No word yet as to whether a woozy ol' psychic has been spotted in NYC. I decided I was gonna have to do something to distract myself from worrying about Anderson Cooper's safety (if Madame were to ravish the poor baby, he might never recover). So I turned, while I was making Mom's supper, to some of the most gorgeous heartrending music I've ever heard: the Irish group Clannad's 1993 CD, BANBA.

Again, it was Tooey who got me into their music, sort of by the scenic route; she is a major fan of their sister and onetime bandmate Enya, and I moved on from Enya to Clannad. The band, which in its latest incarnation consists of Maire Brennan, her brothers Pol and Ciaran, and their twin uncles Noel and Padraig Duggan, have recently regrouped after a ten-year break from recording and touring. They are natives of the town of Gweedore in County Donegal in northwest Ireland. They have been performing since the early 1970s, and their work has been featured in several movie soundtracks and as theme music for British television.

BANBA takes its name from an ancient Irish goddess. I was transfixed by the opening track, "Ne Laethe Bhi," which is like many of their songs sung in Irish Gaelic. It is a slow stately song with exquisite harmony singing by Maire, Ciaran, the Uncles and Maire and Ciaran's sister Bridin.

For me, however, the high point of the CD is track 6, "I Will Find You." A snippet from this song was featured in the soundtrack of the 1992 Daniel Day-Lewis movie THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. The lyrics are in English, Mohican and Cherokee. Maire sings the lead with an ethereal breathiness, and the harmonies are rich and choral. The instrumentation features mostly synthesized music, and the bass hits you right about the base of your spine. As I understand it, the lyrics were inspired by a scene in the film where Day-Lewis's character is being separated from his love interest, played by Madeline Stowe; he tells her "no matter where you go, I will find you." The song can be listened to strictly in that sense, as a love song; or it can be the soundtrack for a fantasy of seeking a true love who's somewhere out in the world but not yet found (the way I hear it).

The final track is an instrumental duet of harp and alto flute, "A Gentle Place." Dedicated to the memory of a friend of the group named Niall McGuinness, it is a fitting tribute to anyone we've lost in our lives. Tonight, after news of the death in Michigan of a cousin, it moves me to tears.

Should you get a chance and be interested, this CD is probably available for download, but I still haven't gotten COMPUTERS FOR DUMMIES and couldn't begin to accomplish that! Happy New Year, all!

Willard and I intended, for our final posting of 2007, before we watch the ball drop and sing "Auld Lang Syne" over the phone, to get a Madame Sadie's Top Ten Predictions for 2008 list.

We snuck off down the crick and up the holler only to find a cryptic note on Madame's front door: GONE ELSEWHERE. ELSEWHERE IS EVERYWHERE.

This concerned us. Well-read in the paranormal brats that we are, we knew this was a message passed on to Abraham Lincoln from a friend killed in the early days of the Civil War by one of Madame's psychic forebears. So now we've created a new game for ourselves: WHERE IN THE WORLD IS MADAME SADIE? (Okay, it doesn't have the same ring as the old kids' series WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANDIEGO, but one works with the material at hand.)

We remembered that, a day or two after her Christmas Eve adventure with Captain Morgan, Madame had told us that some of her generous psychic friends had taken up a collection and were gonna whisk her off to Dublin to step dance in the new year. She added airily that she might also participate in a couple of those curious rituals that send wandering spirits "to the light."

We have our doubts about the step dancing; when Madame dances she cannot to save her life keep from flailing her arms. We also have our doubts about the rituals; Madame does about as well at that as she does at channeling, and is like as not to come home with an entourage of wandering spirits. If she brings a banshee, WE'RE taking up a collection to transport it home; that's all we need, a weeping wailing spirit roaming up and down the creekbank, unless this year we get a visit from the bobcat, whose screams would send a banshee running for cover.

Either way, Madame will assuredly come home from Ireland affecting an accent and drinking Guinness.

But this gave rise to another worry; what if, for some reason, she got stuck at an NYC airport for a long layover? She might have time to work her way down to the celebrations in Times Square. Madame, I regret to say, has another of her adolescent crushes on Anderson Cooper. She has been heard to say it's her dream to be in Times Square to kiss him at midnight on New Year. Willard and I were hit with simultaneous visions of Madame rushing Anderson's platform, pursued by policemen, and going down shrieking, "DON'T TASE ME, BRO!" Or maybe it's "PLEASE TASE ME, BRO!"; with Madame you never can tell.

Either way we have sent emails and telegrams and tried frantically to call Ace in NYC, leaving the same message everywhere: RUN, ANDERSON, RUN! So far we haven't heard anything. If anybody happens to be watching on CNN around midnight and spots a scrawny lady with a red wig and a parka diving toward Anderson, we'll know we failed in our efforts to save him from his fate. And if he comes up for air covered in spots shaped like fire engine red puckered lips, God help him.

