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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.
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.
Wolfe Tone Square: This statue is located at Wolfe Tone Square, Dublin, Ireland, beside the Jervis Shopping Centre. // Source: 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.
The Hanging Judge: John Toler, 1st Earl of Norbury, known as The Lord Norbury between 1800 and 1827, was an Irish lawyer, politician and judge. A greatly controversial figure in his time, he was nicknamed the “Hanging Judge” and was considered to be one of the most corrupt legal figures in Irish history. He was Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas between 1800 and 1827.
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.
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.
Searching for its name, the utburd ghost from Norwegian folklore haunts the forests, waters and houses its parents left them to die. For the most part, they remained in folk tales, but sometimes, the stories about the dead children got real life consequences.
Perhaps one of the most well known figures from Irish mythology is the Banshee, the omen of death, wailing as death comes to a house. But where does she come from? And what does she want from the dead?
Before meeting a vampire in Transylvania, a short story places Jonathan Harket facing the undead outside of Munich. Could it have a connection to the village that according to legend, vanished suddenly in the middle ages.
One of the dark entities on the emerald island, there is the Death Coach who comes to collect the souls of the dead. Pulled by headless horses, the Cóiste Bodhar stops at nothing before its mission is complete, and misfortune happens upon those getting in its way.
In 1687, the ghost of a murdered child started to testify against its mother in northern Norway and people took it seriously. Today, the Utburd of Skåvoll or the Nille-case is remembered as the ghost story that condemned a woman to her death.
Have a look at some of the most haunted places in Dublin, from the mysteries of the Hellfire Club, churches where you can supposedly summon the devil and the dead lingering in the dusty libraries and colleges.
After strange knocking and poltergeist activity made the people at Erstad Farm believe it was haunted. And when they asked the ghost what it wanted, it unraveled the lives of more than one person forever.
Was there an iberian vampire before the European vampire panic in Eastern Europe? Who was really Conde Estruch, the vampire of Catalonia, and what happened to the witches of Llers Castle the count was said to use as his lair.
Join a haunted pub crawl through Dublin’s ancient streets for ghosts and a pint of Guinness. From plotting revolutionaries to somber writers, these pubs and bars are said to be a place where some of the patrons have been lingering for a long time.
In 1852, the alleged psychic Erika Larsdatter Bogen, arrived at Børholmen, a small island in western Norway. She claimed that she had found the ghost and corpse of the dead child, and she named the mother who allegedly buried it. But what was the truth?
Ghostly whispers in the old castle ruins, soldiers haunting the bloody battlefields and even the drums of pagan druids still lingering, Ireland is certainly a haunted country. This is only a small portion of the most haunted places in Ireland and the ghost stories behind them.
Moon Mausoleum
