Four years ago my husband bought me a slim volume of Dublin ghost stories as one of my Christmas presents. This was where I first heard of the Dolocher. It was a small story – it took up just two pages – and it completely intrigued and unsettled me. Fascinated by the spare details I ran to the internet and started to Google the name. I tracked down an article about the Dolocher in an 1832 edition of the Dublin Penny Journal and found subsequent supporting material in old guide books relating to the story. Outside of the Liberties in Dublin it is not a well-known ghost story. This is how it goes…
Down in Corn Market there was a debtor’s prison called the Black Dog, a fabulously gothic name to kick things off. A man called Olocher was found guilty of the rape and murder of a young girl. He was imprisoned in the Black Dog, but on the eve of his execution he committed suicide.
A few nights later one of Olocher’s guards from the Black Dog was found paralysed with shock at the bottom of a flight of steps leading out on to Cooke Street. When the guard’s speech returned he said that he had heard a noise coming from Olocher’s cell. He went in to investigate, when out of the darkness something terrifying came towards him. The guard swore he had been attacked by an entity that was half-beast, half-man. “A demon,” the guard insisted, “Olocher’s demon.” And a legend was born.
Somehow Olocher’s malevolent spirit had broken free of the Black Dog prison and within a week his evil form was also reported to have attacked a woman near Christchurch Cathedral. Word spread like wildfire that Olocher’s demon, having exacted revenge on his guards, was now prowling the streets of Dublin hunting down women, just as he had done when he was alive.
Olocher – now no longer a dead murderer, but a newly-formed devil – probably soon became known as “The Olocher” (which the Dublin accent would have made sound like “D’Olocher”), and before long Dubliners were warning each other to take care wherever they went, that “The Dolocher” was lurking in the alleys and side streets around Christchurch.
For a whole winter Dublin city was in the grip of Dolocher fever. There were numerous sightings, numerous attacks, and even a massive pig-culling in an effort to root the Dolocher out.
I absolutely loved researching this story. Georgian Dublin was a vibrant, exciting, violent and wild city. It was densely populated with rogues and vagabonds, thieves and jilts and ordinary decent folk. The very rich and the very poor lived cheek by jowl. The streets were narrow and medieval and the shambles were bustling. The city was hopping with “superstar” preachers, famous actors and hilarious eccentrics, including a man who used to push open his windows high up on Cork Hill and shout insults down to random young “bucks” only to promptly shoot at them for amusement when the young men objected to the insults.
There were unusual professions, like a Catechista – a teacher of religion – and periwig makers; you can still see the sign for Jones’s periwig shop at the top of Dawson Street. What many people do not know is that bears were kept at the back of wig shops to be slaughtered for their grease which was used as a stiffening agent to maintain the wigs’ curls.
There were hawkers of all kinds, selling everything from clogs to pease pudding. There were famous coffee shops buzzing with the latest news, where exotic animals including monkeys and parrots were fed scraps from the plates of the clientele. There were jelly houses selling confections in tall glasses and frequented by transvestites and prostitutes; molly houses were visited by homosexuals and in the taverns there were clubs of every kind including beefsteak clubs and music societies. There were lottery shops painted gaudy colours, lit with mirrors and chandeliers, with people employed especially to drag you in and encourage you to “insure” a number. The lottery took place once a week in a hall on Capel Street.
“Hell” around Christchurch Cathedral was an infamous district, so notorious in fact that Robbie Burns mentions it in one of his poems. It was crammed with gambling houses, brothels and taverns. All kinds of dog baiting, cockfighting and bare-knuckle boxing matches took place there. The name of the area may also have derived from the devilling barristers that took cheap lodgings in the area. Students at Trinity were warned if they were caught in Hell, they would be immediately expelled from college.
I was inspired to set my novel right in the centre of Dublin, on Fishamble Street, a stone’s throw from Christchurch Cathedral. My female protagonist is called Merriment O’Grady, a one-time ship’s surgeon, now an apothecary. She adopts an orphan called Janey Mack and takes in a lodger named Solomon Fish. Solomon is a broadsheet writer who cannot believe his luck as the Dolocher story begins to unfold. The book focuses on how the population of Dublin react to the notion of a preternatural creature murdering its unsuspecting citizens, picking them off one by one. And as Merriment and Solomon try to understand what the Dolocher is, they try to hold their nerve as everyone around them is panicking.
But are they hunting the Dolocher, or is the Dolocher hunting them?
While most are convinced that the Dolocher is a folk legend, a chilling tale to frighten children with, I am absolutely convinced it is true. There was a Black Dog prison; it was a famous “sink of vice”. In fact the Keeper of the Black Dog at one point in history, a man called Hawkins, was so criminal and cruel that the board were forced to fire him. The Black Dog was shut down and eventually torn down in the year 1789. And from its dank interior the Dolocher emerged, and I am certain it stalked the shadowy alleyways of Georgian Dublin for a whole terrifying winter.
[ The Dolocher is published by Black & White Publishing, at £8.99Opens in new window ]
