The Rice's (C of I) owned a large estate just on the Cashel side of Racecourse Cross (LHS going towards Cashel). The then doyen of the family died, and several months after her funeral Ned Dunne saw her standing inside Rockwell Grove. The wall between the road and the Grove being about 8 ft high, this seems highly unlikely, but he could have seen a little way into the Grove through the farm road gate as he passed it, or what he saw might have been just inside the imposing entrance to a very gloomy avenue. These are the only breaks in the wall, and Ned Dunne was the last man anybody would think of as "seeing" things.
Many many years before the above, the priest was called to Rice's where one of the maids (an RC) was ill. It was a Friday and after he had seen the girl, the then Mrs Rice offered him a cup of tea. About to drink it, he noticed little globules of grease floating on the surface. He decided she was trying to make him break the abstinence – the regulations were very strict then – and he put a curse on her "When you die, horses won't draw you to the grave". In the course of time she died and a grand funeral was arranged, with four matched black horses to pull the hearse. When all was ready, the coachman whipped up the horses, they lunged forward and the hearse did not move. Extra horses, other horses and eventually the plough horses from the farm were tried. The hearse could not be budged. Then somebody thought of the "curse" of some years earlier. A messenger was sent, the priest came and removed the curse, and with the original horses harnessed, the hearse moved smoothly off and the funeral concluded. Between the wars ('14 and '39) the last living member of the Rice family, again a lady, left the estate to her farm manager who happened to be Catholic.
This "superstition" seems to be common to the "Celtic Fringe" round the British Isles and France.
When Ned Dunn was young, he was walking home from New Inn and when he got near home, he heard a noise as of a shoed horse walking towards him and towards New Inn. Something about the sound troubled him and he picked up a stone and stood quietly in the hedge beside the road. The creature came on till it was level with him then stopped and turned shining eyes on him. Petrified, he dropped the stone and at once the creature continued on its way and went over the stile into the grove. It was about the size of a 3 month old calf but the head was that of a dog and the eyes were – well???
In the 1930s, Lena and I were over there, and Lena and Gret Carey were in New Inn, possibly at the platform (dance) there and walking home they had a similar experience – hard hoofs coming towards them, a shape which they identified as a large dog, a feeling of unease (but no stones picked up) and the creature passed on ignoring them and went over the stile. Lena was a B.Sc. (Hons), Glasgow Univ. so not exactly a "peasant".
This was one from the old days. Nobody that I knew ever claimed to have seen, or to have known anybody who had seen it, but the coach complete with horses and driver was supposed to have travelled from Carrigeen House down the borheen, vanishing when it reached the main road. Perhaps it went underground into the Round O. Of course it was the coachman who had no head.
Billy Dunn, coming home late at night from the Racecourse direction crossed the bridge and passed the house, shrouded in trees, at the foot of the hill where somebody was ill. He heard a wailing and looking in at the gate saw an old woman of an untidy appearance sitting on the bench at the door "keening". He did not stop to investigate. Next morning, everyone knew that the sick man had died during the night. The Banshee "follows" only the very oldest Gaelic families.