For centuries, Ireland has been a place of the uncanny, with tales and legends of magic and curses, ghosts and fantastical beings, each and every story told breathlessly and with an oath to its truth. When researcher St. John D. Seymour placed a series of ads in local Irish newspapers soliciting people's tales of their encounters with ghosts, he was doubtful of what results he might obtain.Within a month, he received enough ghostly narratives to fill a book-and still more were on the way. In True Irish Ghost Stories, he and Harry Neligan share the accounts they were sent from all corners of the Emerald Isle, tales of haunted houses and haunted places, of apparitions and harbingers, of the famous Banshee and other legendary ghosts, and even a few cases that resulted in rational explanations for the apparently supernatural goings-on. But whatever the stories represent to the tellers or the listeners, one fact emerges clearly: The fantastic and the supernatural are as much a part of the present as they are the past in Ireland