My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress

by Christina McKenna

  In late August that same year our great-aunt slipped while carrying turf from the shed, and the injuries she sustained put her into hospital for a time.

  My mother saw the fall as a long overdue comeuppance for a selfish life. Old Rose barely countenanced mother’s existence, despising her for having corrupted one of her nephews and having the gall to bring forth children as tangible evidence of that corruption.

  But mother – always the forgiving, dutiful sort – offered to take care of her until she’d regained her strength. Uncle Robert didn’t know how to; he knew how to take care of money, but not of people. His aunt Rose had quite a stash; the mean-spirited often do. Money, it seemed, was her very purpose in living. For Robert, the thought of getting his hands on it was what kept him attentive to her needs.

  So the boys’ bedroom was cleared to accommodate the patient and the parlour became their temporary sleeping quarters. However, despite mother’s unstinting care and devotion, Great-aunt Rose never recovered from the fall; it had propagated the cancer that would release her from the bitter past and agonising present, and into the ‘painful’ future of the hereafter. She spent a month with My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress us, after which Robert moved her to the guardianship of the nuns at the Nazareth House in Derry.

  She died soon after. My mother received nothing for her trouble; the nuns were paid handsomely for theirs. Robert’s attentiveness paid off as well. He received the bulk of her squirrelled-away £300,000 fortune.

  The clergy fared handsomely too. It is a rather depressing feature of the miser’s canon that he will seek reprieve from punishment in the next life by generously greasing the palms of God’s representatives in this one. It seems that God takes on the role of the last great banker in paradise. Who knows how many monastery farms have expanded, or priestly purses have fattened, on the logic of this fallacy?

  On 31 October, approximately six weeks after Rose’s demise, my nine-year-old brother John was woken by the sound of a light tapping from under his bed. It was the same bed his dying great-aunt had lain in, and he shared it with his brother Mark. He wandered into mother’s room and told her that he couldn’t sleep. She listened, concluded that the tapping was caused by an agitated water pipe, and sent him back to bed. But the tapping persisted and, with Mark’s help, mother and I dragged the mattress from the bed and into the kitchen. The boys eventually fell asleep there.

  The following day, however, the tapping could still be heard, only this time it had travelled, and continued to travel: we heard it coming from various points on the floor of the boys’ room. This disproved mother’s noisy water-pipe theory.

  With each passing day the frequency and volume of the eerie sound increased. After a week, when all efforts at a logical explanation were exhausted, the bed taken apart and reassembled, the floor inspected, the foundations checked, we were forced to come to the The Haunting unnerving conclusion that we were dealing with a supernatural entity.

  As a child, having to face this reality was extremely terrifying. It was a truth I would never fully have the measure of, or be able to banish from my thoughts. It was like witnessing a horror that had occurred within my field of vision, while I was innocently focusing on a beautiful landscape.

  There were no ready answers to my questions because they lay outside the limits of human understanding. This was a malevolent invasion and it gripped me with a fear more terrible than anything I’d ever experienced. I thought I’d known dread in Father Monacle’s confessional and Master Bradley’s classroom. Such fears were nothing compared to this.

  The growing terror inside me kept apace with ‘its’ progression. After a week it began hammering on the walls and floor of the boys’ room; furniture would groan and the bed shake. Every nerve and sinew in us began to tighten in response to those awful sounds, only easing briefly when we thought they’d at last gone away. I don’t know how many times we’d turn from the door to that room with tremulous hope.

  ‘It’s gone,’ one of us would say without much conviction. ‘Shush … listen; it doesn’t usually take this long. That’s it. It’s definitely gone.’

  I can still feel the hope that flickered in me then and grew to a blaze of pathetic longing. We’d enter the boys’ room and wait in the testing silence, in the calm before the storm, in the chill of that room. We’d wait, praying, hoping, standing stock-still, not daring to blink or swallow or breathe too deeply in case – just in case. But as sure as hell and heaven it would come: the thunderous communication from another place, and it would tear screams from every throat and precipitate a headlong dash, back into the terror we’d tried to escape from. It acted like some kind of demon doctor at a sickbed; at any given hour it would deliver a dose of fright and panic to keep us mindful of the fact that it had the power. We were the patients in need of healing, but the big question was: who or what had caused the contagion in the first place?

  Mother went frantic. Her only recourse was to multiply and prolong the rosaries; we often said ten a day. The parish priest, Father O’Neill, came to listen to the noises, and said that prayer was the only weapon we had. He concluded that it was the soul of Great-aunt Rose. She was in torment in purgatory, he told us, and needed our invocations in order to be released. He got down on his knees and assured her of our continued devotion, beseeching her to be gone to her rest. But she refused his plea and continued to fill our sleepless nights with fresh assaults.

  We noticed that the phenomenon seemed to follow John. He was the youngest of those of us who had supped at our great-aunt’s table that fateful day. During that first incursion it had tapped its way from under the wardrobe at the far end of the bedroom, and settled under John’s side of the bed.

