Emily Chan
When Brian Cleary, a pharmacist and amateur historian, was browsing the archives at the National Library of Ireland, he stumbled upon a lost story by one of history’s most influential writers.
Bram Stoker was an Irish author who is best known for writing the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula, which is about a count who lives in Transylvania as a vampire. Seven years before he published the famous novel, he wrote a short ghost story in 1890.
The haunting tale, titled “Gibbet Hill,” was printed in the Dublin Daily Express. It was quickly forgotten and has remained buried for over 130 years—until Cleary happened to come across it.
Cleary has been a long-time fan of Stoker. In October 2023, he noticed an old newspaper advertisement from 1891 in the Dublin Daily Express.
The ad referenced a short story by Stoker, which led Cleary to an issue that had been printed on December 17, 1890. It contained the entirety of “Gibbet Hill.”
“I was just gobsmacked,” Cleary recalled. “I went and checked all the bibliographies, and it was nowhere. I wanted to turn around and shout, ‘Guess what I found?’ but there were proper researchers and academics there, and I was just an amateur.”
Cleary contacted Paul Murray, an expert on Bram Stoker and author of From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker.
Murray concluded that the short story had disappeared for more than a century since it did not appear in any references or other archives.
He confirmed that “Gibbet Hill” was an authentic Stoker story. The tale is full of dark themes that Stoker included in Dracula.
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