Dublin's Bram Stoker Festival.

Stoker's Dracula still stalks Dublin

M night parade up Jervis Street Dublin

     The Bram Stoker Festival takes place in Dublin toward the end of October each year. Now in its ninth year it is now well and truly established. Going by last years festivities it is now possibly the largest of Dublin’s festivals.  Dublin born ‘Dracula’ author Bram Stoker is celebrated in four days and nights of Gothic tales, events, and parties. By day, family-friendly with face painting and dressing up fun for the children, and by night, dark excitement of Bram Stoker’s tales stalk the capital in a host of venues and parties.

     Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker, famously and best known for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula, was born on November 8, 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent in Fairview. His father, also Abraham and a Dubliner, was a senior civil servant working in Dublin Castle, his mother Charlotte Thornley was from Sligo. He was baptised at St. John the Baptist Church in Clontarf which in all probability saved him from his later encounters with the undead!

Bram Stoker

'Droch Ola' in Irish means bad blood
     Stoker spent most of the first seven years of his life laid up in bed ill from an unknown illness. He reflected on those years as “thoughtful”, in his words: an ”opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years” It was during these early that his mother told him many stories of mostly sad times in the west. These included tales of the potato famine years and of a devastating cholera epidemic that swept through Sligo in 1832, so rampant that they ran out of wood for coffins and the dead had to be wrapped in rags and rolled into mass graves. So many died so fast that stories were told of people being buried in such haste that many were possibly alive. These tales may well have stayed with Bram and fuelled his later writings. The historian Dennis McIntyre, who like Stoker’s mother comes from the west of Ireland, speaking on a BBC programme on Dracula pointed out that in the west there is a common phrase that goes: “there was droch ola there”. 'Droch Ola' in Irish means bad blood and may be how Stoker got the name ‘Dracula’.

     There may have been other influences. Bram Stoker was the theatre critic for the old Evening Mail, once Dublin’s leading evening newspaper, so he would have known Sheridan le Fanu, a part owner of the Mail. Le Fanu was also a writer of Gothic and vampire tales. Stoker also, apparently, had a chance meeting with one Ármin Vámbéry, a collecter of dark superstitious and old gypsy tales while hiking across the Balkans on ‘strange trails through the Carpathian mountains’.

     But back to the festival, the Macnas Parade was again the highlight as thousands of people lined the streets in a wild spectacle of magic and the macabre. As dusk fell it all started off in Moore Street, a haunting and imaginative procession of strange and otherworldly creatures. It all gathered momentum as it passed into Henry Street, Mary Street and Capel Street and finally ending at Mary’s Lane by the Fruit Market.

“at the helm of a dying trade"
     There was two great days of free events called Stokerland in St.Patrick’s Park, beside St.Patrick’s Cathedral. The many entertainers including Morbid & Sons, five pale faced dark-eyed musicians dressed in black funereal attire, who amused and delighted children and adults with a show they describe as dark musical comedy. Their backdrop, a black coffin and a black Victorian hearse. They are a sort of ‘Adam’s Family’ led by Archibald Morbid, played by Nicholas Kavanagh and his family: Kate Powell, Ciara Kavanagh, Killian Browne and Cilian Jacob. They say they are “at the helm of a dying trade… struggling to save the family business from going under.” The children, mostly dressed and made-up for the occasion - the little monsters love it.

At last years Stokerland event in St.Patrick's Park: Morbid and Sons open the coffin.