The Dublin Ghost Bus Tour offers a taste of the hidden, historic city, but can the tones of a comic summon up the right spirit? Eileen Battersby takes the tour to find out
The hooded figure doesn't seem to have a face. Its pale arm holds a candlestick aloft. No one could accuse it of being welcoming, yet a small group have been summoned. We are not victims - each of us is going willingly.
At this stage, cue a gust of chill air and a blood-curdling wail. But there is no thudding sound of a falling corpse, no terror - at least, not yet. On a warm, summer's evening in broad daylight on an O'Connell Street overrun by surreal crazed rabbits and the urban un-dead, we board a black and purple vehicle that admittedly looks like a bus - because it is a bus - not a hearse - and off we go, in pursuit of Dublin city's ghostly past.
Downstairs, the black panelled interior could belong to any small town undertakers across the US mid-west. Restraint dictates the mood. Admittedly a severed yellow head on a stick lies discreetly on the seat behind the stairs but no one mentions it. Perhaps it is not really there at all. On up the stairs and the passengers take their seats, a ripple of nervous laughter cuts through the silence but there is no real hysteria, not yet. And no organ music.
As European capital cities go, Dublin, the birth place of Dracula author Bram Stoker, has a past rich in invaders, revolution, foreign oppression, slum poverty, disease and wrongdoing.
No doubt the narrow laneways, musty chapels and buried church yards are thick with the ghosts of demented Vikings, wronged maidens, murdered priests and wayward nuns. Any group of tourists would be well entitled to have the socks scared off them and our little band are hopeful.
The Dublin Ghost Bus Tour is under the auspices of Dublin Bus, and is billed as a "theatrical experience". History provides the source material. There are no promises; there is no guarantee that you're going to see a ghost, warns the tour guide/actor Paul Keeley with some solemnity, adding "real ghosts are rare". Although dressed all in black, the tour guide favours conventional clothing, and could as easily be selling electrical goods. I had thought he would be carrying a skull, but never mind.
Instead of speaking in hushed tones, he has the high-speed delivery of a frantic Dublin comic, a well-developed historical sensibility and plays for laughs, informing his tour party of largely foreign visitors that "Dublin is a Martian colony founded in 1956". Which of course explains a great deal.
The man behind me sounds like he is from Ohio and mutters to his companion, "I thought it was older than that". As the ghost bus heads towards Trinity College, the guide points down river and mentions Misery Hill, "remember the name, we will be going back to it". He refers to a wedding that took place in Glencullen, Co Wicklow in the late 19th century.
"Some of the guests heard a banshee - a banshee is a woman ghost. Ban is woman and shee is ghost - a banshee foretells death."
Well, as the story goes, among those who did or didn't hear the banshee were two young girls, one of whom did hear it. After the wedding, as the tired horse pulling the carriage returned to Dublin, "something" happened on O'Connell Bridge and the horse bolted into the Liffey, carriage and all. The girl who had heard the banshee drowned and the banshee's wail was heard again at the scene of the tragedy.
Rumble past Trinity College and hear the roll call of famous names - Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker. Ever wonder where Stoker got the idea for Dracula (1897)? Well, it seems his mother often told little Bram about the cholera sufferers she had seen in the Sligo epidemic of her girlhood. Cholera victims have white faces, receding gums, bleeding teeth, bad breath and due to their un-dead type demeanour tend "not to look the best". Stoker's mother had even had a terrifying encounter with one who had tried to break in when she was at home alone.
The bus slides to a halt in Kildare Street, outside the Royal College of Physicians. The tour guide directs our attention to an upstairs window. Two women are sitting in a room, one is about to text when she becomes aware of the faces peering in at her from the top floor of a novelty bus. She moves away. The guide is now poised to introduce his major theme - body snatchers.
"Before 1800, there were only 40 doctors in Dublin; in the space of four or five years, there was nearly 400." Doctors needed bodies to practise on. Not everyone was prepared to hand over their body, living or dead, so the doctors had to call in the services of the body snatchers, undesirables who frequented burials and later returned to steal the corpse.
Body snatchers emerge as fairly desperate individuals: one of them was even prepared to pretend to be dead himself to up the fee he and his pals were to earn from one particularly nasty Dublin surgeon who taught in the college. The body snatcher was trapped in the room, lying between two dead bodies when the surgeon decided to make sure all his corpses were dead. A fight broke out and one of the protagonists fell to his death, "impaled on the railings". Meanwhile, the nasty Dublin surgeon died and was cut up by the students who hated him. His ghost patrols the college.
The bus lurches on and at St Stephen's Green we hear the story of Hempenstall, a man who stood six feet seven inches and from whose great height, people were hung. When news of Hempenstall's death went out, doctors competed for the body. People walking past the Green sometimes experience a sudden pain in their necks.
Later we stand at St Kevin's church yard, where many bodies were stolen, and a large grappling hook and rope were found. "Body snatchers wanted the cash, but they didn't like touching dead bodies for fear of disease," the guide explains. The small, atmospheric church is haunted by its priest who was murdered, and among the old graves is that of John Moore, brother of Thomas.
St Patrick's Cathedral, once the charge of the great Dean Swift, whose skull ended up in the possession of William Wilde, Oscar's father, comes into view.
One morning in the late 1880s a man awoke to discover his young wife dead beside him. Loud were his lamentations. He did however, manage to arrange her funeral. She was buried in her wedding dress inside the cathedral. A villain, aware that her wedding ring was inside the coffin, went to fetch it. Failing to wrest it from her cold finger, he began to saw off the finger. The "dead" woman began to scream. She lived for another 30 years and was eventually buried back within the cathedral. Her husband was buried outside in the church yard. Should you happen to see her ghost walking in the cathedral grounds making her way back to her beloved husband, you are likely to stay with your intended for life.
Founded by the Anglo Normans, St Audoen's is Dublin's oldest working church and is one of the city's most atmospheric sites. At the side gate set into the remains of what is left of the medieval city wall, the tour guide asked if we remembered his mentioning of Misery Hill, one of the three leper colonies once busy with Dublin sufferers.
"The lepers used to come up the river, the Liffey used to flow past here and they'd stand at that other gate and listen to the Easter service."
To the right of the gate, a series of stone steps lead to the church's main entrance. It was on those stone steps that two nuns had an unsettling experience in 1986. They found a handkerchief and met a stranger. The steps were splashed with blood. The nuns told their story to a garda who came to the scene but saw no stranger, and the blood was gone. The garda then noticed the handkerchief, covered in blood, then clean. Time shifts were involved. It seems the stranger was a leper.
A chill breeze blows on the group. The tour guide asks if anyone has ever seen a ghost.
"I think I did," volunteers a US tourist "or maybe I was only dreaming" and she shrugs, looking as if she regrets saying anything. No one speaks, but my daughter prods me, "You did, tell them, tell them."
So in the shadow of St Audeon's, in the fading evening light, I speak about our haunted house and the violent deaths rooted in its history. The tour guide says it is quite a story. An older man shivers and says, "There must be ghosts all around us, it only makes sense. Where else could all those spirits go?"
• The Dublin Ghost Bus Tour costs €25, and can be booked on www.dublinbus.ie or at Dublin Bus Office, 59 Upper O'Connell Street. Tour departs from outside the Dublin Bus office at 8pm Mon to Fri, and at 7.30pm and 9.30pm Sat and Sun. Dublin Bus says it is not suitable for children under 14