Sometimes people did not have the luck to return, but were led away to a realm of perpetual youth and music.
"Father Hart. What are you reading?
Maire Bruin. How a Princess Edane,
A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard
A voice singing on a May Eve like this,
And followed, half awake and half asleep,
Until she came into the land of faery,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue;
And she is still there, busied with a dance,
Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,
Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top."
Yeats: Land of Heart's Desire.
If one returned, he found that the space which seemed to him but one night, had been many years, and with the touch of earthly sod the age he had postponed suddenly weighed him down. Ossian, released from fairyland after three hundred years dalliance there, rode back to his own country on horseback. He saw men imprisoned under a block of marble and others trying to lift the stone. As he leaned over to aid them the girth broke. With the touch of earth "straightway the white horse fled away on his way home, and Ossian became aged, decrepit, and blind."
No place as much as Ireland has kept the belief in all sorts of supernatural spirits abroad among its people. From the time when on the hill of Ward, near Tara, in pre-Christian days, the sacrifices were burned and the Tuatha were thought to appear on Samhain, to as late as 1910, testimony to actual appearances of the "little people" is to be found.
"'Among the usually invisible races which I have seen in Ireland, I distinguish five classes. There are the Gnomes, who are earth-spirits, and who seem to be a sorrowful race. I once saw some of them distinctly on the side of Ben Bulbin. They had rather round heads and dark thick-set bodies, and in stature were about two and one-half feet. The Leprechauns are different, being full of mischief, though they, too, are small. I followed a Leprechaun from the town of Wicklow out to the Carraig Sidhe, "Rock of the Fairies," a distance of half a mile or more, where he disappeared. He had a very merry face, and beckoned to me with his finger. A third class are the Little People, who, unlike the Gnomes and Leprechauns, are quite good-looking; and they are very small. The Good People are tall, beautiful beings, as tall as ourselves.... They direct the magnetic currents of the earth. The Gods are really the Tuatha De Danann, and they are much taller than our race.'"
Wentz: Fairy-faith in Celtic Countries.
The sight of apparitions on Hallowe'en is believed to be fatal to the beholder.
"One night my lady's soul walked along the wall like a cat. Long Tom Bowman beheld her and that day week fell he into the well and was drowned."