The oldest gravestone at Friar's Bush is dated 1717, but the site is older. Legend says St Patrick built a church here. The name is said to come from secret masses celebrated under a thorn tree in penal times. One story says a friar was caught and killed on the spot.
In the early nineteenth century the graveyard was raided by body snatchers, and the high walls and Gothic gate of 1828 were built to deter them. When cholera and dysentery struck in the 1830s, and then the famine years, many dead were buried hurriedly in a mass grave. Spirited Isle says as many as 2,000 bodies lay in one overflowing pit under a thin cover of earth. It is now a mound near the gate, called Plaguey Hill. Haunted Rooms says hundreds of corpses were dumped there.
Visitors report ghost sightings and unseen hands tugging at their clothes near the pit. Tours are held around Halloween. The graveyard closed in 1869. These are modern reports, and the factual burial history is better recorded than the hauntings.
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