A headless rider on a black horse carrying its own severed head, its skin stretched like a drum and its face smelling of moldy cheese. This episode dissects the Dullahan, the inescapable harbinger of death in Irish mythology, using nineteenth-century accounts compiled by Thomas Crofton Croker and modern retellings from storytellers like Tony Locke of County Mayo to show how impoverished rural communities gave physical form to their fears of sudden, unpredictable mortality.

The conversation explores the disputed etymology of the name, the contradiction between a blind Dullahan lashing out with a whip and modern periscope theories, and the Coiste Bodhar, the death coach built from human spines, thigh bones, and skull lanterns and draped in a worm-eaten funeral pall. It follows the coach out of the charnel vaults of wicked aristocrats, through ...