Female Vampire, County Waterford
In his books The A-Z of British Ghosts and Gazetteer of Scottish & Irish Ghosts, Peter Underwood briefly mentions a legend about a female vampire buried in a small graveyard by a ruined church near Strongbow’s Tree or Tower.
Does anyone know anything else about this?
In his books The A-Z of British Ghosts and Gazetteer of Scottish & Irish Ghosts, Peter Underwood briefly mentions a legend about a female vampire buried in a small graveyard by a ruined church near Strongbow’s Tree or Tower.
Does anyone know anything else about this?
Re: Female Vampire, County Waterford
It’s supposed to be a Dearg-due, which is pretty much the Gaelic name for a vampire.
According to what I have been to piece together there are two variations to the myth: the first say it’s a woman burned at the stake for being a witch who returned to life as a Dearg-due. She used her beauty to lure passerbys to secluded spots and then bleed them to death. After a while she was discovered and a mound of stones was erected on her grave to prevent her from arising ever again. This is probably a later fabrication.
The second says the Dearg-due is a malevolent creature very similar to the Baobhan Sith of Scotland. To prevent her from leaving her home (being a supernatural creature aking to the Good People she had her home in a mound) a cairn was erected on top of her mound.
Re: Female Vampire, County Waterford
Whilst trying to find Strongbows Tower I found the following from Vampires In Ireland:
Dudley Wright, in Vampires and Vampirism, mentioned a female vampire who lured people to her by her beauty. She supposedly resided in the graveyard at Waterford near Strongbow’s Tower. [Montague] Summers conducted one of his rare personal investigations only to discover that there was no Strongbow’s Tower near Waterford. He suggested that Wright made a mistaken reference to another structure, Reginald’s Tower, but upon checking with authorities on Irish lore, was told that no vampire legends were known about Reginald’s Tower. As a final explanation, Summers suggested that Wright’s story was a confused version of a story told of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Waterford after which a frog (not native to Ireland) was found and interred in Reginald’s Tower.