Kensal Green Cemetery, an Abandoned Lover’s Tomb and the Spookiest Ever Telephone Mix-up

L. – as the man in the ghost story is referred to – was wandering through Kensal Green Cemetery after attending a funeral when he found himself lost in the sprawling 72-acre Victorian graveyard. Kensal Green was then one of London’s most fashionable burial grounds. The celebrities and innovators interred there included Charles Babbage, who had invented an early computer – called the Difference Engine – in collaboration with the daughter of Lord Byron. Other famous tenants were the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel; the novelists Anthony Trollope, W.M. Thackery and Wilkie Collins; Pre-Raphaelite painter W.C. Waterhouse, and the news vendor W.H. Smith. L. drifted past the ivy-entangled angels and elaborate gothic mausoleums and strayed into a poorer and more overgrown section of the graveyard. Already a little depressed from the funeral, he began to experience a rising melancholy, a sense of oppression from all the monuments to death and mourning around him. He, however, attempted to shake such feelings off and to interest himself in the different tombs, in the grave markers and their inscriptions. What was life, after all, but for living and he was certainly living his. Moneyed and successful, he moved in the capital’s intellectual circles, enjoying a stimulating social life. He felt he still had much to enjoy in what he hoped would be a long and pleasurable existence.

Kensal Green Cemetery was the burial place for some of London’s wealthiest and most famous people (Photo: Marathon)

Still, the cold, foggy, drizzly weather saddened him; he was irritated by the insistence of the clay soil of the cemetery in clinging to his feet. He wandered down a leafy pathway, taking in the epitaphs on the graves when his eyes flicked over an inscription that made him suck in a breath. He peered more closely and shuddered as he realised he hadn’t been mistaken. The grave was hers, all right. The headstone belonged to an ex-lover, Elsie, who L. had long ago left behind as his personal and professional life took an upward turn. Elsie – a lowborn girl from a dreary suburb nicknamed “the Clerks’ Dormitory” – had possessed “no working brains and no money to speak of”.

The publisher felt a stab of guilt as he remembered his decision to ditch Elsie, feeling she would inevitably hamper his social rise. He recalled how – on hearing of her passing – he’d been too embarrassed even to send a wreath from his Bond Street florist to her humble address. L.’s guilt was deepened by her grave’s condition. A simple cross – soot and weather-stained – poked out of the naked earth, listing at an angle “as if tired”. L. imagined Elsie “lying alone in wet clay and deeper darkness – nasty, sticky clay like that which he tried to clean off his boots by rubbing them against the marble surrounds.” L. made a note of the grave number – perhaps he could pay for a more dignified memorial. After all, someone else might “stumble upon it who knew the story and the name of his invisible mistress.” He winced at the thought of the gossip her dilapidated resting place might arose.

Elsie’s grave was found in a more modest section of Kensal Green Cemetery (Photo: Mr Ignavy)

Swiftly finding his bearings, L. strode from the gates of Kensal Green Cemetery and got into his car. But as he was driven back to Mayfair, he could pay no attention to the copy of The Times that vibrated on his lap. Arriving home, L. gave his coat and hat to his valet – Bowden – and tried to settle down to dinner. Yet, throughout the meal – and throughout the evening – he found himself weighed down by thoughts of mortality and memories of his defunct sweetheart. His mind became so gloomy that – after dismissing Bowden and the other servants – he decided to telephone a friend, hoping this acquaintance could call round for an hour and cheer him up.

L. went to the phone in his library, dialled the operator and asked for what he thought was his friend’s number. But as the operator put him through, L. realised he had requested Kensal Green _____, the number of Elsie’s grave. He stammered out his error, but it was too late and cold shivers overtook him as the receiver at the other end was picked up. A familiar voice answered. At first it sounded muffled, but soon became clearer.

“Yes, who’s calling?”

L. was so shocked he couldn’t help but give his name.

The other speaker gasped with delight.

“Why, it’s never you, darling,” Elsie exclaimed. “Do you want me? Of course, I’ll come.” (This was the way Elsie had always spoken during their telephone calls.)

L. tried to stutter “No, no, no” but couldn’t get his lips to form the words.

“I won’t be long,” Elsie said. “But I was very far away, darling, when you rang up.”

