have any of you had a ghostly experiance or heard of some in your area, and please what about some famous irish ghosts, and their stories.

you tell me yours and i'll tell you mine

The Roth-Aspel
"This happened long ago when I was only an insignificance of a boy, living on the edge of the Sperrins. We lived in a very lonely place, beside a road which ran through the mountains and down into Strabane, twisting and turning like an eel as it did so. I must have been about 8 or 9 when all this first took place. I was taking potato sculpture lessons from a woman a little ways down the road and, every night, after class I would have to go and get some peats to bring home for the fire. This night, at the very edge of winter, it was my turn to go again, which it always seemed to be, and so I set off to bring home a bag of it. It so happened that I had with me my latest work of spud art, eager to show my Mother exactly what I had been doing all this time.

It was a clear and frosty night with the moon as big as a shilling and twice as bright, and I wasn't afraid of anything in those days. The turf had been brought out of the bog about a week before, so it was very dry, but it was also very heavy. That didn't bother me much for I was big and strong from all the potato peeling for an 8 and 3/4 year old. I heaved the bag up onto my shoulders and turned for home, walking a bit slow on account of the weight.

Well, I had only taken a couple of steps towards our house when I heard the sound of wheels on the road behind me. It was louder than you would have heard from a pony and trap and it was coming up on me very quick. I thought it might be one of our neighbours in a hurry, so I turned to see who it was and what was wrong. The road lay behind me, twisting and curling across the hills and, because of the moonlight, I could see along its length for miles. There wasn't a thing on it. I looked again to make sure that I hadn't been mistaken but it was still empty as you please. Yet all the time I could hear the sound of wheels and a strange whirring drawing closer.

I thought that it might be a cart or a carriage some distance away and that the frosty air was making the sound travel, so I put down the turf-sack and waited to see if anything would come into view. Still I saw nothing and the sound drew closer and closer but the divil a thing did I see, although I looked and looked. Then, suddenly, it was right up beside me. My ears were filled with a hellish cacophony of whirring and groaning. The sound of wheels on gravel, backwards and forwards, circling and pirouetting around me. Then strangest of all, I suddenly felt myself in the grip of an inexplicable urge to laugh. It started with the flutter in my stomach becoming a succession of spasms. My jaw quivered and finally rendered me horizontal writhing on the ground in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. The more I laughed, the quicker, the louder and more agitated the groaning/whirring became. Finally I was pushed tight up against the ditch as if something was trying to get past me, as if in a ghostly sulk. And still there was nothing to be seen, nothing at all. There were just the fields, white with frost, and the empty road all around me. The best way that I can describe it was that it was like trying to push into a strong wind and the whole night was filled with its sound.

And then it was gone by me and away down the road before me. I heard the sound of its wheels getting further and further from me and still there was nothing to be seen, even though the moonlight was as clear as day.

Well, you wouldn't believe the speed that I made home. I left the bag of turf standing in the middle of the road and ran for dear life, and in the process my potato object d' Art must have fallen from my pocket. Anyway! I'd have outstripped the best runner in the district, so I would, just to get to my own front door and shut it tight after me. I told all in the house what I'd heard but nobody would believe me and my father made me go back for the bag of turf. They all made such fun of me that I eventually began to believe that the experience had been nothing more than my own imagination.

So, with other things going on, I'd all but forgotten about the whole affair when, some time after, I was talking to an old woman, Ellen Bradley, who used to come about our house. She was greatly regarded as a wise woman in the locality and was always telling stories about the fairies and of the ghosts who wandered across the mountains, though she never offered an excuse as to why they liked to stroll in the mountains. I told her about the noise that I'd heard on the road. At the very mention of it, she started up and crossed herself.

'God between us and harm!' says she. 'It's not right that such a young person should hear these things! That was the roth-aspal - the wheeled apostal- that you surely heard. There is misery for some poor crathur somewhere in this locality in its passing.'

She told me that the roth-aspal, or the 'dick on a stick' as it is sometimes called, carried humiliation into a neighbourhood. It was a death warning like a banshee, she said, but it was never seen at all. The sound of its wheels were sometimes heard going past upon the road outside on frosty nights and if they stopped by a door then you knew that a mortification and embarrassment would visit that house.

Apparently a few years back, one of the local men well known for his fancy ways and high and mighty disposition, sealed his own fate when he subjected the town to a spectacle of such cringe inducing shamelessness, that they exacted a terrible retribution on his person. You see, this man had acquired a Segway Human Transporter, and for a while suffered nothing more than community wide derision, ridicule and laughter. But as is always the case in a proud and close-knit village, the neighbouring villages opinion of them was more important. Very soon, any local who by chance visited our neighbouring kin, would find himself or herself indiscriminately bombarded with the same vitriol and ridicule. Village pride was in peril, and all their pleading with the source of all their woes, fell on ears that were oblivious to all sound bar the whirring of his transporter. Possessed with rage they hoisted him in the air and then violently impaled him (vertically) on his demonic device, an experience that is alien to a man the best of times. Circuitry in disarray and its controller somewhat distracted the transporter took off on its ghoulish wanderings, man and machine, as one. As the last faint moans and the distant sound of whirring faded away, the unfortunate wretch was never seen again.

Well, as you might guess, this greatly troubled me for a time and I watched anxiously to see if anyone in our district looked embarrassed.

There was a man who lived further along the road, just below us, who was very fond of the drink. They said that he was very bad to his wife and I had often seen him passing by our house, coming from some pub or other, in a great state of intoxication. One evening, about two months after I had heard the roth-aspal, he came past our door, more drunk than usual, and passed on down the road towards his own house. As he was going past our turf-stack, didn't the drink trip him up and he fell heavily at the very place that I had heard the sound. Being a strong enough man and well full of the drink, he never gave it much attention. Unknown to him, and me though, he had inadvertently found my wayward masterpiece. A couple of days later, after he sobered up, they had to rush him to the hospital in Omagh where I heard that he underwent an ordeal of surgical removal so traumatic that he cannot bring himself to eat spuds ever again. That was why the roth-aspal had been on our road, leaving shame and misery in its wake. What I heard at that time was a warning sure enough and it was a long, long time before anybody could get me to go back to the turf-stack after that!

Apparently you can still see my potato sculpture to this day, in a specimen jar at the hospital research lab.

Oh my gosh thats a good one*grinning*

anyone else?

But more importantly! its true......honestly.
I still have the potato whittling skills to prove it.

That story reminds me of the ''Fucilli Jerry'' Seinfeld episode...*L*