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tremble, or is it the ground? –
Lord, save us! – what is it? – a coach! –
    A coach! but that coach has no head;
And the horses are headless as it;
Of the driver the same may be said
And the passengers inside it who sit.’
    Both the poem and the way Mr Stephenson said it were so scary that the four of them suddenly felt a great urge to get out, and ignoring the metal step below the door, they jumped to the ground.
    Mr Stephenson closed the door after them, and with a wink to Blind Jack, continued, ‘But you need go no further than the vanishing lake to find another story of a phantom coach.’
    â€˜What coach was that?’ asked Róisín.
    â€˜It belonged to Colonel Jack McNeill. As you know, the lake sometimes appears on one side of the road, then on the other.’
    They all knew about the vanishing lake, or Loughareema, as it was more properly called, on the mountain between Cushendun and Ballycastle, and when they nodded, he went on.
    â€˜Well, it was in 1898 that it happened. They say there was a terrible storm on the mountain, but Colonel McNeill was anxious to get to Ballycastle to catch the train to Belfast. There were no walls at the side of the road at that time, and the lake had risen so far the road was flooded. Whether the coachman missed the road or the horses panicked, nobody knows. But whatever happened the coach careered off into the lake, and both the men and the horses were drowned. Sometimes, they say, you can still hear the coach rumbling down the road and screeching as it goes into the
water.’
    As they thought about that, Mr Stephenson lowered his voice again and continued …
    â€˜Onest before the morning light
A horseman will come riding
Round and round the fairy lough
And no one there to see …’
    â€˜Who wrote that?’ asked Tapser.
    â€˜Moira O’Neill, poetess of the glens.’ Mr Stephenson took a deep breath. ‘There are those who won’t go past the lake on a stormy night, for they know that if the two horses put their heads up out of the water their hair will turn white!’
    â€˜That’s silly,’ said Róisín.
    â€˜Anyway,’ said Rachel, ‘Colonel McNeill wasn’t a highwayman.’
    â€˜No, but Redmond O’Hanlon was. He was a famous highwayman down in south Armagh. Tradition has it that his ghost still haunts the highways and byways that were the scenes of his adventures.’
    â€˜You’re just trying to scare us,’ said Cowlick.
    Mr Stephenson laughed and ruffled his cow’s-lick curl. ‘Not really. All I’m saying is, there are a lot of these stories, and maybe you shouldn’t take all this talk about the ghost of Hugh Rua too seriously.’
    They walked out to the road.
    â€˜How was Hugh Rua captured?’ asked Tapser.
    Mr Stephenson shrugged. ‘A highwayman always had a price on his head, and there was always somebody willing to collect it. Sometimes the informer would pour water into the highwayman’s guns, and with his powder wet he wasn’t able to offer much resistance when the soldiers came. That’s what happened Thomas Archer, the Ballymena highwayman, and another one down in Waterford called William Crotty. Who knows? Maybe that was the way Hugh Rua was captured too.’
    In spite of his extensive knowledge of coaches and highwaymen, Mr Stephenson hadn’t really told them much more about Hugh Rua than they already knew, but before they could ask him anything else, he stopped and said, ‘Anyway, enough about highwaymen. Tell me, are you coming to the ceili tonight?’
    â€˜We forgot all about it,’ said Rachel.
    â€˜Well, remind your people it’s on tonight. It’s being sponsored by the Castle Spa, and we’re going to have a whale of a time.’

4. SEEING THINGS

    Back home, they found that the barley had been harvested and the bales of straw were being collected from the