Haunted Dublin Ghosts, Graves & the Gothic City with Donal Fallon.

After Dark at Chapters: Haunted Dublin

Ghosts, Graves & the Gothic City with Donal Fallon and Warren Farrell

Wednesday 28th October | 7pm | Chapters Bookstore, Parnell Street, Dublin 1

With the support of Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.

Dublin has always been a city with one foot in the other world.

Its streets, graveyards and literature are crowded with ghosts. Bram Stoker walked through Trinity College before he created Dracula. Sheridan Le Fanu made the supernatural unsettlingly at home in Dublin. James Joyce filled his city with the living and the dead. Dorothy Macardle, James Clarence Mangan, Oscar Wilde and Rosa Mulholland all belong, in very different ways, to the darker literary landscape of the city.

And then there are Dublin's actual places of the dead.

For this special Halloween edition of After Dark at Chapters, Dublin historian and Three Castles Burning presenter Donal Fallon joins historian, author and Glasnevin Cemetery guide Warren Farrell for a journey through the literary, historical and supernatural geography of Dublin.

Donal will take us through the haunted and Gothic city in Irish literature, exploring writers including Le Fanu, Stoker, Joyce, Wilde, Mangan and Macardle and the Dublin that shaped their imaginations.

Warren will follow the stories out onto the streets and into the graveyards. From Glasnevin and Mount Jerome to Bully's Acre, Trinity College and the old burial grounds of the city, he will explore grave robbing, body snatching, strange deaths, local legends and some of the ghost stories that have attached themselves to Dublin places over generations.

Among them are figures such as Rosa Mulholland, the remarkable Victorian Irish writer sometimes called the "Mistress of the Macabre", alongside the stories surrounding Trinity's Rubrics, the shadow of the 1832 cholera epidemic, the dead of Glasnevin and tales recorded much closer to Chapters itself.

The two strands then come together for a conversation about why Dublin seems particularly good at living alongside its dead.

Why has the supernatural occupied such a comfortable place in Irish storytelling? How much of a ghost story belongs to literature and how much to folklore, memory and place? Why do certain buildings, streets and graveyards accumulate stories? And what do the ghosts a city chooses to remember tell us about the living?

This isn't a night of jump scares.

It is a whistle-stop journey through a darker Dublin: literary, historical, strange, occasionally macabre and full of stories.

About Donal Fallon

Donal Fallon is a Dublin historian, broadcaster, author and curator. He is the presenter of the hugely popular Three Castles Burning podcast, exploring the social history of the Irish capital, and the author of books including Three Castles Burning: A History of Dublin in Twelve Streets, 14 Henrietta Street: From Tenement to Suburbia and The Dublin Pub. He is a former Historian in Residence with Dublin City Council and Social Historian with Dublin City Council Culture Company.

About Warren Farrell

Warren Farrell is a Dublin historian, author and tour guide. He has worked as a guide at Glasnevin Cemetery since 2016 and is the author of So Once Was I: Forgotten Tales from Glasnevin Cemetery, which uncovers some of the strange, surprising and frequently overlooked lives among the more than one million people buried there.

A graduate of Maynooth University in Politics and History, Warren is also a secondary-school teacher by training and works with Trinity Access Programmes at Trinity College Dublin. His second book, Curious Ireland: Forgotten People and Overlooked Places, will be published in February 2027, by Merrion Press. In his second book, Farrell aims to explore people, places, tall tales and folklore around the island overlooked by history and to try bring them back into the light and conversations.

After Dark at Chapters

After the doors should probably have closed, we keep the lights on.

After Dark at Chapters is our series of conversations, talks and events exploring books, ideas, history, culture and the wonderfully unexpected places they can lead us.

We are delighted to present this event with the support of Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, and enormously grateful for their support in helping us bring evenings like this to readers in the heart of Dublin.

Come for the ghosts. Stay for the stories.

Wednesday 28th October 2026

7pm

Chapters Bookstore, Parnell Street, Dublin 1