By Jim Hagarty
2018
My Hagarty ancestors lived on a farm in the 1800s near a small village in County Cork, Ireland, known as Conna. Dozens of the descendants of John Hegarty and Abigail O’Keefe have visited that farm and the stone cottage where they lived as well as Conna since the 1990s. We have often been entertained by the wonderful, friendly local people, many of them descendants of people our ancestors knew. They have held events for us in a lovely community hall at one end of the village. That hall was built on the same site of a Catholic church that became redundant when a new church was built in the centre of Conna around 1830. The new church, St. Catherine’s, still stands and is in use today. Some of our Hegarty relatives were baptized there and others were baptized in the church that was demolished.
The community centre is a busy place and hosts numerous activities, including local theatre productions. I got up and sang a song from the stage there in 2013. In 2002, the community put on meals there for the 107 Hegarty descendants who were holding a reunion there.
But the hall is also the sometime home of a friendly ghost, apparently seen by many in the community. A priest has been seen there and eyewitnesses have described the apparition as being very short, about half the height of a normal human being. No one seems to know, at least, not that I have heard, which priest this might be but he seems to have perhaps been left behind when the church was moved to a new location. The good reverend seems benign as you might expect a priest to be, even after death, and no one I have talked to seems fearful to be in the hall alone with him.
On the other hand, a woman who lived on the nearby Hegarty farm once pointed to some hills in the distance outside her farmhouse window and said that that is where some “wee people” live.
“No one believes that,” I said to her.
“Oh heavens no,” she laughed. “No one believes it. And no one goes up there!”
Happy Halloween.
