Kbsurreal

Halloween's is near, so let's take a spine-tingling journey to an October night in 1775. The smell of rotting vegetation and the loathsome howl of distant guard dogs fills our senses. Breath smokes before us in the frigid darkness. In the sky above wind parts the ragged clouds to reveal a sickly yellowish full moon. Suddenly, this eerie lunar light illuminates our surroundings, revealing a sprawling ancient graveyard. Crumbling headstones and leaning crosses cast jagged shadows in the pale moonlight. Twisted yew trees loom and ivy strangles graves, leaching their unspeakable nutrients. But I didn’t bring us here for the scenery. Roll up your sleeves, you’re about to raise the dead! This gruesome act of body snatching was a fact of life in Dublin for centuries. The church prohibited body donation, forcing surgeons, desperate to study anatomy, to pay unscrupulous “Resurrection Men” for fresh corpses. Despised for violating the dead, their trade demanded secrecy. Anyone unlucky enough to stumble upon them ended up as an extra in their haul. Luckily, I’ve bribed some shady characters to give us a demonstration. Our employer tonight, a professor from the Royal College of Surgeons, is frustrated the law only allows him to dissect 6 specimens a year, all executed criminals. So he looks to men like us to keep his slabs full and his apron bloody. We find our gang around the fresh grave of a local man. Adult cadavers fetch £2, a princely sum. In tough times corpses are sold by the inch, kids too. Infant mortality makes dead children far too common. Sometimes bodies are stolen to order, if a doctor wants to study a medical curiosity or a particularly beautiful deceased maiden. Graveyards like Bully’s Acre, St. Andrew’s and Kilgobbin are raided regularly to feed Dublin’s flourishing medical schools. The fear of loved ones being stolen was so widespread that Glasnevin Cemetery was built with watchtowers and bloodhound shelters. Huge slabs of rock and iron cages, called mortsafes, were added to frustrate thieves. Luckily for us, I’ve also paid off the sexton, who tips off Resurrectionists about new burials. So we shouldn’t be disturbed... The most infamous of all were Burke and Hare, Irishmen who plied their trade in 19th-century Edinburgh. These villains streamlined their work. Rather than digging up bodies, they murdered at least 16 people for Dr. Robert Knox. Heinous though it was, body snatching did advance medical science immeasurably. Now, under the ghostly light of a shaded lantern, the biggest one thrusts a short wooden spade into your hands and nods at the grave. You start digging. Soil thuds softly onto a dark sheet beside you. Soon comes that dull knock, wood on wood. They’ve hit the coffin. Two iron hooks tear open the lid with a crack that echoes through the cemetery. Leaning on a mausoleum, one man swigs poitín and tells us that medical students often dig up bodies themselves. Sometimes they’d disguise a coffin full of rocks as part of a fake funeral, drug the mourners with whiskey laced with laudanum, then swap coffins before fleeing. This trick was often pulled at The Cabbage Garden near Kevin Street. As if that weren’t ghoulish enough, when drugged mourners stirred, body snatchers sometimes redressed a corpse in fine clothes and dragged it home through the streets, pretending it was a drunk. “Weekend at Bernie’s style!” we joke. They stare blankly. With a groan they get back to work. The broken coffin releases a fetid gust. Moonlight reveals the waxy, translucent face of the dead man, teeth bared, eyes sunken, face frozen in a grotesque grimace. The rope slips around his neck, and with a sickening clack of jawbone the corpse rises, hauled from the earth like a monstrous catch. They strip the shroud and clothes, theyre property and could get them arrested for theft, then refill the grave. Alarmingly, they start whispering and measuring us up, greedy grins spreading. we make a polite but brisk exit back to the DTM.

There's a magical island off the Irish coast that inspired the myth of Atlantis, but it only appears on certain days of the year. Well, according to ancient folklore anyway. It's called "Hy-Brasil" and it's said to lie far out in the Atlantic off the wild west coast. For centuries it even appearing on maps. The unusual name Hy-Brasil comes from Uí Bhreasail, meaning “descendants of Bresal,” an ancient Irish clan name. Some scholars connect it to the Old Irish word bres, meaning “noble” or “fortunate” which fits its reputation as the Island of the Blessed. There's obviously some crossover with that other mythic realm Tír na nÓg, the “Land of Eternal Youth”. It's a place where mortals might cross into the Otherworld. The fact it was on sea charts and maps made this paradise all the more tantalising. But there was a catch. Hy-Brasil was said to be shrouded in mist, visible only once every seven years. Even then, it could slip away, sometimes even sinking or floating into the air (!) just as sailors thought they had reached it. When described, it was often a place of extraordinary beauty with an abundance of pleasure and wealth on offer. Sometimes home to a wise old man who imparted secret knowledge to those lucky enough to land there. That last particular promise of secret wisdom would prove profitable for conmen and false profits peddling information to the guililble and the desperate that they'd either heard second hand or actually gained in person from a visit there. So where exactly was this heavenly holiday resort? Well, unlike many purely mythical lands, Hy-Brasil enjoyed a strange legitimacy because cartographers occasionally recorded a location. The 1325 Dulcert map shows it as a perfect circle, divided by a central channel. Circlular island bisected are also associated with the myths of Atlantis. The 1373 Pizzigano map and others of the 14th–17th centuries placed it west of Ireland, sometimes moving it further into the Atlantic as cartographers updated their charts.More than one expedition even set out in search of it during the Age of Exploration. Sightings of Hy-Brasil persisted for centuries. The most famous came in 1674, when Captain John Nisbet claimed to have landed on the island, met a mysterious wise man, and returned with gold and silver. Even into the 19th century, mariners reported glimpses of strange landmasses west of Galway Bay. Some modern historians suspect these might have been sightings of Porcupine Bank, a now submerged shoal roughly 200 km west of Ireland, which would sometimes appear just above water in the right conditions. Others suggest mirages or Fata Morgana illusions tricked sailors into seeing phantom lands. Basically Hy-Brasil, like most human heavens, speaks more about the desires and fears of the dreamer than it does about what actual Paradise should be. As such, it was a mirror to the Irish folk psyche. And as important as the promise of that place was how illusive the destination was. Emerging only after ages and only epheremally, likely to disapear over the horizon faster than you can desperately swim to its shores.