Le Fanu’s most famous work, the lurid vampire novella ‘Carmilla’, is saturated with womb imagery of intra-uterine ‘blood-stained annals’ (260), which echoes around the gynaecological architecture of secretive chambers and corridors in the Gothic castle. This maternal mise-en-scène finds a precedent in Le Fanu’s fairy tales, folkloric narratives which rehearse Carmilla’s maternal gaze through amniotic hinterlands and superstitions engaging with Irish and European folkloric epistemologies of fairies, witchcraft, and clairvoyance. While Le Fanu was a Protestant and son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, the family was steeped in the folklore heritage of their motherland Abingdon, Limerick, a mostly working-class and suspicious Catholic rural parish. Le Fanu’s brother William recalled how their father Thomas stopped labourer Mick Tucker from burning his son Johnny, whom he believed was a fairy changeling (1893, 37–38). Le Fanu’s fairy tales reverently engaged with these superstitions, evoking a pre-Christian, pre-colonial folkloric belief system which wrote an Irish landscape of viscous, womby bogs and fairy-dwellings inhospitable to patriarchy. This motherland bred superstitions about fairy midwives, human surrogates and changelings, and betrayed anxieties surrounding the maternal body and the child it produced, an archaic anxiety Le Fanu was compelled to repeat through his own narratives.