It is said that tonight, from here at the stroke of midnight, our ancestral ghosts are let loose to roam the earth.Īs the hour nears, I can't help wondering about the haunts of my own schizophrenic lineage. Of the four major pagan festivals, the Irish are most uneasy about this one, with mortals going to the otherworld and the dead returning here. But it's also that most bewitched evening of the Celtic calendar, the Feast of the Dead, when the veil dividing our world from the next is thought to be at its thinnest. The pagan new-year feast day, the Samhain in Ireland marks a fresh start for the year ahead. Tonight is Halloween, known here for thousands of years as the Samhain (pronounced 'sow-when'). The fairy cave and a massive network of Druid ring forts that surround it are a short distance north of where my mother's side - our schizophrenic side - hails from, an area thick with archaeological sites that hold secrets of the past.

I pick my steps carefully, groping in the darkness for the widening cave walls, yet my quest feels as slippery as the muddy clay floor that dips then rises toward the neck of this bottle-shaped chamber. Statistics reveal that one of every four people worldwide suffers from some type of mental illness - one in one hundred from schizophrenia, the most severe form, its victims typically tortured by voices and other hallucinations that give rise to bizarre and demented behavior. I'm here with my own hellish story of sorts, because I know of at least three ancestors who suffered - as two of my fifth-generation Irish American siblings do now - from schizophrenia, a savage psychosis for which there is no cure or effective treatment. Back when all madness was seen as a punishment, as payback for crossing some deity - first pagan and then Christian - so phantasmagoric were the myths surrounding this cave that to step into its darkness was to enter 'Ireland's hellmouth.' Psychotic cats, a symbol of the devil in ancient Ireland, were said to prowl the countryside from here curses were probably cast here as well by robed Druids, the old wizard priests of Ireland who gathered at this spot for royal pagan feasts. Of all the caves in Ireland (and there are thousands), the Oweynagat is the one that gets the most attention in the early Irish literature. Instead, I feel I'm chasing much bigger game here, stalking the madness that stalks my family in a direct line down to - but not including - me. Unlike those Irish Americans who dig after genealogical clues, I have no sentimental attachment to my forebears. It's all too fantastic to believe, but I'm trying to be receptive. According to 1,100-year-old manuscripts, the sidhe (pronounced 'shee') - the mischievous fairy people who capture minds from those who lose them - set the nearby palaces of mortals afire and ran into this cave. But the limestone is my lodestone, drawing me into its black depths because this is as far back as the fairy myths of madness go in Ireland. Inside the cave, the silence is split only by the drip-drop of water, the emptiness of the place and the steady pounding drip unleashing in me small pangs of paranoia. I crept in here just before midnight, searching - vainly, I suspect - for clues to the madness that has mauled my family for generations: the victims include two of my four sisters, along with one uncle, one grandmother, and her great-grandmother before her, a perfect storm of schizophrenia that follows a maternal line stretching from Boston back here to County Roscommon, our ancestral homeland. A royal shrine in the second century, this natural limestone fissure was said to be a local doorway to the 'otherworld' of the fairies, a race of paranormal beings reputed, among other things, to possess the minds of the insane. A muddy abyss in the heart of bog Ireland, the Cave of the Cat, or the Oweynagat, as it's known, is no ordinary grotto. It's dark and murky inside Ireland's Cave of the Cat.

Halloween scenery for tracing