Gravedigger Ghost Bus Tour Dublin

Church Lane and Trinity College, the starting point

Church Lane is a short street off College Green in the very centre of Dublin, a minute from the front gate of Trinity College, the university founded in 1592 whose cobbled squares and Georgian facades frame this part of the city. This central corner is where the Gravedigger bus waits each evening, so the tour fits easily after a day of sightseeing around Dame Street, Grafton Street and Dublin Castle.

If you are wondering how to get to the meeting point, most city-centre buses and the Luas Green Line stop within a few minutes' walk at College Green and Trinity. Arrive 15 minutes early, as the crew checks bookings at the door and the bus leaves on time. Once everyone is seated the lights dim, the effects start and the first tales of plague-era Dublin begin before the bus has even left the city centre.

St Audoen's Church and the medieval city walls

St Audoen's is the oldest parish church in Dublin still in use, founded around 1190 by the Anglo-Normans and named after Ouen, a seventh-century bishop of Rouen. Its tower holds bells cast in the early 1400s, among the oldest in Ireland, and its grounds run down to St Audoen's Arch, the only surviving gate of the medieval city walls. On this Dublin ghost tour you walk through the churchyard after dark, when the narrow steps beside the old walls feel very far from the modern city.

The actor-guides use the church to bring back the plague years, when the lanes below the walls earned a grim reputation and the dead were buried in haste. A daytime St Audoen's Church tour shows you the interior and the small visitor centre in its seasonal opening hours; this evening stop is about the atmosphere outside, the worn stones and the legends linked to them, told on a short guided walk.

Kilmainham Gaol by night

Kilmainham Gaol opened in 1796 as the new county jail for Dublin and held prisoners until 1924. During the famine years men, women and children were crowded into its cells, and many people sentenced to transportation to Australia passed through its gates. In its stone-breaking yard the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed, which made the prison one of the most important places in modern Irish history; today it is a museum.

This tour stops outside the gaol at night, when the dark limestone front with its carved serpents above the door is at its most forbidding, and the guides tell the stories of the prisoners and the hangings. Entry is not included. If you want to see the cells and the yards, Kilmainham Gaol tickets are sold for timed guided visits by day and often sell out, so book them separately well ahead.

Bully's Acre, the body snatchers' graveyard

Bully's Acre, beside the old Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, is one of the oldest burial grounds in Dublin. Tradition links it to an early monastery on the site, and for centuries it was the open cemetery where the poor of the city were laid to rest without charge. It closed to new burials in 1832, after a cholera epidemic filled it within months.

Because it was unguarded, Bully's Acre was a favourite target of the resurrection men, body snatchers who dug up fresh graves at night to sell to the anatomy schools of the city. The guides lead a short walk among the leaning stones and old crosses while they tell these stories, so this is the part of the evening when you are on your feet. Wear shoes with grip, as the ground can be uneven and wet, and keep a torch on your phone ready.

Glasnevin and its guarded cemetery walls

Glasnevin Cemetery, on the north side of the city, opened in 1832 as a burial ground open to people of all faiths, at a time when Catholics still faced restrictions on their funeral rites. It is the largest cemetery in Ireland and the resting place of many figures of Irish history. Its high walls and stone watchtowers were built to stop body snatchers, and in the early years armed guards and dogs patrolled the grounds after dark.

The tour does not go inside the cemetery: the bus ends its route in Glasnevin beside the old walls, where the final tale of the night is told before you ride back to Church Lane. If you would like to visit the graves and the museum, the cemetery is open through the day, and the neighbouring National Botanic Gardens make it easy to plan a separate half-day in this quiet, leafy district.