Welcome back to Dispatches from Dublin! Now that I’m back in Ireland and “Hilary” term starts in a few days, it’s time to get my ass kicked in the new year. As our program head so lovingly told us before we went on break: “Rest these next few weeks because the next eight months of your lives are going to be hell.” Multiple professors also assured us this term is going to be much harder than the last. Thanks so much for the encouragement!
After an overnight ten and a half hour flight, I was wrecked when I landed and perhaps excessively mad at the injustice of the Aer Lingus flight crew not handing out their vanilla ice cream like usual. Luckily, I have this fun habit of being unable to sleep once I’ve arrived here, hence accidentally pulling an all nighter and not sleeping for almost 48 hours. So, what do you do when it’s 4:00am and you’ve been awake all night? Obviously you get up, make some poor clothing choices, and think that it would be an amazing idea to go to the old, likely empty, postgraduate reading room (aka Hall of Honor, see dispatch from October 31, 2025). This is by far my favorite place on campus…except, it turns out, at 4:30 in the morning.
After having lived and studied in multiple haunted buildings in my undergrad years, I have what I like to call my “haunt-o-meter.” Founded in 1592, Trinity is a place ripe for ghost stories and I’m currently convinced the entryway to the campus is full of ghosts. Built in the 1930s as a memorial building for students and staff who died in WWI, the reading room has always had a heavy feeling, and being in there essentially in the middle of the night with only the hundreds of worn “chemical abstracts” piled on the shelves to keep you company is rather unsettling.
I took the opportunity to get one of the prized seats on the balcony and therefore had an amazing view of the very empty room, so I’m certain I was alone when the footsteps started. It sounded like someone was circling the very balcony I was sitting on, but constantly lifting my head up from my reading, I never did see another person until 6:30am when another bedraggled grad student showed up and put me out of my misery. Although freaky, I am convinced this is a friendly ghost who just likes to pace the room and peek over the shoulders of various grad students. After all, who wouldn’t want to read about the role of praxeology in the study of intoxicants during the early modern period at 5am?
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