All we know for sure is that Madame will be back no later than noon on January 7th, when her beloved Stephen Colbert is scheduled to return to air. No way will she miss that.

But that's then and this is now. Guess we chew our fingernails for the next nine hours or so. And on that nervous note, hang in there, keep it ornery in the new year, love and blessings to you all, and fair thee well.

Awhile back I wrote a blog about my favorite British ghost stories. In the interests of patriotism, I felt I should take the time to do another about my favorite American ghost tales by eminent writers. When I began the research, I found just how eminent the authors of my five favorites are: three of them were Pulitzer Prize winners, but not for their supernatural works.

In reverse order, as always. And please hold both yawns and groans till the end. It's better for my self-esteem that way.

Of course "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving has to be on the list. First published in 1820 in THE SKETCH BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, this tale of Ichabod Crane and the ghostly antics of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow is based on legends from the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (now of course the state of New York). Although Irving would go on to write other tales of the supernatural ("The Adventure of the German Student," "Guests from Gibbet Island") this is the most famous. A number of movies have been based on it, most recently Tim Burton's SLEEPY HOLLOW, a very loose retelling of the story starring Johnny Depp. Fun fact: Irving was buried in a cemetery in North Tarrytown, NY; a few years ago the town officially changed its name to Sleepy Hollow.

"The Shadowy Third" by Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945). Richmond, Virginia native Glasgow was better known as a novelist; her IN THIS OUR LIFE (1941) won a Pulitzer the following year. This creepy story was published in her 1923 collection THE SHADOWY THIRD AND OTHER STORIES, but may have been written as early as 19l6. It's fairly standard Victorian fare: a sickly wife married for her money by a society doctor, positive he murdered her daughter so he would inherit a fortune, a nurse who is told the woman is mad but who, like the mother, can see the child's ghost--and the ghost's revenge against the doctor following the mother's death. Very eerie.

"The Lady's Maid's Bell" by Edith Wharton (1862-1937). The novelist Edith Wharton (a 1920 Pulitzer winner for THE AGE OF INNOCENCE; the first woman to win the award) was born into the wealthy Jones family of New York, from whom we derive the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." This story, about another sickly woman tolerated for her money by an insensitive drunken husband, treats of how her deceased personal maid returns from the dead to protect her beloved employer. The maid, Emma Saxon, usually appears after causing her bell, disconnected after her death, to ring, thus summoning her replacement; on at least one occasion she blocks the husband's view of the new maid, prompting that worthy to blurt, "How many of you are there, in God's name?" Originally published in Scribner's Magazine in November 1902, this story leads off the collection THE GHOST STORIES OF EDITH WHARTON, first released in 1973.

"The Devil and Daniel Webster" by Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943). Like Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker," Benet's story of a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the Devil is based on New England folklore. It fits into this category because of the satirical but spooky scene in which Old Nick summons a jury of Americans remembered for their infamous lives: the Tory guerrilla fighters Walter Butler and Simon Girty; the New England Native American King Philip; Salem witch trial judge John Hathorne (an ancestor of author Nathaniel Hawthorne) and others. Benet also used the great New Hampshire native statesman and attorney Daniel Webster as the instrument of Jabez Stone's salvation. Much of Benet's output deals in the same mythic way with American history; he won a Pulitzer in 1929 for his long poem about the Civil War, JOHN BROWN'S BODY.

And at last (you still awake?) "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" by John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922). Bangs's stories remind me no end of the humorous writings of Mark Twain; they combine sidesplitting funny elements with genuinely frightening ones. The title story of his 1894 collection THE WATER GHOST AND OTHERS treats of an American who inherits an English manor house haunted by the extremely wet ghost of a suicide by drowning, and how he uses the new technologies of the time to lay the ghost.

All these stories are available online. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "The Devil and Daniel Webster" are available in any number of anthologies as well; the others are a little harder to find.

Hope you don't mind too much my rambling on like this; it's a damp chilly day and I needed something to occupy my mind; I get whiny unless I can get brain and hands working together. Think I managed quite well. And if I don't get the chance to say so before, Happy New Year to all!

My paternal grandfather was a World War I veteran. Many times I've heard the story of how, when he was twenty-two years old, in early 1918, he and a cousin were lollygaggin' in a little mountain town not far from his home place in the knobs. They spotted a recruiting poster--yep, one of the famous UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU! ones, painted in 1916 by John M. Flagg and used in the next two years in particular for recruitment purposes--and decided it would be a great lark to join the Army and see if the world was really bigger than the knobs and mountains. They caught a train that very afternoon and rode to the nearest big town, about thirty miles away, and signed up. They were first sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, if I remember right, and then on to Belgium. Cousin Jim, a little sawed-off wart of a man, ended up in the cooks' corps, and Papaw, a strapping six-footer who could shoot a hickory nut out of a squirrel's mouth at three hundred yards, ended up as an infantry sharpshooter. He found out the world WAS bigger than he'd ever dreamed, captured thirty Germans singlehanded but turned them in to the wrong unit so he wasn't credited with the capture, and busted an ankle stepping in a shell hole--and, ornery mountain boy that he was, was unimpressed with the fabled AEF general "Black Jack" Pershing.

