Naughty Little Dead Things

I was looking for a painting to illustrate a post about poor Mary Masters, tiny ghost of the Shelbourne Hotel, when I found this other mischievous little scamp with caught-in-the-act eyes dressed in the clothes of a minature French revolutionary and looking like she’s off to sit and knit at the foot of the guillotine with that ball of red wool…

Alexandrine-Emilie Brongniart was the daughter of a Parisian architect and four years old at the time of this painting.   She was a wickedly pretty child and she must have been a wickedly pretty grown-up too or the fastidious Lafayette would never have described her as ‘a Very Amiable Young Lady’.   Emilie, as she was known, married in 1800 and lived happily ever after in America and France, meeting (among others) Thomas Jefferson; read more about her life here.

Such a contrast with poor little white-nightdress-clad Mary, who died at seven years old in one of the houses out of which the Shelbourne was subsequently constructed and has been haunting Room Number 526 (or maybe 256 – the site of her old bedroom) ever since.  At least that’s what she told medium Sybil Leek, wife of ghost-hunter Hans Holzer, to whom she appeared when staying in that room in 1910.

Mary’s a very shy ghost, and doesn’t appear very often, maybe only to those whose husbands are looking for ghost book copy; in fact, she hasn’t been seen before or since. I hope that she doesn’t have to stay in Room Whatever all the time and gets to wander out invisibly to nice places in the locality like the playground in Stephen’s Green with the excellent slide or the children’s section of Hodges Figgis bookshop nearby.  Or maybe, if she misses her old toys, she could pop over to the ESB Georgian house in Merrion Square (so very much worth a visit, if you’re in the neighbourhood!) to play with ones like them.

But most of all I hope that she’s no longer there at all and has gone to a place where she doesn’t have to wander round ethereally – trying and failing to communicate with people who, despite her best efforts, are caught up in their own lives and can’t seem to see or hear her no matter how much she wishes it – somewhere she can meet other people her own age and just joke and play and have fun and get up to mischief and feel as real as any decent deceased seven-year-old ever possibly could. It’s a cold banging-unheard-fists-against-pane-of-glass-lonely world out there no matter how feathery the pillows or opulent the surroundings and if we human beings feel alone and unseen and unfelt and unheard (and we do, or at least I do, a lot of the time) just imagine what it must be like for a seven-year-old ghost…

History of Dublin’s wedding-cakey Shelbourne Hotel here.  Read more about the story of Sybil’s can-it-be-believed meeting with Mary here.

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