Irish Vampire: Abhartach, Dearg Due And Dracula's Roots

Ireland’s best-known vampire legend is Abhartach (say AV-ar-tukh), a tyrant dwarf from Slaghtaverty, Co. Derry, who kept rising from his grave. The first printed telling, in P. W. Joyce’s 1869 book on place names, has no blood-drinking. That first appears in print in 1997. Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, was Irish, born in Dublin in 1847. His notes show the name came from an 1820 book on Wallachia.

Near Garvagh, in Co. Derry, there once lived a dwarf. According to the story, he was “a magician, and a dreadful tyrant”, and his neighbours had had enough of him.

A neighbouring chieftain killed him and buried him standing up. The next day he was back, “more cruel and vigorous than ever”. It happened twice. Only when a druid advised killing him a third time and burying him head downwards did he stay put.

That is the legend of Abhartach as P. W. Joyce printed it in 1869, the closest thing Ireland has to a native vampire. Online you’ll also find a blood-drinking chieftain, a tragic Waterford bride and a secretly Irish Dracula. Most of that was added in the 20th century, and some of it very recently. Here’s what the old sources, and Stoker’s own notes, actually say.

Abhartach: what the oldest source says

Joyce’s story is on pages 304 and 305 of The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (Dublin, 1869). He wasn’t collecting ghost stories. He used the tale as an example of an old pagan custom, burying a chief standing up. He heard it from people in the district, “one of whom told it to me”.

What the name Slaghtaverty means

Joyce also explains the townland name. Slaghtaverty, in the parish of Errigal, comes from Leacht Abhartaigh (say lakht AV-ar-tee), the grave monument of the dwarf. A townland, for American readers, is Ireland’s smallest land division, often a handful of farms. Derry’s official name is Londonderry, and you’ll see both.

Leacht (the ch as in “loch”) means a grave mound or cairn. Joyce spelled the sound of abhartach out himself as “avartagh”. The everyday Irish for dwarf is abhac (OW-uk).

What is not in Joyce

Joyce never uses the word vampire. There is no blood in his version at all.

There’s no bowl of blood, no yew sword, no thorns and no saint. By the 1871 third edition, Joyce had added only that “some say” the killer was Finn Mac Cumhail, the great hero of Irish legend.

There are older traces. In 1814 the Rev. George Vaughan Sampson listed a cromlech at Slaghtaverty, “the death-place of Avertagh, a celebrated giant of ancient times”. There’s no story, just a giant.

In the 1830s the Ordnance Survey scholar John O’Donovan noted that Finn Mac Cool killed “Averty”, an enchanter. Finn buried him head downwards, “lest he might effect a resurrection”. A survey memoir from the same years has a magician dwarf who kept coming back out of the ground. Both stayed in manuscript for decades, so Joyce’s 1869 version is the first found in print.

The National Folklore Collection at duchas.ie has no telling, though its 1930s Schools’ Collection skipped the six northern counties.

How Abhartach got a taste for blood

The blood-drinking Abhartach you’ll meet online comes from much later sources. The earliest found is The Un-Dead (1997), a Dracula book by Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne. In it a chieftain called Cathán kills Abhartach, who returns seeking “the blood of the living”.

A druid then tells Cathán to kill him with a sword of yew and bury him head downwards. Mountain ash twigs and a great stone go on top.

In 2000 Bob Curran, a folklore lecturer at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, wrote “Was Dracula an Irishman?” for History Ireland magazine. His Abhartach demands a bowl of his subjects’ blood. Depending on the version, a druid or an early Christian saint gives the cure. It’s a yew sword, burial upside down, thorns and ash twigs round the grave and a heavy stone on top.

Curran also gives the Irish terms neamh-mhairbh (the un-dead) and dearg-diúlaí (red sucker). Neither is new. An Gúm’s Irish translation of Dracula, first published in 1933, uses neamh-mhairbh for Stoker’s Un-Dead. Haining and Tremayne had already called Abhartach’s story one of a dearg-diúlaí.

His article’s reading list names The Un-Dead, and he repeats its phrase “sustain his vile corpse”. The bowl, the saint and the thorns seem to be his additions. Oral stories do change, but no blood-drinking Abhartach appears in print before 1997.

Old story or new? A quick guide

Most pages online tell Curran’s version as “the ancient legend”. Here’s where each piece actually comes from.

Detail	Earliest source found
A “celebrated giant” called Avertagh died here	Sampson, 1814
Finn kills an enchanter and buries him head downwards	O’Donovan, 1830s (printed 1897)
A dwarf, magician and tyrant, buried standing, returns twice	Joyce, 1869
A druid advises burial head downwards	Joyce, 1869
Seeks “the blood of the living”	Haining and Tremayne, 1997
Cathán, a druid, yew sword, ash twigs, great stone	Haining and Tremayne, 1997
A bowl of blood, a saint, thorns	Curran, 2000
Chainsaw failing at the grave	Modern local tale, no early source

The Slaghtaverty Dolmen, or Giant’s Grave

Joyce wrote that the monument raised over the dwarf “is still there”. It still is, more or less.