In utter horror, L. let the receiver slip from his hand. He thought about fleeing the house, but – in his panic – couldn’t make up his mind so he ended up waiting to see what would occur. When would the ghost arrive? How would she look? Surely she wouldn’t be clad in “her earth-stained shroud, with the seal of corruption on her face?” L. poured a large brandy and tried to calm down. “Damn it all, he wasn’t afraid of any woman living, much less a dead one. Let her come – even if she brings all the clay of Kensal Green with her!”

The front door opened quietly then closed itself. The temperature plummeted and from the hallway came the sound of footsteps stumbling and dragging, as if their owner’s legs had been stiff for a long time. Next came three gentle knocks on the library door. L. did not get to greet his ghostly visitor. He passed out in a faint and was discovered by Bowden in the morning’s early hours.

“And believe me or believe me not,” Bowden said, “bits of wet clay were sticking to the carpet and some was on his dinner jacket. Beats me how it got there. As for the hall mat; it was all mussed up. Why can’t people wipe their feet like Christians?”

After some time, L. began to recover from his experience of Kensal Green Cemetery and its ghost. He started to enjoy his successful and luxurious life again. But the incident bestowed upon him two new habits he would always thereafter follow. He would never again use the phone or attend funerals.

What Does This Strange Ghost Story of Kensal Green Cemetery Tell Us?

Whether these outlandish events happened or not, they perhaps give us an insight into the mentality, concerns and upheavals of the period in which the tale is set. This ghost story, first of all, has a strong class element. There’s L.’s urge for social mobility and his eagerness to leave his embarrassing past – represented by Elsie – behind. But despite L.’s success and wealth, there’s a sense he’s not totally accepted in fashionable and privileged circles. L. “preferred to speak to titles” and “knew to a nicety the degrees of the social scale and what status is demanded by Claridge’s, the Ritz and the Berkeley.” However, “he collected few friends but numerous acquaintances” and “his name never featured as a guest at Bohemian or theatrical gatherings”. L. cannot escape his origins – they continue to haunt the publisher. One slip-up under stress has the ghosts of his past resurrected. A past he’d hoped was dead and buried disinters itself and relentlessly hunts him down.

There’s also, of course, the class consciousness of the authors – how they give their story more credibility by attributing it to the Hon. Alec Carlisle. Their book True Ghost Stories is full of such name drops of the powerful and influential. In the stories themselves, many of the characters sport titles or reside in manor houses and even some of the spooks boast immaculate dress sense. As for Marchioness Townsend – the term ‘marchioness’ denotes a noble rank, meaning a marquess’s wife or widow. The self-consciously bohemian Maude M.C. Ffoulkes was a literal ghost writer who sought to join that aristocratic set and who collaborated with down-at-heel, exiled European royals in the early 1900s to produce – sometimes scandalous – autobiographies.

A lavish tomb in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery (Photo: Marathon)

The story of Kensal Green Cemetery’s ghost also seems full of repressed sexuality. Though society had by that time shaken off some of the more rigid Victorian restrictions, many still had a horror of the body and sex, especially – it seems – the sensuality of the lower-class and female. The fact that Elsie’s desires are so strong they can resurrect her from the grave and are expressed in such gothic and lurid form, the fact that L. finds himself ravished and daubed with graveyard dirt perhaps hint at sexual feelings that many in society would have liked to have kept in a box buried under six feet of mud but which had the distressing habit of breaking free from their confinement.

Another aspect of the tale is how the superstitious and folkloric combine with social progress and modern technology. There’s L.’s use of new-fangled telecommunications, but it is that very technology that delivers the ghost to his door. It seems the supernatural has the ability to subvert humanity’s most impressive inventions. Even the location – Kensal Green Cemetery – hints at social renewal. Kensal Green is one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ – a series of spacious graveyards built on London’s then-outskirts to relieve pressure on the capital’s overcrowded and insanitary churchyards and crypts. This progress is, however, still prone to disruption by the unruly (un)dead. It’s interesting that occult and macabre legends are associated with other Magnificent Seven cemeteries. In the 1970s, London and the entire country were gripped by rumours that a vampire lurked in Highgate Cemetery while a myth has grown up about a neo-Egyptian tomb in Brompton Cemetery being a magically powered Victorian time machine. Brompton Cemetery is also said to be haunted by the murdered Victorian actor William Terriss, who is buried there and who also haunts Covent Garden Underground Station.

