Screams From The Past

A Dublin Ghost Story

A Garda on night duty in Dame Street, Dublin, some years ago, was startled to hear screams and shouts from nearby City Hall. He thought that perhaps somebody had been accidentally locked inside the building and had become terrified. He got help, but a thorough search of the interior revealed nothing.

Months later a Dublin Corporation waterworks department inspector on his night round also heard screams and noise from the building. He also claimed that he had seen what appeared to be a man with his clothes on fire standing at a ground floor window.

Some people believe that the screams came from the ghosts of men who were tortured and perhaps driven to their deaths there.

Built on a rock that used to be known as "Stand Fast Rock, " the place was known as the Royal Exchange and was the chief meeting place for Dublin's merchants until it was bought by the Corporation in 1852.

It was there that the terrible praotice of applying the pitchcap to the heads of "Croppies" was carried on in the two years before the 1798 Rising. The Pitchcap was a headgear filled with boiling pitch or tar and applied to those who refused to give information. It was clapped dawn on their heads and they ran screaming around the place.

One of those who wrote about these incidents was Luke Teeling, whose son, Bartholomew, was executed at Arbour Hill for his part in the French landing at Killala. He said:

"In the centre of the city the heartrending exhibition was presented of a human being, endowed with all the faculties of a rational soul besmirched with a burning preparation of turpentine and pitch, plunging in his distraction into the River Liffey and terminating at once his suffering and his life."

Robert Emmet's father saw a young man named Powell, a cousin of his own, who was a member of the United Irish Society, running down the steps of the City Hall, a blazing pitchcap on his head and the burning tar running down the back of his neck. In the middle of the road Powe11 swayed and fell. When picked up, he was dead.

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