It is no coincidence that Trinity College has several famous writers on the dark side of humanity in its records: notably Charles Maturin and sheridan le Fanu. The whole site has a large number of locations where the visitor might expect to find a shock and maybe something inexplicable. Jean Morley, writing about Trinity suggests the extension to the Berkeley Library. When excavated in 1999, archaeologists found lots of human skeletons from centuries ago. One of the real mysteries there is that there were camel bones among the human ones.
What these remains indicate more than anything is the reign of the notorious “Burkers” – the body snatchers, so called after the Edinburgh criminals Burke and Hare. As Jean Morley points out, “The severely dismembered state of the bodies and their cumbersome arrangement in shallows pits suggests the handiwork of medical students. Prior to the 1830 Anatomy Act, medical schools relied on covert means of acquiring corpses. Having received the corpses in the dead of night in order to carry out dissections, the students would have to dump the proof of their work. The whole scenario is potentially an epicentre of paranormal activity. In fact the college has several ghost tales to tell, and some of the accounts of eerie spots around the place may relate to the Burkers. But more definite is the story of Edward Ford. Ford was a scholar who lived in the Rubrics buildings, at number 25. He had a reputation for being stubborn and prone to make mistakes based on poor judgement, and it was clearly a fun thin to stir him to a response. On one occasion some students threw stones at his window to irritate him. They got more than they bargained for because he grabbed a gun and fired on them. He shouted insults and yelled at them as he fired.
The students determined to fight back they went away to obtain their own weapons and then went back, and fired up at his window in return. The whole sorry affair turned fatal because Ford was shot and died of his wounds. According to the expert on Trinity history, Garrett Fagan, there have been sightings of a man wearing a gown and wif and having high breeches “wandering beyond the rubrics building building at dusk.” It appears that he has been mistakenly recorded as being an art student, and he has been seen disappearing on the slippery pavings of Botany Bay.
It has to be said that Trinity, on the rare occasions when it is quiet, does have that kind of atmosphere paranormal investigators sometimes call “receptive” – there is something about it that invites the unexplained and disturbing. Maybe Maturin, le Fanu (and for that matter Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker who were also here) knew something about this.