It’s always exciting when a collector finds a previously unknown work. Just in time for Halloween, a long-lost story by no other than Dracula author Bram Stoker has been rediscovered.
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Last year, amateur historian and longtime Stoker fan Brian Cleary visited the National Library of Ireland in Stoker’s native Dublin, Ireland, and found a story called “Gibbet Hill” in the newspaper archives. The story was attributed to Bram Stoker, but Cleary didn’t recognize it—and couldn’t find any reference to it in Stoker’s bibliographies. He contacted the library’s director and Stoker experts to verify his discovery. Paul Murray, author of the 2004 biography From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker, confirmed that this was, in fact, a lost story by the iconic writer.
The story is about a traveler to the titular Gibbet Hill in Surrey, England, who encounters such strange sights as a group of children performing a ritual by a grave and the ghosts of three men hanged for a sailor’s murder. Murray calls it “a classic Stoker story,” featuring “The struggle between good and evil, evil which crops up in exotic and unexplained ways.” These themes are part of the lasting appeal of Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and the plethora of vampire stories and especially horror movies it inspired.
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“Gibbet Hill” was originally published in the Dublin Daily Express newspaper in December 1890. After Cleary’s discovery, it is being published again, for the first time in over 130 years, by the Rotunda Foundation of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. The Bram Stoker Festival celebrated the story’s reappearance with a recent public reading, along with an exhibit by artist Paul McKinley inspired by it.
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