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Trinity College: The Ghostly Scholars Who Never Left
Haunted by its former Fellows, Trinity College in Dublin is said to be filled with eerie spirits where even the bell tolls after dark when the shadows take over campus.
Haunted by its former Fellows, Trinity College in Dublin is said to be filled with eerie spirits where even the bell tolls after dark when the shadows take over campus.
Trinity College Dublin is the oldest surviving university in Ireland, founded in 1592. If we are to believe the rumors, the college is also notorious for its haunted ghost stories and is said to be one of Dublin’s most haunted landmarks.
Read More: Check out all ghost stories from Ireland
Its alumni include many great names, and some of them are more fitting to study at a haunted college than others. Most notably Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula, who studied here from 1866 to 1870. But who were the students and staff said to linger even after The Campanile bells rang for the last time?
The Haunted Trinity College
The most infamous haunting is tied to Edward Ford, a former lecturer and Fellow whose stern temperament made him deeply unpopular with the undergraduates as he had a habit of interfering with student matters, being harsh and disciplinarian. He was also very young, being around 28 when he died and is still seen by people around campus.
On March 7th in 1734, after a night of heavy drinking, a group of drunken students decided to teach him a lesson after he had scolded them after they had trashed the rooms of Ford’s colleagues, Hugh Graffan. They entered the Front Gate wearing all white, beating up the porter who was stationed there.
They wanted first to break his windows, but Ford saw them and shot at them with a pistol and injured one from his bedroom window. Now it all escalated and they came back outside of his room at House 25 in the Rubrics with firearms themselves.
They fired shots into his rooms at the Rubrics, the oldest surviving building in the college. Ford had been urged to stay in his bed, but he went to the window in his night dress and confronted the students. Two shots struck Ford in the head and body, mortally wounding him. Although a surgeon was called, he died two hours after being shot, deeply in pain. On his deathbed, he refused to reveal the names of his killers, instead uttering the chilling words: “I do not know, but God forgive them, I do.”
The matter was investigated and four students were accused, but they were all acquitted as most of the witnesses had been drinking and were unable to identify them and had contradictory stories. Although they were acquitted by the court, the Board had all of them expelled from the college.
Ford Haunting the Rubrics Building
Forgiveness didn’t seem to bring him peace however. Since then, Ford’s spirit has been seen wandering the side of the Rubrics at dusk, dressed in his scholar’s powdered wig, gown, and knee breeches.
Students and staff alike have reported catching sight of a figure gliding silently past the red-brick façade, strolling down to Botany Bay before his form vanishes into the shadows before anyone can draw closer. His presence is not vengeful however, although his murderers went without any punishment at all, and went on to have great careers, even after being expelled.
The Legend of The Campanile Bells
The Campanile in Front Square is an iconic landmark of College and was built in 1853 and although there are no ghosts haunting it per se, it certainly has a haunting superstition lingering over it.
Legend has it that if a student walks underneath the Campanile as the bell tolls within the tower, they will fail all of their exams.
Today, the bells are automated, but still, people claim they ring at completely random times and the students avoid it just in case. Some say that there is a way to avoid failing though by touching the foot of former Provost George Salmon’s statue before the bell stops ringing. Salmon is by the way known for promising that no woman would ever study in Trinity.
The Ghost of George Francis Fitzgerald
Another ghost of a former staff member at Trinity College said to haunt the campus is that of George Francis Fitzgerald. He was an Irish theoretical physicist in the 1800s and was working as a tutor at the college. He is mostly known for the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction, a theory of the relativity of space to speed. This would become important for Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
Fitzgerald died in 1901 at the young age of 41, after he became ill with stomach problems. Many attribute his illness and death to overwork.
Students now believe that the ghost of Fitzgerald haunts the Physical Laboratory, now known as the Fitzgerald laboratory even though he never stepped foot in the building when he was alive. The Physical Laboratory was built in 1905, four years after Fitzgerald’s death.
The Ghost of Thomas Meredith
Another mathematician said to haunt the halls is the ghost of Thomas Meredith who was a mathematician and a Fellow at Trinity College. He is said to glide across the grass outside the Provost’s House before disappearing when reaching Challoner’s Corner.
There are also those claiming to have seen a ghost standing in the nave of the College Chapel after evensong in the mid 19th century. This ghost however is much more mysterious and not as widely talked about.
Archbishop Narcissus Marsh was the Provost of Trinity College during the 1670s and is also one of the ghosts said to haunt the campus. First and foremost he is said to haunt the Marsh’s library right by the college campus, searching for a lost note between the pages of the books. Read more: The Haunting in Marsh’s Library in Dublin. He is however also reported to have been seen haunting the college campus.
The Ghosts of the Victims of Body Snatching
As many universities in the 18th and 19th century, Trinity College’s medical departments relied heavily on the dead bodies sold to them by body snatchers. Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, only criminals could be used legally for anatomical study. But the market for fresh corpses was higher than dead criminals, so many in medical academia turned to illegal means. A lucrative business once, people dug up freshly buried bodies to sell to the university who dissected them and studied them in the Anatomy Theatres.
In 1999, close to the Eavan Boland Library, construction workers uncovered remains of at least 20 people that had been buried in shallow graves to cover up the crimes of those buying these corpses. Their bones all showed signs of dissection and careless disposal. This was also the case close to Trinity’s old anatomy theatres at the E3 Learning Foundry where they found skeletons dating back as far as 1711.
Even to this day, staff and students claim to have experienced ghostly activity in the School of Medicine. Shadows and disembodied footsteps after nightfall are said to have made at least one night shift worker refuse to come back.
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References:
Old Trinity: Murder and sprees in rooms
The secret spirits and superstitions of Trinity
Trinity College | Explore Haunted Ireland
