Bram Stoker fan Brian Cleary (R) at the National Library of Ireland.
Credit: X/@NLIreland
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.
Indeed, the story wasn’t included in Stoker’s archival papers, and was unknown to scholars, said Audrey Whitty, 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 an advertisement in the Dublin Daily Express on New Year’s Day 1891. Then he tracked down the special section in which the story had appeared two weeks earlier.
Gibbet Hill is “an important new addition to the canon,” said Paul Murray, author of the biography From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker and an expert on Stoker.
The story, and the book it will be included in, are to be unveiled to the public during Dublin’s annual Bram Stoker Festival on Oct. 25-28.
For Cleary, there’s a personal dimension to his interest in the story. In 2021, he woke up one morning to find that he had gone deaf in one ear. He discovered Gibbet Hill after he got a cochlear implant and undertook a grueling program of auditory therapy, including listening to music in the library as he did research for what he hopes will be a novel with Stoker as a character.
“A thread of deafness” runs through the Stoker family as well as his own story, Cleary said.
Stoker’s mother was a social reformer and campaigner for the deaf. One of Bram’s brothers published a paper on deafness in The Lancet; the wife of another of his brothers lost her hearing after taking malaria medication. Though he was omitted from the novel, a deaf character featured in the original notes Stoker kept for Dracula.