Cork: Evil Spirits — or Fairy Michief?

Cork couple Richie Hewitt and Laura Buke have been reporting problems with visitations from the other world lately in their northside house off the Blarney Road. Things started with the usual fairy mischief — keys and socks vanishing, cushions misplaced on the couch, Carpenters‘ songs taking over their iPod, hot water running out, unfair parking tickets.

Then one day an ashtray went flying across the room at a guest who was having an innocent jar, the Irish Examiner reported. Worse, their young son began flying around the room, too. Chairs shimmied in an odd syncopation to Carpenters’ songs that now emanated from their cooker.

At this point, the couple took action, callling in priests and demanding that the Cork City Council give them a second free house. Neither the priests nor welfare officials came through, however, so the Hewitt-Burkes moved out, back to Mum.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people set up a ghost-watching vigil outside Hollywood Estate, No. 18 — it had been a long-time since the moving statue of Mary in a grotto in Ballinspittle had attracted 10,000 people a week. “Many were just young ones on the piss,” commented Third Eye R. Lloyd. “A number were wearing sheets.”

Tappings in the Night

At this point, shortly after St. Patrick’s Day, a roving New Age shaman from Galway, Paul O’Halloran, appeared on the scene and out of his practitioners bag created an altar outside Hollywood Estate 18, Blarney Road, consisting of sticks, stones and crystals from a variety of sacred places — a “medicine wheel” he called it. According to his website, he is a master shaman who excels in the “clearing and removing of negative energies, entities, curses, and geopathic stress.”

In other words, Paul O’Halloran, who conducts Fairy Workshops and has one coming up May 22 in Galway, is all New Energy and does not believe in churchly superstitions. Concerned about the dark forces taking over Hollywood Estates, 18, off the Blarney Road, he set to chanting.

The master shaman had recently perfected his craft at the Hill of Tara in County Meath, where it has been left to New Agers to futilely protest the desecration by mindless highway building of perhaps the most hallowed historical site in Ireland, the seat of the ancient high kings. The protestors have an interesting website found at http://www.tarapixie.net.

Paul does not hide the fact he talks with trees, and credits his current powers to a Fairy Tree that Ireland Unhinged had the chance to visit in earlier investigations, but Shaman O’Halloran only chanced to meet after first talking to a rival tree, an unenlightening tree off which his spirit bounced. “This time I went to the [correct] tree and it told me that it was my new power place and that the other tree hd said ‘goodbye’ amd could not teach me anything.”

So empowered, O’Hallaron cleared Hollywood Estate, No. 18, of its troubled energy in no time. He said that there the spirits inside were not really malovent, that they were mainly of young children from another time who felt ignored. “There was a lot of Famine energy and Soldier energy inside,” the shaman said.

Mr. O’Halloran said that he is available for personalized woorkshops.

His website recommends a number of fellow practitioners of his trade, incuding Waterford’s own Ella Dillane, self-described as “a life-long friend to those that occupy the faerie world.

Ireland Unhinged is coming to the opinion that NOTHING ever changes in Ireland.

Tags: fairy mischief, Galway, Hill of Tara, Irish fairies, Irish New Age