Tá súil agam gur bhain gach duine agaibh sult as an scléip aréir. Bhí sé ar intinn agam teachtaireacht a chur suas anseo inné ach rinne mé dearmad. Más mall, is mithid!
I hope all of you enjoyed the festivities last night. I had intended to post a message here yesterday but I forgot. Better late than never!
Over the last year, the main focus of this blog has shifted from language and etymology to tackling some of the nonsense surrounding Irish folklore, and especially the idea that Bram Stoker, the Anglo-Irish author of Dracula, was influenced by Irish folktales of the undead when he wrote his most famous novel. While there is evidence of a kind of undead female entity associated with graveyards which drains the life force from young men (the Leannán Sí or Fairy Lover), many of these fakelore versions of tales that could have influenced Stoker focus on Ábhartach, a revenant character from local folklore in county Derry, and the Dearg-Due, which seems to be a distorted version of the Irish term deargadaol, a cursed beetle which ate the bodies of sinners in churchyards.
There is good reason to believe that the vampire version of the tale of Ábhartach was invented in 1997 by Peter Haining, who was well-known for flights of fancy, inaccuracy and bad scholarship. Haining was also partly responsible for spreading the nonsense about the Dearg-Due.
I have already mentioned some examples of Haining’s dishonesty elsewhere. However, in this post, I would like to mention another example, the tale of Bertha the vampire, or the Vampire Mistress.
Haining was mainly known in his working life as an anthologist. In other words, he was supposed to check old newspapers and magazines and forgotten books looking for stories which had a common theme (haunted house stories, vampire stories, supernatural stories of childhood etc.) and then select those stories, research their authors, as far as possible, and give them some kind of context. Of course, back then, there were no searchable databases of old publications, so the temptation to cut corners was probably quite strong, even for someone with a far more robust moral compass than Haining, and the risk of exposure quite low. However, as people have pointed out before, Haining was not subtle about his frauds, and frequently lied for no other reason than for the fun of it.
A couple of years before Haining and Tremayne’s The Un-Dead of 1997, which contained the line about Ábhartach demanding blood from his people ‘to sustain his vile corpse’, Haining produced an anthology called The Vampire Omnibus. This contains an interesting document called “The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress”, supposedly written in 1825 and published in The Casket in 1828. According to Haining, this was the first vampire tale written by a woman, Elizabeth Caroline Grey. In fact, it seems likely that Haining fabricated the story and its publication details and that Grey had nothing to do with it. Again, according to Haining, an anonymous book collector approached him with the one remaining copy of the edition of the Casket containing the story. This document is now lost. (And probably never existed in the first place!)
The story itself has pastiche written all over it. It is full of references to horror cinema, and while the style is stilted it doesn’t sound particularly 19th century to me. My guess would be that this was simply Haining being ‘creative’. One phrase seemed to me especially interesting. When Bertha becomes a vampire, she bites a child and drinks its blood ‘to sustain her unnatural being’. This is interesting, because two years later, in another book by Haining, Ábhartach, who up until then had been a non-vampiric revenant, demanded blood from his people ‘to sustain his vile corpse’. The two lines seem surprisingly similar to me, especially when we consider that one is supposed to be from an English short story written by a gentlewoman in the 1820s, while the other is supposed to be from an ancient folktale from county Derry. In reality, both of them were probably made up by Peter Haining in the 1990s.
Another Haining hoax which I found very interesting was the story of Spring-Heeled Jack. Haining wrote a full-length book on Spring-Heeled Jack in the 1970s. Spring-Heeled Jack was a kind of folk devil who was supposed to have attacked a number of people (particularly women) in the mid-19th century in England. He was the subject of some of the trashy chapbooks called Penny Dreadfuls.
Spring-Heeled Jack is an interesting topic for several reasons. He is interesting because of modern obsessions with folk-devils and mass hysteria. He certainly shaped and influenced the narratives surrounding Jack the Ripper (the name Jack, the belief that it was a high-profile aristocrat responsible).
Mike Dash, an excellent Welsh historian (author of Batavia’s Graveyard, one of my favourite books), did some research into the myth and contacted Haining when he found that several of the supposed attacks mentioned by Haining in his book, the attack on Polly Adams and the murder of Maria Davies, are not recorded in the newspapers or crime reports of the time. Haining replied that he had loaned his research to a scriptwriter and it was never returned. Convenient, that.
Interestingly, the crappy BBC radio and TV phenomenon known as Uncanny, which examines tall and unstable stories of weird things, has recently done a programme on Spring-Heeled Jack as part of its Uncanny Cold Case strand. I have to declare an interest here. I agree with the view expressed online that Uncanny is paranormal theatre masquerading as investigative journalism. Uncanny divides its audience into Team Sceptic and Team Believer. I am firmly in Team-Would-You-Ever-Give-It-A-Fucking-Rest-Already. This is dumbed-down mass-entertainment for the digital age. It is not a serious attempt to examine the evidence (such as it is) for phenomena like ghosts or cryptids. In the Spring-Heeled Jack programme, the murder of Maria Davies and the attack on Polly Adams were treated as real events and not Haining inventions, in spite of their careful and well-publicised debunking by Mike Dash decades ago, which just goes to show how little the makers of Uncanny care about actually getting it right.
These six vampire tales are often presented online as genuine ancient folklore. In fact, all of them are fake, in different ways and to different extents. They show a pattern of fake narratives and bad scholarship in relation to the history of vampire folklore which unfortunately pervades the whole subject and has only become worse with the advent of the internet.
