NOT ALL THE IRISH ARE LUCKY!

Okay, it's time to celebrate St. Patty's Day with a ghost story that comes to us all the way from Ireland. In fact, it is considered to be the most famous Irish ghost tale of all.

According to the tale, a brother and a sister made a pact with each other. They decided that the first one to die would reappear to the other one to confirm that there is indeed life after death. The brother was the first to go (not sure how old he was at the time), and appeared to his sister shorlty afterward. Now this was no ordinary ghost, because to prove to his sister that he was real, he gripped her wrist so hard that it deformed it (ouch!). He also had a few things to tell her about the future. First, he predicted that her husband would die and that she would re-marry. Second, he predicted that she would die on her 47th birthday (he was just full of good news, wasn't he?).

Well, lo and behold, everything the brother predicted came true. Except for that little thing he had to say about his sister dying on her 47th birthday. She made it through the whole day and the rest of the year breathing just fine. So to celebrate her apparent victory over death, she had a big wing-ding for her 48th birthday. One of the guests was a clergyman. When she saw him she said something like, "Hey, look at me, I'm forty-eight and my heart is still ticking. So much for my dead brother's lousy prediction abilities."

This is when the clergyman gave her a curious look and said, "Forty-eight? Why, my dear, you're only forty-seven."

I can only imagine the look on the woman's face at this point. If she were in today's age, she would probably say something like, "What have you been smoking?"

The clergyman hadn't been smoking anything. What he had done was look at the registry of her birth before he had come to the wing-ding.

Witnesses say the woman proclaimed that the clergyman had signed her death warrant, went to her chamber (yes, they called rooms chambers back then), made out her will, had a heart attack, and died on the spot.

So was the brother's prediction true ... or did the woman get so scared that she gave herself a fatal coronary? Guess we'll never know.

Either way, I wish you a happy St. Patrick's Day and hope your luck runs a lot deeper than the poor woman's in our story!

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