The strange goings on at number 7.
By Des Ekin.
They called it “the most haunted house in Dublin.” And until it was demolished back in 1963, the strange old quayside house at No. 7 Hendrick Street was the scene of many chilling paranormal manifestations. From 1845 right up to the early 1960s, people living there were plagued by a series of eerie supernatural happenings. Poltergeists, ghosts of the recently dead, cold blasts of air, shadowy figures, mysterious footsteps in the middle of the night… the haunted building near Ellis Quay made the old house in The Amityville Horror seem like an Ideal Home.
The most dramatic incident occurred one night in the early 1930s. The tenant of a flat in No. 7 was sitting up late in his candlelit kitchen. He was alone. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when he decided to make himself some supper. As he walked across the room towards the dresser, a steel-handled knife that was lying on the cupboard suddenly rocketed into the air. It soared several feet above his head before clattering back into its original position on top of the dresser .
But the most common of phenomena in No. 7 was the strange, inexplicable sound of footsteps in the dead of night. The midnight silence would be shattered by the sound of bare feet scurrying down the stairs, starting at the top of the house and continuing to the bottom. After 15 minutes or so, the same sound would be heard again – but the footsteps were never heard going up the stairs. There was never any rational explanation for the phenomenon.
The people living in the flats in No.7 were in terror of the phantom footsteps. They would pull the blankets more firmly around themselves, perhaps say a prayer, but never, never go out to the landing to confront the source of the strange sounds. Only once did a resident find himself on the wrong side of his flat door when the footsteps began. Arriving home late, he was carrying his bicycle upstairs to the flat when he heard the familiar sound at the top of the house. As he knew that the steps would soon reach the landing where he stood, he tried feverishly to open the door and get inside. But he was too late.
Seconds later, he heard the barefoot steps on the stairs above him. As he reached the landing, he felt “a gush of cold air” whipping across the stairwell, as the footsteps died away towards the hall below. And these were not the only ghosts reported to lie hidden in the darkness of 7 Hendrick Street. When a woman caretaker died, residents several times saw and heard her working in the back yard at night.
Another woman who’d lived in the attic of the house died, and was subsequently “seen” descending the stairs at dusk. These sightings went on for many years. For some reason, the strange manifestations in no. 7 spread to the next house No. 8. Following the sudden death of her husband, a woman living there reported how she frequently “saw” her former spouse in her living-room… sometimes standing in a corner, other times sitting by the fire.
The string of sightingn s was halted abruptly in the early Sixties when Dublin Corporation demolished No. 7 as a dangerous building. But there was one, final manifestation in June 1943, just before the bulldozers moved in. A tenant in No. 7 was walking through the hall when he reported seeing a figure “like a cloud that grew gradually larger and then vanished.” Was it the last appearance of a spook about to move house? Like the entire enigma of the Hendrick Street hauntings, it’s a question that will never now be resolved…
Sunday World (Dublin), 5th November 1989.