Each month James Franklin, online and educational resources officer at Culture Vannin, looks at a particular place in the island and gives a guide to some of its folklore.

Parish churches are good places to look for tales of Manx folklore, and Malew is no exception.

As far back as the 1720s, it was known as being the home of a fairy cup.

A man was led into the hills by the inescapable attraction of strange music. Eventually he came to a large open space, where Themselves were all sat at a feast.

The man joined them, but was warned against taking their offer of a drink by one of the party, who looked strangely familiar to him.

When the feast ended, they disappeared and he was left behind, alone on the hills.

But still in his hand was their silver cup. This he brought to Kirk Malew, where it was used as the communion cup for a long time afterwards.

Traditionally in Manx folklore, graveyards are not really the sorts of places to be finding ghosts.

You need to look over the wall at Skibrick Hill, with its white standing boulder, for that! However, it was from Kirk Malew that a woman’s ghost set off to haunt her old home after her burial in 1863.

The family were horrified to realise that they had not undone the knots in her funeral shroud, which meant she could not pass on from this world.

The family were confident what they needed to do, even when the vicar would not entertain the family’s ‘superstitious’ request to exhume the body.

In the night before Easter Sunday the woman’s brothers-in-law came and got the job done, so that, by the time the vicar arrived in the morning, the grave had been re-dug, the body exhumed and the knots untied.

The men were brought to court, but were not punished severely. It was undoubtedly worth it to allow their sister-in-law release from her earthly ghost form!

The Church not aligning with the beliefs of parishioners showed itself some 250 years earlier, after the outlawing of compurgation. This was the practice of proving your case over a dead person’s estate.

In compurgation, you were legally acknowledged to be expressing the truth if you lay on the deceased person’s grave, with a Bible on your chest, and swore to the truth of your claim before kneeling witnesses.

The legal status of this was only removed as a superstitious practice in 1609.

However, in 1616, it was none other than the Deemster himself who resorted to compurgation, on the grave of the recently deceased chaplain of Castle Rushen.

Evidently Deemster Samsburie felt that this was justified when proving that he did not owe money!

Malew church was also the scene of a spectacular curse in 1659. An MHK’s wife at Ballahick was obliged to publicly renounce the devil in church here, after she had been accused of practising witchcraft, selling charms using bullock’s hoof clippings and stealing the prosperity of neighbours for her own farm.

We can only imagine the outrage of the congregation, and the fear of her accusers, when the woman announced her defiance of the devil and his works, but followed it by her own addition: ‘May those who brought me to this scandal never see their eldest children in the estate my youngest are in!’ It is not recorded if the curse came true or not.

There’s a lot of history, and folklore, in places like Kirk Malew, without even beginning to talk about Norse crosses, Illiam Dhone or the like.