THE MOST GRUESOME IN OUR HISTORY

EVER heard about the Irish woman who was the real Pirate Queen of the Caribbean? Or the woman who brought plague on a population?

EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum, has brought some of our most horrible people in history to life to mark Halloween.

Anne Bonny was born in County Cork some time in 1698 and went with her family to the New World after her father’s reputation was ruined by a seedy affair — the one she was the result of. Anne’s mother later died from typhoid fever, and Anne was left to manage the household, turning into more than a teenage rebel.

Her dad disowned her as her reputation was damaging his legal career and Anne married a lowly sailor John Bonny, before becoming bored and hooking up on the high seas with a colourful pirate named ‘Calico Jack’ (John Rackham). Calico Jack even offered to pay John Bonny to divorce Anne, but he refused. Disregarding this, Anne abandoned her husband and set off to sail the seas with Calico Jack and another female pirate named Mary Read. Their crew engaged in piracy, wreaking havoc and raiding merchant vessels off the coast of Jamaica.

But the law eventually caught up with them — Calico Jack was hanged while Anne and Mary escaped execution, due to pregnancy. Mary died in the prison the following year, but it is not known what happened to Anne. Some say she was released due to the influence of her lawyer father.

Mary Mallon, who later became known as Typhoid Mary, was born in Ireland in 1869 and emigrated to America in 1884. She worked as a domestic cook for a number of wealthy New York families, and for many years went unnoticed. Yet, as would become apparent, she was the cause of several outbreaks of typhoid, some of which resulted in numerous deaths. As it turned out, Mary was the first documented healthy carrier of typhoid fever in America.

And murderers Burke and Hare both came from the north of Ireland, and moved to Scotland to work on the Union Canal as navvies. They met each other and became good friends while in Edinburgh, where they lived on the same street.

They would go on to become two of Scotland’s most notorious criminals, guilty of some seriously gory crimes. They were not grave-robbers, as popular belief might have it, but murderers — supplying freshly deceased bodies to medical and anatomical schools for study and dissection.

If you want to find out more about some of our most gruesome characters, you can drop into EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum which is open seven days a week from 10am, to hear more horrible histories of our ancestors. See epicchq.com