Ambrogio
Ambrogio, supposedly the first vampire, seems to be a story circulated on fan platforms on the internet, which first appeared around 2010, though it claims to be derived from a fictitious document called the Scriptures of Delphi. As a fake, it is really lame. Ambrogio is supposed to be an Italian adventurer who went to ancient Greece, fell in love with Selene and was later cursed to spend eternity in a vampiric state. Ambrogio, of course, is a modern Italian version of the Latin name Ambrosius. Nobody without a TARDIS could move from modern Italy to ancient Greece. The whole story is full of absurdities which demonstrate that the person who invented the Ambrogio legend knew nothing about ancient mythology and folklore. As with Ábhartach, this has recently been turned into a film.
Count Estruch
Another fake vampire story from the south of Europe centres on a Catalan count called Estruch, who became a vampire in the area of Llers in the 12th century. However, when you look at this story, there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of Estruch. You would expect a few different versions of the tale, perhaps the odd poem or play based on the legend. At the very least, there should be some record of Estruch’s family or his coat of arms or his origins. In reality, it seems that Estruch is an entirely fictional character invented by an actor called Salvador Sáinz in a series of cheap novels in the 1970s.
Camille Monfort
Another fictional vampire with very recent origins is the story of the opera singer, known as the “Amazonian Vampire”. According to this story, Camille Monfort, a French opera singer, performed in Belém, Brazil, in 1896. Her unnaturally pale skin and nocturnal habits hid her true nature as a blood-sucking vampire. In reality, the story is a recent internet hoax, and photographs of Camille are actually mocked-up pictures of the daughter of the man who invented the meme.
Croglin Grange
The principal English vampire story, the tale of the Croglin Grange Vampire, dates back to the late 19th century, but is still as fake as a nine-dollar bill. It was first popularised by a man called Augustus Hare in his 1890 autobiography. He claimed that he was told it by a man who heard it from a member of the family who rented Croglin Grange, the Cranswells. One night, the sister of the Cranswell brothers was awakened by a scratching noise at her window. A horrible creature was picking at the lead. When it broke through the window, it attacked her and bit her neck. The family went abroad but returned the following year, and the same thing happened. This time, the brothers were ready and shot the creature in the leg. They followed it to an ancient vault in the nearby churchyard, where they found a mummified body bearing a recent gunshot wound, which they burned. Scholars have had a field day investigating this one. There is a Croglin Low Hall in Cumbria, but there is no nearby church and there is no independent evidence of any attack or incident. Furthermore, some details of the story seem to have been cribbed more or less entirely from an 1840s penny-dreadful called Varney the Vampire.
The Dearg-Due
The Dearg-Due is a curious piece of fakery, because we can trace the errors and misunderstandings that gave rise to it through a succession of badly-researched books on vampirism. The core of the legend makes its first appearance (but without the name Dearg-Due or anything like it) in a book by Dudley Wright called Vampires and Vampirism, published in 1924:
At Waterford, in Ireland, there is a little graveyard under a ruined church near Strongbow’s Tower. Legend has it that underneath the ground at this spot there lies a beautiful female vampire still ready to kill those she can lure thither by her beauty.
This is basically a version of a well-known folktale, the Churchyard Bride, where a dead woman or fairy drains the life force of men.
Four years later than Wright’s book, in 1928, Montague Summers quoted Dudley Wright’s account verbatim in his book The Vampire in Europe:
It has been stated: “At Waterford, in Ireland, there is a little graveyard under a ruined church near Strongbow’s Tower. Legend has it that underneath the ground at this spot there lies a beautiful female vampire still ready to kill those she can lure thither by her beauty.” No authority is given for this, which is perhaps hardly surprising when one knows that there is not nor ever was such a tower at Waterford as “Strongbow’s Tower.” Probably there is some confused reference to “Reginald’s Tower,” which Strongbow (de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, used as a fortress in 1170, and where King John established a mint …
In ancient Ireland the Vampire was generally known as Dearg-dul, “red blood sucker”, and his ravages were universally feared. Irish hagiographical lore vividly portrays various burial customs. To be interred under a cairn of stones is regarded as heathenish, doubtless since such a pile marked haunted places. In a letter ascribed to Theodoret, Epistle lxxx, it is said: “Let every one throw a stone on his grave, lest perchance … he return to earth” …
So, Summers discusses the Waterford female vampire. Then, in another paragraph, he adds that the vampire was formerly known in Ireland as Dearg-Dul and that HIS ravages were feared. HIS. So, this is not a reference to the Waterford vampire, which was a she. Note also the reference to piling rocks on a dead vampire to keep it that way. That image occurs in quite a few modern tellings of this ‘ancient’ legend.
Anyway, let’s go forward to the year 1972, when Anthony Masters wrote a book about vampires called The Natural History of the Vampire. Masters has simply copied the material from Summers, but somehow, he turns the Strongbow’s Tower into Strongbow’s Tree, and the Dearg-Dul of previous accounts into a Dearg-Due, presumably by misreading the word Dearg-duℓ in his little notebook:
In old Ireland there was a traditionally-motivated vampire named the Dearg-due, which means the red blood-sucker. The only way to keep the Dearg-due in its grave was to build a cairn of stones over the top. Another legend claims that there is a female vampire lurking near Waterford. The actual spot is under a ruined church near Strongbow’s tree, and it is to this sinister place that the vampire lures, by her fatal beauty, men with good red blood running in the veins.
So, now we’ve got a female vampire lurking under a tree in Waterford, and a traditional vampire called a Dearg-Due, the artist previously known as Dearg-Dul. Which are two different things. Anyway, fast-forward to Matthew Bunson’s Vampire Encyclopedia of 1993, where, for the first time, the Waterford female vampire is identified as the Dearg-Due. And this completely bogus version was then continued by Haining and Tremayne in 1997. It also became a central element of a truly terrible (and not in a good sense) 2018 book by Bram Stoker relative Dacre Stoker and the ghostly scribe J.D. Barker, which takes place in 1868 and portrays a young Bram Stoker facing off against the evil of the Dearg-Due. Since then, hundreds of internet versions have expanded on this imaginary fakelore. And to add insult to injury, some recent accounts claim that the population of Waterford gather once a year to pile stones on the grave of the Dearg-Due. Anybody from Waterford out there? Do you remember going out every year to stone the vampire with the neighbours? Didn’t think so!
