We may have a long tradition of taking about death, and reflecting upon it in our poems and songs, but it took until 2023 before Ireland opened its first museum focused on death.
“It’s the only one in Ireland dedicated to the history and tradition of funerals,” says Cliona Purcell, head curator of the Irish Wake Museum, adding that the idea had been in gestation for some idea, with the idea of adding a companion museum to Waterford’s Museum of Time.
“For when time runs out,” says Purcell.
But it took until 2023 for the museum to open.
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“It’s quite quirky,” says Purcell, adding that it appeals to fans of dark tourism, which is a growing trend focused on visiting places traditionally associated with death and tragedy, and the macabre. Think of the Paris catacombs, or Belfast’s Titanic museum, or the 9/11 museum in New York.
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“It’s the element of tourism that’s about peeking behind the curtain from the nice side of things,” says Purcell. “People are looking for slightly darker stuff sometimes.”
Waterford may be the only Irish museum dedicated to our funeral rites, but it isn’t the only one in the world. In Vienna the Funeral Museum at the Austrian city’s Central Cemetery gives insights into the funeral and cemetery culture of past centuries, and Amsterdam also has a funeral museum.
While the team behind the museum in Waterford considered these in their approach, the appeal of the Irish Wake Museum is that Irish people are seen to do funerals differently.
“It’s something to be proud of. What makes us unique is we’ve kept up a lot of traditions,” says Purcell, adding that visitors tend to be evenly split between Irish and international tourists.
The traditional wake is still common in rural areas around the country. And it can come as a shock to those visiting the museum, just how open Irish people can be around death.
Purcell recalls her London-born partner attending a wake for one of her relatives some years ago, his first experience of an Irish funeral, and his first time seeing a dead body.
After coping with the first part of the evening, he finally faltered.
“He was hidden in a corner at some point, and I said ‘you don’t look well’,” says Purcell. The reason? Her father had sat down beside the deceased relative and started eating a sandwich.
Back to Waterford, where a trip to the museum is an exploration of life and death, and you’ll learn about traditions and superstitions, from early Christian times to the 20th century.
It’s a guided tour, which takes about an hour, and covers thousands of years of traditions being formed (adults €11/children +8 €6). Subject matter may not be for all – it is advised for children aged eight and over.
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So what can you expect to see?
One of the items on view is Ireland’s oldest death mask, created in 1658 for Luke Wadding. A death mask is a mold of a dead person’s face, typically made in wax or plaster cast.
Wadding was a Franciscan friar (you’ll see a statue of him at the entrance to the French Church in the city) who has been credited with inventing St Patrick’s Day- when creating a calendar of the saints, he assigned March 17th to St Patrick.
Victorian mourning jewellery is another item on display at the museum, with people of that era often holding a lock of hair in a locket or other form of jewellery to remember their loved ones.
“One of my absolute favourite objects is a set of false teeth,” says Purcell.
Unlike today’s dentures, these teeth were made with real human teeth and bring to mind another unpleasant aspect of history – body snatching.
While death might come for us all, unless we decide to donate organs, we can typically expect our bodies to remain intact. But this wasn’t always the case in days gone by.
“Dying wasn’t the only thing you’d be afraid of – there were still different things they could do to you,” says Purcell, adding that teeth were always valuable. Human teeth were often called Waterloo teeth at the time, because the battlefields of slain soldiers were pillaged for their teeth, to be sold on for dentures.
But it is upstairs that may not be for the fainthearted.
On the top floor of the museum is the wake room, where a life-like artificial body – dubbed Auntie Nora by the guides – is laid out on her bed.
And she has the power to frighten some.
“We see it here occasionally, people who’ve never seen a dead body before,” says Purcell, “so we’ve had some slight wobbles from people.”
There is a great attention to detail in the room, and it’s furnished with genuine relics – the crucifix on the wall is from Cliona’s family, for example.
As in a traditional house during a wake, the windows are open for the soul to escape, and the mirrors are covered so the deceased doesn’t see their reflection and decide not to leave. As in the WH Auden poem, the clocks are stopped.
But, as anyone who has been to an Irish funeral can attest to, it’s not all sad, and particularly in days gone by, the wake was an occasion for a social gathering, Women took snuff, the men smoked a pipe and people amused themselves.
Purcell recalls “wake” games, such as getting under the bed of the corpse and frightening people entering the room by pretending to make the body move; card games were played, with a hand dealt to the dead person; so much fun was being had, in fact, that the church banned younger people from attending a wake from sunset to sunrise.
“It wasn’t unusual for a wedding to follow a wake quite closely,” says Purcell.
One of the most exciting aspects of the museum is the building itself, says Purcell, which dates from the late 15th century and is located on the city’s Cathedral Square.
Built as the former Dean John Collyn’s Almshouse, it was much like a retirement home today, and was called ‘God’s People’s House’, offering local people a death with dignity.
The occupants of the former alms houses paid for their keep by praying three times a night for the souls of its patrons and the souls of the deceased citizens of Waterford.
“It’s an incredible building,” says Purcell, noting that while archaeologists and other experts spent two years working on it, “they’ll never get to the bottom of all the details”.
“People are always interested in layers of history, and in the Irish Wake Museum, the layers are more obvious. You can see the centuries piled up on top of each other. It’s incredibly evocative,” says Purcell.
In one architectural report it was noted that “the survival of this building is nothing short of a miracle”. Not because it’s such an important building, but rather because it was always people in poverty who lived in it.
“Anyone who ever lived there, lived in poverty. Nobody ever had the money to do it up,” says Purcell.
For the curator, the property is home to “mad mysteries”, such as windows coming through the floor, while there were three front doors at the back of the building.
“One of my favourite details is the hand-painted plaster,” says Purcell, noting that in the 18th century, ornate wallpaper was the fashion. However, it was also expensive.
But someone at the property tried to recreate this look by painstakingly painting a pattern themselves throughout the property, an 18th century DIY aficionado.
Some of this plaster is still on display in the museum, while a sewer, which runs underneath the property, has been repurposed to display artefacts. Also impressive is an original fireplace, which was hidden behind its modern equivalent.
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Since its early use as an almshouse, the property was subsequently passed into residential use with the last inhabitants moving out in the early 2000s. The house was acquired by compulsory purchase order by Waterford City council in 2012 from a private owner.
Now former residents are happy to see the property back in use, and have been in to see it with their families. Some have interesting stories to tell.
One former inhabitant asked Purcell “have you seen the ghosts yet”, while Purcell was heartened to hear that one resident gave birth to her two children in the house. Death into life – “it brought it all full circle”, she says.
