New Bram Stoker story found that foreshadows Dracula

In a Dublin library frequented by James Joyce and WB Yeats, beneath a turquoise and white domed ceiling and surrounded by oak shelving, Brian Cleary stumbled across something by the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker, he believed no living person had ever read.

- Ella Creamer

Cleary, who had taken time off from his job at a maternity hospital after a sudden hearing loss, was looking through the Stoker archives at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) when he came across something strange. In a Dublin Daily Express advert appearing on New Year's Day 1891 promoting a supplement to the 17 December edition, one of the items listed was “Gibbett Hill, By Bram Stoker”. He had never heard of it, and went searching for a trace. “It wasn't something that was Google-able or was in any of the bibliographies.”

Cleary tracked down the supplement and found Gibbet Hill. “This is a lost story,” he realised. “I don't think anyone knows about this.” The story follows an unnamed narrator who runs into three children standing by the memorial of a murdered sailor on Gibbet Hill, Surrey, which is also referred to in Charles Dickens' 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby.