In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past—a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Farewell, Irish Family Homestead

Six or seven years ago, I walked through the Irish family home, awash in memories and the vibrations of the past. It was the first time I had been in my great-grandma Maggie’s house, now Great-Aunt Irene’s, in nearly thirty years. The days of the house overflowing with Irish relatives, neighbors, and friends were long gone. Great-Grandma, Mimi, Big Uncle Thomas, Big Luke, Grandma Dorrie, Norah, and Nellie had all passed away. But they were also still there, my Irish relatives, or at least traces of their energy were—their daily sorrows and joys lingered in the house long after their days on earth were done. The house was so filled with spirit energy, I had to stop and collect myself before I could go beyond the first two rooms. Norah’s daughter Kay had asked if I could take Great-Aunt Irene out for their usual Friday night dinner date, as she was going to be out of town and wouldn’t be available. I saw Irene at all of our family parties, of course, but the party hosting had moved on to the next generation and other houses. The Irish family homestead had gotten quiet.

The back screened porch, where Big Uncle Thomas used to watch ball games on the television with his Irish setter Prince by his side, now had two lawn chairs so Irene could enjoy a cup of coffee and watch the birds with her guests. The porch still had the sixties-era indoor-outdoor green carpeting that I remembered. The kitchen, which for decades had been the center of activity for so many family gatherings, seemed tiny. The historic neighborhood, which had been a stable and safe working-class community in its heyday, was now in decline.

Front to back: Mimi, Grandma Dorrie, and Nellie in front of the Irish family homestead, St. Paul, Minnesota, circa 1925.

In the fall of 2004, my daughter Molly, who was in her mid-twenties, moved into the Irish home with Great-Aunt Irene. Irene was Big Uncle Thomas’s widow and the last family member of her generation still living. At ninety-four, Irene was still sharp and funny, but she needed someone around to help out if she was going to be able to stay in her home. Irene did have helpers coming in five days a week, but due to having surgery, she needed someone there overnight as well. My mom’s sister Margie and cousin Kay, along with one of Irene’s nieces from her side of the family, devoted a lot of time to helping Irene continue to live in her home. My aunt Margie had finally convinced Irene to update the house a bit, using some of her favorite colors. The living and dining room carpeting, which had been emerald green, Uncle Thomas’s favorite color, was replaced with a soft rose-colored carpet. Margie had also helped Irene purchase some new furniture that was comfortable and pretty.

Irene had been at a nursing home while recuperating from surgery, but she hated it so much that she tried to bribe one of the employees into taking her home. When that didn’t work, she attempted to leave by calling a taxi and offering to pay the driver in jewelry. Irene had lived in the Irish family home for almost seventy years, and she had only lived in one other house her entire life, so it was easy to see why she was so intent on getting back to her house. I was proud of Molly for being part of an endeavor so important and worthwhile. And I was glad Molly was strong and practical and used to living with spirits. I figured she would probably encounter a few in her time at the Irish house.

So Molly moved in, bringing her three cats with her. We had been a little concerned about the cats with Irene’s mobility issues, but Irene fell in love with them. Molly’s tiny cat, Snip, was Irene’s favorite. Snip, who does whatever she wants, would ride around in the basket of Irene’s walker, sticking her chest out like a ship’s figurehead. Occasionally, Molly would come home from work and discover that Irene had created little trails of food leading to her chair to get Snip to come sit in her lap.

Molly moved into the upstairs bedroom that had belonged to Great-Aunt Mimi for more than fifty years. She told me sometimes at night when she was in bed, she would hear strange noises and think of all of the relatives who had lived in the house, and Big Luke, who had died there. One night, Molly had a dream in which she thought she woke up. She heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs and then felt like something was in her room with her, pinning her down. Molly said even in the dream, she didn’t think it was Big Luke’s spirit, but she thought it was a male spirit who had lived in the house. She got the distinct impression that the angry spirit wanted her boyfriend Bryan to stop coming around. Molly had another vivid dream that was a little spooky, but mostly cool. She dreamt that she woke up and heard a party going on downstairs. She went down to check it out, and found the living and dining room packed with youngish but old-fashioned partygoers, drinking and eating and playing cards. They looked like they were from the 1940s or ’50s. No one seemed to notice her, and she went back upstairs.

Energetically speaking, Molly said she felt the strongest sense of the past in the old basement, where she felt a residual vibe of parties and gaiety. Molly did not see any ghosts while living in the house, but she and Irene both heard voices at night. The voices were muffled—neither Molly nor Irene could understand what they were saying. One night, Molly came home late, and Irene was upset because while Molly was out, Irene had heard a loud knock. They both had the death knock on their minds as Molly went around the house to see if she could find anything that had fallen over or was out of place, but she found nothing.