I expect that was how a mountain boy named Charlie Smith ended up in Europe in the waning days of 1917. Charlie's story was a bit different, though; Papaw was pretty much footloose and fancy free, while Charlie had a steady girl, Ruthie Jones. When Charlie told Ruthie he had joined the army, she cried, of course; but he promised her that he would write to her every chance he got, and when he came home they would be married and live happily ever after. So Ruthie let him go.

For awhile his letters came regular as clockwork; then they tapered off and then stopped altogether. Ruthie was afraid something had happened to Charlie, especially when her own increasingly frantic letters got no answers. But then, Ruthie didn't know about the machinations of Charlie's older brother, Sam. Sam had a vested interest in Ruthie, one might say; he was in love with her too, but she loved Charlie. Sam took to destroying Charlie's letters and telling Ruthie that Charlie had probably taken up with some French hussy and had forgotten all about her. Sam played on her fears so well, and made her so angry with Charlie, that she agreed to marry Sam from sheer spite. They were married in October. And still, never a word from Charlie.

So things stood on Christmas Eve 1917. There was a snowstorm that day; by the evening the snow was a foot deep. Ruthie was cooking supper when she heard a knock at the front door. Sam called that he would answer it; when he opened it, he let out a startled cry. "CHARLIE?"

There was a sound as if Charlie had pushed his way past Sam into the front room, and he spoke one sentence: "I know what you have done to Ruthie and me, and I have come to kill you as you deserve."

And then there was a single gunshot that echoed through the entire house. Ruthie rushed in from the kitchen to find Sam lying dead on the floor, a look of surprise on his face--and the front door standing open. She also caught a glimpse of a man in an AEF uniform going out onto the front porch, but she was in too deep a state of shock to follow.

Nobody, least of all Ruthie, ever knew how long she knelt there beside Sam, in a spreading pool of his blood, with the door standing open and the house full of snow and wind. The next thing she knew there was another knock on the door facing and a youthful nervous voice saying, "Ma'am?"

The voice at the door belonged to a Western Union telegraph delivery boy. It was not until he had delivered his message, and rushed back out to summon the sheriff, that Ruthie, still in shock, read these words in cold lifeless black letters, on a black-edged sheet of paper: "Regret to inform you that Private Charles Smith died in action in France on the 21st of December, 1917."

It was proven that Sam Smith owned no gun; and no murder weapon was ever found. It was equally proven that there were no footprints in the foot-deep snow other than those of the Western Union boy.

Ruthie insisted until her dying day that Charlie had come home from the dead to avenge his brother's lies. And the sheriff, in the absence of all other evidence, had no choice but to concur.

This story is told in at least two versions that differ mostly in small details; one, from Morgan County, Kentucky, is retold from his own family's recollections by the late Michael Paul Henson in MORE KENTUCKY GHOST STORIES (1996); the other, from Logan County, West Virginia, is told by Lonnie E. Legge in VISIONS OF GHOST ARMIES: FROM THE FILES OF FATE MAGAZINE (2003). I've pretty much collated the two versions and changed the names, but it's told for true in both those collections.

Vengeance isn't always the Lord's; sometimes it belongs to the dead. And on that chilly note, fair thee well.

Hi everybody. Hope all your Christmas celebrations were merry and bright. One of the high points of ours was explaining to the Princess that navel oranges have belly buttons. The one in particular I was showing her had, I solemnly assured her, an "outie." The look on her face was absolutely priceless. She's outgrowing the bags and baskets full of silly little bits and geegaws she wanted in her younger days; she's a big girl of eight now and wanted gift cards! Less wear and tear on everybody's ingenuity!

Meanwhile though, here's a sweet old hillbilly custom that my mom and aunt still follow: the "ruling days." The old people would make note of weather conditions on the twelve days beginning on Christmas Day, as they believed these would correspond to weather in the coming twelve months. Christmas Day "rules" January, today "rules" February, and so forth. The ruling days end on January 6th, to which the old people often still refer as Old Christmas.

I've done some research into that last. "Old Christmas" in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions is the Feast of the Epiphany; this festival celebrates among other events in the life of Christ the visit of the Three Wise Men. In England, during Shakespeare's time, this had been renamed "Twelfth Night" and was a day of partying and revelry; his play of the same name takes place on January 6th.

Here, yesterday's weather was cold and cloudy, windy with rain late in the day. Hopefully January will be rainy; we could use it after this year's severe drought. Today is partly cloudy early; at the moment, just before eleven AM, it's sunny but chilly and damp. Mom and my aunt will write this down faithfully until January 6th. Then we'll wait and see.

And with that weather report, fair thee well.