A telephone exchange in Montreal, 1895. At the time of the Kensal Green ghost story, most calls had to be connected through an operator.

Many of the turn-of-the-century anxieties found in the tale of Kensal Green Cemetery and its ghost surface in other gothic literature of the period. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, is full of social tensions, with its middle-class fears of both the aristocracy and the working class. The book frets over the role of the liberated ‘new woman’ and even has Lucy Westenra – manic with her unleashed vampiric sexuality – breaking from her tomb and roaming an area suspiciously like Highgate. Dracula is also full of the technological advances of the time – telegrams, phonographs, blood transfusions, trains – that contrast strangely with the folkloric powers of stakes, crucifixes and bulbs of garlic.

So, the story of Kensal Green Cemetery and its ghost – as grotesque as it might appear – maybe gives us a window into the priorities and concerns of a different era. The account of this lascivious spook contains within it a range of social, sexual, psychological and technological anxieties. Though now long-buried beneath the clay of time, this absurd yet chilling tale does make one wonder what other things might lie under the patina of the everyday mind, just waiting for the opportunity to be resurrected.

(This article’s main image – showing a gothic tomb in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery – is courtesy of Marathon.)

The post Kensal Green Cemetery’s Strange Ghost Story – Grave 132 Please, Operator appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

The mausoleum – resembling a hulking Greek temple and surrounded by pillars capped with the memento mori emblems of eternal flames – is the resting place of the Russian aristocrat Baroness Elizaveta Demidoff. Elizaveta (Elizabeth) died on 8th April 1818 and was buried in Père Lachaise the next day. Though in life Baroness Demidoff was famed for her beauty and light-hearted humour, a sinister legend would grow up around her tomb. Elizaveta is said to lie in a glass coffin, but the legend goes well beyond this Snow-White-like detail. What’s really creepy is the claim that a very odd clause lurks in Baroness Demidoff’s will.

Baroness Demidoff’s tomb looms over the other graves in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. (Photo: Luca Borghi)

The will is said to promise a fortune – one million francs, some maintain; others assert as many as five million, equivalent at the time to about a million dollars – to any person brave enough to endure an especially gruesome ordeal. To earn this money, the person would have to spend 365 days and 366 nights alone with Baroness Demidoff in her tomb. Any such candidate would be forbidden all human contact for the duration of the trial. And – just to make the experience even grimmer – the tomb’s walls and ceilings are rumoured to be lined with mirrors. Wherever the contender looked, the sight of the baroness’s body in her crystal casket would assail them.

The legends claim several courageous, or at least greedy, individuals have taken up the challenge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same legends state none were able to see it through. After – in most cases – just a few days, contenders were pummelling the tomb door, begging to be let out. Some suffered mental breakdowns or heart attacks; others swore they’d felt a vampire-like entity draining their lifeforce.

But who exactly was Baroness Elizaveta Demidoff and how did these outlandish stories become attached to her? Did her will really lay down such a macabre challenge? What might the strange symbols and occult numbers carved on her tomb mean and why do some people associate them with the vampiric? Let’s investigate below.

The Colourful Life and Early Death of Baroness Demidoff

Baroness Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stroganova entered the world on 5th February 1779 in St Petersburg, Russia. She was born into one of the nation’s wealthiest families, a family that had risen from peasant origins to become landowners, traders and industrialists, making much of their money from salt and fur. This increase in social status was further boosted when Tsar Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725) bestowed on them the title of Barons of the Russian Empire.

Elizaveta acquired a reputation as a beautiful and beguilingly light-hearted young woman. A number of portraits were made of her, which collectors still prize. At 16-years-old, she married Nikolay Nikitich Demidoff. Nikolay, born in 1773, was from an extremely rich family of industrialists that had acquired their cash from copper, silver and gold mines and iron foundries. He became a diplomat and the couple were posted to Paris.

