Ireland is where strange tales begin . . .

Charles Haughey

The Death Knock, Bad-Luck Names, and Other Irish Family Stories

When talking about the Irish side of my family, all stories begin or end with a party. From sit-down holiday dinners for more than seventy people, birthday celebrations held every month, graduation parties, anniversary soirees, and wedding and baby showers to card parties and weekly coffee meet-ups, we love to socialize. As my brother Dan says about our Irish relatives, “It’s the party that never ends.” Of course, pulling together when someone is ill or in need of help goes without saying, as are the bittersweet but comforting gatherings after one of our family members has died. My Irish great-grandma Maggie set the tone of unity, support, and celebration that is still a strong part of our family identity more than one hundred years later. (The image on the front cover of this book is of Maggie with her daughters Dorrie and Mimi.)

Left to right: Aunt Mimi, Uncle Thomas, James, and
Grandma Dorrie in front of their St. Paul home, circa 1913.
Enterprising men would bring pony or goat carts such as this around the city neighborhoods and charge a small fee for pictures.

Maggie McDonough was my mom’s maternal grandma. By the time I was around, in the 1960s, most of the bigger family gatherings had moved from Maggie’s house to her daughters’ houses. Great-Aunt Norah hosted Thanksgiving and Easter in St. Paul, and Grandma Dorrie had everyone down to her house in southern Minnesota for dinner on Christmas Day. These fancy dinner parties usually included some of the Irish friends and relatives that had been coming to family parties since the 1920s.

We still had smaller celebrations at Great-Grandma Maggie’s house every now and then. I remember my great-grandma smiling at us kids from her chair while Big Uncle Thomas and Great-Aunt Mimi, who both lived with Great-Grandma, acted as hosts. Mimi was thin, with bright red hair and conservative but fashionable clothes. She was the first woman in the family to graduate from college, from the College of St. Thomas (now known as the University of St. Thomas). She worked as a librarian at the St. Paul Public Library. Mimi never married because she had fallen in love with a man who wasn’t Catholic, and his parents had disapproved of the union. Mimi gave us kids books as gifts and took us to the ballet. Big Uncle Thomas was my godfather. He was loud, garrulous, and a generous spirit. He liked to drink, and he was a great storyteller. He gave us quarters and took us to Como Park, which had carnival rides and zoo animals. Thomas’s wife Irene was very quiet, but she smiled a lot and had a wonderful sense of humor.

At the family parties, Big Uncle Thomas would bring in a grocery bag full of animal crackers and Cracker Jacks, a gift to us kids from Great-Grandma (see photo gallery at end of book). After thanking Great-Grandma, we’d make our way through the talking, laughing maze of grownups and head out to the porch to get down to the business of divvying up the goods. We always found out-of-the-way corners to play in at all of the main party houses—at my great-grandma’s, it was the front porch.

I only knew my great-grandma Maggie when she was a very old woman. But I know some of the stories of her life, because both my mom and my grandma Dorrie spoke of her often. When they talked about Maggie, I could tell, even as a child, how much they loved and admired her. Their stories almost always started out with, “Great-Grandma had a very hard life, but she was a happy person …”

My mom, my grandparents, and my mom’s younger sister Veronica lived with my great-grandparents in St. Paul in the 1930s, while my grandpa finished law school. Grandma Dorrie worked as a buyer for the china department at the Emporium, a fancy department store in downtown St. Paul, so my great-grandma was the primary caretaker for my mom and Aunt Veronica when they were little. Also living in the four-bedroom house on the east side of St. Paul at that time were Great-Aunt Mimi, Big Uncle Thomas, Great-Aunt Nora, and Great-Aunt Nellie. Mimi’s real name was Mary, but to everyone in our family born after 1934 she was Mimi, thanks to my one-year-old mom not being able to pronounce Mary. The name Mimi suited my great-aunt anyway, and it stuck.

