A Paranormal Experience After Kissing The Blarney Stone
During my trip to the UK and Ireland in 2008, I was reading Nick Redfern’s book, Three Men Seeking Monsters. The book chronicled Nick and his friends’ adventure as they went to different locations in Britain to investigate paranormal sightings. Their journey involved listening to punk rock and consuming copious amounts of ale, which made it an exciting read for me, especially since I was on my own road trip across the island.
At that time, I was about to quit my software job to pursue a career in music, and my girlfriend at the time (now wife), Chris, was also considering leaving her music teaching career. It was a nerve-wracking time for us as we were planning to change our lives completely.
To lighten our mood, Chris brought a set of sticky googly eyes on the trip and would put them in random places, like on the Nick Redfern book, to make us laugh. This was based on a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Christopher Walken, where he played a gardener who was scared of plants and would put googly eyes on them. It became our inside joke, and we decided to save it for the those times on the trip when we might get on each other's nerves so that we'd have something to laugh at.
Blarney Castle
While in Ireland, we visited the Blarney Castle outside of Cork, where we saw the Blarney Stone. According to legend, kissing the stone grants the “gift of gab,” also known as the “Stone of Eloquence.” The stone supposedly makes you more persuasive and eloquent, even when telling lies. One of the origin stories involves a witch who granted the lord of the castle the gift of eloquence after he saved her from execution.
The castle is surrounded by a beautiful park with rock formations called the “Rock Close,” a Druid’s Cave, and a Witch’s Kitchen. The folklore surrounding the area is entertaining, with stories of a witch trapped in a stone during the day, only coming out at night to cook.
One of the coolest legends of the area is The Wishing Stairs, a stairway where one is supposed to walk up and down with closed eyes and focus on a wish. If successful, the wish is believed to come true within a year.
The following paragraphs are taken directly from my journal (which still has googly eyes on it) and I wrote them down as soon as we got to our hotel that night.
We weren’t expecting much but it was awesome. The lines weren’t too bad and it was a little overcast, but the temperature was perfect. The pathways were so wind-y and skinny, it was a long trip for us to get to the top of the battlements, so I can just imagine what it’s like for elderly people who take the journey.
Kissing the Blarney Stone was way more of a rush than we expected because you have to actually lean back really far over the edge and someone holds you while you kiss it. You're far enough back though, so it’s scary. That was fun, and the castle was magnificent, but the Rock Close was the real treat. We waled along there by the Druid Cricle and up and down the Wishing Stairs (where I wished for financial independence because I was planning on quitting my day job and Chris must have wished something about her cats, but more on that later.)
So, we walked away from the Rock Close and to the gardens around the castle. We were completely alone and sat at a bench overlooking a field through the foliage. I told Chris about the Cormons in Nick Redfern’s book because I had just finished it that morning.
In his book, Redfern talks about interviewing an old witch, who told him about these creatures called Cormons. They were summoned to our world centuries ago by some British magicians and Irish occultists who were looking to protect the Isles from foreign marauders like the Vikings. These Cormons were supposed to appear as the darkest fears of the attackers (usually with glowing red eyes) and defend the island. But the magicians and the occultists were slaughtered, and the Cormons were free to roam the land and feed on our fearful emotions. He speculated that UFOs, ghost sightings, and other monsters were these Cormons who use our fear as a pathway from their dimension into ours.
I was telling Chris about the Cormons and what an interesting idea I thought it was, and she said, “How scary would it be if the Big Black Wolf from The Never-Ending Story appeared right now? ”
Just then a shape appeared in the pathway a hundred yards from us. I took a couple of blurry pictures and adrenaline rushed through our veins. It looked like it could be a wolf from the distance, but we approached it slowly and it was the form of a black cat that jumped into the bushes before we got a good look at it.
Sorry it’s blurry, but as soon as I saw it, I immediately tried to get a picture.
We never really saw its eyes but looked around for it where it jumped to and didn’t see anything. We couldn’t believe what we’d just seen after what we were talking about, it couldn’t have been written any better.
Chris said that it might have been because of the wish she made when she was on the Wishing Stairs. I thought she might have wished that our black cat, Mr. Spock, was okay and that’s why a black cat appeared. But the shape looked like it was a wolf at first, which made it so we just couldn’t believe it.
We were so grateful for the experience that we left googly eyes on a fern at the Druids sacrificial altar that was in the garden as an offering for the Blarney Witch to thank her. We thought she’d appreciate giving her our jokes “for the hard times”. We had a delightful lunch by the horses and took the Woodland Walk, saw Faeries’ Glen and the Horse’s Graveyard, but it’s the Shadow Cat of Blarney that’s the story we will always remember.
Years later, my spouse revealed that while standing on the Wishing Stairs, she wished for a sign about her future. And when she spotted what she believed was a miraculous cat, she felt overjoyed because she had been offered a job at a cat specialty clinic before our trip. She was eager to receive any kind of indication about her life's direction, and there it was.
Spotting an enigmatic, shadowy creature while on the trail was one thing, but both of us witnessing something distinct was another matter. And her sighting of the Shadow Cat of Blarney played a role in her making her final decision. If I dare describe something as "magical", that experience was as close to the word as I've ever felt in my life and a small creature had a huge impact.
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