Dearg Due

Dearg Due — the name means roughly "red blood-drinker" in Irish — is the most prominent female vampire figure in Irish folklore, and one of the few Irish supernatural beings specifically associated with blood-drinking rather than the more usual fairy mischief or ghostly haunting. The legend as most commonly told centres on a beautiful woman in ancient Waterford, beloved throughout the region, whose father refused her chosen partner and sold her instead into marriage with a wealthy but brutal chieftain. Treated as property rather than a person, she wasted away and died. On the first anniversary of her death she rose from her grave, killed her father and her husband by draining their blood, and has walked since as a creature of appetite and revenge.

The specific location — a grave near a landmark known as Strongbow's Tree in Waterford — gives the legend an unusual geographical anchor for Irish vampire lore, and the annual folk custom of piling stones on the grave to weigh her down is still noted in local tradition. This detail connects the Dearg Due to a genuinely ancient class of European corpse-suppression practices intended to prevent the restless dead from rising.

It should be noted that the legend's earliest clearly datable written source is Dudley Wright's Vampires and Vampirism (1924), and some folklorists have questioned whether the figure has deep medieval Irish roots or whether she represents an early 20th century reworking of older motifs. Nevertheless, the Waterford tradition is well established in local memory, and the Dearg Due sits within a genuine Irish tradition of dangerous revenants — of which Abhartach, the vampire-dwarf of County Londonderry, is the most thoroughly documented example.