and all around headless Dullahans, both men and women, nobles and commoners of various occupations. Larry was offered a drink, which caused his head to be severed in mid-sentence as he was about to compliment it, though his head reverted when he regained his senses. He also seemed to have lost his horse to the Dullahans. Bone-crafted objects The Dullahan has been ascribed with using the spine of a human corpse for a whip by a number of modern commentators. The headless coachman merely bears a "long whip" in Croker's tale "The Harvest Dinner", with which he lashed the horses so furiously he almost struck a witness blind in an eye (the would-be-victim regarded it as deliberate assault). Croker deduces that the headless one as a way of habit always uses the long whip as weapon to destroy his witness's eye or eyes, reasoning that the coachman's wrath turns to the onlooker because he himself lack the ability to look, due to his headlessness. The spine is mentioned in conjunction by Croker in his poem "The Death Coach", but the lines "The spokes are the dead men's thigh bones,/And the pole is the spine of the back" presumably refer to these bones being used on the axle and the wheel-spokes of the carriage. A later writer prosifying this description supplied additional details, so that the "two hollow skulls" used as lanterns on the carriage are set with candles, and the hammercloth made of pall material "mildew'd by damps" is embellished as being chewed by worms, Severed head The Dullahan may be a headless body, or may carry his (severed) head, which he may carry under his (right) arm, as in Croker's tale "The Headless Horseman": ..such a head no mortal ever saw before. It looked like a large cream cheese hung round with black puddings: no speck of colour enlivened the ashy paleness of the depressed features; the skin lay stretched over the unearthly surface almost like the parchment head of a drum. Two fiery eyes of prodigious circumference, with a strange and irregular motion, flashed like meteors.. In the words of the modern storyteller Tony Locke of County Mayo, Dullahan's mouth, full of razor-sharp teeth, forms a grin reaching the sides of the head, its "massive" eyes "constantly dart about like flies", and the flesh has acquired the "smell, colour and consistency of mouldy cheese". A modern commentator also