Portrait of Baroness Demidoff as a child

They both enjoyed life in the city, but Paris especially suited Elizaveta’s outgoing lively nature. Nikolay, in contrast, was more reserved and focused much of his attention on increasing his family’s fortune, obsessing over how to modernise their industrial operations. The Demidoffs had four children, with two – Pavel and Anatoly – surviving to adulthood. Anatoly was destined to continue the family’s social rise – he’d have the title of Prince of San Donato bestowed on him by the Italian government and would marry Napoleon’s niece Mathilda.

During their years in Paris, Nikolay and Elizaveta became admirers of Napoleon Bonaparte, but in 1805 increasing tensions between Napoleon’s regime and Russia led to Nikolay being redeployed. The family spent some years in Italy before the Tsar recalled them to Russia in 1812. Nikolay and Elizaveta settled in Moscow, but – due to the differences in their personalities – they separated shortly after their return. Nikolay remained in the Tsar’s service and would fight against Napoleon in spite of the esteem in which he held the French Emperor. He’d later gain the post of Russian ambassador to the Court of Tuscany. In 1827, Grand Duke Leopold II granted Nikolay the title of Count of San Donato – a mark of gratitude for Nikolay’s role in establishing a silk factory there.

Portrait of Baroness Demidoff – a woman famed for her beauty and lively character

After separating from her husband, Baroness Demidoff moved back to her beloved Paris, but she died there in 1818 at the age of just 39. She was buried in the newly fashionable Père Lachaise Cemetery, which had only opened in 1804 to relieve pressure on overcrowded Paris churchyards. Elizaveta’s mausoleum was originally located in Division 39 of the vast necropolis, but was later moved to the 19th.

Elizaveta’s husband Nikolay Demidoff

So Elizaveta appears to have led a privileged, often enjoyable, but in many ways unremarkable life for a woman of her time and social position. She’s known to have died wealthy, but gossip claimed she was perhaps a little nutty towards the end. Her real fame, however, came after she passed away, thanks to the lurid rumours that circulated about her last will and testament, rumours that would make it into both the French and international newspapers.

The Strange Will of Baroness Demidoff, the Macabre Challenge to Spend a Year in Her Tomb and the ‘Vampiric Symbols’ on Her Mausoleum

Most of what we know about the strange and morbid will of Baroness Demidoff comes from articles in the 19th century press. These articles – some of which refer to the Baroness as a ‘countess’ or even a ‘princess’ – outlined how those taking up her challenge had to follow certain rules. The will, we are told, forbade ‘all visitors. The candidate must be alone with the dead for a whole year before the whole $1,000,000 is won.’ Though a servant would bring ‘meals regularly to the watcher’ and would carry away the bucket containing their bodily waste, any attempts to communicate with this employee were strictly forbidden. The contender was allowed to leave their gloomy lodgings once a day ‘to stroll among the tombs for an hour’. But – to make sure no human contact could be achieved – this walk had to be undertaken after the necropolis’s gates had closed for the night or before they opened in the morning.

The newspaper reports emphasised the horror of passing so much time in such proximity to the corpse of Baroness Demidoff. ‘The princess lies in a crystal coffin,’ one article stated, ‘Thus, the whole body is distinctly visible, and this is what causes so much fright to all who have as yet attempted to gain the prize.’ Another journalist described how ‘the body of the princess, according to legendary report, lies in a crystal coffin, in a wonderful state of preservation’, stressing that ‘in order that the man or woman who might undertake the long watch should never lose sight of it, and during the whole year and a day have his thoughts constantly occupied with the deceased princess, the walls and ceiling were lined with plate-glass mirrors, so that, whichever way the watcher might turn, he or she would always be confronted by the spectacle of the dead Princess in her glass coffin.’

How, then, might the watcher have achieved any respite from this grisly display? Though contenders were forbidden to distract themselves with any sort of work, books and newspapers were permitted. Such material could be read by ‘the funeral light at the head of the coffin’. But what would happen to the candidate if, in a moment of weakness, they attempted to talk to the meal-bearing servant or sneak over the cemetery walls? We’re told that ‘in the case of any of these stipulations being violated, the watch was to recommence, or all hope of inheriting the million francs be abandoned.’