Locally it’s the Giant’s Grave, which fits Sampson’s “celebrated giant”. It’s a big stone and a few smaller ones under a twisted hawthorn near Garvagh. Curran says farmers once took more stones away for building.

Online it’s usually the Slaghtaverty Dolmen. A dolmen is a prehistoric tomb with a flat capstone on upright stones. Sampson called it a cromlech in 1814, and W. C. Borlase listed it as a dolmen in 1897. The 1940 survey of Northern Ireland’s ancient monuments calls it a cairn.

The hawthorn and the chainsaw

A modern story, repeated locally and all over the internet, says people once tried to clear the tree. The chainsaw kept cutting out. Then the chain snapped and badly cut a workman.

It’s a recent tale, not old folklore, and no early source has it. But according to tradition a lone hawthorn is a fairy tree and best left alone, so the story fits.

Can you visit the Slaghtaverty Dolmen?

The cairn sits in a field in Slaghtaverty townland, a short drive from Garvagh. It’s private farmland, not a visitor site.

Ask the landowner first, close gates and leave the stones and tree alone. After the chainsaw story, that last part shouldn’t be hard.

For more places with a shiver attached, see my list of haunted places around Ireland.

The Dearg Due: an Irish vampire or a modern one?

Search for Irish vampires and you’ll soon meet the Dearg Due. The usual tale has a beautiful Waterford girl forced to marry a cruel man. She dies, then rises from her grave to drink men’s blood.

It’s a good story. There’s no evidence it’s an old one.

The earliest trace in print is two sentences in Dudley Wright’s Vampires and Vampirism (London, 1914). “Legend has it” that a “beautiful female vampire” lies under a little graveyard near “Strongbow’s Tower” in Waterford. There’s no name, no story and no source.

How the name got attached

Montague Summers, in The Vampire in Europe (1929), said there “is not nor ever was” a Strongbow’s Tower in Waterford. He guessed Wright meant Reginald’s Tower, and the historian W. H. Grattan Flood told him no vampire legend attached to it. On the same page Summers said the Irish vampire was “generally known as Dearg-dul”, a “red blood sucker”. He gave no source, and didn’t tie the name to Waterford.

Anthony Masters respelled it Dearg-due in 1972. Peter Haining’s The Leprechaun’s Kingdom (1980) is the earliest book found that calls the Waterford vampire “the beautiful female Dearg-due”. Matthew Bunson repeated it in 1993.

Both books misprint the tower as “Strongbow’s Tree”, a hint that one copied the other. No source found from before 2000 tells the forced-marriage story.

What does Dearg Due mean?

Half of it means something. Dearg (say DYAR-ug) is Irish for red. “Due” isn’t an Irish word at all.

The nearest real Irish is diúlaí (DYOO-lee), a sucker, which gives the modern coinage dearg-diúlaí, “red sucker”. No early Irish text found uses it.

Bram Stoker: Dracula’s Irish author

Abraham “Bram” Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, on Dublin’s north side. That was Black ’47, often called the worst year of the Great Famine.

He was a sickly child. In his own words, “till I was about seven years old I never knew what it was to stand upright”. He made up for it at Trinity College Dublin, where he became athletics champion.

From Dublin Castle to the Lyceum

Then came ten years as a civil servant at Dublin Castle. His book The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879) was, he admitted, “dry-as-dust”. Not the obvious start for a horror writer.

From 1871 he also reviewed plays, unpaid, for the Dublin Evening Mail. The 1870 Newspaper Press Directory lists its owners as Henry Maunsell and Sheridan Le Fanu. Remember that name.

In 1878 he married Florence Balcombe, once courted by Oscar Wilde, and moved to London to manage Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre.

Dracula came out in London in May 1897, from Archibald Constable and Company, in yellow cloth at six shillings. The printer’s typescript was titled The Un-Dead. Stoker died in London on 20 April 1912.

Dracula’s Irish origins: what scholars say

Dracula is set in Transylvania and England. Still, scholars have found plenty of Ireland in it. These are readings, not proven facts.

Carmilla, the Irish vampire story that came first

Le Fanu’s Carmilla ran as a serial in 1871 and 1872, a quarter of a century before Dracula. It’s a female vampire story set in Styria, in Austria.

Stoker’s early notes set his own story in Styria too. Scholars also compare Le Fanu’s vampire expert, Baron Vordenburg, with Van Helsing, and the victims waste away in much the same way.

His mother and the Sligo cholera

Stoker’s mother, Charlotte, was born in Sligo in 1818. She lived through the 1832 cholera outbreak there, which officially killed 643 people in a town of about 15,000. Her family fled to Ballyshannon.

In 1873 she wrote down her memories, including hasty burials of people who may not have been dead. Bram used them in “The Invisible Giant” (1881). Marion McGarry, writing in the Journal of Medical Humanities in 2022, argues the epidemic also shaped Dracula.

