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the narrative just before his death to someone who transcribed and printed it. Although his embellishments and omissions, or those of the pamphlet’s printer, are impossible to know, the sequence of events he describes fits the chronology outlined by colonial records and newspaper accounts. Printed in twelve pages of thick black type, the confession recounts Sullivan’s life, beginning with his childhood in Ireland in the 1720s and 1730s.
    Imagine a child cowering in bed while an invisible spirit floating somewhere within the lightless room calls his name for several minutes before disappearing. It starts each night at eleven o’clock, and continues for days, weeks, months: ministers from local parishes come to pray alongside the boy’s bed, begging him to repent of his sins, hoping to dispel the spirit with prostrate displays of devotion. Word spreads, drawing hundreds of visitors from near and far to the child’s room to get a glimpse of the afflicted boy and convey their sympathies. But the spirit keeps returning, now calling so loudly that the windows of the house shake, and when the child falls ill, the voice becomes even more powerful, and the boy, lying in bed, feels a hand press the skin between his shoulders as if the specter, after three months of nightly visitations, were at last reaching down to pry his soul from its mortal cavity.
    Sullivan started hearing voices as a young boy. Born and raised in a seaside village in southeastern Ireland, he became a troublemaker early, perhaps out of boredom, perhaps on the advice of the demon that haunted his sleep. “[F]rom my youth I was always in all kinds of Mischief,” he confessed, “so that I never minded Father nor Mother, Sister nor Brother; but went on in all Manner of Vice.” He tormented his parents, who tried desperately to discipline their unruly son. First they locked him in his room with only bread and water, then they sent him to live with a schoolmaster. Neither reformed his ways.
    At the age of thirteen, Sullivan ran away from home. He roamed thecountryside, wandering westward. The landscape he traversed must have offered countless scenes of the poverty endemic to Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century. Tenant families farmed potatoes on rugged plots of a few acres each, living in windowless cabins made of dried mud. Inside were single rooms lit by slow-burning peat fires, livestock dropping dung on earthen floors, a few broken stools. In 1727, Jonathan Swift deplored the “miserable dress and diet and dwelling of the people, the families of farmers who pay great rents living in filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, not a shoe or stocking to their feet.” Two decades later, little had changed. In an impassioned 1748 editorial published in the Dublin periodical
Reformer
, a nineteen-year-old Edmund Burke wrote that tenant farmers wore “clothes so ragged, that they rather publish than conceal the wretchedness it was meant to hide…it is no uncommon sight to see a half dozen children run quite naked out of a cabin, scarcely distinguishable from a dunghill, to the great disgrace of our country with foreigners, who would doubtless report them savages.”
    Anglo-Irish Protestants owned most of the land, and as the country’s population rose precipitously over the course of the eighteenth century, they raised rents and further subdivided their estates, forcing more people to live on less acreage. A series of laws passed by the British Parliament severely restricting Irish trade had made farming essentially the only livelihood, and the island became almost wholly dependent on agriculture. To make matters worse, the harvests failed regularly, causing devastating food shortages. A famine in 1740–1741 killed hundreds of thousands of people, emptied whole villages, and left the roads littered with unburied corpses.
    A young face amid the scruffy sea of beggars and landless laborers then tramping around the country, Sullivan drifted