Matheson Collection > Folk tales and fairy lore in Gaelic and English

THE TAILOR AND THE KILNURE ANIMATED
CORPSE.
Long ago, many people believed that burying places
with the ruins of an ancient church standing within
them were frequented by ghosts and bogles innumer-
able. After nightfall few people cared to pass one
of these abodes of the dead, especially if it stood far
away from the dwellings of the living, and fewer still
had the foolhardiness to enter the uncanny place
during the silent hour of midnight. And yet some
bold fellow now and again would offer to furnish this
infallible proof of his daring! To make the proof
certain a human skull was left in a crevice inside the
old, ruined church, and, as soon as twelve o'clock at
night strucK, he would enter the church alone and
bring back the skull to a place where his companions
awaited his coming.
A tailor once, living on the farm of Fincharn, near
the south end of Loch Awe, having denied the
existence of ghosts, was challenged by his neighbours
to prove his sincerity by going at the dead hour of
midnight to the burying place of Kilnure and bringing
back with him the skull lying in the window of the
old church that gives its name to the place. The tailor
replied that he would give them a stronger proof even
than that, by sewing a pair of trews in the church
between bed-time and rock - crow that very night.