The Fetch

In Ireland a fetch was the ghostly double of a living person, and seeing it foretold either long life or a death close at hand: if it was seen in the morning the person would live long, if in the evening they would soon die. Hone printed a passage from the Tales of the O’Hara Family in which cottagers tell of a girl who saw her father’s fetch following her across the fields, waving her on, and came home to find him dead, and of a widower who met the fetch of his little daughter the evening before she died. Hone reminded young readers that these were only tales, but said such things were still believed.