The Ceremony on Clonmillan Hill

Maximilian Pirner, "Funeral of a Fairy"The following tale comes from Dermot MacManus’ 1973 book, “The Middle Kingdom: The Faerie World of Ireland.” Whether the narrator encountered ghosts, fairies, or, well, something else, it is certainly one of the more unusual alleged encounters with supernatural beings.The next account I have is of a very different kind of being. One might be tempted to classify it as a ghost rather than an elemental, but taking everything into consideration I feel that it never was a human being but is truly of the fairy world. My informant is Mr Gowran, who is today a prosperous owner of shops in Dublin, but who hails from Offaly. The incident happened in 1901 when he was a boy of ten.Mr Gowran's family lived at that time in the small county town of Edenderry. One day in May, when the cowslips were out and everything was bright and cheerful with the promise of coming summer, he and a school friend, eight-year-old Jack Gooley, set off for a stroll about four in…