Ábhartach
Finally, we get to the legend of Ábhartach. If you are stupid enough to believe everything you read on the internet, you will find many fake accounts of the Ábhartach legend. I’ve been through this many times in other posts, but here I will give a very brief summary.
Firstly, the real story as given in 19th century sources. Several of these suggest that Ábhartach was a dwarf. (There is no truth to the idea that Ábhartach is an Irish word for a dwarf. This is completely disproved by all the Irish dictionaries.) One of the 19th century accounts (Joyce) implies that Ábhartach could have been a chief, because he is described as a ‘tyrant’. However, the other 19th century accounts make it clear that Ábhartach was a servant of another chieftain called Cannan. Ábhartach was fighting against Fionn Mac Cumhaill and was killed but being a sorcerer, was able to come back to life again. Eventually, Fionn (or some other unnamed chieftain, according to P.W. Joyce) buried him upside down under a large stone to prevent him coming back. One source says that Fionn used his second sight to find out the one place where the sorcerer could be killed, and stabbed him with a spear at that part of his body. All of these accounts refer to Fionn, placing the story in the third century. All of them agree that Ábhartach was a magician and came back from the dead.
Here are the things which are not found in the 19th century stories. Ábhartach was not a vampire. He did not demand blood at all, not for any reason, and certainly not to keep his vampire body alive. He was not stabbed with a yew-wood sword or stake. He was not described as a neamh-mharbh or a dearg-diúlaí, neither of which are real Irish expressions anyway. (Neamh-mharbh was invented in the 1930s by the translator of Dracula into Irish as an Irish version of ‘un-dead’. Haining and Tremayne seem to be responsible for dearg-diúlaí.) He was not associated with any chieftain called Cathán. Nor did the people of the area sacrifice anyone to give him blood. (That detail was added by Manchán Magan.) Nor did he die the first time by falling from a window, as houses in Ireland in the third century didn’t have windows or high stone walls. And because there is no evidence that any of this vampire stuff relating to Ábhartach existed before 1997, it cannot have influenced Stoker or the novel Dracula.
Fake narratives
The fact is, people love this stuff, which is why there is so much of it online. However, the problems go deeper than people simply wanting to believe it. The books which purport to tell us about the history of this aspect of folklore are pretty much all bad, even those purporting to be ‘academic’ studies. The so-called researchers who pretend to care about sources and do their (Dearg-) due diligence really don’t give a damn what arrant nonsense they serve up to the public. They don’t check primary sources, or ask valid questions, or even use basic common sense to winnow out the bullshit. That’s the bottom line. The ‘scholars’ don’t care about providing the facts, and a lot of people out there are so stupid, they would rather have an entertaining false narrative to share with their idiot friends than have their bubble burst and learn the truth. Which is really quite sad. To me, and to any decent human being, the truth is always preferable. Always.
Curiouser and curiouser … I have had another look at Daniel Kirkpatrick’s post on the subject of Ábhartach, the fake Irish vampire dwarf from Garvagh. It looks a little shorter than it did a week ago. Clearly, he has followed my advice about some things. The stupid and entirely imaginary comment about Joyce saying that Ábhartach ‘demanded sustenance’ when he returned from the dead is no longer there. And the rubbish about Ábhartach meaning ‘dwarf’ or ‘distorted one’ has gone from the main body of the text, though it is still there in a FAQ section, where it says: ‘What does the name Abhartach mean? Some have suggested it comes from Irish, meaning “dwarf” or “distorted one,” reflecting his unusual size or appearance.’ This, I have to say, is another of my pet hates, people who know fine rightly that information is incorrect (otherwise why remove it from the main text?) but still continue to plug it as something that someone else has said. If you know it’s untrue, just say that! I mean, the world is about to be plunged up to its arse in deepfakes, and yet there are some people who still have qualms about stamping on an obvious shallowfake when it scuttles past them. Bizarre!
Perhaps I am being unfair by posting now, and perhaps this skilled researcher and author Daniel Kirkpatrick will eventually end up with something resembling the truth by the time all the dawdling and nuancing and salami-slicing is over. However, that is far from the case yet.
The weirdest thing about his post is the change he has made to this line: According to local tradition, Abhartach rose from his grave demanding blood from the living, binding his people in fear long after his burial. He has changed this, but now it reads: According to local traditions from at least the 19th century, the Abhartach rose from his grave demanding blood from the living, binding his people in fear long after his burial. In other words, he seems to be doubling down on the completely incorrect notion that Ábhartach (which is a name, so doesn’t need the definite article) demanded blood in ‘local traditions’. He also implies this in other places in the post.
Back in the real world, there are three accounts of the Ábhartach legend from the 19th century (unless Kirkpatrick has found others, which I doubt). The earliest, from the 1830s, is in the Ordnance Survey Letters: Averty was a remarkable enchanter and a great enemy to Fin McCool; he was vulnerable only in one spot of his body. Fin by the prophecy derived from his thumb (already well celebrated) discovered where this spot was situated, aimed him there with his spear and killed him; he then buried him with his head downwards (lest he might effect a resurrection) where the monument of Slaghtaverty or Averty’s monument is now shewn.
So, no blood-drinking there.
