At the Cork Assizes on Wednesday, Robert Sullivan was placed at the bar, charged with the wilful murder of his own child, by taking him up in his hands and placing him on a large turf fire, and so burning him as to cause his death. Mr Bennett stated the case, observing that it was one of the most lamentable and cruel he ever brought before a jury. The prisoner was charged with the wilful murder of his own child, a very young boy, by deliberately burning him on a fire. The fact was clear, and the only question the jury would have to decide was, if the prisoner was sufficiently in his senses at the time he committed the deed. He should mention that the prisoner was caught in the act of escaping to America. John Radcliffe examined by Mr Bennett – knows the prisoner at the bar; knew the deceased also; was living in the house with the prisoner; recollects him putting the child on the fire at the hour of 12 o’clock at night; the prisoner had been in Bandon and when he came home he told the witness to get up and untackle the horse; the deceased child was in bed at the time; the prisoner’s eldest child was in Bandon with him; witness having untackled the horse as directed, the prisoner told him to bring up the child to him; he did so, and the prisoner gave them both some bread; witness then put the child into bed with the prisoner; there was some hogwood lighting on the hearth; the prisoner was talking to the child and said ‘are you my Johney?’ the child made no reply; the prisoner said again, ‘in the name of the Father are you my Johnny? The witness was in bed about an hour when he was called up by the prisoner to bring some lighted hogwood which he did; the prisoner first took the child and put it down into an earthen pot of water; it was the child’s head was put into the pot; witness took the child from him and began to dry his head; the prisoner then took a bill-hook in his hand from the top of the bed, and, taking the child in his hand, he went to the fire; the prisoner said ‘You are not my child at all, you are a sheffraun;’ the prisoner put the child on the bog-wood fire, when it began to cry; witness then ran and called the boy who had been in bed with him (witness); the prisoner said ‘Why are you calling?’ to which witness replied ‘I am not calling’, as he was afraid; went out of the house, and called the boy through the window of the room; the child all this time was screeching and the father used to say ‘I’ll roast you and toast you in the name of the Father’ (sensation); the child died in about 24 hours after; was afraid of the prisoner  at the time; went to call the neighbours, and, by the time he came back , the child was off the fire; the prisoner went to bed after burning the child; the prisoner’s wife died about a year previously; before the prisoner went to bed he told them to get some oil and rub it on the child; on the following morning the prisoner got up and went off with himself; he did not tell any person where he was going; the prisoner did not return that day; saw the prisoner after in the Bandon Bridewell; the witness was a servant to the prisoner who was a farmer; never observed anything odd about the prisoner up to the time he burnt the child. To the Court: The prisoner used to be often tipsy. To Mr Bennett: I did not get a doctor for the child as the prisoner’s brother and family were there, and they did not get a doctor; the child was very much burned. To Mr O’Hea. The prisoner had six children; the child that was burnt was a very fine little boy; ‘little Johnny’ seemed to be a pet with  the father; heard the prisoner often talking to himself when out in the fields. Catherine Leary examined by the Recorder recollected the night the child was burnt; was in the prisoner’s house that night, and when a bystander said to him ‘you would not have burnt the child, if you had the Lord to guide you’. Sullivan replied ‘it was in the name of the Lord I did it, because I thought he was a sheffraun’; Sullivan did not appear drunk at the time. Dr Samuel Wood was examined by Mr G. Leahy, and deposed to having made a post mortem examination of the body of the child. There were most extensive burns all over the child, and quite sufficient to cause its death. Constable Wright swore that he arrested the prisoner in Liverpool on the 6^th of last December, at which time he was on board a packet bound for America. Mr O’Hea addressed the jury for the prisoner, observing that the only defence he would set up was that of insanity. He called for an acquittal on the groun that when the prisoner perpetrated the acts his conscience was astray, and the feelings of his nature altered. There was no evidence adduced to prove the prisoner insane. His Lordship, in addressing the jury, observed that it was not the absence of the reasoning powers that constituted insanity, but the fact of an individual labouring under a delusion. A person under the influence of a delusion would commit a wrong act, totally unconsciously of it being so, but this same person might afterwards be perfectly conscious of the wrong he did, the delusion under which he acted, not then continuing. The jury without leaving the bar, acquitted the prisoner on the grounds of insanity.’ Anon, ‘A Child Murdered by its Father’ (1848)

Matthew Lolley [also spelt Lally and Lolly], a private of the 2nd Queen’s Royal Regiment, gained the affections and the confidence of the inhabitants of Callons, Westmeath, while his regiment was quartered there. After they left he obtained a furlough, and returned to Callons, where he introduced himself to a family as their son whom they supposed had been dead sixteen years. Lolly said that he had been spirited away by the fairies with whom he had lived thirteen years, after which, they allowed him to return to earth. And, in proof that he was their son, he had the grave and coffin opened in which they supposed that they son had been buried, and instead of their son’s body they found in the coffin a log of wood.’ Lolley vanished only to appear in Longford where he was later implicated in the death of one Corrigan: a fact the local peasantry ascribed to his powerful relations with the fairies. Lolly was not prosecuted: though his activities were decried in at least two newspapers.

