Book Number 10 – Ghost Storey by Michael Fitzalan
If you have never been to the west coast of Ireland, perhaps, you may not be able to appreciate the glorious green of the perfect pastures. From the verdant verges to the gently rolling undulations of the hills, the country looks like it was blanketed in the colour that gives the republic its name, the Emerald Isle.
Around the place, there are the dry-stone walls, feats of amazing engineering, rocks of tremendous size piled high one upon another in such a skilful pattern that they stay upright, a boulder barrier between fields.
Every silver lining has a cloud and Ireland’s gloomy, grey skies put off many settlers. Then, there’s the rain, the rain, the rain; you need an awful lot of water to get green as vivid as the colour of the landscape and does it pour; it pours, drumming on the roof; it pours, sluicing along the gutters; it pours, gurgling down the drainpipe. You do not visit Ireland for the weather.
Opportunities lie in the successful cities:
Dublin, Cork, and Galway to name a few. New offices for tech and services have replaced the old timber and linen mills, ghosts from the past.
So, what does Ireland have in spades? Its history and its beauty. Is it enough, though in a country bled of its population, in the famine and, by subsequent emigration to busier places? They say that Ireland is a great place to visit, and the education is very good indeed but to live there takes a certain fortitude and a love of water: streams, lakes, rivers, and rainwater, running down your neck, soaking your cuffs and leaking into your boots.
Our story is not about the place, as such, but a building within that setting.
There are cutesy cottages and fine rambling mansions like the Guinness’s old place, Ashford Castle, though those are few and far between. On the west coast of Ireland, where our story takes place, many have been preserved, others rot as the ground around them claims the brick back to its birthplace, deep within the clay soil.
Our story concerns one such glebe. The only glebe with a ghost.
A ghost that lives in the room on the half landing, a mirror image of the room on the other side but through generations its presence has made itself known. If you feel that ghosts do not exist, read on. If you have ever suffered some of the exceptional experiences that fill my story, you will know, now, that you are not alone.
Ghosts exists.
They are not just in your head.
My ghosts stack up like the storeys of a building, one floor after another. Some of them I have inherited from my mother, the ghost in the bedroom, her survival, my grandfather’s ghosts, the ghosts of friends who helped me when they lived, the ghosts who helped from beyond the grave. Moreover, however, haunting feelings that my life should have been better or that I could have given back more swirl in my mind.
All these storeys have a moral, which you can easily discover. Do you tell stories to teach your young and learn from your old? What ghost stories stack up in your life and are there more storeys than you can count in the haunted house that is your mind?
Here I share mine.
ABOUT ME
A well respected author
Michael Fitzalan was born in Clapham, South London where his mother had established a doctor’s surgery in a house which she filled with children.
With three sisters, two brothers and a library full of books, a love of literature was imbued in him from an early age.
Michael Fitzalan comes from Irish parents were doctors and they settled on the West Side of Clapham Common and had six children in quick succession.
A story by Michael Fitzalan