The next was also around 1834, in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs: A tradition which exists in the parish says that an engagement took place between Fion Mac Cumhal and Cannan, a man skilled in magick, in which a certain dwarf or ubhach belonging to Cannan was killed and afterwards buried under the centre cromlech in the townland of Slaghtaverty. The dwarf was also a magician and it would appear that his art was of no small service to him after death, for he several times came out of the earth, always forcing himself through the ground head foremost. To prevent a repetition of such a strange and unwished-for event, they buried him with his head downwards and placed a large flat stone over him, which stone and 4 others were called Leachd-an-Abhach, and the townland received the same name, but has since been corrupted to Slaghtaverty.
Again, nothing there about blood-drinking vampires.
Maybe it’s in P.W. Joyce’s account from the 1870s? Here it is: There is a place in the parish of Errigal in Londonderry, called Slaghtaverty, but it ought to have been called Laghtaverty, the laght or sepulchral monument of the abhartach [avartagh] or dwarf (see p. 61, supra). This dwarf was a magician, and a dreadful tyrant, and after having perpetrated great cruelties on the people he was at last vanquished and slain by a neighbouring chieftain; some say by Fionn Mac Cumhail. He was buried in a standing posture, but the very next day he appeared in his old haunts, more cruel and vigorous than ever. And the chief slew him a second time and buried him as before, but again he escaped from the grave, and spread terror through the whole country. The chief then consulted a druid, and according to his directions, he slew the dwarf a third time, and buried him in the same place, with his head downwards; which subdued his magical power, so that he never again appeared on earth. The laght raised over the dwarf is still there, and you may hear the legend with much detail from the natives of the place, one of whom told it to me.
Again, nothing at all about blood-drinking.
Unless Kirkpatrick has a source up his sleeve that he’s not revealing to the rest of us, the truth, as given in a number of posts here on my blog, remains the same. The idea that Ábhartach demanded blood from people to sustain him in his undead state and had to be slain with a wooden sword (i.e. a stake) first appeared in 1997 in Haining and Tremayne’s book The Un-Dead. The most likely scenario is that this was pure invention on their part and that it has nothing to do with any printed or oral source originating in Ireland. To the best of my knowledge, there is no source dating before 1997 which even claims that Ábhartach demanded or drew blood from the population in County Derry.
I have no idea why Kirkpatrick is prepared to admit that he got it wrong in relation to so many other points but is still insistent that the legend of Ábhartach the Irish Vampire is genuine folklore when in reality, it is nothing of the sort. There is no more evidence for this than for Echtra Nerai being about vampirism or for Ábhartach ‘demanding sustenance’ when he returned from the dead, so it is hard to see why he has chosen this particular evidence-free hill to raise his standard, while simultaneously lowering his standards of accuracy.
Anyway, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you are claiming to provide information, you have a responsibility to make that information as accurate and reliable as possible. You owe that to the people who read your content.
I recently received a message from Daniel Kirkpatrick. I had criticised Kirkpatrick for producing a very bad article on the tale of Ábhartach. I should have replied to his message before now, but I have been very busy with other things. His message is certainly gracious: I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to challenge and correct the content of my blogpost. I actually take sources really seriously, but make no pretence that I’m an expert on Irish folklore, only that I’m trying to understand it and write what I discover – sifting through the many inaccuracies online is a challenge at the best of times and I certainly don’t want to be contributing to these. To that end, I’ve corrected the original post to be much more heavily caveated and address your points.
However, while I don’t want to be negative all the time about everything, I have certain standards and values. I believe that people who claim to be providing information have a responsibility to ensure that their information is as accurate as possible. Unfortunately, while Kirkpatrick’s rewrite of the original post is an improvement, it falls far short of being accurate, well-researched and credible.
Firstly, the good points. He has now turned the title into a question, expressing doubt about the vampire dwarf story. More doubt than he expresses in the rest of the article, unfortunately. And he has rectified the bizarre mistake about the Irish text called Echtra Nerai, which he stated was about a resurrected corpse demanding blood. There is a resurrected corpse in it, but no reference to blood. That piece of fantasy has gone. He also expresses a vague kind of doubt about the story of Ábhartach, but without specifying which aspects of the story we should doubt.
However, mostly, he has left the fake and misleading elements intact. For example: According to local tradition, Abhartach rose from his grave demanding blood from the living, binding his people in fear long after his burial. There is not a shred of truth to this claim. What evidence exists that the blood-drinking was part of local tradition and where can we find it? In the 19th century, we have accounts that were based on local folklore by the Ordnance Survey collectors and a generation later by Patrick Weston Joyce. None of these contains any reference to Ábhartach drinking blood or demanding blood.
In another place, Kirkpatrick produces an even crazier piece of nonsense: Joyce’s account describes a revenant who demanded sustenance from the living; later writers interpreted this behaviour through the lens of vampire folklore, though blood-drinking is not explicitly mentioned in the original text. You know what else isn’t specifically mentioned in Joyce’s text? Ábhartach demanding sustenance from the living! He is described as being cruel but there is no reference to his demanding milk, mead, beer, wine, a strong cup of tay, tray bakes, salad, hang sangwiches or any other potable or comestible substance from his victims. So, it is hard to see how Kirkpatrick thinks somebody jumped to such a bizarrely distant conclusion from such a pathetic, non-existent springboard. Another aspect of this that worries me is that Kirkpatrick seems to be at great pains here to pretend that the only explanation is that someone made a bad guess, that this was somehow an innocent mistake. There is a far more obvious explanation, which is much more sensible and much less contrived. I’ll explain that below.
