Said to be haunted by its former fellows, Trinity College Dublin is filled with eerie ghosts and even a bell rings after obscure when shadows take over the campus.
Trinity College Dublin is the oldest surviving university in Ireland, founded in 1592. If rumors are to be believed, the college is also eminent for its ghost stories and is considered one of Dublin's most haunted landmarks.
There are many great names among the graduates, and some of them are more suited to study at a haunted college than others. First of all, Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula, who studied here from 1866 to 1870. But who were the students and workers who would remain even after the Campanile bells had rung for the last time?
Haunted Trinity College
The most infamous haunting involves Edward Ford, a former lecturer and fellow whose austere temperament made him deeply unpopular with students because he had a habit of meddling in student affairs and had a strict and disciplinarian behavior. He was also very youthful, around 28 years elderly, when he died and is still seen by people on campus.
On March 7, 1734, after a very drunken night, a group of drunken students decided to teach him a lesson after he scolded them after they trashed the rooms of Ford's classmate, Hugh Graffan. They entered the Front Gate dressed in white, beating the gatekeeper stationed there.
They wanted to break his windows first, but Ford spotted them and shot them with a gun, wounding one from his bedroom window. Now everything escalated and they returned to his room in House 25 in Rubrice, alone with firearms.
They shot into his rooms in Rubrics, the college's oldest surviving building. Ford was urged to stay in bed, but he walked to the window in his nightgown and faced the students. Two shots hit Ford in the head and body, mortally wounding him. Although a surgeon was called, he died two hours after being shot in deep pain. On his deathbed, he refused to reveal the names of his killers, instead uttering the chilling words: “I don't know, but God forgave them, yes.”
A case was opened and four students were charged, but all were acquitted because most of the witnesses were under the influence of alcohol and could not identify them, and gave contradictory statements. Although the court acquitted them, the Management Board ordered them all to be expelled from the university.
Ford haunting the Rubrics building
However, forgiveness did not bring him peace. Since then, Ford's ghost has been seen wandering the Rubrics at dusk, wearing his scholar's powdered wig, gown, and knee-length trousers.
Students and staff alike report spotting a figure sneaking silently past the red brick facade and heading towards Botany Bay before its figure disappears into the shadows before anyone can get close. His presence, however, is not vindictive, although his murderers went unpunished and made great careers, even after exile.
The legend of the Campanile bells
The Campanile on Front Square is the College's iconic landmark. It was built in 1853, and while it isn't haunted by any ghosts per se, it certainly has some hauntings.
Legend has it that if a student passes under the Campanile when the bell rings in the tower, he will fail all his exams.
Today, the bells are automated, but people still say they ring at random times, and students avoid them just in case. Some say failure can be avoided by touching the foot of the statue of former Chancellor George Salmon before the bell stops ringing. Salmon, by the way, is eminent for promising that no woman would ever study at Trinity.
The Ghost of George Francis Fitzgerald
Another ghost of a former Trinity College employee who is said to haunt the campus is George Francis Fitzgerald. He was an Irish theoretical physicist in the 19th century who worked as a college teacher. He is best known for his Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction, the theory of the relativity of space to velocity. This would become essential for Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.
Fitzgerald died in 1901 at the youthful age of 41 after suffering from stomach problems. Many attribute his illness and death to overwork.
Students now believe that Fitzgerald's ghost haunts the Physics Laboratory, now known as the Fitzgerald Laboratory, even though he never set foot in the building during his lifetime. The Physics Laboratory was built in 1905, four years after Fitzgerald's death.
The Ghost of Thomas Meredith
Another mathematician who is said to haunt the halls is the ghost of Thomas Meredith, who was a mathematician and fellow of Trinity College. It is said to have slithered across the grass outside the Chancellor's house before disappearing as it reached Challoner's Corner.
There are also those who claim to have seen a ghost standing in the nave of the College chapel after Evensong in the mid-19th century. This spirit, however, is much more mysterious and is not talked about so widely.
Archbishop Narcissus Marsh was Chancellor of Trinity College in the 1670s and is also one of the ghosts that haunt the campus. Most notably, he is said to haunt Marsh's library just off the college campus, searching for a lost note between the pages of books. Read more: Haunting at the Marsh Library in Dublin. However, he has also been reportedly seen haunting the university campus.
Ghosts of body kidnapping victims
Like many universities in the 18th and 19th centuries, Trinity College's medical departments relied heavily on cadavers sold to them by body snatchers. Before the 1832 Anatomy Act, only criminals could legally be used for anatomical research. However, the market for fresh corpses was larger than the market for dead criminals, so many in the medical community turned to illegal means. It used to be a profitable business: people would dig up freshly buried bodies and sell them to the university, which would dissect them and study them in anatomy theaters.
In 1999, near the Evan Boland Library, construction workers discovered the remains of at least 20 people who had been buried in shallow graves to conceal the crimes of those who purchased the remains. All their bones showed signs of dissection and haphazard removal. The same was true of the elderly Trinity Anatomy Theaters at the E3 Learning Foundry, where skeletons were found dating back as far as 1711.
To this day, staff and students claim to have experienced ghost experiences at the Medical School. Shadows and disembodied footsteps after obscure are said to have caused at least one night shift worker to refuse to return.
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