Liz Warren | Storyteller

I remember my Grandmother, Nora Fogarty Wunsch, sitting me in the rocking chair next to hers on the front porch of the lumbering house my ancestors built in New Jersey. She would tell me stories about how the Irish side of the family came across the Big Ocean in the 1800’s. They settled in New York and fought their way to make a life.

She would tell me about our wild relatives and how I was related to the Irish gunrunners who smuggled arms back to Ireland. Not on the Fogarty side of the family, of course. But her best stories were the creepy ones. She would be telling them to me as the huge chestnut tree in the front of the house chose exactly the right moments to bang its windblown, heavy branches against the roof. My startled self would jump and drop any goodies I had been clutching in my tiny hands.

Grandma would smile then tell about the local undertaker, who would get really drunk, place a well dressed corpse in the front seat of his hearse and drive it around town. She would tell me the stories of how the bodies of our relatives, who passed away in the old days, would be laid out on ice right in the living room. Sometimes their spirits stayed around for a while to see how things were going.

And my grandma Nora always went to funerals. Anyone’s funeral. It was the proper thing to do. Trudge up the steep hill to catch a cart or in later years, a bus to pay respects to the departed. There were many other religious, priestly and supernatural stories related to the church that infused my brain.

So maybe that is why I am drawn to the particular stories I tell. The supernatural, corpses, banshees, earthly redemption, fairies, kelpies, demons, fallen angels and the priests that do business with them. The Irish tradition is filled with wondrous tales of explanation. No part of the underworld, otherworld, or this world goes untouched. They share a belief in otherness and the phenomenal and why we should too. And now as I think back on my Grandma and the world she gave me, I know why. Why I tell what I tell. Thanks Grandma. These stories are for you.

The image at the top is Calvary Cemetery in Queens with the Manhattan skyline in the background.