Wednesday: The Mission with The Apparitions*

(*OK, so I'm clutching at straws with the rhyming titles now...)

Any historical touristy city worth its salt now has some kind of tour after dark which tells you some of the less authenticated stories about spooky and (not really)unreal goings-on of yore. Or possibly of yesteryear, which is another term people use to try and make the past sound more interesting. These usually involve some out-of-work actor, possibly a student, dressing up all funny-like and being dramatic.

In Dublin, it's the Ghost Bus Tour!



Ghost-Bus-Tour... Do you see what they did there? I have to confess that I hadn't until about half way through...

Anyway, we toured round the city on this double decker with the curtains shut and occasionally got out to tiptoe round graveyards like we were the pesky kids in Scooby Doo. The guide (Look Velma, it was the out-of-work actor all along!) took against some woman in the front row of the bus who hadn't turned her mobile phone off and demonstrated how bodysnatchers got corpses out of graves quickly using a meat hook...

Japanese tourists looked on...



And he then proceeded to tell a highly improbable story, which he said (more probably) that he got off someone in a pub, about this gravestone and why the stonemason hadn't finished carving the last letters of the name at the bottom.



This involved several supernatural events and so I prefer to consider more rational options. Perhaps he died. Or didn't get paid. Or perhaps it was a good episode of Coronation Street that night.