`It was as if the house had begun very faintly to beat. Faintly at first, a mere stirring of the vacant atmosphere, yet, as the minutes passed, it gathered strength ... Whatever had dwelt there had come back.'The spectres which haunt these Irish ghost stories include massacred Spanish sailors, a silver-robed woman who plies her guests with poison, a mutilated pedlar, a benign but icy embrace, and the devil himself. They are drawn from the rich and varied literary tradition of a culture long enchanted bythings supernatural, a land where ghosts and ghost-seers are common. The collection includes contributions from familiar writers such as J. S. Le Fanu and Elizabeth Bowen, but also rarer stories by authors such as Peter Somerville-Large, Forrest Reid, and Rosa Mulholland.