Hallowe'en is a remnant of Ireland's pagan, Celtic past. Samhain was an important Celtic feast celebrated on the last day of October, marking the beginning of winter and the New Year. This fire festival was celebrated at night with ritual sacrifice by the druids of animals. The Celts feasted on the fruits and harvests of the autumn. Ireland's conversion to Christianity absorbed this Celtic festival and established two significant feast days, All Saints' Day on 1 November and All Souls' Day on 2 November. Ireland has always had a special reverence for the dead. Even into the twentieth century, many people in rural Ireland believed that dead family members returned to the fireside on All Souls' Night. Families went to bed before midnight and left the fire lit. Chairs were arranged around the fireside for the dead family members who returned to the house.

In the Christian calendar today, the month of November commemorates dead friends and family members with prayer for the repose of their souls.

If you believe everything you hear, the ghosts of Ireland are very busy. Spirits and ghosts haunting castles and derelict houses, banshees pursuing noble Irish families, sinister black dogs roaming the mires and hollows from Tyrone to Tipperary. There is a theatre is Dublin where there are supposed to be no less than three ghosts walking the stage. Graveyards, towers and Anglo-Irish estates have their own ghosts. Heirs of ill-begotten fortunes are haunted by the ghostly slaves who were wronged ancestors. Ghosts and spirits defy rational explanation. When it's daylight, we can easily laugh at the myths of ghosts and spirits. By nightime, our laughter might not be so genuine and we ponder on the incredible tales. Belief in the presence of ghosts undermines religious theology. Jonathan Swift once said "man is not a rational animal" which is helpful to storytellers but no help to the sceptics who need an explanation for everything.

The ghost of Helena Blunden walks in the linen mill wher she once worked.Sceptics might shake their heads, sigh and lament "Not another Irish ghost story". However, the witnesses of the ghost in Pure Flax House are rational, sceptical men and women who scorn superstition but each have their own account of the ghost's presence. Ask the printing manager or the designer who late at night listened to quick, light footsteps on the stairs and in the corridor. Speak to the accounts secretary who will tell you how she found her radio switched on early in the morning. For the most vivid recollections, ask the men who work in the warehouse. They have discovered boxes of books moved around the warehouse when no one has been near them.

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