  We experimented with it. The oilcloth was lifted from the floor so as to dampen the sharpness of the raps, but the noise continued unabated, the volume shifting in consonance with the stone floor. We’d evidently angered it. Suddenly the tapping ceased and something altogether more horrifying replaced it. We heard the excruciating rasp of fingernails being dragged, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, along the underside of the mattress.

  Whenever John left the room the knocking, thumping and scratching would stop. Whenever he was laid on the bed it started up again; if one of us lay down beside him it quietened; when he was lifted free of the bed, it stopped. A crucifix placed on the bed would cause it to shake violently; when it was removed, the shaking ceased. All these variations in sound and movement demonstrated to us that the being had an uncanny sense of awareness. Sometimes when visitors called we’d have to turn up the volume on the TV to drown out the unearthly racket in the bedroom.

  My parents viewed the menace as an aberration somehow brought on by the family, and therefore something to be mortally ashamed of – on a par with the ignominy of a daughter going out with a Protestant.

  Such scruples also prevented us calling in the psychic detectives, experts who could throw authoritative light on the mystery. By the same token we couldn’t have chequebook-toting journalists – and, God forbid, banner headlines in the local newspaper – or the prospect of a book perhaps and the sale of the film rights. William Peter Blatty wrote The Exorcist and Jay Anson The Amityville Horror (the latter since unmasked as a hoax), and there we were with the screenplay for The Forgetown Phantom being hammered out in our midst, blocked by mother’s shame and father’s ignorance. Oh, to have even raised the idea of a public airing would have been looked upon as sheer insanity, and would no doubt have brought ‘the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields’.

  A consistent theme running through rural Ireland is the inability of the people to challenge the resolute belief systems of an introspective communal ethos. Many choose to live, suffocate and die in a ‘safe’, benighted fog. My parents thought that the manifestation might simply go away, given time.

  We were halfway through the ordeal when the two boys were moved to the girls’ bedroom: Rosaleen and I in one bed, Mark and John in theirs, against the
opposite wall. The parents hoped to prove by this experiment that the scourge was confined to one room only. It surely wouldn’t have the nerve to travel. The electric light was left burning in the hallway; ever since the beginning of the episode the thought of darkness was unbearable.

  So all four of us lay there in the stillness, terrified and longing for the sleep that would transport us from this nightmare into gentle, soothing dreams. I lay with the blankets clutched tight around my face, my eyes concentrating on my brothers as they too tried to sleep, and hoped and prayed that ‘it’ would stay away.

  I kept watch over the boys, snug in their blankets, and willed them not to move a muscle. I felt that the merest shift from them would bring on the haunting. The sheer dread of those hours carved such fearful pathways in my psyche that even now the most innocent knock on a door or tap on a table has the power to jangle me.

  Was God listening to my prayers that first night? I do not know. For about an hour I watched and waited, and then it happened. What I witnessed next was terrifying.

  The strike was sudden, swift and brutal. The boys’ mattress lifted clear of the horizontal, hovered for a second or two above the frame and, in one brisk, motion, sent Mark and John crashing to the floor. We all dashed screaming from the room. We set up a howling that was as uncontrollable as it was unreasoning and seemed destined to stretch over an entire lifetime. I felt certain even at that moment that I would never have need to scream like that again. A turning-point had been reached.

  We had hardly slept during those first three weeks, and that was bad enough. Now we had to contend with a new and frightening development: the first assault.

  My parents decided to take John to the shrine at Knock – an appropriate place if only because of its name. They’d pray for a solution that would give him a few nights’ release, and the rest of us some sleep. My mother, like so many women of her generation, was devoted to Our Lady and had visited the shrine many times.

  The village of Knock, County Mayo, is a famous place of pilgrimage. On 21 August 1879 the Blessed Virgin Mary allegedly appeared to 15 locals. This apparition remained for two hours, and was not witnessed again. The incident was unusual in that the BVM neither moved nor delivered a message. At other more famous sites, such as Lourdes and Fatima, the witnesses have all received communications.

  She appeared on the gable wall of the village church as the central figure in a tableau, flanked by St John the Evangelist and St Joseph. To the left of the group was an altar with a large cross surrounded by adoring angels, and at its foot a lamb. Not a word was spoken during the apparition, but many words have been written about it since.

  The pilgrimage undertaken by my parents appeared to bear fruit. While they prayed with John in Knock, we waited at home for results; 26 days had passed since the haunting began.

  All seemed well that night. The sleep we yearned for was restored; the house was quiet, there was a glimmer of hope in the long darkness. The Virgin Mary had routed our weird visitor, had sent it packing for good.

  Or so we thought. The following day John and my parents returned, sleepless and distraught. The entity had followed them all the way to Knock and back; it had kicked up a racket under the bed in the B&B they stayed in and continued its pestering in the car. John could not sit anywhere now: stool, chair, sofa, bed, it followed him everywhere. It got to the point where sending him to school was a risk that could not be taken.

  In the sixth and final week of the ‘visitation’ a third mass was offered in the room, but to no avail. The racket continued as before. The hands of the most devout – several holy men and women from various orders and parishes – and relics of the most sainted were laid on John’s head, but the evil cacophony persisted, wreaking havoc in our hearts and all around us.

