Dublin is a city with a densely layered history. A site of collective habitation since the fourth century, the city is marked by successive waves of settlement and violence. As a result, Dublin has a rich material and cultural history, populated with iconic landmarks, historic buildings, and a host of urban legends. As a modern tourist destination, Dublin leverages this history in service of attracting visitors from around the world, promoting the city’s complex past and, in particular, its Gothic antecedents. In October 2012, Dublin City Council in partnership with Fáilte Ireland (the Irish tourism board) held the first of what was to become the annual Bram Stoker Festival. Each year the festival coincides with Hallowe’en – which originates from the Irish pagan festival of Samhain – and celebrates Stoker’s most well-known work, Dracula (1897). Since the original festival to commemorate one hundred years since Stoker’s death, the event has expanded to become a celebration of Dublin as a supernatural city. This is despite the fact that Dracula is not set in Ireland and is devoid of any Irish characters. However, the novel has long been interpreted as a parable for the Irish sectarian and class wars of the late nineteenth century. Given that Stoker was a native Dubliner, the novel has been reclaimed as a story with an Irish subtext, and Dublin as the home of the Vampire. This paper will chart the evolution of the Bram Stoker Festival and the concomitant reimaging of Dublin as a supernatural city over the past decade. The paper will consider the cult of Stoker and how, despite having only one work of merit, Stoker continues to be the most well-known Irish Gothic writer of all time. The paper will also examine how the festival has managed to expand from its original remit of Stoker and Dracula to a broader promotion of Dublin as a profoundly haunted city, one that now operates as a unique selling point for attracting tourists.

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