Molly’s favorite part of living with Irene was listening to the stories she told about her life. When Molly found an old shoebox full of photographs, she and Irene looked through the pictures together. One photo was of Big Uncle Thomas petting Prince in the living room, right where she and Irene were sitting. There were a few photos in which the “old” relatives were unrecognizable to Molly because they were young. In one of them, four people Molly didn’t recognize were sitting at a table drinking, smoking, and playing cards. Irene laughed and told Molly that it was her, Mimi, Big Uncle Thomas, and a neighbor. Molly said she loved listening to Irene’s stories because it was obvious that while she told the stories, she was reliving them. According to Molly, who wrote a paper about the experience for grad school:

Irene would get very emotionally caught up in her story, a few times she cried, but most of the time she laughed and smiled during the story and after the story. I know she enjoyed telling me the stories, especially those that ended with her sighing and saying, “Just imagine.” I did imagine the stories she told me. When I was doing laundry in the basement, I would imagine thirty adults in the back room drinking at the homemade bar, and I imagined Big Luke falling asleep in his chair while reading a book and never waking up.

I believe that, even though the Irish family home had gotten much quieter, there was still some fairy magic left around. In the same week I saw the vision of my friend Dylan’s white deer, I dreamt I was at a big family party at my grandparents’ house. As I looked around, I suddenly realized that everyone seated at the table was a ghost. One of the women became aware that I knew she was a spirit and tried to fly away. I yelled out, “Name yourself!” As she disappeared into the ceiling, she called back, “Eileen Gallagher,” who was one of the family friends that had been part of our parties for decades. I wrote the dream down in my datebook. About a week later, I went to visit Irene and found a picture lying on the floor of a woman from the 1960s. I picked it up and showed it to Irene. I asked who it was, and Irene said, “That’s Eileen Gallagher.” I said, “Oh, how weird! I just had a dream about her a week ago!” Irene asked me if I remembered Eileen. I told her I remembered Eileen Gallagher, Bridget Flanagan, and Margaret Brennan (whose mother was the woman who went blind when she saw her daughter struck by a street car), who all came to the parties, even though, as a kid, I wasn’t sure exactly who they were. (I even remembered people referring obliquely to Bridget’s sister Babe, who we weren’t supposed to talk about. I never found out why, except that she was “wild.”) I asked Irene where the picture of Eileen Gallagher had come from. She said she didn’t know—it had just shown up that morning.

The other item that just showed up one day on Irene’s end table was a man’s gold watch. Irene showed it to me the next time I came over. She asked me what I thought it meant. “Hmmm …” I thought about it. It seemed a little ominous, given Irene’s age. I searched for a more positive interpretation. “Maybe the fairies are back?”

I asked Irene what she was going to do with the watch.

“I’m just watching it,” Irene said, smiling at her own play on words. “I’m curious to see what it’s going to do next.”

Once Irene learned that I lived in a haunted house, she started telling me about some of the weird things she had experienced in her house. I know some people think that older people are confused or their medications are playing tricks on them, and I know that may be true in some situations. But I also believe that the closer we get to the end of our physical life, the more awareness and interaction we have with the spirit world. The first weird thing that Irene told me about was her blanket standing up beside the bed. She woke up one night because she was cold. She figured she must have accidentally knocked her blanket to the floor, but then she saw the blanket standing straight up in the air beside her bed. Irene referred to that story many times, because it had absolutely shocked her.

Irene also told me that on more than one occasion, she woke up and saw little people, or fairies, going through her dresser drawers, and she wasn’t happy about it. I told her about Dan’s Irish renter, who believed that brownies were straightening up the pile of shoes and boots by his back door at night, and suggested that maybe the little people were helping her keep her clothes in order.

Irene’s most dramatic ghostly encounter was waking up and seeing a “craggy-faced” man beside her bed. And—I love this part, because Irene was in her nineties at the time—she didn’t scream, and she didn’t cower under her covers. She hit him, which I think is a perfectly appropriate response to seeing a menacing stranger standing beside your bed.

“That’s so righteous!” I told Irene when I first heard the story. “Then what happened? Did he disappear?”

“My hand went right through him,” said Irene. “Then he disappeared.”

Irene also talked about a “spirit man, come to dance me away.” I thought it was a poetic and powerful way to refer to dying. But I wasn’t sure if Irene was actually referring to death, and because of her age, I felt it would be bad manners to ask her directly. I got the answer when Molly moved in with Irene. When Molly greeted Irene in the morning and asked her how she was doing, Irene would often smile and reply, “The spirit man didn’t come to dance me away last night, so I’m fine.”

Molly had to get up early during the week to go to work. Since Irene was a night owl, often staying up very late to watch TV, Molly tried to be unobtrusive when she came downstairs, keeping the lights off and walking quietly. One morning, as Molly came down the staircase, she froze. She could see Irene’s figure silhouetted in her chair in the dark living room. With her heart in her throat, Molly braced herself to go over and check on Irene, when Irene suddenly chirped, “Good morning!”

