General
A Fan Discovers a New Story by the Author of ‘Dracula’
The work by Bram Stoker, previously unknown to scholars, will be read and included in a book launched during Dublin’s annual Bram Stoker Festival.
Brian Cleary, a clinical pharmacist in Dublin, was trawling through the archives at the National Library of Ireland a few years ago when he stumbled across something extraordinary: a virtually unknown short story by Bram Stoker, author of the Gothic masterpiece “Dracula.”
The story, a creepy tale of the supernatural called “Gibbet Hill,” had been published in a now-defunct Irish newspaper in 1890, but had not appeared in print or, it seemed, been mentioned anywhere since.
“I was just gobsmacked,” said Cleary, who works as the chief pharmacist at the Rotunda maternity hospital and has long been fascinated by Stoker. “I went and checked all the bibliographies, and it was nowhere. I wanted turn around and shout, ‘Guess what I found?’ but there were proper researchers and academics there, and I was just an amateur.”
Indeed, the story wasn’t included in Stoker’s archival papers, and was unknown to scholars, said Audrey Whitty, the director of the national library. While it isn’t unusual for something unexpected to turn up in the library’s archives — a collection of 12 million items — Cleary’s discovery stands out for the way he made it, she said.
He first spotted a reference to “Gibbet Hill” in a promotional advertisement in the Dublin Daily Express on New Year’s Day, 1891. Then he tracked down the special section in which the story actually had appeared — two weeks earlier, on Dec. 17, 1890 — and where it had been “hidden in plain sight,” she said.
