The street now known as Railway Street has worn several names in its time. Laid out in the 1760s along the course of an older route called Great Martin’s Lane, it was named Mecklenburgh Street after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III. By the late nineteenth century, its association with the Monto – once Europe’s largest red light district – led to it being renamed Tyrone Street, and then Railway Street in 1911, as if a new name might wash away the old reputation. By the early twentieth century it was among the most impoverished streets in Dublin, its Georgian houses long since carved into tenements.

But before all of that, in March 1785, it was the setting for one of the most detailed and well-documented ghost accounts in Dublin’s history.

The story was reported across several Irish newspapers and published in the Hibernian Magazine. The witness was a widow, described by those who knew her as a woman of integrity and sound character – not someone given to invention. On the night of 9th March, she went to bed in her house on Mecklenburgh Street, having locked her bedroom door. Her two children were asleep in the room with her.

She was woken by a mournful cry – the sound of a woman, coming from directly outside the door. Before she could make sense of it, the door burst open. The curtains around her bed were torn down. In a flash of light she described as being like lightning, she saw a figure standing at her bedside – tall, thin-faced, dressed in black, wringing its hands and shaking its head at her. She pulled the bedclothes over her face. The figure disappeared. Over the course of that night, it came back three more times.

The following morning, the widow told her cousin and the cousin’s new husband what had happened. The couple agreed to stay with her the next night. They saw nothing at first – but then the figure began throwing chairs around the room, filling it with groans and an extraordinary noise. The couple could not see what the widow saw, but they could not explain what was happening around them. They left the house the following day.

The account attracted enough attention at the time that someone carried out what amounts to one of the earliest recorded ghost investigations in Irish history – visiting the property, documenting the claim, and writing a poem about the experience, published in the same Hibernian Magazine that had broken the story.

The specific house has not been identified and the street has changed beyond recognition since 1785. Railway Street today bears no obvious resemblance to the Georgian terrace where the widow locked her door and the curtains came down. Whatever was in that room has left no further trace in the record.