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Legends, Ghosts and Ghouls Walking Tour Dublin
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From €14 per person
Ireland has always had a strange relationship with its past. The old gods were never quite forgotten here - as scholar Mark Williams puts it, they were demoted to lesser beings, kept alive through the poets and storytellers who refused to let them go.
This 2-hour walking tour weaves two threads of Dublin’s history together: the ancient legends passed down through the Filí and the Seanchaidhe, and the more recent world of Dublin’s literary and occult underground - the ballrooms, salons, and private studies where secret esoteric orders tried to unlock the mysteries of existence.
Along the way, your storyteller guide covers some of the city’s most unsettling stories:
Meeting point: Your guide meets you in front of a historic house at the start point - details confirmed on booking.
The tour is conducted in English and takes groups of up to 15 people. Suitable for all fitness levels. Strollers are welcome. Service animals are allowed. Public transport is available nearby.
The Shelbourne Hotel on St. Stephen’s Green has been one of Dublin’s most storied addresses since 1824. It’s where the Irish Constitution was drafted in 1922, and the ghost stories associated with it go back well before that. If you want to extend the evening after the tour, the Horseshoe Bar inside is worth knowing about - it’s one of those Dublin institutions that doesn’t need to advertise itself.
Maud Gonne and WB Yeats are one of the great complicated relationships in Irish literary history. Yeats proposed to Gonne multiple times; she consistently refused. Her involvement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - and the seances and rituals that went with it - is the kind of detail that gets glossed over in the standard literary biography but makes perfect sense when you’re standing in the right part of Dublin.
Bram Stoker was a Dubliner, born in Clontarf in 1847, and the city shaped him in ways that show up throughout Dracula if you know where to look. Your guide will make those connections - it adds a layer to the novel that you’ll notice on a reread.
Darkey Kelly’s story is one of the darkest in 18th-century Dublin. She was a brothel madam on Copper Alley who was executed in 1746, allegedly for witchcraft and infanticide. The true circumstances of her case have been debated ever since, and some historians argue she was protecting a far more powerful figure. The guide handles it with the seriousness it deserves.
The tour works particularly well after dark, when St. Stephen’s Green and the surrounding streets have a different quality to them. It’s worth checking the start time when you book - an evening slot adds atmosphere that an afternoon start can’t quite match.