The Tell-tale Horse

By Caleb O'Connor

Picture it - you’ve been living in an old house, rich with history, for years,and here you are - finally ripping up old floorboards. The room is hazy with the dusty ghosts of well danced floors. From the wreckage you pull a skull. Not a human skull - a horse skull.

While it sounds like the work of a tricksy Púca, or perhaps a baby Leatherface, horse skulls are more common than you’d think!

When buried under the floor, they reverberate sound, acting as a sound-box for dancing and music alike. With a culture as musical as ours, they’re the perfect speaker for a night of dance and trad. It’s worth mentioning that this was not some kind of ritual - the horses would be long dead by the time they were even on the way to the house.

In the 1945 volume of "The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland", a member shared the responses he received from a 1938 query regarding local traditions with the burying of animal heads or other objects within homes or other spaces. Each one tells a fascinating story from all corners of Ireland. Liam Ó hIceadha from Mitchelstown said:

“Long ago people had a custom when flooring with wood a barn or a room in a house, of putting one or two horses’ skulls under the floor to give it an echo. Horse skulls were buried under dwelling house floors to increase the volume of any music played in the house...One man told me that the skull was put under the flagstone of the fire, for that was where reels, jigs and hornpipes were danced”.

Horse skulls have been found in floorboards throughout Scandinavia, and while it may not be a horse skull in every home, China, South America, and throughout the continent of Africa, these foundation sacrifices exist. It seems a bit macabre. But perhaps there’s solace in knowing it wasn’t just us.