I have a few stories spanning from my early childhood to around 5 years ago. The most chilling happened during my teen years but I will post them separately.
The experiences on this post I don't remember and have been told to me by family members. We were on the Isle of Aran for my paternal Nan and Granda's wedding anniversary and I was 2 years old. I was being put to bed on the first night and said to my mam "Who is that lady in the funny clothes?" Pointing in the corner of the room. Obviously there was nobody there and they put it down to my imagination, which it could well have been.
Secondly, my maternal grandmother lives in a house that isn't a particularly old house and as far as I know nobody has died in there but it has the most creepiest feeling I can't explain. As a child I apparently would ask my nan who the funny man/lady/dog was in different rooms of the house. Again I cannot recall this so it could well have been my imagination. A lot of the things that have happened I would like to hope have an explanation as I am a rational person and to be honest secretly quite scared of the unknown.
OK so a quick back story and additional story before I add my personal experiences on another post. My nan in particular seems to be susceptible to things but is the most skeptical. My nan used to do Ouija boards on her lunch break at work, not because she believed in it but just because all her colleagues were for a laugh.
One time the glass spelled out the name of her deceased grandfather, but she wasn't paying attention and was thinking about jobs she had to do when she got home. The man 'leading' the seance/Ouija board thing said "does anybody know a *her grandfather's name*" nobody spoke until he repeated it and my nan came back to reality and said "oh yeah it's my grandad" all blazè. The glass then went super fast from K to L to M over and over again. Nobody had any idea what it meant until years after she was recounting the story to a friend and realised, they are my mam's initials and she would have been just pregnant with her at that time.
As mentioned, my nan's house has always had a strange feeling about it. When I was about 15, she and my granda went on holiday and I was allowed to use the house for school work. I would get off the bus after school and go there to play at being grown up, making my own tea and then doing some work.
One day I went upstairs to use the toilet and had an overwhelming feeling to go into one of the bedrooms. I walked in and (I still get goosebumps now even though it isn't the worst of my experiences) a vase of flowers had been knocked off the window ledge and were under the bed all laid out. My nan's 'ladies' as we called them (white ornaments she collected of Victorian ladies) were stood under the bed also. I know that I cried and was shaking, left the house without locking it and went home (we all live very close to one another). I told my dad and he said it was probably the wind (even though the vase didn't smash and everything was laid out so perfectly and weird.) He went and cleaned it up and locked the doors. I am an adult now with kids of my own and he still denies this ever happened when I talk about it.
Recently my nan has told me of an experience of her own in this bedroom. She was leaving the room and glanced back to switch off the light. She saw a black mist in a body shape at the top of the bed. It slid all the way down the bed and disappeared into the floor. Oh my life when she told me this I had the worst goosebumps and said "what did you do?" She replied "nothing I just shook it off and went downstairs so, it was probably my imagination." I have no idea how that can happen and she think it's nothing.
I will leave it at that for now and write my other experiences on another post.
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While there are very gender-specific narratives, I don't recall anything about folklore/myths pertaining to the seventh child of a seventh child.
Throughout Europe, the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (no girls in between!) traditionally was thought to be very lucky, even adept in natural magic (Healing Powers, etc.). The Irish tended to believe that he would have a facility with predicting the future, also; the Scots thought that predictions were the province of the Seventh Daughter of a Seventh Daughter (various Celtic traditions differentiated over time). The 7th/7th son did have a natural proclivity for healing (British and French folklore), but would find it was a burden to weigh the consequences of intervening, for good or for ill. Similarly, Romanians thought that the 7th/7th son may be more impulsive, thus would be vulnerable to becoming a Vampire/Werewolf which used to be considered the same mythic creature (they were separated about 600 years ago -give or take 2 centuries because news travelled slowly, and folklore even more slowly).
I'm all for egalitarianism, but I can't find anything online or in my Myth Ref collection (which I keep in my classroom) suggesting that gender is not a factor.
Best,
Biblio.