Landlords, the Land War and Henry Irving

Critics such as Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane read the Count as a caricature of the Anglo-Irish landlord, bleeding his tenants dry. The Anglo-Irish were the Protestant landowning class who held most Irish land.

Bruce Stewart, in the Irish University Review in 1999, reads the novel against Irish politics and the Land War. That was the tenant farmers’ campaign against landlords from 1879. Critics argue about these readings for a living, so take them or leave them.

Many biographers also see Stoker’s boss, Henry Irving, in the Count’s looks and manner.

Did Abhartach inspire Dracula?

Probably not. The idea was popularised by Curran’s 2000 article, 103 years after Dracula came out.

The evidence is thin. Curran says Joyce told the tale in a History of Ireland of 1880, which Stoker “is believed” to have read. But the tale is in Irish Names of Places (1869), and no Joyce history from 1880 has turned up.

Curran also calls Stoker a Dublin civil servant at the time. By 1880 he wasn’t. He had moved to London in 1878.

He also cites the neamh-mhairbh in Geoffrey Keating’s 17th-century history, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. Curran points to chapter ten. A search of the full Irish text, both books, on University College Cork’s CELT website finds no such word.

Stoker’s notes never mention Abhartach, and they point to Transylvanian travel books instead. Could he have heard the tale? Of course. There’s just no evidence he did.

Where the name Dracula really came from

Here we don’t have to guess. Stoker’s notes survive at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, and they were published in 2008 as Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula.

The earliest dated note is from 8 March 1890, when the villain was still Count Wampyr. That summer, in Whitby’s library, Stoker read William Wilkinson’s 1820 book on Wallachia and Moldavia. Wallachia is now part of Romania.

Wilkinson mentions a ruler “also named Dracula”, with a footnote Stoker copied down: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil.” Count Wampyr became Count Dracula.

Does “droch fhola” mean bad blood?

You’ll often read that Dracula comes from the Irish “droch fhola”, meaning bad blood. The claim is older than you’d think. It was in print by 1990, in an essay by Alan Titley, and Curran spread it widely in 2000.

The words are real Irish, but the link isn’t. The Irish for bad blood is drochfhuil (say DRUKH-il). Its genitive, the “of” form, is drochfhola.

The fh is silent, so it sounds roughly like DRUKH-ul-uh. You can see why the idea caught on. But Stoker’s notes show exactly where his name came from, and it wasn’t Irish.

This one belongs with the other Irish myths you probably believe.

Was Dracula based on Vlad the Impaler?

Less than you might think. Wilkinson never names Vlad Tepes or mentions impaling. The scholar Elizabeth Miller argued in 1998 that Stoker’s notes show no detailed knowledge of Vlad. The link was popularised in 1972 by the book In Search of Dracula.

So was Dracula Irish?

His author certainly was. Stoker was born, schooled and employed in Dublin, and only left for London at 31.

The name came from Wallachia, and Abhartach only got a taste for blood in 1997. The Irish traces are in Stoker himself: his mother’s cholera stories, Le Fanu’s Carmilla and a Dublin upbringing.

The Bram Stoker Festival 2026

The Bram Stoker Festival runs from Friday 23 to Monday 26 October 2026 at venues across Dublin. That’s the October Bank Holiday weekend, Ireland’s public holiday on the last Monday of October.

Dublin City Council runs it, and the programme is on bramstokerfestival.com. I’ve covered it with Ireland’s other Halloween festivals in how the Irish invented Halloween.

Irish vampire FAQ

Is there an Irish vampire legend?

Yes, in a way. Abhartach, a tyrant dwarf of Slaghtaverty, Co. Derry, rose from his grave twice, according to a story P. W. Joyce recorded in 1869. The blood-drinking first appears in print in 1997.

Was Dracula Irish?

His author was. Bram Stoker was born in Clontarf, Dublin, in 1847, studied at Trinity and worked at Dublin Castle. Dracula came out in London in 1897.

Was Dracula based on Abhartach?

Probably not. The idea was popularised by Bob Curran’s 2000 article in History Ireland. Stoker’s notes never mention Abhartach, and they show the name came from an 1820 book on Wallachia.

Where is Abhartach buried?

According to legend, at the Giant’s Grave in Slaghtaverty townland, near Garvagh, Co. Derry. It’s a stone cairn under a hawthorn on private farmland, so ask the landowner first.

Is the Dearg Due a real Irish legend?

Not an old one, as far as anyone can show. The earliest trace is two unsourced sentences in a 1914 English book about an unnamed Waterford vampire. The name was attached by 1980, and the love story came later still.

What is the Irish word for vampire?

Vaimpír (say VAM-peer) is the standard word. Súmaire fola (SOO-mur-eh FUL-uh), a blood-sucker, is used too.

The Irish Vampire: Abhartach, the Dearg Due and Dracula’s Irish Roots