I learned from my mom and grandma that Maggie loved to throw parties, play cards, and dance. Great-Grandma loved to sing, mostly songs from the Gay ’90s. Several of the songs were very sad, such as “Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven, ’Cause My Mother’s There” and “Poor Babes in the Woods,” which my mom loved too—she said they both cried as Maggie sang them. Maggie also sang a song called “The Band Played On.” (Decades later, I had a clairvoyant experience related to this song at one of my grade-school concert practices, covered in the “Bloody Mary and Ouija Boards” chapter.) Of course, Maggie sang Irish songs too, like “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and “The Minstrel Boy,” a sad song about young men dying in a war. She sang while doing her housework—washing and ironing the clothes, doing the dishes, cleaning the house. My mom says she thinks singing cheered up my great-grandma.

Although she was taken out of school at age seven to help care for her younger siblings, Maggie was fluent in both Gaelic and English. She loved the outdoors, was a great rower and swimmer, and as a young woman, she used to swim across the Mississippi River. Maggie loved to cook and worked as one until she got married to Great-Grandpa Thomas. If people dropped by my great-grandparents’ house unexpectedly, which they often did, Maggie could throw together a meal and still have the energy to roll up the rugs for a little dancing after dinner. My great-grandparents built a bar in their basement, painted white with a red ribbon trim, and hosted dances and poker games downstairs for their many guests. Our family likes to tell the story of how, during a blizzard, the streetcar that ran in front of my great-grandparents’ house had to stop running. People came to my great-grandparents’ door looking for a warm place to stay till the weather improved, and Thomas and Maggie let everyone in and gave them a drink. Eventually, they all moved into the basement to dance, turning everyone’s bad weather luck into a party.

Maggie’s father, Patrick, had lived in County Galway in Ireland. He owned a store and boat rental business near Carraroe on Galway Bay. Patrick had nine children with his first wife, Bridget. When Bridget died, Patrick got married again, to a woman named Mary, who was twenty years his junior. They came to America and soon helped all of Patrick’s children from his first marriage emigrate, with the exception of his oldest daughter, who was married and wanted to stay in Ireland. In America, the six older half-brothers lived with my great-great-grandpa Patrick and turned their paychecks over to him. Maggie said her dad made all the clothes for the family. Maggie’s two older half-sisters got married and set up their own households.

Maggie was my great-great-grandpa’s first child with his second wife, Mary. Maggie had two younger sisters, Kate and Annie. According to my mom’s sister Veronica, when Maggie was a child, she and her sister Kate would hide in the kitchen behind the stove and listen to the adults tell stories about the fairies, or “little people,” and ghosts. Their dad told them about banshees, fearsome spirits whose keening and wailing presaged the death of someone in the family. He also told stories of leprechauns, the clever fairies who delight in outsmarting humans.

Maggie’s mom died from complications of childbirth when Maggie was seven. On her deathbed, she said, “I’ll come for you, Maggie.” This was considered a very bad omen, as one of the Irish beliefs was that the last name spoken by a dying person revealed who would be next to die. My great-great-grandpa was terrified that the death coach, an old-fashioned spectral hearse that comes to collect the souls of the dead, was going to come for Maggie. He moved the four youngest kids into his room on a trundle bed to keep them safe at night from the banshees and the Irish death coach.

Maggie’s father was in his mid-fifties when her mother died. He and seven-year-old Maggie tried to care for the baby and the two younger girls, who were three and two. (This is when Maggie was taken out of school.) Records are sketchy, but apparently the baby died only a month or so after her mom’s death.

