Derrie Danders: A Walk through the Walled City’s Dark and Haunted History

If Ireland is the birthplace of Halloween (or Samhain, as the ancient festival is called in Irish), then Derry/Londonderry is where it began to flourish in modern-day culture. On this walking tour of Derry/Londonderry, where the largest Halloween street festival in Europe is celebrated, we‘ll go on a dander in and around the famous 400-year-old city‘s walls, and find some of the spookier histories that haunt its nooks and crannies.

Your walk starts and finishes near the city‘s main tourist information centre, Visit Derry, in Waterloo Place. As you walk, I‘ll tell you about plenty of characters from our city‘s past and present. At the Nerve Centre, an important organization for the city‘s creative arts, you‘ll climb the iconic Derry Walls and journey towards the Double Bastion. There, you‘ll see a cannon nicknamed Roaring Meg, and hear the screams of a famous banshee, an old woman who wails to foretell a death in a family. I‘ll show you St Augustine‘s Church graveyard where you’ll find out about the ghost of Little Weezy, whose warnings went unheard. Our tour ends close to where we started at the Tower Museum, where you‘ll learn about the skeleton in the city‘s coat of arms, representing Walter De-Burgh, who starved to death in a castle cellar after a family dispute over titles and inheritance.

Along the way, you‘ll have a chance to:

• Hear the legend of Half-Hanged McNaughten, and the tale of love that went tragically wrong
• Learn about the tragedy of those who tried to escape the potato famine aboard the SS Londonderry
• Catch a glimpse of a ghostly nun at The Playhouse, formerly a convent
• Gasp at the grim tale of the Workhouse and the Matron in Blue
• Encounter banshees and the tale of Finvola the Gem of the Roe, the Irish maiden whose Scottish prince husband kept her body not to bury her in her Irish homeland
• Find out about the Legend of Stumpy‘s Brae, the ghost at Bishop‘s Gate with only stumps for legs
• Feel the hair-raising presence of the tugging ghost of St Columb’s Hall

By the end of this 60-minute tour, you‘ll appreciate more of the city‘s unique history and understand why Halloween has become so popular here for locals and visitors alike. You‘ll also learn about aspects of the city‘s history including the 1688/89 Great Siege of Derry and the 1914-1918 First World War.

Please note: this tour doesn‘t cover the tragic events of the Troubles that affected our city and Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1994.