Among the treasures in my library of (hold your groans till the end, please) ghost tales is this 1947 volume by James Reynolds.

I have been unable to find any biographical information about Reynolds; the publication data page in my copy of GHOSTS IN IRISH HOUSES gives his birth year as 1891, but nothing else. From hints he drops in his books, I suspect he probably was American by birth. He collected stories from Ireland to the United States to continental Europe, and in the hardback originals did his own painted or charcoal illustrations.

Most of the stories predate the year 1900 and take no account of the history of "The Troubles"--the struggles that went on for centuries against what the native Irish regarded as English invaders and culminated in the formation of the Republic of Ireland in 1921. Of the twenty-three stories in the book, only one--"The Four Terrors," a story of spectral revenge against a brother who committed murder for the sake of an inheritance--takes place in the six counties of Northern Ireland; it is set in County Antrim. One wonders if, even in the years when he was collecting stories, Reynolds avoided the violent north; would he do more collecting nowadays, in a relatively settled country?

One of the fun things--for me, perversely educated brat that I am--about reading "true" ghost stories is seeing how closely the story comes to matching its historical era. Reynolds, unfortunately, plays pretty fast and loose with dates. One such instance would be the iconic Battle of Clontarf, which took place on Good Friday in the year 1014 and at which the most famous of all Irish kings, Brian Boru, was killed. This great battle, which crushed Viking attempts to control Ireland once and for all, figures in two of the stories. In one story, Reynolds dates the story to 1115 and refers to this as "the year after Clontarf": in another story he gives the date of Clontarf as 1100.

The stories are basically worthless as history, but fun reads. Some are of deathless love: "The Bridal Barge of Aran Roe," about a bridegroom killed on his way to his wedding and how his barge still sails off the coast of County Donegal, is my favorite of this genre. "Mickey Filler and the Tansey Wreath" is about the grandson of a famous Irish healer and historical character named Biddy Early.

My favorites, though, are of course the ones of revenge, some bloody Grand Guignol affairs, others psychological. "The Four Terrors" I have already mentioned. "The Headless Rider of Castle Sheela" is another; it is about an adulterer whose horse brought his master's headless body home, and whose hooves were heard on the castle stairs for many years. Of them all, though, my favorite is "The Bloody Stones of Kerrigan's Keep," which brings together a lot of Irish themes: war, revenge, parties, and one truly bizarre haunting, in which skeletons buried under the Keep rise up and pelt anyone who disturbs their mass grave with stones.

I have never been able to find independent verification of any of these stories, sad to say. The parapsychologist Hans Holzer once tried to track down the location of "Shallardstown and the Orloff Whip," only to learn that the local people had never heard of such a place.

Which begs the question: Was James Reynolds collecting genuine Irish ghost stories, or did he make these up from the whole cloth?

As for the facetious question I asked earlier, he affirmatively was not a storyteller, a seanchai (pronounced SHAN-ah-hee) in the traditional sense. He writes in a very literary style that tries a lot too hard to SOUND Irish, totally at odds with the colloquialism of say a James Joyce or Sean O'Casey.

For myself, I have my suspicions about how "true" these stories are, and the style can get annoying at times. But they're good reads all the same, for people who like ghost stories.

And I'm one of them. If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.