Galway Shopping Centre: The Builders Beneath the Wall

The Galway Shopping Centre hides one of the city’s most unsettling stories. Long before it became a retail hub, this ground was Corbert’s lumber yard, which burned in 1972. When construction began a decade later, builders uncovered preserved sections of the medieval city wall and carefully incorporated them into the new structure. In 1979 a violent storm tore a section of that wall down onto a Ford Transit van where four vagrants had taken shelter. Three men were killed instantly while a fourth crawled free. Their names were soon forgotten until forty years later. In 2019 two American ghost hunters visited the site and set up instruments beside the Shoemaker’s Tower. Their devices spiked and they claimed three male spirits were trying to communicate. Brian Nolan, who knew the site’s history, asked how many ghosts they had found. They told him three. He then told them about the three men crushed beneath the wall in 1979, a detail not published anywhere. The colour drained from their faces. How could they have known? Today, shoppers hurry past without realising that the old wall beneath their feet holds both medieval mortar and modern souls. If you pause by the tower at closing time, you might feel the faintest tremor in the glass, as if the building itself remembers.