More Ireland

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Tonight we went on "the world's only ghostbus tour". It was pretty spectacular and probably my favorite thing we've done in Ireland so far. We had a very good guide who was oddly hilarious for such a somber topic. The tour started out with a ghost story involving the very bus we we're riding in, which is how it came to be the ghostbus tour. It was one of the few ghost stories in which a ghost came from the future rather than the past, so that was fascinating. Next, we learned about Abraham "Bram" Stoker's twisted mother, who was terrorized by cholera victims while growing up and who tormented her son with horrific bed time stories involving the walking dead as they were called. So that's where he got a lot of the details and ideas for his Dracula tale. Our next stop involved us getting out of the bus and touring a graveyard. It is where a Blessed (not quite Saint) Archbishop from the 1500s is buried, and also where the Irish version of the Inquisition took place. There is quite an evil history of that place, Satanic rituals and bizarre happenings have been happening at least once every century since the 1500s, the last being in 1957. We also learned how body snatchers operated during the early 1800s when bodies were high in demand (for anatomy studies). Really fascinating part of the tour. Our 4th stop was the Haunted Steps leading to the Gate to Hell (no joke). There was an underground society named Hell and the gate we walked through was the only entrance into it. The site is also famous for a character named the Sandyman, who is the Irish boogey man. There was a fascinating ghost story involving this character and two nuns. One of the nuns tripped on the steps in 1955 and fell into a pool of blood. She found a disembodied thumb and wrapped it in her white hankerchief. Then the nuns saw the Sandyman and ran to the police. When the police investigated, they discovered that the hankerchief was no longer bloodstained and the thumb had mysteriously vanished. The nuns took that as a sign of intervention. Pretty creepy stuff. The final stop on the tour was the graveyard at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, where we heard the ghost tale of the Lady in White, Ireland's most famous ghost story. According to the tour guide, the terms 'saved by the bell' and 'dead ringers' both originated in Ireland. Many bodies were accidentally buried alive, so many bodies buried were attached to bells above ground. If the body woke up, the bell would ring and the graveyard caretaker would dig up the grave to save whoever was down there. (saved by the bell). Dead ringers means someone who looks strikingly similar to someone else. This term came around because once the bodies were brought back, people who thought they were dead would see them walking around on the streets. That must have been terrifying. The tour was a tad expensive at 25 euro, but I strongly recommend it.