The Abhartach (old Irish word meaning dwarf) is one of the scariest stories I’ve read while studying Irish myths and legends. This story first appeared in Patrick Weston Joyce‘s The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (1870) and his account was based on the oral histories he collected around Ireland.
The story begins during the time of the druids, just as the Catholic saints were coming to Ireland. In a small village named Slaghtaverty (in County Derry), there lived a magician and villainous Irish warlord who was cruel to everyone and known for his bloodletting sacrifices to evil entities. Finally, a neighboring chieftain (some say it was Cathain, others say it was Fionn Mac Cumhaill) killed the terrible man (who was a dwarf) and buried him in a standing posture (a common form of burial at the time) on a hill outside the town. And the entire town rejoiced!
But the next day, the man returned and killed every person he could find by drinking their blood. So the chieftain again slayed this killer dwarf, now known as the Abhartach, and reburied him. The next day, the Abhartach escaped and went on an even more brutal rampage killing men, women, children, and any beasts he could find and draining their blood. People were terrified and sought help from the chieftain. The chieftain consulted the head druid priest (some stories say it was an early Irish Catholic saint) who gave him directions on how to stop the Abhartach.
So the chieftain captured and killed the Abhartach with a sword made of Yew wood, but this time he buried him head down. This position vanquished his magical powers and kept him in the grave. The villagers then built a dolmen (a stone megalithic tomb, like a tiny Stonehenge) over the Abhartach‘s grave, and surrounded the area with thorny bushes (some say blackberries), to make sure the Abhartach never rises again.
To this day, you can visit the Slaghtaverty Dolmen which the locals refer to as “The Giant’s Grave”, in County Derry. But the thing I found fascinating about this story was the research done by a lecturer in Celtic history at the University of Ulster named Bob Curran. Mr. Curran wrote in the summer 2000 edition of History Ireland (a peer-reviewed journal edited by other historians and cultural anthropologists) that Bram Stoker (an Irish author) may have used the Abhartach as inspiration for his famous story Dracula. Mr. Curran based this premise on the research by Professor Elizabeth Miller in her book Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow.
Professor Miller discovered that Stoker’s research notes for Dracula included no biographical knowledge of Vlad III or his campaign against the Turks and no additional research on Vlad III’s reputation as an impaler. While there is evidence that Stoker studied Central and Eastern European folklore, and may have borrowed names from the Carpathian mountains, there is plenty of evidence (notes, guest book signings, etc) that Stoker was heavily influenced by his visits to Whitby (a seaside town in Yorkshire, England), Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and the crypts of St. Michan’s Church in Dublin. Considering that Bram Stoker was an Irish journalist and writer, who traveled extensively around the British Isles and left no evidence behind of his interest in Vlad the Impaler, it’s quite possible that his famous story of Dracula was based on this ancient horror story of the Abhartach. And after spending a lot of time wandering around that mystical Irish Isle, I am definitely a believer.