Anon ‘Extraordinary Credulity in the Nineteenth Century’ (1848)

Another Lough Neagh fisherman told me about an ‘old oddity’ in the district who was believed to be a ‘changeling’. The story was that her father was building a jamb wall in the kitchen one day and he was supposed to be ‘keeping an eye’ on the child in the cradle, a beautiful little girl. The child was sleeping peacefully when he turned round to lift a stone and, when he looked again, she had gone and the jamb wall had been removed to the other side of the house.  In the child’s place the fairies had left an ugly, dwarfish creature who had grown into an ‘oddity’. (Foster, Ulster, 76)

In the Portrush district, until about two years ago, there was living a man who was thought to be a changeling. He was small, about five feet two, and he had red-hair. He had, too, the most uncertain temper in the countryside. The district where he lived is full of stories of his unnatural behaviour. These modern changelings appear to have fared better than others of their kind, for childred believed to be changelings were often shockingly ill-treated in early. They were sometimes placed on a hot griddle, or branded with the sign of the Cross, and some were left out on a shovel on the manure heap all night. The reason for these tortures was to induce the fairies to come back and rescue their children and to leave behind them the stolen infants. It has been suggested that children who had rickets may have been suspected of being changelings. It is an interesting thought, for rickets is not a disease that is very usual in country areas. (Foster, Ulster, 76-77)

The story of the fairy-glove seems peculiar to the Mournes. A lady who lives near Annalong told me that when she was a little girl, around fifty years ago, she found on her window-sill one morning a tiny, slate-coloured glove. It was perfectly made, with tightening at the wrist, but it was so small it would not have fitted her thumb. She took it to an old man who lived in the district, a ‘wise man,’ who told her it was a fairy-glove and advised her to put it back where she had found it. She did so and some days later it disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. She thought that the fairy who had lost it had come back and found it. (Foster, Ulster, 80)

It is a mistake to suppose that because fairies are never or, at least, rarely, to be found connected with graveyards, that they had not connection with graveyards, that they had not connection with ghosts or spirits. Many fairy beliefs had, no doubt, their origin in pre-Christian days and so would have no place in sites associated with Christianity. And we do find them associated with pre-Christian burial sites. I was told by a man who lives in Templepatrick that his mother, who was brought up at Dunloy, remembered that children were forbidden to play in the vicinity of some old stones because ‘the fairies lived there.’ What the stones were, or why the fairies lived among they had no idea. A few years ago these stones were found to be a prehistoric burial cairn, known now as ‘Doey’s Cairn.’ The country people knew nothing about archaeology, but the place was sacred to the fairies. This, incidentally, is a point in favour of those who oppose the theory that folk-memory is short, and seldom goes farther back than two centuries. (Foster, Ulster, 82-83)

There is an old abbey on the river, in County Mayo, and people say the fairies had a great battle near it, and that the slaughter was tremendous. At the time, the fairies appeared as swarms of flies coming from every direction to that spot. Some came from Knock Ma, and some from South Ireland, the opinion being that fairies can assume any form they like. The battle lasted a day and a night, and when it was over one could have filled baskets with the dead flies which floated down the river. (Evans-Wentz, 1911, 39)

An old lady in Aghalee believed that when a brown butterfly flew into her kitchen it was a messenger from the fairies to tell her that they would be visiting her house that night and, before going to bed she would sweep the house clean and leave a plate of cheese on the table. Her grandson who told me about it, said that if she had not cheese in the house when she saw the butterfly-messenger, she would go to the shop and buy some. The cheese was, he said, always missing in the morning, and often the old lady saw the marks of little feet in the peat-ash on the hearth. She must have known all about mice and their habits but, apparently, she did not associate them with either the footsteps or the disappearance of the cheese.  The fact that she left only cheese is worth noting, for cheese was regarded as being a necessity at country wakes some years ago, and still is in some districts. The order of procedure was cheese at all meals served to visitors during the wake and meat for the men who returned to the house after the funeral. A Tyrone man gave me a very prosaic explanation for the use of cheese on such occasions, it was that if you eat cheese, you can drink as much whiskey as you like without becoming intoxicated. There may, however, have been another reason, more powerful than immunity from drunkenness, for, after all, not everyone might wish to be immune. McPherson noticed that in Scotland cheese was used to appease fairies at wakes and at the ‘merry meht’ birth celebrations. It is possible that both the Scottish fairies and the Aghalee woman’s fairies were the souls of the dead. Butterflies are known to have been associated with the souls of the dead in Ulster, and we have, too, the belief that the dead live on in graveyards. (Foster, Ulster, 81-82)

A heap of stones in a field should not be disturbed, though needed for building, especially if they are part of an ancient tumulus. The fairies are said to live inside the pile, and to move the stones would be most unfortunate. If a house happens to be built on a fairy preserve, or in a fairy track, the occupants will have no luck. Everything will go wrong. Their animals will die, their children fall sick, and no end of trouble will come on them. When the house happens to have been built in a fairy track, the doors on the front and back, or the windows if they are in the line of the track, cannot be kept closed at night, for the fairies must march through. Near Ballinrobe there is an old fort which is still the preserve of the fairies, and the land round it. The soil is very fine, and yet no one would dare to till it. Some time ago in laying out a new road the engineers determined to run it through the fort, but the people rose almost in rebellion, and the course had to be changed. The farmers wouldn’t cut down a tree or bush growing on the hill or preserve for anything.’ (Evans-Wentz, 1911, 38)

Editor’s Note: this relates to Co. Cavan.

Well, I heard of one woman [who had seen a banshee]…; her and the old sister lived together. Her name was Lizzie Crowe. And the old sister was very bad; she was working in the agony of death this summer’s evening after sunset. So she [Lizzie] went down and stood leaning over the half-door, and the crying started. She had a turf stack up on a wee hill in front of the house. The crying started near the turf stack and she looked up – the sun was set, it was not dark – and this wee old small woman bent in two with a grey head went crying around the turf stack. She went round the back of it and disappeared. She did not see her anymore and she quit crying… That is the only person ever I heard that seen the banshee… I never seen it. I never heard tell of anyone only this woman, and she certified it. She was a Protestant woman the name of Crowe. (quoted in Lysaght 1998, 25)