I need to write this down before I lose my nerve.
Remember the verse twelve thing? People claiming there's a hidden twelfth verse to the Rattlin' Bog that nobody officially recorded? I've been getting emails about it for months but I always thought it was just people misremembering, or mixing up songs, or having a laugh.
Now we're at ELEVEN people.
From SEVEN different countries.
All describing the same verse.
They don't know each other. I've checked — cross-referenced the names, the email addresses, their social media. These are genuine people from genuine places. A woman in Stockholm. A man in Vancouver. Two people in New Zealand. Someone in rural France who doesn't even speak much English but described the melody so accurately I recognized it.
And they all describe the same words. The same melody. The same cadence.
Something about "beneath the bog" and "what was there before." They say it comes after the final verse about the last jump. They say it's quieter. Almost whispered. That it loops — goes through the same four lines three times, each time slightly different.
I've never heard this verse. I've sung this song hundreds of times and I've never heard it.
But I've started hearing it in my head now. Now that they've described it to me, I swear I can almost remember it.
Is that crazy? Is my brain just filling in blanks that people have suggested?
I posted asking the community — has anyone else heard this verse? And I asked them not to read the other descriptions first, to tell me what they remember without influence.
Waiting to see what comes back.
It's probably nothing. Probably just a folk thing, a verse that existed in some versions and not others, and now we're piecing it together by accident.
But I'm starting to take this seriously.
I'm not sure that's a good thing.
—Seamus