Paul Gallagher was born in Ireland in 1390, to a village healer and a drunk fisherman. From his earliest years in County Clare, Paul learned the art of reading people — when to joke, when to charm, and when to slip away from trouble. He was neither a fighter nor a coward, but his luck was notoriously poor. Growing up in a small coastal village, Paul was often at the center of local mischief, relying on quick wit rather than fists. In his early twenties, restless and craving adventure, he drifted to England, where he worked as a traveling minstrel in the courts of Norfolk and Suffolk, earning modest coin entertaining nobles and peasants alike. In 1425, he moved briefly to London, where he tried his hand as a clerk but soon grew bored.
Returning to Ireland in 1431, Paul found himself back in his village. After a night of heavy drinking, he lost a wager and was forced to rescue the prized village cow stuck in a bog. The panicked beast trampled him, delivering a fatal blow. His funeral was held that afternoon with laughter and whiskey. He dug himself out of the grave that night. Nobody laughed then. He remembers waking in the dark under loose earth, clawing his way out, gasping — and laughing, because of course he couldn’t die. Not even when they wanted him to. Paul fled in confusion and fear, eventually finding himself in England.
In England from 1455–1487, Paul sought a sense of purpose and respectability, Paul attempted to don the armor of a knight during the turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses. He fancied himself a noble warrior, ready to prove his worth on the battlefield. But his natural inclination toward wit and charm did not translate well to swordplay. Clumsy and uncoordinated, he fumbled with weapons and armor alike, earning the bemused pity of seasoned soldiers. His aversion to actual violence only made matters worse — he was more likely to attempt negotiation or distraction than strike a blow. Paul’s brief military career was punctuated by mishaps: he was captured not once, but twice, during skirmishes where his attempts to flee were as ungraceful as his sword fighting. His captors saw little threat in him, but one noblewoman found his awkwardness oddly endearing and she ransomed him back to his faction. After this, Paul quietly abandoned his knightly ambitions, content to leave the battles to those better suited for them.
Paul found his way to Clonbrin Abbey, a stone monastery outside Kilkenny, Ireland in 1490. There, among the Benedictine brothers, he sought something he couldn’t name: peace, maybe, or purpose. Or perhaps he simply thought that if he couldn’t die, he ought to learn how to live well. After all, he’d tried to live seriously and failed. He donned rough wool robes, and tried to pray. But monastic silence was never his strength. On the second day, he hummed during vespers. By the fifth, he whispered irreverent commentary about a brother’s snoring. By the second week, he cracked a joke during a funeral vigil that made three novices snort wine through their noses. Despite his transgressions, the monks couldn’t quite bring themselves to hate him. Paul was frustrating, but kind. He helped with chores, knew how to soothe colicky goats, and made the older brothers laugh when their bones ached too badly to kneel. He learned to read Latin — badly — and debated scripture with a grin. But he didn’t belong. Not really. When the abbot finally expelled him, gently, over tea and bread, he did so with a sigh and a half-smile, telling him that he was “a divine disruption” and that God made him with too much mirth for their walls.
In 1500, in the bustling, chaotic city of Antwerp, Paul survived as a thief — not a gifted one, but charming enough to talk his way out of most trouble. He stole more hearts than coin purses, and he gave away more than he kept. He spent his nights in the taverns and back rooms of the red-light district, telling stories and trading favors, performing card tricks for drinks, dancing badly for laughs. He was poor, often cold, but strangely content. He learned to speak Dutch with a terrible accent, sketched caricatures for florins, and once conned his way into painting the background of a cathedral fresco — a job he promptly lost when he added a crude caricature of the bishop. It was here he encountered Mursi Storvold, a wandering Norseman who radiated a strange familiarity. Mursi explained the truth: Paul was immortal. He would never age, never fall to disease, never die — unless he lost his head. Mursi became both a mentor and a friend, though Paul always resisted the warrior’s path.
From 1582–1599 under the name Giovanni Bellarosa, Paul roamed the sun-drenched streets of Florence, Siena, and Venice with nothing but a lute, a sack of worn costumes, and a talent for weaving magic out of thin air. He was a cantastorie, a wandering storyteller, spinning outlandish versions of local legends and saints' tales in piazzas and alleyways for coins, wine, and the occasional invitation to dinner. He performed at carnivals, under balconies, beside fountains, and in the smoky courtyards of taverns, where the laughter was as rich as the wine. He joined a commedia dell’arte troupe for a year, donning masks and learning Harlequin, Pantalone, and Il Dottore. He wrote bawdy verses under a false name and spent two weeks in a Venetian jail for mocking a minor duke’s love life in rhyme.
Tired of drifting, Paul, under the alias Calum Cameron, bought a modest farm in the Highlands of Scotland in 1604. He grew barley and potatoes, raised a few stubborn sheep, and learned the rhythms of a quieter life. In 1611, he married Elspeth MacCrae, a kind, sharp-witted woman with a fondness for riddles and wool dyes. She never knew his secret. Their time together was brief — a winter fever took her within five years — but Paul never forgot the sound of her laughter in the kitchen or the way she warmed her feet on his calves under the blankets.
