On September 18, 1916, three weeks shy of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, the “Uncrowned King” himself appeared to an audience assembled at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre. The occasion was the Irish debut of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a film already notorious at that time for the technical brilliance and unvarnished racism of its director. In the days immediately following Parnell's death in 1891, a rumor had circulated that his coffin buried in Glasnevin Cemetery was filled with stones. The idea that the great leader might not really be dead had led to Elvis-style sightings all over Ireland and as far away as Germany, where Parnell's sometime political ally John Dillon claimed to have seen the great leader attending a performance of the Wagner opera, Götterdammerung [The Twilight of the Gods] (Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 603). In a country as rife with unresolved histories as Ireland, the appearance of ghosts is probably to be expected, and even, perhaps, taken for granted.