The elder Abraham Stoker was a civil servant who worked as chief secretary at Dublin Castle. Charlotte Stoker, twenty years younger than her husband, was the stronger personality, and possessed a vaulting ambition for her five sons. When she was twenty-four, she had experienced the cholera epidemic which reached the town of Sligo in Western Ireland in 1832; the town became "a place of the dead." According to family legend, her house was bolted and secure, but one day she saw the hand of a looter reaching through a skylight, seized an axe, and chopped it off. She remembered an army sergeant who "died" from the plague and was so tall that the undertaker had to break his legs to squeeze him into the coffin; at the first blow, the man revived. Her accounts of the plague and of the narrowly averted premature burial became favorite bedtime stories during Bram's long childhood illness. This illness has never been explained; Stoker says of it in his
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906): "In my babyhood I used, I understand, to be often at the point of death.
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