Cliffhanger from Cooneen - Frank McNally on the only Irish ghost that ever emigrated

In my part of Dublin, at least, this has been the quietest lead-in to Halloween I can remember. Normally, starting in late August and escalating throughout September and October, the neighbourhood would sound evermore like a warzone every night.

But fireworks seem to be scarce this year. With half the world at actual war, or so it seems, central Dublin is eerily peaceful.

This is the season when, as believed by our ancestors are least, the boundaries between the physical and spirit realms are at their most permeable.

And it must be the permeability of another Border – the one with a capital B – that explains why, although the sale of fireworks is illegal in the Republic, there has rarely been any shortage of them here.

Blood brothers – Frank McNally on the deaths of two young men, one Irish, in the Korean War

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Hard Border – Frank McNally on a visit to the Korean Demilitarised Zone

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Transmigration of Seoul – Frank McNally on a long-awaited trip to South Korea

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Son of the soil – Colm Keena on the occasional delights of getting our hands dirty

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You need a licence to buy them in the North too, apparently, but the number of outlets selling them within a banger’s throw of the Republic is suspiciously high.

When I walked a section of the Monaghan-Fermanagh frontier for a post-Brexit feature in 2018, signs advertising “fireworks” were one of the few reliable indicators anywhere that I had left the State.

If bangers are in short supply in 2023, it can hardly be because of any hardening of the Border. Maybe it’s the after effects of the pandemic on Chinese supply lines.

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Quieter as it may be, the Halloween industry in general shows no sign of a downturn, in Dublin or anywhere else. It’s a global phenomenon now, of course, although in the US recently I was reminded how huge and increasingly grotesque it is there in particular.

This ancient Celtic festival of the dead fills some strange and unifying need in multicultural America, where even the blandest of suburbs are now decorated with flesh-crawling zombies, vampires, and half-buried bodies in gardens, none of them accompanied by the trigger warnings now considered necessary for everything else there.

It’s just a pity, I always think, that Ireland and Scotland couldn’t have taken out some sort of joint patent on the whole thing before it went corporate.

Instead, like mugs, we exported the raw materials for what has become America’s “biggest non-sectarian festival”. And worse, we now have to buy the improved, super-sized, and colour-themed Halloween back, at a mark-up.

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But speaking of America and sectarianism, while returning to Fermanagh, a reader has reminded me of the story from that county of the Cooneen ghost: the only Irish poltergeist ever known to have emigrated.

He, she, or it was also called the “Coonian” ghost, because that’s the way Catholics pronounce the name of the wooded townland where the ruins of the haunted house still stand.

And according to the late Wesley Boyd, who was from there and wrote about it in this column once, the ghost itself was presumed to be Catholic, because so was the family it attached to: that of a Widow Murphy and her children.

The whole thing started, it is said, with rappings on their door and windows, and footsteps in an upstairs hay-loft. It escalated to include flying cups, plates, pots, and pans, and a bed lifting off the floor.

The rappings sometimes extended to the rhythms of known marching songs. Confusingly, those appeared to span the sectarian divide (although since some republican and loyalists songs use the same air, it must have been doubly hard to identify the tunes from percussion only).

A Father Coyle from Maguiresbridge was brought in twice to perform exorcisms in the house. Those were accompanied by flying bedsheets and loud groaning noises.

Witnesses to the drama are said to have included the then or future nationalist MP for Fermanagh, Cahir Healy. But the haunting continued regardless, and finally, the Murphys abandoned the house and emigrated.

That would normally have been the end of the story because, according to folk belief, ghosts do not cross water. This one seems to have been an exception, however.

The Murphys’ sea passage to the US was accompanied by such a racket from their cabin that the captain, who refused to believe in a supernatural culprit, threatened to put them off the ship.

After that, the story does go quiet. Unlike Halloween, the Cooneen Ghost does not seem to have taken off in America.

But perhaps it could happen yet. It strikes me that there is a Hollywood movie to be made here: perhaps a screwball comedy with Tom Cruise reprising his terrible Irish accent as a ghost newly arrived from the Old Country, faith and begorrah, and struggling to adjust to life in New York or Beverly Hills.