Dr Pat was born and reared in Achill Island in County Mayo and after completing medical training at University College Dublin and St Vincent’s University Hospital he returned to the island with his Dublin born wife Mairead. She was an artist.

One November night, the doctor was returning home following a late emergency call to the old coastguard station in Keem Bay, which had been converted to a holiday home.
Cut out of the side of the rocky cliff, the Keem Bay road is three hundred feet above the Atlantic. It was a clear night with a full moon and the breakers pounded the rocks below. He felt a strange loneliness. He reached the entrance gates to Corrymore House.

“Beautiful view but I would prefer my bed at this unearthly hour– I’ll be home soon,” he thought.

He remembered with a smile his grandfather’s tales, about the ghostly presences encountered on the Keem Bay road. “No one should be out there late at night,” he would say. Grandmother was more pragmatic, “Watch out for the live ones they can do you more harm,” she would say.

Opposite the gates to Corrymore House the engine cut out. He engaged the starter a number of times without success. “Better not to run down the battery, probably a bit of dirt in the carburettor– I’ll leave it a few minutes and try again,” he thought.

Mairead and Pat loved the historic and artistic past of Corrymore House. Corrymore was the former residence of the notorious landlord, Captain Boycott. In 1924 Robert Henri, the famous painter who was the leader of the Ash Can group, visited Achill with his Irish-born wife Majorie Organ and purchased the house. They spent their summers there up to 1928. In July 1929 Henri died from cancer in New York

Dr. Pat looked in the direction of the House and to his surprise the entrance gates started to swing open. “Caught in the breeze coming down from Slievmore Mountain,” he thought. In the background the mountain was huge in the night sky. He was cold and shivering. “I must stop this nonsense,” he thought as he recalled his grandfather’s ghost stories.

The clip-clop of horses’ hooves could be heard above the sound of the Atlantic breakers. Slowly through the gates came a black hearse being pulled by four horses. Their heads were elaborately decorated with white and black feathers. Three men, in top hats and long coats followed carrying a coffin. He could hear his grandfather’s words. “If in the dead of night you see three men carrying a coffin, then the only way to prevent your own death is to become the fourth pall bearer.”

“There must be some logical explanation to this, low blood sugar or something,” he thought.

The scene changed suddenly and he seemed to have been transported to Slievmore graveyard. The ground underfoot was mucky and his feet were wet. Strangely, his fear had gone and he now felt comfortable there.

He was a spectator as the three men carried the coffin to the open grave. A headstone had been erected and through the swirling mist the words Dr P were visible. The priest carried out the burial ceremony and a lone piper at the top of the cemetery played a lament. He could distinctly hear each shovel of earth thump on the coffin as the grave was filled in.

As if woken suddenly from a dream, he was back in his car driving past the gates of Corrymore House. It took him a few seconds to adjust. “I must have dozed for a minute or two and had a nightmare, lucky I didn’t go off the road,” he thought.

When he got home, his wife Mairead had prepared an early breakfast of toast and marmalade. His feet were wet and covered in mud. “I am not going out to any more late calls from strangers, it’s enough to look after my own patients,” he said.

He told Mairead about his experience and they both concluded that he must have dozed off while driving and his grandfather’s ghost stories buried somewhere in his subconscious did the rest. Although it was strange that the emergency call appeared to have come from the old coastguard station, yet when he got there it was all shuttered up for the winter.

Two years later in the autumn, the silent killer pancreatic cancer claimed another victim, Dr Patrick O’Connor. He was buried on a misty day in Slievemore cemetery and a lone piper played a lament. The local undertaker Michael Moran had imported a horse-drawn hearse from England and he had restored it completely. The horses pulling the hearse had been expensive. They had come from the Curragh and were jet black. “My little bit of madness,” was how the undertaker described his new purchase.

The Doctor was the first person to be buried, using the new hearse. A lone piper at the top of the cemetery played a lament and the mourners complained about how their shoes were being destroyed by the wet and mucky ground in the cemetery.

Painting of Keem Bay, Achill by Robert Henri.