Another very sad story from Maggie’s life is that four of her nine children died while they were young. Two died as infants; both were boys, and both were named John. One of the boys was a twin of Ethel, who died a few years later. In one terrible year, 1920, my great-grandma lost two children and her much-loved sister Annie. Annie, who lived with Maggie’s family, died of tuberculosis. Maggie’s five-year-old daughter Ethel died from scarlet fever, and her ten-year-old son James died of rheumatic fever. My mom’s cousin Kay said that Annie got sick first, and she was so worried about someone else in the house getting tuberculosis that she prayed constantly. Great-Grandma felt that Annie’s prayers had kept her family safe. After Annie died, Ethel and James got sick. My grandma Dorrie, only eleven or twelve years old herself, was at the bedside of her younger siblings when they died. According to my mom’s cousin Bev, “After the scarlet fever and the deaths of Annie, Ethel, and James, (Great-)Grandpa moved the family because he believed the house was a sick, or sad, house, and he didn’t want the family to live there.” The house had actually been quarantined. After the quarantine was lifted, they moved a short distance away into the house that I call the Irish family homestead, because it was home to an ever-changing cast of Irish family members for the next eighty-five years.

Bev also told me that while James was sick, he told his mom that he saw St. Cecilia. (Cecilia was my great-grandma’s middle name and one of her patron saints.) Great-Grandma asked James what St. Cecilia looked like, and he started to cry. When she asked him why he was crying, James said, “Because you don’t believe me.” Bev said my great-grandma always felt bad about that. When I came across a memorial Maggie had written about James’s death eighty years after she’d written it, I felt her heart-wrenching sorrow and despair leap off the scrap of paper before I’d even read the words: “My darling James died, Dec. 30, 1920, 7 am.” I am sensitive to energy, but I’d never felt anything like this shock of grief before. It was crushing. I said a prayer for both my great-grandma Maggie and James, and then for all of Maggie’s children, thinking of the losses they had experienced in their lifetimes. I reminded myself that they’ve been reunited on the other side for many years now.

Maggie’s son James’s death was the second tragedy to befall a James in our family. Maggie’s brother-in-law James (my great-grandpa Thomas’s brother) had died unexpectedly at a young age, and Maggie and Thomas’s son James had been named for this uncle. This led some of the older Irish relatives to declare James a bad-luck name for our family. (I’m not sure why the name John didn’t fall into this category too, considering the two babies named John who had died.) Great-Aunt Mimi even made my mom’s cousin Victor promise not to take the name James as a confirmation name or give the name to any son he might someday have.

My mom and grandma told me stories of my great-grandpa Thomas, too. Like Maggie, he was Irish and he had lost his mother at a young age. He was just ten years old when his mom died. Thomas completed high school at age sixteen and taught at a country school. He was very interested in politics and moved to St. Paul with the dream of going to law school. The family lore is that he lost his law-school money in a poker game shortly after arriving in the city. Thomas met Maggie when he was a customer at the restaurant where she cooked. He worked as a streetcar conductor when he was a young man, and sometimes he’d let Maggie ride for free.

Great-Grandpa liked to do magic tricks for his grandkids, like pulling nickels and quarters out from behind their ears. My mom remembers that he also loved to recite from memory the poem “Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley (see appendix III for the full text of this poem). The poem was outlandishly frightening—its most well-known line was “an’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you, ef you Don’t Watch Out!” My mom said the part of the poem that scared her most was a reference to two “big black things” that pulled a little girl through the ceiling:

They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side, an’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowed what she’s about!

Worst of all, my great-grandpa had a little door in his bedroom, about three feet high and two feet wide, which led to an attic crawl space. It was the perfect size for a goblin.

As a child, my mom also heard the true, tragic story of my great-grandma’s friend, a nurse named Mrs. Brennan. Mrs. Brennan had seen her three-year-old daughter get struck and killed by a streetcar, and she had gone blind instantly. She never regained her sight for the rest of her life. When my mom told us this sad story, she told us what her grandma had told her—it was just an example of how things happen that we don’t understand and can’t explain.