Baroness Demidoff’s mausoleum in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. (Photo: The Paranormal Guide)

Despite these rigorous demands, there was no shortage of applicants willing to go through the ordeal. An article in a Chicago newspaper stated, ‘Several Frenchmen have essayed to win the prize, but all have given up after a short trial. One lasted out nearly three weeks, by which time he had completely lost his reason and still remains a jabbering idiot. The will makes no mention of foreigners being ineligible; there is every chance, therefore, for a strong-minded American who fears neither ghosts, ghouls nor gravestones to become rich in the short period of 365 days. Applications to be made to the municipality of Paris.’

Letters indeed flooded in from across the world. ‘Though applications to watch by the coffin of the Russian Princess came from all parts of Europe, and even North and South America,’ one article related, ‘Belgium seems to have furnished the largest number of intrepid individuals willing and anxious to sit for a whole year beside the glass coffin.’ Would-be contenders included ‘an old soldier, occupying the post of night watcher in a factory’ who ‘declared he would certainly earn the million francs if the conservator of the cemetery would only admit him into the tomb of the Princess’ and ‘a young shepherd of Laekesles-Bruxelles’. This young man ‘was in such a hurry to commence the watch that would make him rich and enable him to marry the girl he loved, that he begged the conservator of Père Lachaise to indicate the day and hour at which he might present himself.’ A letter from an American, which still exists, earnestly requests ‘please tell me if this is a bona fide offer’ before adding ‘if it is, please consider me an applicant of these requirements at once’ then signing off ‘And greatly obliged – yours very truly, J.H. Davis.’

It wasn’t only men who were prepared to endure a gloomy year in the presence of Baroness Demidoff’s remains. An article expressed surprise at ‘the number of widows who presented themselves for the interminable watch … they disguised their desire to become rich with the supposed Princess’s million francs under all sorts of excuses. They wanted the money for this and that praiseworthy object – to help a friend, to provide for a daughter etc., and one even went so far to declare that if she earned the money she would found a home for orphans.’

Even newspaper reporters themselves, including those working for respectable journals, seem to have been seduced by the prospect of the Baroness’s fortune. One article related how ‘a journalist on Le Temps seriously enquired with whom the money had been lodged, and whether he was quite sure to receive the million if he succeeded in accomplishing the watch.’

The parade of people presenting themselves to undertake the ordeal grew as the story of Baroness Demidoff’s will spread. One American newspaper described how applicants ‘began to bombard the officials in Paris and our ambassador with letters seeking information and so numerous were these enquiries that the prefect of police had to hire another clerk, the city fathers had to increase their secretaries, and Mr Eustice had to call in the extra hall man at the embassy to open the communications that arrived from all parts of North America.’ Some would-be contenders tried to bribe officials with presents or with cuts of the prize money.

Most who attempted the challenge, however, are said not to have lasted long before screaming to be let out. Tortured by the inescapable presence of the Baroness’s corpse – and haunted by its incessant reflection in the mirrors all around them – few endured for more than a fortnight. One man is alleged to have gone totally insane, another to have died of a heart attack soon after his release. Others felt their vitality being drained, with one sensing his very life was seeping from him. Some contenders claimed to have ‘heard unearthly and mysterious sounds’ or to have ‘been struck with horror and fear by ghostly apparitions’. Certain candidates suspected the tomb was a portal leading to hell while others came out covered in scratches and bruises. Even present-day visitors to Père Lachaise have reported feelings of unease and emptiness around the mausoleum and strong urges not to linger nearby. It’s been theorised that Baroness Demidoff may be some sort of ‘energy vampire’, with the challenge in her will a means of providing her with victims so she could feed off their lifeforce.

The strange design of the Baroness’s tomb has also stimulated ideas about her ‘vampirism’. The mausoleum boasts carvings of bats and of wolves’ heads, with the wolves rumoured to guard the Baroness’s body during the daytime. The tomb also bears a carving of a knot – thought to depict the Knot of Hercules, which symbolises the binding together of the states of life and death. The date of Baroness Demidoff’s demise is also believed to be significant. She died on April 8th, 1818, and the number eight – with its interconnected loops – is said to be an emblem of infinity when laid on its side. Or it could represent the eternal ouroboros – the cosmic snake biting its own tail. It’s claimed three eights are to vampires what three sixes are to the Devil or that eight is a number of occult initiation, with nine being the number of the accomplished adept.

