Dearg Due

A ruined church at Waterford, a little graveyard slumped beneath it, and under the grass a beautiful woman who is not done with the living. That is the whole of the story in its first appearance, and its first appearance is four lines long.

Dudley Wright printed it in 1914, in a book called Vampires and Vampirism, and the entire paragraph reads: “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 source. No name. No husband, no forced marriage, no suicide, no rising once a year, none of the furniture the story carries today. It sits in a run of English and Scottish revenant anecdotes, wedged between a burnt priest at Melrose Abbey who had loved hunting too well and a girl screaming in a Cumberland farmhouse, and it reads exactly like what it is, a stray line of hearsay dropped into a chapter about somewhere else.

The first person to test it was Montague Summers, who had every reason to want it to be true. In The Vampire in Europe, published in 1929, he quoted Wright’s paragraph in full and then took it apart. There is not and never was a Strongbow’s Tower at Waterford. There is Reginald’s Tower, squat and round and grey on the quay, which Strongbow used as a fortress in 1170 and where King John later kept a mint. Summers wrote to the Chevalier W. H. Grattan Flood, the Enniscorthy musicologist who knew the county’s antiquities as well as anyone alive, and Grattan Flood told him flatly that no vampire legend attached to Reginald’s Tower. He died in August 1928, which is why Summers, printing the answer, calls him the late. There was no legend. The man best placed to know had already said so, in print, ninety years before the internet decided otherwise.

And then, a few lines further down the same page, Summers wrote the sentence that undid all his good work. “In ancient Ireland the Vampire was generally known as Dearg-dul, ‘red blood sucker,’ and his ravages were universally feared.” His. Not hers. A masculine generic term with no story attached, no source given, and no connection whatsoever to the woman under the Waterford grass. The two things were separate paragraphs about separate claims, and Summers had just spent the first one proving the second one had nothing to do with it.

It took forty-three years for someone to staple them together. In 1972 Anthony Masters, in The Natural History of the Vampire, reproduced great tracts of Summers with a copyist’s carelessness. Dearg-dul became dearg-due, which is not a sequence of letters Irish permits. Strongbow’s Tower became Strongbow’s tree. He added that the only way to hold the creature down was to pile a cairn of stones over the grave, a detail Summers had lifted from a letter ascribed to Theodoret about somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean entirely. Masters at least kept the name and the woman in separate sentences. Matthew Bunson’s Vampire Encyclopedia of 1993 welded them. Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne finished the job in The Un-Dead in 1997, announcing eighteenth-century tales of the dearg-dul that nobody has ever located, proposing dearg-diúlaí as the original Irish, and supplying the beautiful young woman of Waterford who lures strong men to their doom by flaunting her sexuality. The abusive husband, the arranged marriage, the suicide and the annual resurrection arrived later still, in the blogging years, and each retelling laid another stone on the cairn.

The Irish will not carry any of it. Dearg means bright red or scarlet and is not used as a noun for blood, which is fuil, or cró. Diúlaí does mean a sucker, but dearg-diúlaí is in no dictionary, and Irish grammar would in any case demand séimhiú in the compound, giving dearg-dhiúlaí, pronounced quite differently. What Summers almost certainly had was a garbled deargadaol, a word attested in its older form darbdael as far back as the Book of Ballymote in 1391, built out of doirb, a water beetle, and daol, a beetle. It means the devil’s coach-horse. It is a small black rove beetle, glossy as wet coal, that lifts its abdomen over its back like a scorpion when something large stands over it, and it can be turned up under any flat stone in the country. The Irish held it accursed. Thousands of children copying folklore into school ledgers between 1937 and 1939 wrote down that the deargadaol had betrayed Christ by pointing him out to the soldiers with that raised tail, and that killing one wiped out seven sins. Tina Rath ran the same word to ground while writing a London doctorate on the vampire in fiction, wrote to University College Dublin, and was told what it was: a beetle.

So the powers are easy to list, because they were all issued after the fact. She has beauty, which is the only equipment the 1914 line gives her, and she uses it as a lure rather than a weapon. She drains what she catches and is never satisfied, which is a property borrowed wholesale from the eastern European vampire. Her one limit is the cairn, the weight of stones on the grave, and that limit came from Anthony Masters misremembering an eastern Mediterranean burial custom in a book about somewhere else. Against her stands the plainest weakness any monster can have. There is no ancient Irish word for a vampire, because Ireland had no use for the idea, any more than it had a word of its own for a djinn. The modern Irish is vaimpír. Deamhan fola, blood demon, sounds native and is not: its earliest trace is a radio thriller broadcast on Radio Éireann in 1941. Neamh-mharbh, the undead, was minted in the 1930s by Seán Ó Cuirrín so that he could translate Bram Stoker into Irish at all.

None of which stops her. Ireland does have a genuine returning corpse who drinks blood, Abhartach, a chieftain buried standing and pinned under a stone in Derry, and he has waited a good deal longer for the attention. Meanwhile the beetle is still out there under the flagstones, still lifting its tail at anything that disturbs it, still bearing a curse it earned in a story nobody tells about vampires.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Dearg Due?

The Dearg Due is a female vampire said to lie in a graveyard at Waterford, Ireland, and to rise and lure men to their deaths by her beauty. She is not an ancient Irish figure. Her earliest known appearance is a four-line, unsourced paragraph in Dudley Wright’s Vampires and Vampirism of 1914, which gives her no name at all.

Is the Dearg Due a real Irish legend?

No. The story cannot be traced in Irish folklore before the twentieth century, and Montague Summers checked it in 1929 with the Waterford antiquarian W. H. Grattan Flood, who told him no vampire legend was attached to the tower in question. Ireland has no native vampire tradition and no ancient word for a vampire; the modern Irish word is vaimpír.

What does Dearg Due mean?

It means nothing in Irish, because “due” is not a possible Irish spelling. The name is a mangling of Dearg-dul, printed by Montague Summers in 1929 and turned into “dearg-due” by Anthony Masters in 1972, and Dearg-dul is itself almost certainly a garbling of deargadaol, the Irish name for the devil’s coach-horse beetle, attested since the Book of Ballymote of 1391.

How do you stop the Dearg Due?

The retellings say you pile a cairn of stones on her grave to hold her down. That detail entered the story through Anthony Masters in 1972, who took it from Montague Summers quoting an ancient letter about burial customs in the eastern Mediterranean, not from anything Irish.

Who invented the Dearg Due’s backstory?

It was assembled in stages. Matthew Bunson’s Vampire Encyclopedia of 1993 first attached the name Dearg Due to the Waterford story, Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne added the seduction and the Irish-looking form dearg-diúlaí in The Un-Dead in 1997, and the forced marriage, the abusive husband and the suicide appeared later, online.

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