The Abhartach: The Tyrant Who Would Not Stay Dead
In the townland of Slaghtaverty in County Derry — the name is Leacht Abhartaigh , "the Abhartach's sepulchre" — there stands, in a field, a great old thorn tree with a heavy stone half-sunk beneath it; and the people of the district, when they still spoke of such things freely, would tell you not to disturb either the stone or the tree, because of what lies under them, and what it did, and how hard it was to make it stop. The story is one of the oldest recorded vampire-tales of the British Isles — set down by the antiquarian Patrick Weston Joyce in the nineteenth century from local tradition, and argued by more than one scholar to be a source, or at least a sibling, of the great vampire that came out of Ireland's own Bram Stoker a generation later. It concerns the Abhartach: a dwarf — the word means a small person, and the tradition makes him small, deformed, and correspondingly cruel — who was a chieftain, or a wizard-chieftain, of that country in the deep past: a ...