The story is significant as it sheds light on Stoker's development as an author and serves as a “station on his route to publishing Dracula.”

Gibbet Hill — set in a notorious crime hotspot in the English countryside and published as Bram Stoker was beginning work on Dracula — is rediscovered by an amateur historian passing the time in the National Library of Ireland.

A long-lost story from Bram Stoker, the Irish author of one of the world's best known gothic horror stories Dracula, has been found in Dublin.

Amateur historian Brian Cleary was paging through Stoker's works at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, the gothic novelist's hometown, when he made the discovery.

"Gibbet Hill" tells of a sailor murdered by three criminals whose bodies were strung up on a hanging gallows on a hill as a ghostly warning to passing travelers.