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North Quay Ghost Walk Tour
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From €19 per person
Dublin has more than a thousand years of history, and not all of it is comfortable to sit with. This 2-hour guided walk takes you through Oxmantown, one of the oldest parts of the city, a former Viking enclave on the north side of the Liffey, and explores its haunted past in proper detail.
Your local guide from Hidden Dublin Walks knows the stories that don’t make the usual tourist trail. The mass graves. The infamous hanging judge. The medieval ruins passed daily by thousands of commuters who have no idea what’s underneath them. Oxmantown looks ordinary enough from the surface. It isn’t.
Hotel pick-up and drop-off is not included. The tour meets outside The Church Bar on Mary Street.
Croppie’s Acre - Worth a word of warning before you visit. What was used as a football pitch in the 20th century is in fact a mass grave: the final resting place of hundreds of rebels executed after the 1798 rebellion. It’s not a comfortable stop, and occasionally the spirits here seem to make that known.
Oxmantown - The area once known as Oxmantown was a Viking settlement with over a thousand years of history. The walk takes you through its oldest streets and spaces, and your guide makes sense of what you’re looking at.
Saint Mary’s Abbey - One of the most powerful monastic settlements in medieval Ireland is now a small ruin down an alleyway, walked past by thousands of people every day without a second glance. Your guide puts it back in context.
Lord Norbury, Robert Emmet and beyond - You’ll hear the story of Lord Norbury, the notorious Hanging Judge who presided over the trial of Robert Emmet. Emmet himself is said to still appear at the window of The Brazen Head, checking whether those approaching are friend or foe. You’ll also learn about Scaldbrother, the infamous medieval thief whose buried treasure may lie somewhere in the tunnels under Smithfield, and Billy the Bowl, an 18th-century murderer born without legs who terrorised Stoneybatter and Grangegorman. The tour finishes on Hendrick Street: the site of two of Dublin’s most haunted houses, nos. 7 and 8, which between them were home to six different ghosts. Demolished in the 1960s, the buildings are gone. The guide isn’t entirely sure the ghosts went with them.
Start the evening with a drink in The Church Bar before the tour begins. The bar is literally built inside a former church on Mary Street, which puts you in the right frame of mind for an hour of hauntings. It’s worth arriving ten minutes early to have a look around.
Oxmantown rewards a return visit in daylight. The area around Smithfield and the north quays looks very different in the morning. Once you’ve done the ghost walk and have the stories, it’s worth coming back to see how ordinary and how layered this part of the city can feel at the same time.
The Brazen Head, where Robert Emmet’s ghost reportedly appears, is worth a visit on its own terms. Established in 1198, it’s generally claimed to be Ireland’s oldest pub. The Emmet story gives it an extra layer for anyone who has done this walk.
Don’t skip the history of the 1798 rebellion if it’s new to you. Croppie’s Acre, the first stop on this tour, only lands properly if you know what happened in 1798. A quick read before you go makes the stop significantly more powerful.
Stoneybatter, just west of the route, has become one of the better food and drink spots in the city. If you’re doing the ghost walk on a Friday or Saturday, it’s a good place to end the evening. It has nothing to do with the haunted history, which is rather the point.