In a cemetery turned into a public park, the Wolfe Tone Square is said to be haunted by John Toler, one of Ireland’s most haunted man and remembered as the Hanging Judge.
Along Jervis Street in Dublin, the hum of the city never seems to stop and Wolfe Tone Square, a public place that hides a far darker past beneath its modern surface. Long before cafés and benches filled the square, this ground was home to St. Mary’s Church and Graveyard, and later the site of a hospital where countless souls drew their final breath.
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Around the mid-1800s, the graveyard was so overcrowded, they had to gig up buried people to make rooms for others. Still after the area was turned into a park, the last burial was in the 1950s. The earth here has seen centuries of sorrow, and some say it has never forgotten.
Ag Crú na Gréine “Enjoying the Sun” (2003)
The Hanging Judge Haunting Wolfe Tone Square
Among the many buried in St. Mary’s is one man whose presence still disturbs the peace is thought to be the ghost of John Toler, the Earl of Norbury, known to history as the “Hanging Judge.”
During his lifetime, Toler earned his grim nickname for his unrelenting cruelty in sentencing men and women to death, often delivering the verdict with a smile. He was deemed Ireland’s most hated man in the 1700s.
One of his most infamous judgments was against a young man convicted of sheep stealing, a crime that, even then, rarely merited the noose. But Toler showed no mercy. The young man was hanged, leaving behind a heartbroken widow. He was also the one who hanged the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet, making him the most hated man in the country.
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Before she died, the widow is said to have placed a curse upon Toler, condemning him to never find rest in death. When Toler himself passed in 1831, his body was laid to rest in St. Mary’s Graveyard, but his peace was not to last. Some say that his ghost is haunting the area in the form of a black dog. There are also those who talk about eerie sounds near the graveyard — the clanking of heavy chains and the slow, dragging footsteps of something unseen. The noise, they said, would travel from Cabra to Jervis Street, echoing through the night as though the Hanging Judge himself were being marched to an eternal gallows.
There are also people talking about another ghost of a tall dark figure, passing through a wall and walking across the square in the night. The thing is, the bottom part of his legs are underground.
The Haunted Wolfe Tone Square
Even now, after the graveyard has been cleared and the square transformed, there are whispers that the Earl of Norbury still walks, bound to the earth by the widow’s curse. On quiet nights, when the city falls still, some claim to hear the faint rattle of iron links and the hollow tap of boots across the stones. Few linger long once the sound begins. Wolfe Tone Square may be a place of rest for Dubliners today, but for one soul beneath its soil, rest will never come.
In the early 2000s, excavations uncovered “consideral quantities” of human skeletons were uncovered and sent to museums before the area was covered with gravel and concrete, trying to keep the remaining buried bodies buried.
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