Dracula author Bram Stoker, pictured in 1906. Photo: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons
- An amateur Irish historian says he is still coming to terms with finding a long-lost story by Dracula author Bram Stoker.
- Gibbet Hill was published in the Dublin edition of the Daily Express in 1890 but it was forgotten over time.
- The story will be presented at this month's Bram Stoker Festival and published as a limited-release book.
A long-lost short story by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, has been re-discovered after remaining undocumented for more than 130 years.
Amateur historian Brian Cleary was doing research on Stoker in the Irish National Library last year when he came across the 1890 Christmas edition of the Dublin Daily Express, where he found a Gothic horror tale that had been lost for more than a century.
Mr Cleary said he was astounded when he realised he could have been the first person to read the ghostly tale in more than a century.
"I was doing archival research to pass the time in the National Library of Ireland and during that process I found an advert for this story and I read the words "Gibbett Hill", and I knew that that wasn't a Bram Stoker story that I'd ever heard of, and I was just astonished," he said.
"I couldn't believe it that I was potentially looking at a lost ghost story from Bram Stoker, especially a lost story from Bram Stoker around the time he was writing Dracula and that had elements of Dracula in it."
Irish National Library director Audrey Whitty said Mr Cleary had conducted "astonishing amateur detective work".
"There are truly world-important discoveries waiting to be found," she told the BBC.
Dracula is regarded as a seminal gothic novel. Here, Bela Lugosi plays the titular count in the 1931 film adaptation. Photo: Wikipeda
Gibbet Hill tells the story of an unnamed narrator who encounters three children standing by the memorial of a murdered sailor on Gibbet Hill.
The four walk to the top of the hill, where the narrator takes a nap.
When he wakes up, the children attack the narrator with a snake, and the story culminates with it wriggling out of the narrator's chest and gliding away down the hill.
It was written when Stoker was making the first notes for Dracula.
Stoker biographer Paul Murray said Gibbet Hill showed many features for which Stoker would become renowned.
"It's a classic Stoker story; the struggle between good and evil, evil which crops up in exotic and unexplained ways," he told the BBC.
Gibbet Hill, in the English county of Surrey, also features in Charles Dickens's 1839 novel Nicholas Nickelby.
The site was notorious for its criminal activity in the 18th century, including the murder of a man known as the Unknown Sailor.
The newly rediscovered story will presented at Dublin's Bram Stoker Festival this month.
It will also be published as a limited-edition book, with money going to the Charlotte Stoker Fund, dedicated to research on preventable deafness in newborn babies.
Charlotte Stoker, mother of Bram Stoker, was a pioneering social justice campaigner with a special interest in hearing loss.
Brian Cleary, the amateur historian who discovered the tale, also suffers sudden-onset hearing loss.
This story was first published by ABC News