“One house would be attacked and the next spared, there was no telling who would go next and when someone said goodbye to a friend, he said it as if forever. IN a few days the town became like a city of the dead. The great county infirmary hospital was turned into a cholera hospital but it was insufficient to meet the requirements. The nurses died one after another and none could be found to fill their places.” - Charlotte Thornley
In 1832, a little girl named Charlotte Thornley was 14 years old. She had lived all her young life in Sligo and had now found herself living through an epidemic. A cholera epidemic that would claim the lives of 50% of Sligo’s population. However, Charlotte and her family would survive. The Thornleys were a family of means and were raised protestant. They were a wealthy, middle-class family. Often, mysterious illnesses in the 19th century only affected the working classes. There were various reasons for this, people of means had access to better foods, access to clean drinking water, their houses were better, cleaner and most importantly had more modern sanitation. This in turn led to the middle and upper classes to be far less susceptible to illness and becoming unwell. That is not to say that they didn’t. However, the working classes were afflicted by disease at a far higher infection rate, for all the aforementioned reasons. Sickness rates and death rates among the working classes were disproportionately higher than that of the middle and upper classes. However, it is this exact reason that made cholera all the more terrifying.
Cholera held no bias, and had no concern for any socio-economic class structures. It killed anyone it came in contact with within 48 hours. Often quicker. It brought with it a horrific and undignified end and it was killing middle and upper class people with the same severity and at the same rate as the working class. Because of the brutality of this unknown disease, the speed at which it killed you and its ability to kill anyone it came in contact with within sometimes hours, cholera was without question the most frightening thing anyone in the 19th century had ever encountered. This coupled with the fact there was no antibiotic, no vaccine and no obvious transmission route of the virus, hysteria set in and it set in quickly.
Charlotte Thornley was 14 years old when the virus eventually made it to Sligo. It had come from the East and prior to its arrival news of cholera's capabilities had been travelling West in a steady stream for months. Charlotte wrote about this later in her life in her book called “Experience of the Cholera in Ireland 1832” and said
"It was said to have come from the East in China, it rose out of the Yellow Sea going inland like a cloud dividing into two, which spread North and South in those days I dwelt with my parents and brothers in a provincial town in the West of Ireland called Sligo it was long before the time of railroads or steamboats. But gradually the terror grew on us. Time by time we heard of it nearer and nearer. It was in France, it was in Germany it was in England and with wild affright we began to say it was in Ireland."
Its reputation preceded it and immediately on its arrival it got to work. Arriving in August, its first recorded case was August 11th and then another and then another and then another, in quick succession until the deaths so were many and so often that the coffin builders could not meet demand and people were buried in shallow graves, burned or simply dumped outside the city walls. One of the first things she says in her book about its arrival is:
"I vividly remember a poor traveler was taken ill on the roadside some miles from the town and how did those Samaritans tend him? They dug a pit and with long poles, pushed him living, into it and covered him up alive."
They were burying people alive as they didn’t understand what was happening and out of genuine fear of being infected, it was better to bury someone that was suspected to have the disease alive, than to run the risk of catching it yourself. Panic had now set in and with no understanding of germ theory and with total reliance on God and folklore as an explanation for essentially everything good and bad in life, this must have been an incredibly traumatic environment. Full families died overnight. mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, everyone was dying and there was no obvious connection as to why this was the case. There are reports of people wandering the streets like zombies, a type of living dead before succumbing to the virus and dropping dead. These poor souls that took on this side effect of the disease were known as the undead. Because of the current situation we are all living through we have some context for the panic that this must have brought about, as we can see and have seen for 2 years how people behave when faced with an epidemic, they seem to lose all rationale, with reluctance to accept a vaccine and all the behavior that goes along with that. However, in 2022 we understand the science of a virus and how it operates, how it is transmitted, the things we can do to mitigate becoming infected, we have medication we have vaccines, we have full understanding of how it is transmitted and can take all the necessary precautions in order to protect ourselves and our community.
In 1832, there was not one of those things. People were simply dying and doing so at a rate that had never been seen before. They had no understanding of germ theory and their best scientific explanation was 'bad air' or that odors caused infection. Therefore, people did the best they could to avoid each other. They went into lockdown. The Thornleys locked themselves into their home for 2 weeks until Charlotte's mother went out the back yard one evening and found all their chickens dead. She took this as a sign from God and they immediately packed and left Sligo by horse and cart and travelled towards Bundoran in Donegal. On the way they met a violent mob of people led by a local doctor that had become psychotic due to fear the fear and panic induced by they worry of catching cholera. The mob attacked Charlotte and her family and tried to set them on fire because they saw them come from the direction of Sligo and assumed they were infected and wanted to kill them in order to kill the threat of cholera. The Thornleys were protected by passing soldiers and were taken to the local barracks. However, when they got to the barracks, the soldiers there were so frightened of Charlotte and her family because they had come from Sligo, they voted to remove them and send them back to Sligo. But, they would be protected from the mob. The entire trip took a month, when they returned Charlotte notes in her book:
"We returned to Sligo where we found the streets grass grown and5/8 of the population dead and had great reason to thank God who had spared us through such dangerous and trying times and scenes."