A wolf’s head on Baroness Demidoff’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris – a daytime guardian of the vampire princess?

There’s also the tomb’s location within Père Lachaise Cemetery. It sits on the Alley of Acacias. The acacia plant is a symbol of resurrection, immortality and initiation, frequently found in Freemasonry. The Baroness’s tomb also lies on the Path of the Dragon – the name Dracula stems from the word meaning ‘dragon’ or ‘devil’ in the Romanian language. Baroness Demidoff’s body is said to face the setting sun, which also has – apparently – some vampiric significance, and it’s alleged her corpse doesn’t show any signs of decomposition. In modern times, there are those who have attempted to film inside the tomb – through a cross-like opening in its door – and who claim to have captured the eerie movements of some florescent figure or a glowing demonic face.

There’s no doubt that the newspaper reports about Baroness Demidoff appeared and that people did send letters asking to take up her challenge. But how much truth actually was there in these journalistic articles, what did the Baroness’s will really say, and – if not vampirism – what could explain the extremely odd decorations on her tomb? Keep reading and we’ll try to find out.

How Much Truth Is There in the Sinister Legends of Baroness Demidoff’s Bizarre Will and ‘Vampiric Tomb’?

For some time, people have tried to explain the weird contents of the Baroness’s will and the strange legends surrounding her. It’s been suggested that the stipulations in her last will and testament came from a fear of being interred in her mausoleum alive. A terror of live burial was common in the 18th and 19th centuries. Medical advances in the understanding of coma-like states had led people to realise it was possible for one to appear dead, be buried then wake up underground or sealed in the tomb.

These fears can be seen in fiction like Frankenstein and Dracula – books which obsess over the blurry boundaries between death and life and the dark possibilities of reanimation – as well as in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Some coffins were fitted with bells and flags, enabling people who suffered overhasty burial to signal to those on the surface. Or the ‘dead’ were buried with loaded pistols so they could end their anguish if it turned out a terrible mistake had occurred. Might Baroness Demidoff’s will have been an attempt to lure a watcher who could raise the alarm if he saw movement in her crystal coffin? Were the mirrors to make sure any such stirrings wouldn’t be missed?

This argument – considering the widespread fears of the time – might be compelling, but it’s unlikely to be accurate. As mentioned above, most of our knowledge of Baroness Demidoff’s will comes from newspaper reports and an analysis of these soon provides a simpler explanation. The dark fairy tale of the glass-coffined princess in Père Lachaise Cemetery appears to have sprung from nothing more than the 19th-century equivalent of ‘fake news’.

The greatest giveaway is the date of the articles. Research by Chris Woodyard – author of the Victorian Book of the Dead – has found that the earliest printed reference to the Baroness’s morbid myth crops up in the Chicago Daily Tribune on 25th October 1893. The Tribune’s short article claims that ‘five years ago a Russian princess died leaving a large fortune’ before going on to give details of the glass coffin, a five-million-franc reward and the requirement for anyone who wanted this cash to remain in the mausoleum for a year. Immediately, we can see an issue – the article implies the baroness died in 1888 when in fact she passed away in 1818.

The Chicago Daily Tribune article was picked up by newspapers in the United States, in France and throughout the world, leading to a deluge of letters from those willing to endure the ordeal. Another Chicago newspaper – probably the Chicago Herald – published an article on November 15th 1893 also stating the ‘Russian Princess’ had died five years earlier. When the American J.H. Davis wrote his charming letter – also in 1893 – asking to undertake the challenge, he enclosed ‘an article from the Chicago Herald to the effect that one million dollars are left by a Russian Princess to the person who will watch her tomb for the space of one year.’

