Ireland Trip Part 19: Galway and a Terrible Haunting Secret

Nice dinner at the Cellar Bar

This is our Ireland Trip blog Part 19: Galway and a Terrible Haunting Secret. In this blog we'll take you on a walk around Galway and point out some historic and interesting places. What is Galway's most haunting and terrible secret that led to people fleeing the church, and ghostly screams still being heard today?

GETTING TO GALWAY BY TRAIN - A  We took the train to Galway, which was a nice 2 hour ride from the Hueston station in Dublin. The trains are clean and comfortable, and had plenty of room for luggage. Each ticket has an assigned seat number and we sat at a "table" and two women we didn't know sat across from us (but didn't talk to us the entire way). It's a great way to travel-  and we got to see a lot of green countryside. We did notice that there were a lot of stone-stacked walls separating pasture land.

NICE ACCOMMODATIONS - We stayed at the Radisson Blu in Galway, right next to the train station. The hotel was beautiful and we had a room with a nice view of Galway Bay. This is the place to stay in Galway. The service was great, and the front desk staff helpful. Everything was clean, and the breakfast was wonderful. Once we got into town we stopped and had a nice pub dinner at the Cellar Bar.,

The church where unmarried women were abused and their children killed

THE TERRIBLE HAUNTING SECRET OF GALWAY - Well, it's not so secret anymore, but it was. During our "Haunted Galway Walking Tour" with Brian Nolan, we learned about a church with a tragic past. Brian told us about horrific abuses of single mothers and murder of their children by the church.
  - A building was built over a mass grave and ghostly screams have been reported many times coming from it. The building is now empty, but once housed a bank.

Here's the article about the horror from the Guardian.com:
Tell us the truth about the children in Galway's mass graves Emer O'Toolehttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/04/children-galway-mass-graves-ireland-catholic-church


The bodies of 796 children, between the ages of two days and nine years old, are believed to have been buried in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway. They died between 1925 and 1961 in a mother and baby home under the care of the Bon Secours nuns.

 Cries of women and children heard from here

Locals have known about the grave since 1975, when two little boys, playing, broke apart the concrete slab covering it and discovered a tomb filled with small skeletons. A parish priest said prayers at the site, and it was sealed once more, the number of bodies below unknown, their names forgotten.
The Tuam historian Catherine Corless discovered the extent of the mass grave when she requested records of children's deaths in the home. The registrar in Galway gave her almost 800. Shocked, she checked 100 of these against graveyard burials, and found only one little boy who had been returned to a family plot. The vast majority of the children's remains, it seemed, were in the septic tank. Corless and a committee have been working tirelessly to raise money for a memorial that includes a plaque bearing each child's name.
For those of you unfamiliar with how, until the 1990s, Ireland dealt with unmarried mothers and their children, here it is: the women were incarcerated in state-funded, church-run institutions called mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums, where they worked to atone for their sins. Their children were taken from them.
FULL STORY: http://www.theguardian.com/

(NOTE: The Ireland Blog resumes in 2 days)
NEXT: GALWAY'S JFK SITE , JAMES JOYCE'S WIFE'S TRAGIC LOVER