact for that.”
Neglecting to mention what fact they were referring to, the story-spinner continued, “Nowadays, people are too busy with other things to be dabbling in the ‘Black Art’.”
Mysterious! Give us a sense of what these witches got up to oh stranger-of-the-past.
“I mind well the oul’ people talking of a woman who could take butter from the cows. She was seen at it many a morning,” it reads.
Perhaps a little less stereotypically ‘witchy’ than one might hope for… but wait.
This same woman, according to the source, trailed a rope with her. This rope seemed to have its own source of power for it “brought all the butter from the field ’till her”.
Not only that, but the rope was said to be woven from “human hair”!
How was the witch dealt with? Did they string her up, burn her at the stake or attempt to drag her to the bottom of a river weighed down as we have all been told were the most common fates of the suspected witch?
Not quite. While the narrator said there “were another sort you might shoot at” – notably with a “silver bullet” – this particular type of witch, “nothing could be done about”.
