Dracula author Bram Stoker wrote a short story in 1890, seven years before he published his most famed work. Gibbet Hill is a similarly gothic affair, but its grim outcome—after we meet a murdered sailor, the three criminals strung up on a hanging gallows as a warning to travellers, an actual traveller, three kids, and a snake—comes much faster than the 165,000-word masterpiece.
It may be read in scans of microfilm copies of the Dublin Daily Express, where it was spotted by Brian Cleary, who the BBC reports was "taking time off work following a sudden onset of hearing loss in 2021" and passing the time at Ireland's national library there. Good for us that Cleary is a fan: "I read the words Gibbet Hill and I knew that wasn't a Bram Stoker story that I had ever heard."
The first paragraph I transcribe below; no-one seems to have posted the full thing yet online. It's very late Victorian; they paid for it by the page. A new collection including it is on the way, with profits to go to infant deafness research. The Bram Stoker Festival opens in Dublin next weekend, too.
When I left the Royal Huts Inn, on the top of Hind Head, in order to visit the Devil's Punch-bowl and Gibbet Hill, immortalized by Turner in the Liber Studiorium, I passsed along a wide straight road—the new high road between London and Portsmouth—and shortly came to the edge of the Punchbowl and easted my eyes on its beauty. The fog, which had been heavy in London when I left on this mid-October morning, extended even to Haslemere and hung in the valleys so that the tops of the Surrey hills rose like islands from the sea of mist, and in the brilliant sun-shine which glorified these upper levels softened and mellowed all the wide expanse of hill and dale and down which ranged between me and the Southern coast. The hill gave steeply on all sides gave the north-west, where the circular valley opened to the plain below. All the summer tints were chastened and mellowed; all the full colours which the sunshine had glorified had faded into the sere of Autumn. The pink and purple of the heather were changed to a brown with only a suggestion of faded colour to warm its tone. The bracken was of rich amber and faded yellow, and the myriads of grasses and wild flowers had donned their winter garb—the hues of decay. Through all this rich mass of Autumn tints, the broom, untouched as yet by the frost, sent an emerald flash. The green bushes which fringed the tiny stream running through the valley seemed of supernatural vividness, and the dark green of the pines which covered the western slope and ran down into the valley seemed to assert in some positive way the right of nature to maintain her own colour despite all influen-ces. Away to the north and west, past the spurs and shoulders of the hill, the woods and valleys, the copses and villages and hills and ridges ranged in endless succession ; and it was after a long, long pause that I turned from drinking in the beauty of the scene with my heart full of the power and majesty and purifying influence of nature's beauty. " Here at least," said I to my-self, "the soul of man is elevated ; and on this higher plane of natures' handiwork the evil of our hearts is lulled."
Witness the birth of a Wikipedia article!
