The forgotten short story was recently discovered and will be read to the public for the first time this weekend at the Dublin City Council Bram Stoker Festival.
A long-lost short story by Bram Stoker, the author of the classic gothic novel “Dracula,” has been unearthed by an amateur historian in Dublin who stumbled upon the work while browsing the archives at the National Library of Ireland.
Titled “Gibbet Hill”, the story was uncovered by Brian Cleary, who found a reference to it in a Christmas supplement of the Dublin Daily Express newspaper from 1890. He made the discovery last year, after taking time off work following a sudden onset of deafness in 2021.
The short story was published just seven years before Dracula and has remained undocumented for more than 130 years. “Gibbet Hill” had never even been referenced in any Stoker bibliography.
Cleary contacted Stoker’s biographer Paul Murray, who confirmed that Gibbet Hill had indeed disappeared for more than a century.
“Gibbet Hill is very significant in terms of Stoker’s development as a writer. 1890 was when he was a young writer and made his first notes for Dracula,” Murray told AFP. “It’s a classic Stoker story, the struggle between good and evil, evil which crops up in exotic and unexplained ways.”
The macabre tale tells the tale of a sailor murdered by three criminals whose bodies were strung up on a gibbet or hanging gallows as a warning to passing travelers.
Perfect reading in the run up to Halloween… And the Dublin City Council Bram Stoker Festival knows it. “Gibbet Hill” is being published by the Rotunda Foundation – the fundraising arm of Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital for which Cleary worked – and the first public reading of the story will take place at this year’s festival, on Saturday 26 October.
Proceeds from the book will go towards the newly-established Charlotte Stoker Fund at the Rotunda Foundation, to fund research on preventable deafness in vulnerable newborns.
Dublin City Council Bram Stoker Festivaltakes place from 25-28 October.
Additional sources • Dublin City Council Bram Stoker Festival, AFP