He has also completely ignored what I said about the name Ábhartach, saying: The name Abhartach (sometimes written Abhartagh or Avartagh) comes from Irish. It is generally understood to mean “dwarf” or “distorted one.” If he had bothered reading the material on this blog properly, he would know that this is nonsense. Apart from the Sleacht Ábhartaigh/Slaghtaverty sorcerer, there are at least three different individuals and one dog in Irish tradition bearing that name, none of whom was specifically dwarf-like. There is no etymological connection between Ábhartach and the Irish word abhac. And if I sat for twenty minutes thinking of words for ‘distorted’ in the Irish language (míchumtha, camtha, as a riocht, freangtha, lúbtha etc.) and jotting them down, and then looked in all the dictionaries to see if I’d missed any, I guarantee you that I would not find anything resembling Ábhartach. So, ‘generally understood’ by whom? Keyboard scholars who’ve never heard a word of Irish in their lives? Why should I, or Daniel Kirkpatrick, or anyone else, give a toss what they say, or promote their nonsense for them?
So, if Ábhartach demanding blood to keep him in a vampiric state of undeadness is not an ancient story and not part of local folklore, where does it come from? Again, I’ve been over this before in great detail, but I’ll do it again here. In 1997, Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne published a book called The Un-Dead, The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula. Their account contains the line:
But the next day Abhartach appeared and sought the blood of the living to sustain his vile corpse.
This is when Ábhartach suddenly became a vampire. They also invented the idea that he needed to be spiked with a yew-wood sword to kill him. Again, this is not in the original stories from the 19th century, and suddenly appears, as if drawn from van Helsing’s leather staking bag, in Haining and Tremayne. Why would anyone invent something like this out of the blue? Well, Haining certainly had form in inventing stories. He was a hack who famously published a book claiming that Sweeney Todd was a genuine criminal. I also came across the following in a blog called Wormwoodiana:
The prolific anthologist Peter Haining (1940-2007) is known not only to have cut corners in filling up his anthologies, but to have gone so far as to make up references and fabricate texts. Both of these serious problems are especially visible in his collections of Bram Stoker materials, where he has given deliberately false citations as well as having significantly re-written some of the texts he has supposedly reproduced.
And that’s not even taking into account the dodgy claims given in several places in the same chapter of Haining and Tremayne’s book. For example, they cite an article in an Irish magazine from 1874. The magazine is now available online. The article does not exist.
So, Haining and Tremayne seem to have been responsible for the vampire aspects of the story in their 1997 book. Then, Bob Curran, a ‘folklorist’, took up the cudgels on behalf of the legend of Ábhartach the Irish vampire. In various articles and books after 1997, Curran popularised this recent piece of fakelore without checking any sources or doing any real research at all.
Let me just spell it out very clearly. I cannot find a shred of evidence that Ábhartach was regarded as a vampiric figure before the publication of a book co-written by a known liar in 1997. And if the evidence suggests that Haining invented the idea that Ábhartach was a vampire, then it isn’t part of ‘local folklore’, and to pretend otherwise is lying to people. Lines from Kirkpatrick’s article like this are as weasel-wordy as you can get: The modern figure of the Abhartach is unique in Irish mythology. He does not merely haunt, he consumes. He does not simply appear as a ghost, he rises in physical form. The detail of demanding blood from his people places him alongside European revenants, Slavic vampires, and even Norse draugr. But where these traditions come from and whether it reflects a truly vampiric framing remains far from conclusive. I don’t get this at all. I mean, if he genuinely (in any traditional telling) consumed the blood of the living, he would plainly be a vampire. And if all he did was come back from the dead, then he wouldn’t be a vampire. The evidence is that a dishonest English hack decided to depict him as a vampire in 1997, and that before that date nobody had ever said that he was in any way vampiric. Let’s just say that, rather than give a nuanced telling that allows the fake version to flourish.
If Kirkpatrick is really serious about providing proper information and not strengthening fake memes in cyberspace, what he should do is pretty clear. He should delete his article entirely, read every primary source available on the subject of Ábhartach (he can take them from here but by all means check them against the originals), and rewrite it to tell the truth about Ábhartach. That truth being that Ábhartach was an ancient story of a sorcerer who returned from the dead which was vamped up by one English hack and a bunch of lazy morons about thirty years ago and has now taken off in cyberspace.
For some time now, I have been posting on the fakelore phenomenon (yes, it’s fake, and it’s a phenomenon, not a phenomena) of Ábhartach, the so-called Garvagh Vampire. To summarise, this is the story of a warrior in ancient Ireland called Ábhartach, who was skilled in magic. Using his magic, he was able to rise from the dead and had to be buried upside-down to keep him buried permanently.
The first versions of this story were recorded in the 1830s. In those versions, Ábhartach was fighting with a chieftain called Canan and the ‘Danes’ (probably the Irish fairy people called the Tuatha Dé Danann) against Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the warriors of the Fianna. Ábhartach was described as a magician in the Ordnance Survey Letters but not as a dwarf. However, he was described as a dwarf in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs, which are slightly later.
A generation later, Patrick Weston Joyce describes the legend, and he also says that Ábhartach was a dwarf. In the 1830s accounts, he was killed by Fionn Mac Cumhaill. Joyce says that he was killed by ‘a neighbouring chieftain, some say Fionn Mac Cumhail’.
None of these 19th century accounts mentions Ábhartach demanding bowls of blood, or drinking the blood to keep himself ‘alive’. And none of the 19th century accounts mentions the name Cathán.
