I've received THREE separate emails this week asking about VERSE TWELVE.
Not verse eleven. Not a different version of the standard verses. Verse TWELVE specifically.
Each person asking has claimed they heard it as children but can't remember the words. One woman from Galway said her grandmother taught it to her but she's had a blank spot in her memory for decades. A lad from Dublin said he found a reference to it in an old notebook but the page was water-damaged and illegible. Another person said they heard it sung at a session "a long time ago" but they "probably imagined it."
The standard version of the Rattlin' Bog goes to about ten or eleven verses depending on who's singing. The version I've documented on this site is ten verses. That's the traditional version. That's what people sing.
There is no verse twelve. There shouldn't BE a verse twelve.
But all three people described it with similar language: something about "what's beneath," something about "what the bog holds," something about "going down." One person said it was "darker" than the other verses. More serious. Like the song was admitting something.
I don't know if I believe in collective false memory or if I'm being pranked or if something actually exists that I've somehow never encountered in all my years of collecting versions of this song.
But the coincidence is EERIE. Three people, independent of each other, all asking about the same missing verse.
If anyone reading this has heard a verse twelve — or if you remember something about the Rattlin' Bog that feels incomplete or forgotten — PLEASE email me. I need to know if this is real.
The bog remembers everything.
But maybe it's remembering something I'm not supposed to know about.
Yet.