Inishdowns

Jim Sweeney has spent forty years chasing ghosts.

Now, for the first time, something might be chasing him.

When paranormal investigator Jim Sweeney finally makes good on his long-held intention to leave Cork behind and settle in Inishdowns, Ireland's most haunted town, he expects to find the same rich vein of supernatural activity that has drawn him here for years. What he doesn't expect is the feeling, growing quietly from his very first night, that the town has been waiting for him specifically.

As Jim begins collecting the testimonies of Inishdowns' residents, a pattern emerges in the darkness between the stories. People are hearing a voice outside their windows at night. Their name, spoken once, clearly and distinctly, in the small hours before dawn. And in the days that follow, someone they love is touched by misfortune.

The Caller has been in Inishdowns for a very long time. Longer than anyone currently living can account for. Longer than the written record reaches. And now, for reasons that Jim is only beginning to understand, it is speaking more frequently than ever before.

But the accounts Jim gathers are not only about the Caller. In the tradition of the first volume, the people of Inishdowns have stories to tell.

A farmer accepts a ride home from a creature on a dark October road and wakes up forty miles away with graveyard soil under his fingernails. A lorry driver on a late night run encounters something on the N21 that no headlights should ever illuminate. A schoolteacher lying in her Dublin flat hears her name spoken outside her window, four days before her mother's fall. A historian finds her own name in an archive entry for a document that doesn't exist. And deep in the ruins of the old mill, behind gates that have been padlocked for forty years, something is keeping an empty chair at its table.

Through it all, Jim writes. He documents, he investigates, he connects the threads. And as the winter deepens and the voice outside his window grows more familiar, he begins to understand that the story he has come to Inishdowns to tell is not only about the town. It is about him. About Mary, his wife of forty-eight years, twelve years gone. About what it means to spend a lifetime in the company of the dead and finally, at the end of it, to feel them drawing close.

Inishdowns: The Hauntings Part 2 is a collection of ghost stories in the finest Irish tradition. Rooted in folklore, grounded in humanity, and haunted throughout by the particular truth that the things we fear most are rarely the things that deserve our fear.

Some voices speak to warn you. Some speak to prepare you. And some speak in the voice of someone you love, because that is the only voice you will truly hear.

Welcome back to Inishdowns. Jim has been keeping the kettle on.