So, when did the name Cathán become a part of the story? As with vampirism, it was first mentioned by Haining and Tremayne in their 1997 book The Un-Dead as the name of the neighbouring chieftain who slew Ábhartach. (They misspell it Cáthan. It comes from Cath, meaning a battle, with the masculine diminutive -án, so it should be Cathán.) But where did they get it from, if it was not an original part of the story? I have thought a lot about this over the last couple of years, and I have come to the conclusion that there is one very good candidate for the inventor of Cathán. Haining was certainly a fantasist who was given to inventing things, but there is not much evidence of any knowledge of Irish culture in his work. Tremayne (Peter Berresford-Ellis) on the other hand, certainly had some knowledge of Irish mythology and history, and a passing knowledge of the language. (Although obviously not very good – the Irish is pretty much all rubbish in The Un-Dead). It seems likely to me that Tremayne saw the comment by Joyce and decided to work out who the ‘neighbouring chieftain’ could have been. The most powerful sept (or clan) in the area around Errigal was the Ó Catháin or O’Kane family. The name means ‘descendant of Cathán’. Anybody with a copy of MacLysaght’s The Surnames of Ireland, or an Irish surname map, would be able to find the importance of the Ó Catháin family in that area quite easily.
In fact, anyone with a genuinely deep knowledge of Irish history and culture would realise very quickly that Cathán, the ancestor of the Ó Catháin family, could not have been anything to do with Ábhartach, because Ábhartach was linked to Fionn who lived in the third century A.D. Ireland developed surnames in the 10th century, and the ancestors who were mentioned in the hereditary surnames rarely lived before the 8th century. So, even if we accept the fake claim that Ábhartach was in the fifth/sixth century, it is still an anachronism. Also, the Ó Catháin family moved east from Inishowen in Donegal in the 12th century, so Cathán never lived in County Derry and lived many hundreds of years after the time of Fionn and Ábhartach. In other words, it’s an educated guess, but not a good one.
As for the other versions like Catháin, Cathrain, Cahool and Cathal, these have arisen because there are so many eejits on the internet who are incapable of copying stuff with any degree of accuracy.
In other words, the whole Cathán version of the story is just more dishonest trash invented by Haining and Tremayne in 1997, just like the idea that Ábhartach was a vampire and a model for Stoker’s Dracula. It’s completely fake and should be treated as such.
I have come across another idiotic item online about the phoney Irish vampire myth of Ábhartach. It was posted by a certain Daniel Kirkpatrick on the 20th of January, 2026, and is entitled: Abhartach in Irish Mythology: The Blood-Drinking Undead Dwarf.
The incompetence of Kirkpatrick’s treatment of the subject beggars belief. Just to give a few examples, he states that Patrick Weston Joyce in the 1870s was the earliest discussion of the Ábhartach story. As readers of this blog will know, it is discussed in depth in the Ordnance Survey documents of the 1830s. He states that Joyce claimed that Ábhartach drank blood, though the Wikipedia article on Abhartach actually gives Joyce’s comments in their entirety, so if he had bothered reading Wikipedia, he would know that Joyce does not mention blood. (Not that I am recommending Wiki as a source – the article on Ábhartach is nearly as bad as Kirkpatrick’s.) He also claims that the name Abhartach likely derives from the Old Irish abacc, meaning dwarf. So Irish has randomly stuck “art” into the middle of the word abhac(h) rather than using a prefix or a suffix? Is that it? Art in Irish means “a bear” or “a stone”, so perhaps Ábhartach is supposed to mean “dwa-bear-rf” or “dwa-stone-rf”. Like I say, totally moronic.
However, much as I hate this kind of nonsense about the fake Irish vampire meme, this is not the reason for my singling out Daniel Kirkpatrick here. One reason is that overall, his blog is not that bad. He provides reasonable information with reasonable clarity about ancient Irish myth, and he should be sceptical and rational and do the necessary research in every single case, rather than just hoovering some of his data up from the internet. However, the other reason for attacking his post here is that he actually tries to vampirise another Irish myth that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been linked to blood-drinking before. Here is his claim:
“In the Echtra Nerai (Adventure of Nera), preserved in the 12th century Lebor na hUidre, a corpse rises and demands a drink, refusing milk and insisting on blood.”
The Echtra Nerai is available here: https://www.ucc.ie/en/media/academic/seanmeanghaeilge/cdi/texts/Meyer-Echtra-Nerai.pdf In other words, it’s easy to find and easy to read and there is no excuse for anyone inventing their own version.
The relevant part of the story is that the hero Nera ends up carrying a dead man on his back at Hallowe’en to get the dead man a drink. They go to one house which is surrounded by a lake of fire. The dead man says not to bother, as the people in that house always rake the ashes together before they go to sleep. At the second house, it is surrounded by a lake of water. The dead man says that they never leave foot-water or washing-water out at night there, so it is no good. They go to another house, where there is foot-water, washing water and a slop-pail. The dead man drinks, then spits the last of the liquid on the faces of the people in the house, killing them instantly.
So, the dead walk. But there’s no blood, just water you use to wash your feet and your face. What’s that all about?
The fact is, this story may be scary in a way, but it’s not classic horror material. Tales of the dead hitching a lift on people’s shoulders are actually quite common in Irish folklore, but not in horror stories or horror movies. And the magical importance of keeping a fire coigilte (raked together so the ashes last till dawn) and of disposing of foot water properly are well-documented in Irish tradition, even if we as modern, rational people find these things hard to comprehend. In other words, this is speaking to us from another culture, far removed from Hollywood. It plays by its own rules. It has its own internal logic. Trying to understand that logic and engage with it is important. At the very least, people should tell the story as it was told and not rewrite and disneyfy (or perhaps Hammer) it into something they think is better, either in the case of Ábhartach or in the case of Echtra Nerai.
Treat it with respect, or leave it alone!
One question I have never completely tackled is the name Ábhartach and what we know about it. I have commented on this question in many places, but it seems to me it would be worthwhile to give everything we know about the name Ábhartach and similar names in one place.
As readers of this blog will be aware, Irish folklore has been rewritten and reinvented to include vampires. More specifically, an old story from County Derry about a man called Ábhartach, a sorcerer fighting against the legendary Irish hero Fionn and the Fianna, who was able to come back from the dead using his magic, until Fionn worked out how to kill him and keep him dead by burying him upside-down under a huge stone, has been changed into a blood-drinking vampire by certain fake scholars and a multitude of idiots on the internet.
