Hit or myth – An Irishman’s Diary about the urban legends of Dublin

You’ll have heard a version of the grisly tale at some time, the one involving a motorcyclist overtaking a lorry. The lorry is carrying sheets of metal, or sometimes glass. Suddenly, a sheet flies off and decapitates the motorcyclist so neatly that bike and headless rider continue to overtake. Seeing them in his wing mirror, the driver has a heart attack and crashes, causing further carnage, of varying extent.

It’s a classic urban legend, so widespread and enduring that it must serve some deep-seated human need – to face down horror, maybe, or ward off bad luck.

And although it's not one of the stories in his latest book, folklorist Brendan Nolan mentioned it at an event in Clondalkin last weekend by way of explaining how his collection, Dublin Urban Legends, came about.

A former journalist, Nolan now tells tales for a living (yes I know that’s not necessarily a change of vocation), in person, on radio, and in print. He’s unusual in being a Dubliner who does this, the seanachí tradition is more associated with rural Ireland.

But then again, as another speaker at the launch pointed out, one of the most famous story tellers was Malachi Horan, who lived in the hills above Tallaght and whose oral 1943 memoir, Malachi Horan Remembers (published by his friend George A Little) was a bestseller.

In any case, Nolan updates the tradition, including, for example, a myth he helped create himself a few years ago, for April Fool’s Day.

The book also mentions such modern phantoms as the chiropractor who is said to leave cards at the foot of the Spire in O’Connell hoping to recruit patients from those staring upwards.

But it also features most of the classics, including the headless coachman, the “wandering butcher of Summerhill” and the story of how a Dublin theatre owner invented the word “quiz” as a bet. That last one is perhaps unusual in being demonstrably untrue. The best urban myths are immune to disproof, and contain a grain of truth, or at least plausibility.

In fact, another Nolan at the Clondalkin event, uilleann piper Martin, touched on the context for some of Dublin’s grimmer folk-tales when mentioning that real-life pub, the Deadman’s Inn, in Palmerstown.

It became so named for proximity, in the days of the steam trams, to a string of fatal accidents involving pedestrians. As such, it forms a sobering set with another pub, “The Morgue” in Templeogue, also named from the era when that notorious serial killer, the No 15 tram to Blessington, passed its doors.

Nolan the piper, by the way, is a cousin of Nolan the storyteller. And as well as the book, the two were also launching a collaborative CD, Irish Love Stories (see talepipe.net). To illustrate which, Martin played a more-than-usually haunting version of Aisling Geal.

Getting back to Malachi Horan, his memoir is fascinating for two reasons – because he was an urban countryman, living in what is now the suburb of Killinarden but was then rural wilderness; and because his life stretched from the Famine to the second World War. Born in “Black ’47”, he died in 1945.

So his book (published in 1943) is valuable social history. But it also includes a story, related as first-person experience, that might have qualified for inclusion in Nolan’s collection. The Blessington tram was again implicated.

Walking home along the Saggart Road one foggy January night, having drink taken but “not drunk”, Horan was bumped into by an unseen passerby. When it happened a second time, he shouted at the stranger. But by the third time, anger gave way to fear. “The drink went dead in me”, he recalled.

Sweating and praying, he walked on, bumped periodically, until he reached the cottage of a neighbour called Brian Byrne. He hammered the door and Byrne opened, holding up a candle, first to Horan, then over his shoulder.

And as Horan remembered it: “I saw his jaw drop, his eyes stare, and his skin go yellow and pinched. Following his eyes for the first time I looked behind me. The hair pushed my old hat off my head. A fully dressed man stood [there], but – he had no head, just a raw stump of a neck!”

The two living men hurried inside and barred the door. They recovered with whiskey and a prayer for the soul of the headless one, a supposed victim of the steam tram 40 years before. In a footnote, George Little said the same spectacle was frequently reported in Tallaght for many years.

@FrankmcnallyIT