Dublin Folktales (15 page)

In this case, however, the four-legged animal was not a black dog, but a black pig. While pigs wandered freely through the streets of eighteenth-century Dublin, the Dolocher was different. It prowled the night and it attacked without warning. The belief was that the beast was the ghost of a convicted murderer and rapist, who had committed suicide in the Black Dog Jail that stood in the Cornmarket area of the city. The jail was a debtors’ prison, governed and managed by deeply corrupt officials and guards. Unfortunate debtors had to pay their jailers for sufficient food, drink and bedding to stay alive until their
debts were cleared. There were also people who had been sentenced to death in this prison, which was not unusual at this time. Prisoners were dispatched by public execution, both to chastise the wrongdoer and as a warning to others of a similar fate should they transgress.

A convict by the name of Olocher was lodged in this prison, under sentence of death for rape and murder. Olocher was to be hanged by the neck until he was dead. The convicted Olocher thought it better to take his own life before being publicly executed on Gallows Green before a mocking crowd. On the night before his execution, Olocher cut his own throat with a knife given to him by a sentry. Such a swift end would have been soon forgotten, except that it was soon after this death that a reign of terror began in Dublin.

It was reported that something in the form of a black pig began assaulting sentries, in the first instance, then lone women in the darkness of night. Terror spread through Dublin when the sentry whose station was at the top of a long flight of steps that led into Cook Street below, was found lying speechless, with his unfired gun by his side. He was brought to the hospital in the adjacent jail, such as it was. In time, his senses and speech returned, but one side of his body appeared powerless as if stricken by a paralytic stroke, which he declared was caused by an apparition of a black pig which attacked him.

The next night, another sentry called out the alarm to turn out the guard. This sentry confirmed the sighting of a black pig which had attacked him. One attack followed another, night after night. The guard was called out each time. Its members declared they had seen a strangely fearsome animal of unnatural appearance. Many people of the neighbourhood affirmed the same apparition.

Terror deepened when the relief guard did its rounds of the Black Dog Prison at midnight. They visited each sentry position; but found the sentinel at one station
seemed to have deserted his post. He could not be found. However, on searching behind the sentry box they saw what they believed to be the form of a man lying down. On closer inspection it was found to be the sentry’s gun. It was fully accoutred with his shirt draped around it, the relief reported. The supposition was that the unfortunate man had been devoured by some animal. It was not a huge leap of the imagination to think that it was the black pig that had attacked the unfortunate sentry. He had carried him off, leaving nothing except his outer garments and his unfired gun. Many believed that it was the work of the Dolocher, who had left the mark of his revenge on a sentry for what happened to him.

Terror spread on every side, both within and without the prison. The very next day, a woman came before the magistrates to swear that she had seen the Dolocher, in nearby Christ Church Lane. It made a bite at her, she said, and it held fast her cloak with its tusks. She fled in absolute terror and left her cloak with the monster, which had already been given the name of ‘The Dolocher’. These reports continued. A pregnant woman was attacked by the monster and miscarried her baby as a result.

The fright continued until no woman would venture out after nightfall, for fear of being assailed by a demon in the form of a sharp-tusked black pig, intent on maiming and harming all it met. It was now hinted that because Olocher was sentenced to death for a rape and murder, his hatred of women tormented him after his suicide, so that he was now hunting down lone women as a consequence.

A group of men banded together to rid the city of this torment. At a late hour, they combed around Cook Street and the surrounding streets and laneways for the black pig. They were armed with clubs, swords, knives, and any weapon they could lay their hands on. They were determined to slay every black pig they met so as to be sure they had killed the Dolocher.

The slaughter commenced. According to reports of the time, such a breaking of legs, fracturing of skulls, stabbing, maiming, and destroying, had never been heard of before. The streets were littered with dead and bleeding and expiring animals. At the time, Dublin was populated with so many pigs kept for food, but allowed to wander freely, that bailiffs were obliged to go through the streets demanding their owners keep them in order. Bailiffs even killed the swine with pikes, when a recalcitrant owner failed to ensure the animal was brought under control. Corpses were thrown into carts to carry them away. The hunters of the Dolocher did not bother with such niceties. They left the butchered and screaming animals where they fell.

Terrifyingly, when dawn broke after a night of slaughter, not a pig, black or otherwise, could be seen anywhere. The streets were empty when light spilled through the lanes and alleyways that had been so cloaked by darkness the night before. The absence of slain bodies was attributed by a hysterical population to some infernal agency at work in removing the carcasses in the same way that the corpse of the sentry had disappeared from his post. However, when no further sightings of the Dolocher were reported that winter, nor in the longer days that followed, it was thought he must have fallen in the massacre, even though he was said to be a ghost in the first place.

Those who owned and lost a pig, even if they had but one, did not show much regret, as it had fallen in the glorious effort that had delivered the city from a plague. Nonetheless, when the days shortened once more and darkness stretched through the streets for longer and longer each night, the Dolocher re-appeared. A young woman passing by Fisher’s Alley on Wood Quay was pulled in and a bundle of clothes that she carried in her hand was dragged from her, as was her cloak. The alarm spread and people grew fearful once more. Women fled from the streets, especially about Fisher’s Alley, Christ Church Lane and surrounding thoroughfares.

