The Sluagh: The Host of the Restless Dead on the Night Wind
In the Highlands and islands of Scotland, and across the water in Ireland, there was one direction the night was watched from, and it was the west. When someone lay dying in a Hebridean house, the women moved quietly through the rooms ahead of the dark, and the window on the western side — and only that one — was shut fast, sometimes stuffed with cloth for good measure. Not against the weather. Against the sluagh : the Host — the crowd, the multitude, the airborne nation of the restless dead — which rides the night wind out of the west and hunts, above all other quarry, for souls at the moment of their leaving. The old people described what the Host looked like, because many of them believed they had seen it. It looked like birds. A great dark drift of them, wheeling and folding against the last light — like jackdaws, like starlings in their vast winter clouds, rising and settling, thickening and thinning, always with that unsettling appearance of a single intention moving through te...