Paul reemerged in Paris in 1715 at the height of the Enlightenment, drawn to the crackling energy of new ideas and old hypocrisies. He reinvented himself as “Émile LaRoche,” a charmingly irreverent satirist with a flair for mimicry and scandalous impersonations. Under candlelit ceilings and plumes of pipe smoke, he performed in private salons, reciting wicked parodies of sermons and mocking royal decrees with alarming accuracy. He earned a reputation for lampooning the most self-important minds of the day — natural philosophers, clergy, and royal flatterers alike. Once, he read a poem aloud that compared the Sun King’s mind to a broken wine cask: leaky, bloated, and full of vinegar. Laughter erupted. So did a few duels. Not everyone hated him. Among his most spirited defenders was a clever, hot-tempered young writer named François-Marie Arouet, who later rose to fame as Voltaire. The two shared a passion for wine and wit Paul often claimed it was his idea to teach François how to turn a good insult into a revolution.
In 1801, Paul met Isolde, a healer with fire in her veins and earth on her hands, in the Black Forest of Germany. She found him collapsed after a riding accident, his wounds healing far too quickly. Instead of fleeing or accusing him of witchcraft, she studied him. Asked questions. Listened. She was the first person he ever told the whole truth to. The pair lived in a cottage outside ofTriberg, and Isolde guarded his secret with fierce loyalty, once lying to a bishop’s inquisitor so convincingly that Paul believed it himself. They grew herbs, she delivered babies, and together they taught reading to a few local children. When she died in 1840, her hair streaked with silver and her hands still warm in his, Paul didn’t speak for a year and a day. Not a word. He let the animals roam, let the fields go wild. He buried her beneath a towering silver fir, and carved her name into stone with shaking hands.
The Industrial Revolution fascinated Paul, not just for its machines, but for the way it rewired society’s sense of wonder. In London in 1842, he avoided the polished stages of the West End, instead frequenting grimy East End music halls, smoky taverns, and gaslit backrooms where the working class gathered for distraction. Performing under a dozen pseudonyms — Jackie Shilling, Mister Mirth, The Mechanical Medium — he blended crude humor with uncanny illusions, making pennies vanish, rats “speak,” and once, during a power outage, appearing to catch lightning in his hands.
In 1859, he briefly took up work building theatrical sets at the Old Vic, helping stage an ambitious production of Faust — one that ended with the set catching fire mid-performance. Paul “died” in the fire and left London.
1898 found Paul crossing the ocean for the first time, landing in New York. At the height of the vaudeville era, Paul found a natural home among the chaos and creativity of Manhattan's theater circuit. Under the stage name P.J. Astor, he performed comic monologues, slapstick routines, and illusions that bordered on the uncanny. In 1901, he crossed paths with Harry Houdini, then still known as Ehrich Weiss and gaining traction on the vaudeville circuit. The two formed a brief mentorship Paul taught him sleight-of-hand techniques picked up over centuries, how to read a crowd like a book, and how to control the rhythm of tension and release. Houdini would later call Paul "the most infuriatingly gifted performer I ever met, and the only man who ever made me question physics." They parted ways in 1908, after an argument over a particular underwater escape trick Paul claimed was “not fair to the locks.” Houdini went on to fame Paul, true to form, disappeared into another identity before the age of film caught up with him.
After leaving New York, Paul drifted to Montmartre, Paris in 1910, where he reinvented himself yet again — this time as “Jacques Moreau,” a cabaret pianist, emcee, and occasional illusionist. At Le Chat Noir and other bohemian haunts, he rubbed shoulders with absinthe-addled artists, war-weary poets, and jazz musicians. He played ragtime, translated risqué jokes, and once famously stopped a brawl between a surrealist and a dadaist with nothing but a tambourine. During WWI, he posed as a medic behind the lines, patching wounds and stealing morphine for makeshift field hospitals. He fled France in 1923 after a nobleman’s wife recognized him from his time in New York.
From 1936-1945, Paul lived in Cape Town, South Africa. The shop had no name, only a creaky blue door that stuck in the humidity. It faced the harbor, wedged between a fishmonger’s stall and a tailor who no longer took measurements. No sign hung above it. If someone needed it, they’d find it. Paul opened when he felt like it and closed without warning. He gave away more than he sold.
Paul resurfaced in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1950, under the name “Santiago Doyle,” opening a small nightclub in Buenos Aires that doubled as a haven for political dissidents, artists, and lost souls. He booked tango musicians, hired exiled poets, and bribed just enough officials to keep the place running. He crossed paths with fellow Immortals now and then — including Ramsey Torryngton and Rory Greene, and preimmortal Valen Santiago. He had a brief, intense love affair with a radio journalist who vanished during the early days of the Dirty War.
Paul wandered north in 1963, lured by the American counterculture. In San Francisco, going by the name Cornelius Fog he became a street performer in Golden Gate Park, reading tarot cards, telling fortunes, and doing “spirit tricks” during drum circles. He lived communally, played sitar badly, experimented with LSD (which did not agree with him), and briefly joined a traveling psychedelic puppet troupe. He was arrested three times — never for the things he actually did. At a free concert in the park, Paul met immortal private investigator, Paige Brewster they hit it off instantly, sharing laughter, secrets, and the occasional bed.
Tired of noise, Paul settled in Brattleboro, Vermont in 1988, opening a dusty, underfunded used bookstore called “Twice Upon a Time.” He lived in the back of the shop. Locals knew him as the “ghost of the stacks,” with an uncanny memory and a knack for recommending the perfect book before you asked for it. He hosted occasional poetry nights, hired runaway teens, and quietly helped those who needed it.
In 2002 when Captain Trips hit, Paul was moving cross-country with a U-Haul, on his way to LA.
