Bram Stoker was Irish.
And his mother was Charlotte Stoker. As a child she had lived through the 1832 cholera epidemic in Sligo. It had been sweeping through Europe so everyone was braced for it, and when it arrived Sligo was hit hard. It was believed rightly or wrongly that dead bodies could spread the disease, so they were disposed of as quickly as possible after death, or, in some cases, before death. There were tales of the body of a tall man, which was too long to fit in a coffin, having its legs broken, whereupon the body stated screaming with pain. And of a man who found his wife in a pile of bodies, pulled her out and took her home. She survived for many years. Charlotte's family fled to relatives some distance away and they were greeted by locals with pitchforks who forced them back. She wrote her reminiscences of the epidemic in later life. Worth reading if you can find it.
Anyway, Bram was a sickly child and spent much of his early boyhood bedridden, where his mother told him stories of her childhood, including the great cholera epidemic, and people seemingly coming back from the dead.
Of this time, Stoker wrote, "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years."
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_StokerI learned this a few weeks ago.
