The Mysterious Mystery of "Mystery In Flames"

While in the library picking out books about Ireland, in anticipation of going there soon. I came across an interesting book of anecdotal writings about life in small Irish villages a century or more ago. Interesting articles about the construction of field stone cottages with thatched roofs. About shepherds and their flocks, and about the spinning of wool, and the making of warm sweaters. The kinds of foods people grew, the kinds of meals they ate, and so on. Most fascinating was a story written about a mysterious series of events that took place in a small village in Northern Ireland, in the county of Donegal, in 1883.

The story centered on a text entitled "Mystery In Flames", a manuscript written long ago. There were no copies of it. The one and only hand-written and unsigned manuscript was simply passed about from one person to another, in the small village where the author had taken up quarters. And as it passed from one hand to another, it left a fiery trail behind it. While the manuscript was in the hands of one woman, she came home to find her kitchen on fire. And when it was passed on to her next door neighbor, he reported that later that night, the fire in his fireplace kept getting bigger and bigger, and hotter and hotter. So hot, in fact it melted the grate on which it burned, into a puddle of molten iron that sizzled and cracked the stones of the hearth. Another woman broke out in reddish rashes over 90% of her body. Another woman reported menstruating the entire time the book was in her possession, and it wasn't even that time of the month. A man reported burning his hand when he accidentally set it down on a hot bed of coals. And then, there was the farmer who said his cow was hit by lightning while he had the manuscript. And the woman who got a very severe sunburn, even though she hadn't been out of the house in days. Most tragically, a house burned completely to the ground. No one was killed or hurt, but the manuscript was reduced to a small pile of ashes, some of which went flying up into the smoky air. The villagers gathered around the smoldering ruins of the house talking quietly about the loss of the manuscript. And what a terrible loss it was. In the end, one by one, they each confessed they hadn't read the text. The author, whose name they never knew, had left town days ago and was never to be seen again. To this day, the unread, and never to be read "Mystery In Flames" is only known by the wake of strange events it left behind, in a small village in the Northern county of Donegal, in Ireland in 1883.