Everything must come to an end, even black terror. The story of the Dolocher drew to a conclusion quite by accident, by a simple case of mistaken identity. A country blacksmith came into Dublin on business. As befitted his occupation, he was a brawny man with a fist as strong as a smith’s hammer. Once his business was concluded, he had a drink or two with friends and maybe one more than he should have had for someone intent on a journey. Darkness had arrived before he prepared to return home.

It was a wet night with sweeping rain washing all before it on empty streets. The blacksmith had no greatcoat to withstand the elements on the journey that lay before him. Instead, he wrapped himself up in a woman’s cloak belonging to his friend’s wife, and she placed on his head an old black beaver bonnet, and out he went with jovial warnings to take care, lest he be eaten by the beast that was the Dolocher.

He was not so far advanced on his journey when out rushed a black shape ready to pounce. Despite his size, the Dolocher pinned him against the wall. The blacksmith was not a man to give in easily, and especially not with warming drink in his belly and fire in his blood. He raised his muscular arm and struck the attacking beast; down dropped the Dolocher after that single blow. The blow was followed by a number of kicks from the enraged blacksmith. By which point the attacker was screaming and frantically rolling about on the ground trying to escape. While the Dolocher groaned under the man’s foot, the blacksmith called out that he had killed the Dolocher. As a crowd collected, the groaning devil that had terrorised the city of Dublin for so long was lifted up from where he lay in agony. His secret was revealed.

Out of a black pig’s skin came the form of the sentry who had been supposedly carried off from his post at the Black Dog. He had invented his own disappearance and had moved only through darkness ever since. He draped
the black skin about his frame when he attacked, the better to protect his identity and to increase the terror so a victim would be half defeated before he attacked at all. The Dolocher was removed to the jail hospital, where his earlier victim had been taken. The marauder died there, the next day, from a fractured skull, sustained when the blacksmith imposed his swift and painful justice on him.

Before his death, he confessed that Olocher, the prisoner, had committed suicide with his assistance. He further revealed he was the ringleader in the disposing of the pigs, and that as fast as they were killed they were removed by accomplices to a cellar in Schoolhouse Lane. He did so to profit from the pork so cheaply provided by the vigilantes, but also so that it appeared they had been moved by ghostly hands. Such strange goings-on would ensure that fear of the terrible being that prowled the streets of Dublin continued.

In this way, he had kept up the myth of the Black Pig of Dublin for the purpose of robbery and assault. The Dolocher has not been seen in Dublin for hundreds of years, but they say his spirit lives on in dark corners of dark streets when winter nights cause people to hurry on about their business, towards the safety of home and away from dark corners where strange beings may lurk.

While man may tremble and shiver with fear and apprehension in the face of storms and the awful majesty of the aroused heavens, often a man’s dog comes to the fore in such adversity. Sometimes the spirit of that dog lingers on past its own demise to remind us of what was.

Many are the accounts of a spectral canine being seen long after the animal and its master have come to the end of their lives on this earth. Such a ghost dog was reportedly seen in Dublin, for almost a century after the tragic drowning of his master. He was seen by some in St Patrick’s Cathedral, by others in a nearby graveyard. The black Labrador simply refused to accept the consequence of the events off the coast of County Dublin in early February 1861.

Dublin and the east coast experienced some fierce storms in the early 1860s. One such storm brought snow to the Dublin Mountains above the coast, where deep drifts were the order of the day. The townland where Malachi Horan the storyteller lived on his family farm did not escape this storm. The story was collected by Dr George Aloysius Little in his book
Malachi Horan Remembers Rathfarnham and Tallaght in the Nineteenth Century
.

The family woke one morning to find their home in pitch darkness. There was a terrible hush over the house. Snow had fallen overnight to cover the small cottage to the height of the
chimney outside. There were fifty-foot drifts on the mountain that had not been there the night before. The Horan sheep were somewhere under that snow. They were completely invisible to the human eye. Shep, their dog, went hunting for the lost flock with young Malachi. As they walked, their feet sank deep into the soft whiteness that surrounded them. It was bitterly cold with the wind bringing frozen air from the Russian Steppes across the continent of Europe to the east.

Shep soon found the air holes that were kept open by the warm breath of the ewes that indicated life to the searchers. Once they had come upon signs of the lost sheep, the rescuers dug with frozen hands and throbbing fingers to locate the terrified and bucking animals and drag them out by the shoulders from their suffocating prison of snow. Temperatures were so cold on the side of the mountain that the air hurt Horan’s chest when he drew breath into his lungs. They were fortunate that they lost but ten of the flock when the rescue was done, and the traumatised animals were drawn closer in for safety.

They were so blessed for Malachi’s father Pat Horan had divined on the previous day that snow was on the way. He had sent the boy and Shep out as a precaution to bring the sheep in closer to the house. Horan was a man of the land, in tune with the earth and the elements. He was well aware that a storm was on its way. Farmers and sailors alike had long read the elements for signs of changes in the weather. Operational meteorology only began in Ireland from October 1860, when the first real-time weather observation was transmitted from Valentia Island
in County Kerry. The Valentia Observatory was one of a network of weather stations established around the coastlines by the naval authorities in London, to enable storm warnings to be provided for ships at sea.

Such warnings notwithstanding, man still had to face whatever the elements chose to visit upon him and to try to protect life and property as best he could. On the night of Friday, 8 February 1861, one of the worst gales ever recorded sprung up in the Irish Sea, hitting shipping and vessels all the way from Bray in County Wicklow up to Drogheda in County Louth. Some 135 vessels sank during the storm, thirteen of them went down in the region of Dún Laoghaire Harbour alone.