Something about half a century ago in South Cork the "Scoriugheacht" was very common.
The houses most frequently visited were those of people who were popular and especially good story-tellers.
Ghost and Fairy stories, were very common and children after having listened to some of these stories dreaded retiring to a dark room at bedtime.
Quite convenient to the school where I served my monitorship lived a a farmer whose name was Tade Halloran. Now Tade was famous for telling ghost stories chiefly of his own make-up, and generally descriptive of his own experience of encounters with ghosts. From constantly repeating these stories he came to believe after some time that the stories were true.