My great-grandpa Thomas died in 1959, two years before I was born. Even though he died at a hospital, the Irish “death knock”—a loud, unexplained rap in the walls, heard when someone in the house has died—served as the announcement of his death to my great-grandma, who was waiting at home. I learned some of the details of my great-grandpa’s death after Maggie’s spirit came and had a sit-down visit with me a few years ago. I wrote about the visit in my first book, but one of the things my great-grandma told me was that she knew when her husband had died even though she “wasn’t in the room with him.” I asked my mom and Bev about some of the things Great-Grandma told me, and between them, they confirmed the accuracy of the information and filled me in on some new details. That’s when I learned that, after the experience at her mother’s deathbed, Maggie never again wanted to be in the room with a dying person. Bev, who is Norah’s daughter and Maggie’s granddaughter, said that she and Great-Grandma were at the Irish family homestead and most everyone else was at the hospital with Great-Grandpa. Great-Grandma heard the death knock and told Bev that Great-Grandpa had died. A few minutes later, they got a call from the hospital confirming the news.

The other bit of Irish magic that marked my great-grandpa’s passing was the little people stopping by to pay their respects. Maggie believed that the little people disguised themselves as rabbits when humans were around, and she would set out bread crusts and saucers of milk for them. When the family gathered at my great-grandparents’ house after Great-Grandpa’s funeral, an astonishing number of rabbits showed up. The rabbits came from the hill behind the house, ran across the yard in a large group, and disappeared into the woods across the street. This happened in the middle of the day. My great-grandparents had lived in that home for nearly forty years, and no one had ever seen anything like it.

The death knock was heard once again when my grandma’s cousin Big Luke died. Big Luke was another relative who had lived at my great-grandma’s house for many years. He had come over on a boat from Ireland at age five, alone; his only identification was a nametag around his neck. Big Luke was a gentle and kind man who had worked as a teacher until his retirement. He fought in WWI and had been shot in the head, but made a full recovery. At the family parties at my great-grandma’s house when I was a child, he sat in a straight-backed chair by the porch door, smiling and greeting people as they passed, but not saying much.

Big Uncle Thomas’s wife Irene told me about hearing the death knock when Big Luke died. Luke liked to spend time reading and had gone out to the porch with a book. Irene, Thomas, and my great-grandma were home at the time. Out of the blue, Irene and Thomas heard a loud knock. They went to the front door, but no one was there. Thomas went over to ask Luke if he’d heard or seen anything; Luke didn’t respond. That’s when Thomas realized that Luke was gone. Irene said they were going to try to keep the news from Maggie until they had it confirmed by a medical person, but when they came in from the porch, she already knew. She had heard the death knock, too.

One of my favorite Great-Grandma stories is the story of the fairies and the missing check. When Great-Aunt Norah’s daughter Bev was a teenager, Norah called to tell her that her grandma Maggie had lost a check. Norah was at work, so Bev went over to help her grandma look for it. Maggie told Bev that she had already looked all over for the check and thought the fairies might have hidden it. Bev, who loved and respected Maggie, said, “Oh, Grandma, you don’t really believe in fairies, do you?” Bev said it was the one time in her life that she felt she had offended her grandma. Bev felt bad when she realized that she had hurt her grandma’s feelings, so she asked Maggie where the fairies might hide money. Together, they looked in the garden, the kitchen, and all around the house again. Bev said she had about given up when my great-grandma reached in her apron pocket and discovered the missing check. Bev was happy the check had been found and wasn’t expecting Maggie’s next comment: “How do you suppose the fairies got it into my pocket without me knowing?”

My mom told me that when the movie Darby O’Gill and the Little People first came out, Big Uncle Thomas brought Maggie to see it, hoping it would convince her that banshees and little people and the death coach were just superstitions. Instead, my great-grandma became more convinced than ever that they were real.

Throughout her life, my great-grandma prayed for her family each night, asking God’s blessings for each person by name. In later years, she slept with a crucifix on her chest. When my great-grandma died, with many of her family members at her bedside, she called out to her mom. After all those years, her mother had kept her promise—she had come to take Maggie home.