Halloween started in Ireland. I put a century of Irish ghost stories back on the map, and code wouldn't let the AI invent a single place

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine

Halloween started here. Long before plastic pumpkins, Samhain was the night at the end of October when the Irish said the wall between this world and the other one wore thin, and the dead walked the roads.

I live in Ireland. In the 1890s an American folklorist, Jeremiah Curtin, sat by firesides in Kerry and wrote down what people told him: a man walking to Sneem at night who meets a ghost and fights it off with a steel sword, a midwife carried away to a fairy fort on a horse that turns out to be a plough beam, a dead mother walking a strand at night, perishing with the cold, asking for a pair of shoes to be given to the poor in her name. He printed thirty of them in 1895 as Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World.

Every one of those tales happens somewhere real. The road to Sneem. Blackwater bridge. Ventry strand. You can still walk most of them. But in the book they're just words on a page, and the old spellings (Lochlein, Rahonain) don't match any modern map.

Kerry is only one corner, though. So I added a second public-domain book: True Irish Ghost Stories (1914), compiled by a Tipperary rector, St John D. Seymour, and a police district inspector, Harry L. Neligan, from accounts people sent in from all over the country: haunted houses in Dublin squares, banshees, poltergeists, RIC barracks with something in them besides the police.

So I built Samhain Map: click a place anywhere in Ireland and read the ghost stories that happened there.

A story on a phone: Curtin's own words, in type close to how they were first printed, with the scanned 1895 page one tap away.

The rule behind all of it: Gemma reads. Code decides.

Live: samhain-map.onrender.com (no sign-up, works on a phone)

Try: filter by Ghost, click Sneem, open The Ghost of Sneem, then scroll to "Where it happened". Then zoom into Dublin Bay and click Dún Laoghaire: the 1914 story calls it Kingstown. Or click any white ghost, like Leap Castle, open its story and press play under "Listen to the story". Headphones, lights off.

Irish ghost and fairy stories from two public-domain books, put back on the map.

An open-weight model (Gemma 4) reads each story: what haunts it, a one-line summary, and which places it names. Plain code then checks every answer before anything is pinned on the map.