I was a teenager when I went to Ballinspittle during the spat of moving statues.
I couldn't understand why the girl next to me wasn't seeing what I was seeing. The statue was rocking backwards and forwards, tipping over frontwards etc. But I didn't believe it for one minute. In the moment I said there are people up there tilting it and making it do that.
Having said that yer one next to me was looking at me like I had ten heads saying I was delusional. This went on for about a half hour and I wasn't like staring at it constantly I was looking around at people, then looking back and it was still rocking sideways and what not.
Then it stopped moving after a fashion.( For me) The girl next to me then started to see it. She actually got quite upset saying it was going to topple down off the hill. I wasn't seeing it at this stage but I believed her because she was describing exactly what I had been seeing.
At the time I had no explanation except to me the whole atmosphere with all the chanting and praying and the violent rocking of the statue seemed evil to me. I genuinely didn't like it at all.
Years later I read an article about the lens of the eye and our own bodily movement sending messages to the brain. Something I suppose about our centre core of gravity or something like that, I can't remember the exact wording. But it made sense.
Suffice to say it wasn't the statue that was moving it was ourselves.
Mystery solved.