Cholera had killed 1500 people in 6 weeks.
Charlotte Thornley grew up and married a man called Abraham Stoker. Abrahams family were from Derry in Ireland. In rural Derry there is a place called Glenullen and here there is a town call Slaghtaverty and near Slaghtaverty is a field. In this field is a tree and under this tree is a giant stone. This tree with the enormous stone underneath it is known as "The Giant's Grave" it is a tomb. Buried there is a 5th century High King called Abhartach. Abhartach is a real person and was killed in the 400s. The local folklore around this tomb is that Abhartach although a real person had special powers. He was universally hated in Derry by the people he precided over. They wanted him killed and hired a chieftain from a neighboring tribe called Cathain to murder him and remove him from power. Cathain murdered Abhartach and buried him standing up. However, Abhartach returned from the dead the next day and went back to his kingdom to confront his people. As penance, he made each member of the town give him, a bowl of their own blood. Which he drank. Cathain the assassin couldn’t believe what had happened because he knows for sure that he killed Abhartach. So, he goes to a nearby woods to speak to a saint called Eoin that lives there. Cathain tells Eoin what has happened. The saint explains, that Abhartach was never alive, instead he was the living dead. A type of wizard. He is a Neamh Marbh which is Irish for the undead. He is a Dearg Dulai which translates as a drinker of human blood and it is impossible to kill him.
However, what you can do, is you can put him in a type of purgatory, a state of suspense of life and death. This can be done by killing him with a sword but the wood of that sword has to be from a Yew tree. Then, you need to bury him upside down and scatter thorn and ash twigs over his grave. Once this is done, you need to get an enormous boulder and place it directly on top of the grave. Only when these steps are followed and completed is will he be prevented from returning. He isn’t dead, but he is prevented from reappearing as he will now live in this state of suspension unless someone moves that stone. Cathain follows these directions and from the thorns that Cathain scattered grew a huge tree. You can go to Slaghtaverty today and see that tree. The locals will not disturb that tree and because of that story and the folklore and mystery around it, that tree exists 1500 years later in rural Derry.
Abraham Stokers family are from Derry and Abraham marries Charlotte Thornley. They marry and have a son, they call him Bram Stoker. Bram Stoker goes on to write the book Dracula but what is not universally known is that Bram Stoker was born with a mystery illness that prevented him from leaving his bed for 7 years. So, Bram was entirely bed bound until he was 7 years old. In that time, he was undoubtedly told stories from his mother and fathers youth such as the cholera outbreak in his mother’s home town of the undead and the story of Abhartach who was essentially a vampire. Bram wrote the book in 1897 and in it there are too many similarities for it to be a coincidence. If you read Dracula and view it through the eyes of what you now know, taking into account Bram's mother's experiences, it becomes more than simply an eccentric count that lives in a castle.
Dracula becomes this wave of terror that originated in the East and travelled West as Transylvania which is now modern day Romania in Eastern Europe. He makes his way West to London by ship and anyone that he bites becomes a vampire who in turn bites someone else. Passing the disease. Transmission of the virus. Dracula has no bias or concern for socio-economic class structure he doesn’t care if you are working, middle or upper class. He will bite you and drink your blood. You have no way of knowing who has been bitten, or who is going to bite you. Dracula becomes this terrifying unknown wave of death that travelled from the East to the West by ship, infecting people with no clear or obvious method of transmission that causes havoc. In Bram's Dracula there is a doctor character that has similarities to the doctor in Sligo that tried to set his mother on fire.
There is a recurring them throughout Dracula of coffins and people in the coffins that are alive, when they were assumed to be dead. They come back from the dead. Just like Abhartach. People being buried alive just like they were in Sligo. Dracula drinks blood like Abhartach. You need a stake made of wood in order to kill Dracula, just like the sword that killed Abhartach needs to have the wood of a Yew tree in its construction. Possibly the most telling sign of all is that the first person recorded in Sligo to have died from cholera, died on the 11th of August and Dracula bites his first victim when he arrives in London on the 11th of August. Dracula is an amalgamation of the experiences Bram Stoker's mother endured during the cholera outbreak in Sligo in 1832 and of the undead 5th century High King Abhartach of his father Abraham's family home town in Derry.
Dracula is Irish.
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