The area where this was supposed to have happened is called Slaghtaverty, which is a phonetic rendering of the Irish Sleacht Ábhartaigh, the grave-monument of Ábhartach. (Sleacht is a northern variant of the Irish word “leacht”.) Slaghtaverty is a townland, which is a small unit of land, not a town or a parish, as some of the internet garbage on the subject of Ábhartach’s vampirism would have it. Most of the townlands in Ireland probably date back to the 17th century or earlier. The Hearth Money Rolls (a tax on fireplaces imposed by the English) of 1663 have survived for Errigal parish, but the townland of Slaghtaverty is not mentioned, which means that it was not yet reckoned as a townland, or perhaps it contained no houses and was therefore not taxable. The earliest reference to Slaghtaverty as a place, as far as I can see, is only from 1808. A map kept at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland shows the townlands of Slaghtaverty and Drumbane. In other words, we know that by 1808, people were calling that place by a name which means “the grave of Ábhartach”.
So, who was Ábhartach? Many of the misinformation merchants on the internet talk about “the abhartach”, and suggest that an abhartach is a separate category of supernatural being, or a word for a dwarf, or that it means “misshapen one”. None of these claims is true. The form Slaghtaverty suggests that the averty part is the name Ábhartach in the genitive. Strangely, Patrick Weston Joyce implies in his Origin and History of Irish Names of Places that abhartach actually means dwarf, because he refers to the abhartach [or dwarf]. This is nonsense, and surprising in a scholar of Joyce’s standing. The fact is that the standard Irish for a dwarf is abhac (genitive abhaic), while in Ulster abhach (genitive abhaigh) seems to have been used historically. However, the word ábhartach or abhartach has never been used to mean dwarf, and Ábhartach is definitely a name.
While Ábhartach does not mean “dwarf”, the earliest accounts suggest that the Slaghtaverty sorcerer was of small stature. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of around 1835 mention that the magician who in legend was buried and came back from the dead in Errigal parish was a dwarf (a dwarf or abhach) and that the tomb was originally called “Leachd-an-Abhach, and the townland received the same name, but has since been corrupted to Slaghtaverty.” In other words, the OS Memoirs are quite clear that Ábhartach does not mean “dwarf”, but they suggest that the original name, which in correct Irish would be Sleacht an Abhaic or Sleacht an Abhaigh, was corrupted to Sleacht Ábhartaigh. Personally, I think it’s unlikely, but it could be right.
As I have said above, Ábhartach is a name in Irish. Some people (including Dáithí Ó hÓgáin) have maintained that it means “doer of deeds”. The Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language disagrees. (The name Ábartach (with lenited -b-, Dánta Gr. 7.21 , Acall. 3021) is presumably distinct.) In other words, we do not know what Ábhartach means or where it comes from, but we do know that it exists as a name.
The Wikipedia article on Ábhartach suggests that there was a different individual in Irish myth called Abarta (or Ábartach – there are two separate links). This is nonsense. I do not know where the name Abarta came from, but if you click on it, you come across an article about a character called Ábhartach, a character referred to as Ábhartach by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin in his book The Lore of Ireland, and also referred to Ábhartach by Niall Ó Dónaill in his retelling of the Fiannaíocht stories, Seanchas na Féinne. We do not know if this Ábhartach is the same as the Ábhartach of Errigal, but they definitely had the same name and were not referred to in Irish-language sources as Abarta. This other Ábhartach (or perhaps the same) in Irish sources was a Tuatha Dé Danann warrior. In some cases he is regarded as a loyal supporter of Fionn. In other stories, he was a malicious sorcerer who kidnapped some of Fionn’s people and took them to the other world. Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, in his article on Ábhartach in his The Lore of Ireland: An Encyclopaedia of Myth, Legend and Romance, first published in 1990, discusses the Ábhartach who was a Tuatha Dé Danann sorcerer in Irish myth and says that he was associated with a fairy-mound at Shivey, near Lough Neagh (about twenty miles from Slaghtaverty). He was supposedly son of Ioldathach or Iolallach. Ioldathach was a son of Manannán. Ó hÓgáin also suggests that the monument in Slaghtaverty was associated with a man with the same name, and that the stories of the other Ábhartach were then applied to him. Ó hÓgáin may be right, but there are other possibilities, such as that the monument was associated with tales of a sorcerer and that someone decided that the best-known mythical sorcerer was Ábhartach. In other words, we do not know if these are two separate individuals called Ábhartach, or if the man from Slaghtaverty is really the same as the son of Ioldathach.
There are a few other individuals called Ábhartach. In some Irish legends, the sun-god Lug has a son called Abartach.
In the Triads of Ireland, we find the following: Midear’s fairy mound with its bright-portaled (?) rampart, the castle of Sanbh, or the fairy mound of Abhartach—you know not of a woman in these castles to equal the gentle, softly-speaking one. (This fairy mound is presumably the one at Shivey near Cookstown.)
A person called Ábhartach was also one of the two sons of the obnoxious mythical poet Aithirne Ailgheasach, whose obnoxiousness was so unwonted that his victims eventually burned him to death in his house along with his sons.
Finally, Ábhartach was the name of a hound honoured in a poem by Brian Ó Corcráin: Rí con Éireann Ábhartach (The king of the dogs of Ireland is Ábhartach). Some people on line have called it ‘a poem about kingship’, which it most certainly isn’t. Not being an ancient Irish bard, I find the Irish difficult to understand in places, but I understand enough of it to know that it is a playful, mock-heroic poem of praise, full of references to characters from the Fiannaíocht stories like Goll Mac Morna, and Fionn’s dog, Bran, as well as the Ábhartach son of Ioldathach who is found in some of the Fianna stories, who is compared by the poet to his canine namesake.