Even at the time, it didn’t take most of the press long to see through the hoax around Baroness Demidoff’s will. Articles were published around the world giving details of the legend then thundering against the fraud it had sprung from. In January 1894, the San Francisco Morning Call denounced the story as ‘a very grim hoax’. The New Zealand Herald, on 17th February 1894, wrote, ‘How this story got circulated, no one knows, not even the conservator of Père Lachaise Cemetery, who has used every effort to discover its author. To put an end to the fable and to the streams of letters, he has sent notes to the journals contradicting the story, but they have not yet met with so much credence as the legend of the Princess’ million.’ In April 1894, the Boston Herald published  ‘A Bogus Special about the Will of a Princess’, stridently condemning ‘a certain Chicago newspaper as the cause of all sorts of emotions and of semi-diplomatic annoyances to the American embassy, to the prefecture of police and to the municipality of this great capital.’ This lamentable news item, the Boston Herald tells us, had aroused ‘the ambition of all the cranks in the country’.

A quiet lane in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris (Photo: X Days in Y)

I can’t help wondering, however, if these articles – which devoted more space to describing the macabrely fantastical legend than debunking it – didn’t increase the myth’s popularity and keep the torrent of letters from eager candidates gushing in. In 1896, Baroness Demidoff’s grim fame received fresh impetus from an article in Le Temps, which depicted the story in the manner of a morbid fairy tale. Even years later, the legend would surge into the popular consciousness from time to time. In 1932, the Emporia Gazette described how ‘some time last August an ex-soldier arrived at the cemetery and solemnly announced that he had come to win the million francs offered … his advent, so the authorities have informed reporters, was the beginning of a veritable procession of adventurers all equipped with the same tale and paraphernalia and all eager to pass a year in the tomb of the Russian Princess … Not only this, but letters have been received by the cemetery authorities from persons in Morocco, Tunisia, the Sudan and Indo-China, who desire to undergo the ordeal. Those who have appeared at the cemetery in person, although carefully interrogated by the authorities, have either declined or refused to divulge the source of their information.’

So it appears that the legend of Baroness Demidoff’s will was likely a creation of a journalistic pen (or typewriter) to provide content on a slow news day – a short article that then caused an unexpected sensation around the globe, memories of which lingered in the collective imagination for decades. There is, of course, the possibility that the articles may have been based on oral folklore that had grown up around the Baroness’s tomb, but there’s no way of proving this. As for the Baroness’s will itself – the document that would clear much of this speculation up – no one seems to know where it is or what is says. A figure with the wealth and social status of Baroness Demidoff would have likely left a last will and testament, but there is (perhaps mysteriously) no surviving record of it.

But what about the vampiric symbols on Baroness Demidoff’s tomb? The tomb does bear unusual emblems, though some of these – like hammers and depictions of small creatures, probably weasels – are references to the sources of the Demidoff family wealth in the metalworking and fur industries. The wolves’ heads function as water-spouting gargoyles and though bats are an unusual and somewhat sinister choice of tomb ornamentation, they’re not totally unheard of – another mausoleum in Père Lachaise is decorated with the creatures. The eights in the Baroness’s death date – as records show – simply refer to the day she died. As for the tomb’s location on the Path of the Dragon and Alley of Acacias, the case for any deliberate siting of the tomb on these thoroughfares must be weakened by the fact the tomb was moved from the 39th Division of Père Lachaise to the 19th. There’s also nothing in what we know of Baroness Demidoff’s life or her upbeat personality to suggest any dabblings in the darker aspects of the occult, let alone vampirism.

Hammers and weasels – representing the Demidoff’s sources of wealth – on Baroness Demidoff’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery. (Photo: Guilhem Vellut)

Spooky and atmospheric Victorian-era cemeteries do, however, have a strange capacity to attract otherworldly legends. A vampire was once rumoured to lurk in London’s Highgate Cemetery while another vampire panic took place in Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis. In Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia, a tomb is rumoured to be decorated with vampiric signs and emblems, rather like the Baroness’s resting place. In London’s Brompton Cemetery, a striking Neo-Egyptian mausoleum is said to be either a Victorian time-travelling contraption or a teleportation device.

