The Crusader Is Gone: Fire, Theft and St Michan’s Mummies

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

For most of the last century and a half, the St Michan’s mummies were one of the strangest things a visitor could see in Dublin, Ireland: brown, leathery bodies lying in open coffins in a limestone vault beneath a plain Church of Ireland parish church on Church Street. Two arson attacks and a theft have changed that. The best known of the bodies, the tall figure known as the Crusader, no longer exists.

The church above ground is still a working parish church of the Christ Church Cathedral Group of Parishes. The crypt is the reason people came, and the crypt is the part of the story that has gone badly wrong.

A Viking Foundation Under a 1686 Rebuild

The first Christian chapel on the site dated from 1095, and it operated as a Catholic church until the Reformation. That early Norse foundation gives St Michan’s its unusual claim: it is the only parish church on the north side of the Liffey surviving from a Viking foundation.

What stands today is mostly later. The current church dates from 1686, largely from a reconstruction undertaken under William Robinson, and it has served Church of Ireland parishioners for more than 300 years. A former almshouse, later used as church offices, was built on the grounds around 1720. The church was renovated around 1825, when a two-storey vestry was added on the northern side. Several grave markers in the adjoining cemetery date to the mid-17th century.

Why the Bodies in the Vaults Did Not Rot

The preservation is usually explained in plain physical terms rather than mystical ones. The walls in the vaults contain limestone, which has kept the air dry and created ideal conditions for preservation. No embalming, no ritual, just a dry chamber cut into the right rock.

The remains have included the 400-year-old body of a nun, a six-and-a-half-foot man popularly believed to have been a crusader, and a body with its feet and right hand severed. The Sheares brothers, Henry and John, who took part in the 1798 rebellion, were interred here, as were the various holders of the title Earl of Leitrim. The identification of the tall figure as an actual crusader is tradition rather than established fact, a popular belief attached to an unnamed body.

The Theft of 2019 and the Fire of 2024

The crypts have been repeatedly damaged by vandalism, including two arson attacks, and the pattern is documented rather than rumoured.

In July 1996, vandals broke into one of the church’s five burial vaults, removed bodies from their coffins and started a fire using rags and paraffin. The vault was destroyed, and water used by firefighters damaged the remains further. The disturbed bodies were reinterred at a church service, the four undamaged vaults stayed open, and the ruined one was permanently closed. Recalling the incident 23 years later, David Pierpoint, Archdeacon of Dublin and rector of St Michan’s, said the vandals had dragged bodies onto the ground and appeared to be playing football with their heads.

Over the weekend of 23 and 24 February 2019, an intruder entered the crypt again. The mummy known as the Crusader was decapitated and its head stolen along with another skull. The remains of the nun were damaged, and other bodies, coffins and the family vault of the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton were disturbed. The stolen remains were recovered by Gardai in early March 2019. Brian Bridgeman pleaded guilty to burglary and five counts of criminal damage, including two counts of damaging a dead body, and was sentenced to 28 months’ imprisonment in July 2019. After restoration work and improved security, the crypt reopened to visitors on 9 July 2019.

On 11 June 2024, an intruder deliberately set fire to the crypt. The fire, and the water used to stop it spreading into the wider church, left five mummified remains, including the Crusader, destroyed or damaged beyond repair. In February 2025, Cristian Topiter was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to arson.

The Organ Trophy and the Handel Story

Above ground, the interior holds some fine woodwork and a historic pipe organ that combines an eighteenth-century case with a twentieth-century instrument. The ornate case was built between 1723 and 1725 by the French craftsman Jean-Baptiste Cuvillies, while the present organ was built around 1940 by Evans and Barr of Belfast, the builders keeping the historic case and fitting a three-manual pneumatic console into it. Mounted on the front of the gallery is the Organ Trophy, a carved wooden panel depicting seventeen musical instruments, installed in 1724.

Long-standing local tradition holds that George Frideric Handel practised on this organ before the first performance of Messiah in Dublin in 1742. It is worth naming that for what it is. The earliest published account of the tradition appeared in 1852 and recorded that the story had long been preserved in Dublin, while noting that its accuracy could not be confirmed.

An Uncanny Place, But Not a Documented Haunting

St Michan’s has been folded into Dublin’s ghost tours and dark-tourism circuit for generations, and the vaults have the atmosphere to sustain it. The written record, though, is thinner than the reputation. There is no documented body of witness accounts here, no catalogue of apparitions, no investigation establishing anything unexplained.

What does survive is the tone of the place in print. In 1890 the guidebook writer M. J. B. Baddeley told readers that the vaults beneath the church have the property of preserving bodies from decay, repeated the claim that Dr Lucas the patriot lay here and that some said Robert Emmett did too, while cautioning that this is doubtful, and finished with the observation that anyway it is an uncanny place. That is the honest position: a genuinely eerie space, a burial ground of real Irish dead, and a set of stories that have never needed a ghost to keep going.

Visiting St Michan’s Church While the Crypt Is Shut

Before the 2024 fire, the crypt received approximately 30,000 visitors each year, reached by guided access down into the vaults. As of March 2025, public access to the crypt had been suspended for about nine months while conservation work continued. Pierpoint said the closure was expected to cost the parish between 75,000 and 100,000 euro in lost income.

Anyone planning a trip should check with the parish before travelling, since the crypt’s reopening depends on that conservation work. The church itself sits on Church Street on the north side of the Liffey, a short walk from the Four Courts, and the exterior tower with its stepped battlements and the mid-17th-century grave markers in the churchyard can be seen without going below ground. Treat it as a working church and a damaged burial site, not as an attraction built around its dead.

Address: Church Street, Dublin, Ireland

See St. Michan's Church for Yourself

Sources

• Cill Michin/Saint Michan's Church
• Brief History of St. Michan s Church Halston Street
• The Mummies of St. Michan's
• St. Michans, About Us, History, The origins of the Church and Parish
• Dublin Bucket List: the 25 best things to do in Dublin, Ireland
• Wikipedia: St. Michan's Church, Dublin

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