  We thought things could get no worse, but they did. A presence began to move across the mattress of the haunted bed. We could see the depressions made by what looked like a four-footed animal as it roamed around on the pliant surface. Mother bravely extended her hands to see if she could touch it, only to recoil in horror when she made contact with what appeared to be the motile coat of either a dog or a goat-like creature.

  This startling development demanded more urgent measures. All the prayers that had been said, all the masses offered in the room, had come to nothing. Father O’Neill decided he would have to inform the archbishop, who in turn authorised the visit of an exorcist from England. Even as a child I understood the gravity of this development. The exorcist was the last resort and our final hope.

  Among Christians, only the Catholic Church offers a formal rite of exorcism, the Rituale Romanum, a ceremony which dates from 1614. Less solemn exorcisms are performed by Protestant ministers. To ‘exorcise’ does not mean to cast out but rather to place the invading spirit ‘on oath’; the exorcist invokes the power of God to compel the entity to act in a way contrary to its wishes. The Bible tells us that Jesus cast out many devils, but did not exorcise, because he had no need to call on an authority higher than Himself.

  Most exorcisms are performed by a priest or minister, assisted by a junior cleric, a physician and, if need be, a family member.

  I can only remember that December morning in monochrome. Me at the parlour window, my chin resting on the sill, staring out at the mist-veiled mountains, the dew-beaded grass, a crow perched still and deathlike on a fence post. All quiet, shrouded, hidden, as if the world held a finger to its lips in a warning hush.

  And then suddenly through the mist in the lane, two dark figures advancing on the house: the exorcist and his assistant. Then my mother coming into frame, hurrying to meet them. I see hands gripping hands, an exchange of voiceless greetings. All at once they appear in the kitchen: serious, etiolated men in black soutanes, saying little, patting heads, calling John ‘my child’.

  We knew the priests were very important men because they wasted no time on smiles or badinage. They refused the proffered tea with the slightest of gestures; such economy of speech and movement hinted at the energy they needed to conserve for the dreadful task that lay before them. They were the divine specialists come to do battle with the ghostly insubstantial.

  This was the beginning of the end of our sorrow. There was a palpable feeling in the air that morning; a kind of realisation that these men of God would cleanse the house and release us all at last.

  At their request the room had been stripped of its remaining furniture: the wardrobe and the bed. On a small table mother had assembled a crucifix, two candles and a bowl of holy water. The exorcist carried a small black suitcase; the assistant helped him into a surplice and draped a violet satin stole about his shoulders before they entered the room. They shut the door quietly and firmly behind them, at once shutting themselves in and ourselves out. Mother sighed and crossed herself as she turned away from the closed door. For now, it seemed she would not be needed. I could feel the strain of all those tortured weeks begin to ease as she willed those capable and ministering men to deliver us from the danger that threatened.

  We children were banished to Helen’s home for the remainder of the day, and were at once curious and glad to be absent. The exorcist and his assistant stayed in the locked room for many hours, not emerging until they’d completed their mission.

  At the end of it all they drank tea, then went with us to the now-purified room. There we all prayed together; the clergymen assured us that Great-aunt Rose had been finally laid to rest and would never bother us again. With that they were gone. They left as quietly and unobtrusively as they had come.

  The blind faith we had in those men was matched by the fearless actions of my mother following their departure. The linoleum was laid down again, the room’s furniture was reinstalled and the bed returned to its proper place by the window. We all assembled and said the rosary as we’d done so many times before – except that this time our prayers were of thanksgiving, and were uninterrupted.

  Afterwards we remained kneeling in the glorious silence. Mother, in o
ne final act of faith, lifted John in her arms and placed him on the bed. He didn’t wail or remonstrate but lay there and waited. (It is perhaps worth mentioning that throughout the weeks of haunting John never showed any degree of fear or panic, nor did he cry or question why this was happening to him.) Prior to this, just sitting on the bed for a few seconds was enough to bring on the knocking. This time there was nothing, just complete and total peace. There was no doubt that the entity had gone, that the spirit of our great-aunt had finally been laid to rest.

  That night we all went to bed with relief coupled with a lingering nervousness, not quite believing that we were free of the haunting at long last.

  There was, however, a cruel epilogue to the tale. In the early hours we were awakened by our dog Carlo howling in the yard. The doleful cries lasted for about five minutes, fading into a whimpering lament before ceasing. The following morning, to our great dismay, we found Carlo dead. His poor little twisted body lay where he sometimes slept: under the wheelbarrow. We were in no doubt that the departure of our ‘visitor’ and Carlo’s death were linked.

  From that day forward, and after six hellish weeks, we were never bothered again. A miracle had been worked and a blessed calm descended, unlacing every knot of fear in our hearts and in every room of the house. All alarm and panic were sucked clean away with the entity’s parting, but not surprisingly it left a residue of trauma that was harder to expel. None of us could sleep, eat or study normally for a long time after.

  Our mother never told us what kind of ritual had been performed and we never dared to ask; she took that secret knowledge to the grave. As I contemplate it, more than 30 years later, this event still has the power to amaze and unnerve me. Something awesome happened then, a subtle adjusting of perceptions that set me on another path, another journey, a spiritual questing for knowledge and answers that has never abated.