Nora Whelan:
Indeed Moneen has a great name for things that do be going on there beside that big forth. Sure there's many can hear them galloping, galloping all the night. You know Stephen's house at the meadow? Well, his daughter got a touch from them one night when she heard them going past with horses and with carriages, and she the only one in the house that felt them. She got silly like for a bit, but she's getting better now.
An old woman from Loughrea told me that a woman, I believe it was from Shragwalla close to the town, was taken away one time for fourteen years when she went out into the field at night with nothing on but her shift. And she was swept there and then, and an old hag put into the bed in her place, and she suckling her young son at the time.
It was a great many years after that, there was a pedlar used to be going about, and in his travels he went to England. And up in the north of England he saw a rich house and went into the kitchen of it, and there he saw that same woman, in a corner working. And he went up to her and said, "I know where you come from." "Where's that?" says she, and he gave her the name of her own village. Well, she laughed and she went out of the kitchen, and I don't know did she buy anything from him. But anyhow not long after that she come back and walked into her own house.
The husband never knew her, but the boy that was then fourteen year come up and touched her, and the father cried out, "Leave off putting your hand to that fine dress," for she had very rich clothes on. But she stood up and said, "I'm no other than your wife come back again, and the first thing you have to do is to bring in all you can carry of turf, and to make a big fire here in the middle of the floor."
Well, the old hag was in the room within, in the bed where she'd been lying a long time, and they thinking she was dying. And when the smoke of the fire went in at the door she jumps up and away with her out of the house, and tale or tidings of her they never had again.
My mother often told me about her sister's child—my cousin—that used to spend the nights in the big forth at Moneen. Every night she went there, and she got thin and tired like. She used to say that she saw grand things there, and the horses galloping and the riding. But then she'd say, "I must tell no more than that, or I'll get a great beating." She wasted away, but one night they were so sure that she was dead they had the pot boiling full of water to wash her. But she recovered again and lived five years after that.
Sure there was a faery in the house out beyond fourteen years. Katie Morgan she was called. She never kept the bed, but she'd sit in the corner of the kitchen on a mat, and from a good stout lump of a girl that she was she wasted to nothing, and her teeth grew as long as your fingers and then they dropped out. And she'd eat nothing at all only crabs and sour things. And she'd never leave the house in the day-time, but in the night she'd go out and pick things out of the fields she could eat. And the hurt she got or whatever it was touched her, it was one day that she was swinging on the corner gate just there by the forth. She died as quiet as another. But you wouldn't like to be looking at her after the teeth fell out.