Of Long Women and Little People

The following is taken from the journals of Dr Marina Fitzgerald of the Society for Psychical Research whose notes were recently recovered by Mr Seymour Mulligan, editor of New Ireland Studies. Mr Mulligan wishes to express that he cannot guarantee the genuineness of any incident described in Dr Fitzgerald’s reports and only publishes out of the desire to educate, and also to some extent amuse.   

July, 1974

This summer it has been the sunniest and warmest all round as far as memory serves, except for one place, that is, my beloved northeast, which suffers now darkness day and night like those climates of the northernmost, where the sun behaves rather shamefully always.   At the end of June I returned to the town of my birth after many years away to be greeted by a great cloud over everything which returned this happy and lately married woman to a thought-lost despondency. 

I went there to interview Mr J Begley, rural schoolteacher and writer of action-adventure novels, who had suffered a rapturous fit of temper early one evening and immediately rushed to town to pick a fight with the man who had bullied him as a child.  The skirmish did not end fatally, thank the lord above, resulting only in a few bruises and a single arm fracture, but the incident came to my attention due to Mr Begley’s account of what he had seen before he took the turn.  He claimed that while walking home from work on the evening in question he was confronted on the road by the long woman and that, at the point of seeing her, he was mentally persuaded, which is how he put it, to embark on his frenzy.  

I myself being native to these parts could recall the legend of a long woman that most held had been a person of wealth and high stature in the 13^th Century – they say she was seven and a half foot tall.  She had come to the region from Spain to marry a local man, a chieftain’s son, who was about two feet lower; but very soon after arriving on the island she sadly lost her diminutive husband to dying.  She too would pass some years later, alone, and in great sorrow.  There was another legend, one more monstrous than romantic.  In it much of the tale remained the same, but it was added that the long woman had been considerably longer and that the town had been greatly disturbed by her presence, for its inhabitants were said to be the shortest people known to walk the country.  When the men of the town came upon her one day, their beady little eyes burning with jealousy, and gushing with murderous intent, she declared that if they came anywhere near her she would make them a good deal shorter, and when they did just that she took her giant foot and crushed each one underneath, depriving them of anything to measure at all.   

When I met Mr Begley, I was struck by how tall he was and thought that if he had truly seen the long woman she must have been very long indeed.

Are you from this town? I asked.

I am, he replied.

So the Liliputian legend is untrue.

I don’t believe so, he said.  Times are different.  We have better food.  Better services, as you should well know.  Better habits. 

And your bully.  Was he taller?

Once upon a time he was.  Not anymore.  As a child I was small.  Sweet takings for a boy like he.  His family’s well-known round these parts.  A bad sort, you know.  He wasn’t fed much at all as a young one.  And smoking from the age of seven.  Blessed be the world he didn’t grow anymore because who knows what damage he would have done.

And you saw fit to assault a person who was quite clearly smaller than yourself? I asked, disapprovingly.

Hey, I’m the one with the broken wrist, look.

Yes, from striking that wee man.

I’m a schoolteacher, said Begley.  And a reasonably well-known bookwriter.  Richard Burton has optioned The Silver and Blue God, I’ll have you know.  I wouldn’t go and jeopardise it all by beating a man up.  I was crazed, don’t you understand.  She did it to me.  She got inside me.  She made me do it. 

Begley went on to talk about his encounter.  He described a country road about three miles from where we were.  He said that he saw the long woman near the gate of a field.  The gate was wide with maroonish paint peeling off it.  He said that when he was passing that gate he saw the long woman coming towards him on the road.  He described her as only a silhouette at first, but as she got closer to him he saw her face which he described as harsh and foreign.  She looked directly into his eyes as she neared him and it was then that his mind flashed back to his youth, to the beatings.  A boy named Donleavy.  Of a bad sort.  He became exhilarated with rage and immediately ran to town and to Donleavy’s house. 

I’d every right to do it, to be fair, he said.  Everyone around here dislikes me.  They’re jealous of my many published works.  He was the first to make his dislike known.  It was a traumatic childhood.  But I am a scholar.  I could only beat him up in my mind.  Until the long woman got in my head.  There are too many bullies out there.  And they go through their lives getting away with it. 

Mr Begley, do you mind if I ask if you are married?

I am not, he said.  Then he eyed me suspiciously as though I was enquiring for my own purposes.  But I held onto my official countenance and I think he remembered quickly that I was merely an academic conducting an interview and he had wits enough to defer to science.