Molly’s knees buckled. She said it was the closest she’s ever come to collapsing from fear. When she caught her breath, she said, “Irene, what are you doing sitting in the dark?”

Irene said, “I was hoping you could teach me how to use the microwave oven.” Everyone had been trying to get Irene to stop using the stove, so it was a perfectly reasonable request, although Molly was still quaking inside when she got to work a half-hour later.

Molly and her cats lived with Irene for about a year. A painful chronic spinal condition finally made it necessary for Irene to move into a nursing home. When I visited Irene in the nursing home, it broke my heart when she leaned over to me and said, “Say, can you tell me about my house? I’m forgetting what it looks like.”

Molly lived in St. Paul for a year, then moved to Savannah, Georgia, to attend grad school. I had a new cigarette-smoking ghost at my house, and Molly dreamt that she met the spirit. It was an old woman with bright red hair, wearing dark sunglasses. The woman had a lit cigarette in her mouth and was taking boxes out of my house. When Molly asked her what she was doing, the woman turned around, took off her sunglasses, and said, “I’m helping your mother sell books.” As soon as Molly saw the old woman’s eyes, which were red-rimmed, she knew she was talking to a ghost. I thought there was a good chance the spirit was Mimi, since she looked like Mimi, was helping with books (which were Mimi’s life work), and Molly had just spent a year sleeping in Mimi’s old room, so they probably had an energetic connection. It also seemed to me that Mimi’s eyes had always been a little red, but I couldn’t remember for sure. We asked my mom if Mimi had been a smoker, and she said, “Oh, yes. Everyone smoked then.” We also asked her about red-rimmed eyes, and she said that between Mimi’s coloring (red hair and very fair skin) and the eyestrain from her job, her eyes often did look red. I always think my Irish relatives are helping from the other side, and Molly’s dream was just another confirmation of that, so I thanked Mimi for the help. And I have not experienced any more ghostly cigarette smoke at my house since then.

A few years ago, when it became apparent that Irene would not ever be able to go back to her home, the Irish family home was put on the market and sold. I have to keep reminding myself that a house is not part of the family, it’s just a place that holds a family’s spirit for a while. And I believe that houses have a life cycle, just like people do. Our Irish family home is gone from us, but new again for some other family. May they have many happy times there.

My most heart-wrenching moment in the Irish homestead was when I helped Molly move some of her stuff into the basement on the day she moved in, and I saw the bar that my great-grandpa had built in the back corner. I knew that Maggie and Thomas had moved into the house shortly after the terrible year in which Annie, Ethel, and James had died, hoping to make a fresh start in a new home. As I gazed at the long-deserted bar in a now-dark corner of the basement, the jaunty red ribbon painted around it moved me to tears. It made me realize what incredible resiliency and strength and hope my great-grandparents possessed. It also made me realize that when my grandma Dorrie had a basement bar built in her beautiful historic home, and Norah set up a basement bar for all the family parties, they were following a family tradition that they knew fostered happiness and joy.

My mom recently had a vision of Great-Aunt Mimi. She had been listening to André Rieu on PBS, and they were playing a Viennese waltz. My mom suddenly saw a very distinct image of Mimi dancing to a Strauss waltz, which she had always loved to do. Mimi was wearing a beautiful ball gown. My mom didn’t recognize her partner, but I bet it was Fred, the man Mimi had loved but didn’t marry because of his parents’ objections. Mimi and Fred had found each other again, later in life, when he became a widower. They were planning a trip to Europe when Mimi was diagnosed with cancer. She died not long afterward. Everyone felt very sad that, once again, circumstances had kept Mimi and Fred apart. But in my mom’s psychic impression of Mimi dancing, she said it was easy to see that Mimi was supremely happy.

I have no doubt all the Irish relatives in spirit are together, celebrating and helping out from the other side when they’re needed. In my first book, I wrote about a conversation I had with my grandma Dorrie, with a little help from psychic Patrick Mathews. At the end of the reading, I reluctantly said goodbye to my grandma. She told Patrick that she had a luncheon to attend with a bunch of the family on the other side, which is exactly how I picture my Irish relatives enjoying their time in heaven, in between dropping by to visit or help.

There will never be another generation of people quite like my grandparents and great-grandparents. Thankfully, it is likely that none of us will have to endure the kinds of heartbreaking losses and hardships they endured. When my young nieces and nephews and cousins are old enough, we will share the family stories with them so they can be inspired by their ancestors and, in some small way, get to know them. In the meantime, I always greet the rabbits in my yard with a friendly hello and set out bread crusts for them, just in case Great-Grandma Maggie was right.