So, there you have it. Ábhartach was possibly a dwarf, but his name does not mean dwarf. He was possibly the same as the Tuatha Dé Danann sorcerer mentioned in a number of stories. We do not know what his name means, but his name was the same as the Tuatha Dé Danann sorcerer and both of them were linked to Fionn Mac Cumhaill.
Finally, a reminder that neamh-mharbh is not an ancient Irish word for a vampire. It means “undead”, and was invented by the translator of Dracula into Irish in the 1930s as an equivalent of that word. It is not spelled neamh-mairbh and it does not translate as “walking dead”. The word “neamhbheo”, mentioned by some clowns like Curran in connection with Ábhartach, means “not alive”, and specifically in the world of art the word “neamhbheo” is the equivalent of the English phrase “still life”.
Recently, I have shifted the focus of this blog from language to some of the cultural aspects of the Irish language, and more specifically Irish folklore and the supernatural beings which figured in our traditional stories. In recent decades, there has been an explosion of nonsense online about Irish vampires like Ábhartach and the Dearg Due. Neither of these are genuine ancient Irish tales. Ábhartach was originally a sinister sorcerer who came back from the dead, but Haining and Tremayne invented the claim that he demanded bowls of blood in 1997, and this rubbish is now treated as if it were an ancient myth rather than a modern fantasy. As for the Dearg Due, this is a conflation of two (or more) separate stories and a misspelling which turned Dearg-Dul (= Irish deargadaol, a cursed beetle) into Dearg Due.
Anyway, I have said in some previous posts that there is no ancient Irish vampire tradition, and I stand by that. However, there is one genuine supernatural being in Irish folklore which drains the life force from its victim, and in that sense, it is almost like a vampire. That supernatural being is usually called a leannán sí.
So, what is a leannán sí? The word leannán means a lover, and sí means fairy, so it is literally a fairy lover. In fact, the stories of this type cover several distinct types of being. In its simplest form, the tale concerns a couple who fall in love and one of them dies, but the power of love is so strong that the dead person appears to the other in dreams and promises that they will soon be together.
This is presumably based on a well-known scenario, familiar in thousands of places up and down the country before modern medicine and treatments against tuberculosis. Kisses and sweet nothings would guarantee that the bacteria was transferred to the lover and that their days would also be numbered. William Carleton wrote about this in his poem The Church-yard Bride in the 1830s. He claimed to have taken the idea from stories he had heard from young men in the parish of Errigal Trough in Monaghan. (This is not the Errigal in the Ábhartach story, which is in County Derry.)
In other versions of the story, the leannán sí is just that, a fairy woman who hangs around enticing young men so that they agree to a fatal tryst in the graveyard. This is clearly the kernel of the story of the ‘beautiful vampire’ in a graveyard in Waterford which was later mutated into the modern fake tale of the Dearg Due.
These stories are common in international folktales and ballads. The Scots have their own version, the baobh sì. This is basically the cognate of the Irish words badhbh sí, although that term does not actually exist in Irish.
There is also apparently a male version mentioned in some sources, under the name Ganconer. This is plainly the geancánach or geancachán mentioned in the dictionaries. It comes from the word geanc meaning a snub-nose. (Some sources have invented their own zany version of Irish where the words gean cánach supposedly mean love-talker. In reality it would mean something like “affection of tax”.)
In several posts, I have tackled the fake claims that the Dearg-Due was a mythical vampire in Waterford. I have shown that this is the result of a number of mistakes and miscopyings of the writings of previous “experts”. The real origin of the Dearg-Dul or Dearg-Due is the Irish deargadaol, which is a type of cursed beetle. The Irish word deargadaol was originally known as a darbdael or darb-dóel. In the former spelling, it occurs as early as the Book of Ballymote of 1391. The word is formed from the two words doirb (a water beetle) and daol (a beetle), and this was later corrupted to Dearg-Daol or Deargadaol. In English, it is called a Devil’s Coach Horse. It has a habit of putting its tail up like a scorpion when threatened, and so the story developed that the Deargadaol betrayed Christ to his enemies by pointing out his location with its tail.
However, I had never heard the idea that there was anything vampiric about the deargadaol in genuine Irish folklore until the other day, when I came across the following post from the blog of the Royal Irish Academy – OS200: Spotlight on the Ordnance Survey Letters, posted by Meadhbh Murphy in July 2024. This talks about the Ordnance Survey collectors who also first recorded the information about Ábhartach in County Derry.
In 1840, while collecting topographical information about the parishes of Rathronan and Killeedy in Co. Limerick, O’Donovan included references to St Ita and her association with Limerick. In O’Donovan’s over thirty pages of notes, he referred to a ‘primitive Irish church’ founded by Ita, who was also known as Ite, Ida and Mide, and inserted the following piece of associated history…
‘It was she [Ita] who suffered great tortures for the love of God; she permitted a daol to suck her unknown to all for a long time, until it grew to a size greater than that of a sucking pig, so that all her side was weakened, etc.’
O’Donovan included an explanation note about what a ‘daol’ was. He noted that a daol, or Darbh Daol, was ‘an insect well known and universally detested by the Irish people, because they believe that it feeds on human flesh in the Churchyards’. Today this insect is known as Devil’s coach horse beetle.
This is fascinating, because it shows why a tradition developed of the deargadaol being something vampiric and large rather than a tiny insect. And it shows that if you search for further information, there is a good chance that you will find something that clears up mysteries and answers questions. If you are prepared to check facts, that is, and keep on checking them rather than accepting nonsense on trust.