It is just . . . I added . . . I have met bachelors in the past who have spoken of ghostly women.

Long women, like the legend?

Not that particular legend.  Other legends usually.  Though the point I am trying to make is that those witnesses were often projecting anxieties they had with women.  For some it was fear, or deep resentment, and for some unrequitedness, or simply the condition of being unmarried. 

I am not mad by nature, Miss Fitzgerald.  I was made mad by men.  And women.

Dr Fitzgerald.

I was sure that some of the researchers in Maynooth would find Mr Begley’s account fascinating, but I had serious doubts myself, judging by his clear battiness, not to mention his additional work as a fiction writer.

Having finished interviewing Mr Begley, I was inclined to depart but my role as a researcher of such matters as well as a sense of curiosity about the legend implored me to visit the spot where he claimed to have seen the apparition. 

After a cup of hot coffee in a cafe I used to frequent in younger days, as well as a nice bowl of chicken soup, I walked out on the road Mr Begley spoke of.  It was teatime, six o’clock, when I got to the gate he had described, and yet, it was so dark it could very well have been the dead of night.  The air was ashy and breezeless.  I approached the peely gate and looked out at the field on the far side.  Unlike the gate, it looked well-treated and I imagined it would shine a lustrous green if ever a sun got hold of it.  I turned back to the road and took the electrostatic meter out of my bag to check for any activity nearby.  Nothing.  Damn it to hell.  I don’t know why I carry the thing, to be honest.  Natural shifts in ambience occur all the time and conceivably they can be recorded, but it is rarely ever the case that an otherworldly being is responsible.  After all, most paranormally associated incidences are either products of delusion, projection, or flat-out fraudulence. 

Even though there was no breeze to speak of, I began to feel cold and was given to tremble.  It was a strange feeling, the kind one gets when in the throes of fever, and one I had known before, having felt it when in the presence of other possible spirits.  Then about three yards in front I saw someone walking towards me out of the shadows.  It was a fuzzy shape and in its approach it flowered and dilated like spilled ink slowly spreading on a page.  My eyelids began to act funny; they were forced to flutter, weakened by whatever was before me, making it difficult to see.  But a woman’s face became manifest as the figure neared.  It was pale and brittle as a grey gone lake.  There was a shroud over her head like an elevated picture of the bereaved.  She was taller than any human being I had ever seen and I rescinded the doubts I had earlier regarding Mr Begley’s statement.  Believing every word now, I braced myself psychologically to defend against any contact by telepathy.  But I felt nothing.  She looked at me, but through me, like glass.  There was no frenzy as that which had taken Begley.  But I cannot say I wasn’t moved in the moment.  As her form ascended over me, I became abruptly concerned for myself and my own.  My husband.  The longevity of our time together came into question.  I was visited in my mind by a vision of him in his coffin.  Not dressed as I imagined we would dress him in his deathbed.  He was wearing a truly awful brown pinstripe suit with a cream shirt and I heard faintly in my mind a great argument between myself and my mother-in-law about the situation.   

Then the feeling desisted.

I watched the spirit of the long woman pass through the peely gate and out into the field where she vanished in the darkness. 

I speculated that perhaps Mr Begley had indeed seen the ghost but that in his fear and simple-mindedness had retreated instead to a bitter place in his past.  I gathered from my own experience that neither was I immune to the long woman’s psychical authority.

I am writing this report on the evening of July 27^th after reading through the regional papers, and two stories in the Democrat, a publication from my home area, caught my attention. (It is my job to keep abreast of parochial affairs countrywide so a weekly visit to the library is never a time wasted.)  One of the stories involved a marriage.  Mr R Donleavy, butcher, and bachelor this forty years, known bully as a child and recent victim of a delayed revenge attack, had transcended his bachelorism and married Ms T O’Cadhain, greengrocer.  A happy story.  The other story was less jovial, reporting the death of Mr Begley, not even a month following my interview with him.  He had died alone in his house from a perforated ulcer.  The write-up celebrated his work as an author and to a lesser extent his career as a schoolteacher.  I noticed that they got his height wrong.  Having met the man, I knew he was a great many inches taller than the 5’ 6” the newspaper stated.  It occurred to me to call the paper up and inform them of their error but knowing the place as I did I was sure they would not take the editorial criticism well and consequently refuse to issue a correction.  

There is not much more I can say on this matter.  My last sentence will announce that it is still warm and sunny here, far and wide, but a cloud still hangs where the long woman walks.