Editor’s Note: The Dullahans were headless fairies, who were sometimes associated in Munster with the death coach. Crofton Croker writes: ‘The Death Coach is called in Irish ‘Coach a bower’. The time of its appearance is always midnight; and when heard to drive round any particular house, with the coachman’s whip cracking loudly, it is said to he a sure omen of death.’ Crofton-Croker got the following account from ‘a lady resident in the neighbourhood of Cork’:

They drive particularly hard wherever a death is going to take place. The people about here thought that the road would be completely worn out with their galloping before Mrs Spiers died. On the night the poor lady departed they brought an immense procession with them, and instead of going up the road, as usual, they turned into Tivoli: the lodge-people, according to their own account, ‘were kilt from them that night.’ The coachman has a most marvellously long whip, with which he can whip the eyes out of any one, at any distance, that dares to look at him. I suppose the reason he is so incensed at being looked at, is because he cannot return the compliment, ’pon the count of having no head. Crofton-Croker, II, 136-137