Mausoleums in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. (Photo: Whitty McCloud)

Whether or not Père Lachaise Cemetery contains a glass-casketed vampire princess – or whether or not you dare to peer into or hang around Baroness Demidoff’s mausoleum – the necropolis is certainly worth a visit. As well as being Paris’s largest cemetery, it’s the city’s biggest park. Paths thread pleasantly through the tree-shaded, landscaped grounds – grounds full of the most fascinating and beautiful tombs. Père Lachaise is like a history book of marble, granite and earth, hosting the graves of numerous cultural figures, such as Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Édith Piaf, Honoré de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Max Ernst, Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire. But one of the graveyard’s most famous tombs – whether as the result of press sensationalism or something more supernatural and sinister – will always be the imposing mausoleum of the Russian baroness who made her eternal home in the French capital.

(This article’s main image – showing Baroness Demidoff’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery – is courtesy of Guilhem Vellut.)

The post Baroness Demidoff – the Glass-Coffined ‘Vampire Princess’ of Père Lachaise Cemetery appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

This perplexing and ominous tomb isn’t the only aspect of what’s known as the Richmond Vampire legend. Not far from the graveyard is an old railway tunnel that has long been seen as ‘unlucky’ or ‘cursed’. The Church Hill Tunnel – built in the early 1870s – was notoriously prone to flooding, cave-ins and subsidence, problems so severe that they led to rumours the Richmond Vampire liked to skulk down there, with the evil around the creature generating many of these mishaps. On 2nd October 1925, a disastrous cave-in occurred, with tons of rock and soil crashing down on a work train, killing, trapping and wounding several labourers. Shortly after the catastrophe, eyewitnesses saw a horrific creature running from the tunnel’s end – with fanglike teeth and rolls of decomposing flesh hanging from its body. The creature is said to have sprinted into Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery and disappeared into the mausoleum of W.W. Pool.

But is this really what happened during the Church Hill Tunnel collapse? Who might the ‘vampire’ who dashed from the tunnel have been? What do we know about the ‘life’ of W.W. Pool before his entombment and how might vampire stories have become attached to him? And what of the reports of ‘occultists’ and ‘Satanists’ gathering around his mausoleum? Let’s begin by examining the strange legend of the Church Hill Tunnel disaster.

A Catastrophic Cave-in in the Church Hill Tunnel and a Hideous Sighting of the Richmond Vampire

The Church Hill Tunnel was built by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad company (C & O) in 1873. The 1,200-metre (4,000-foot) tunnel – one of the longest in the US – burrowed 4,000 feet under Richmond’s Church Hill district and was assailed by problems from the start. Richmond’s soft blue marl clay has a tendency to shrink then swell in response to fluctuations in rainfall and groundwater, a fact which – during the tunnel’s construction – led to multiple cave-ins and 10 worker deaths. The tunnel remained so troublesome throughout its working life – with water seepages, safety worries and a tendency to cause buildings on Church Hill to tilt and kink – that in the 1890s a decision was made to replace it with a three-mile, double-track railway viaduct. The viaduct – which extended along the James River, easing past Hollywood Cemetery, Downtown Richmond and Church Hill – was completed in 1901 and in 1902 the tunnel closed.

Inside the eastern entrance of the Church Hill Tunnel – was the tunnel a hideout of the Richmond Vampire? (Photo: Jkmscott)

The Church Hill Tunnel, which soon grew dilapidated, stayed shut for over twenty years. But by the 1920s – with Richmond’s population and economy expanding – the C & O realised they needed extra railway capacity so in 1925 the company decided to restore and enlarge the unlucky tunnel. Though every engineering firm consulted thought such plans hairbrained, C & O’s own technicians approved the tunnel as safe and work soon commenced. A series of minor cave-ins, however, took the lives of 12 workers. On October 2nd 1925, a work train and around 200 workmen were in the tunnel, about 160 yards from its western end. Their job was to clear dirt by loading it onto the steam train’s flatcars. As the crew laboured away, a brick fell from the tunnel’s ceiling, slamming onto one of the train’s 10 wagons. The workmen knew this was an ominous signal and, sure enough, more bricks crashed down, severing electrical cables, cutting the lights and plummeting the tunnel into darkness. ‘Watch out, Tom, she’s a-coming!’ Benjamin Mosby – the train’s burly 28-year-old fireman – shouted to his engineer.

Panic buzzed through the black tunnel and workers began swarming towards the exit, stumbling and tripping over railway sleepers and each other, convinced Mosby’s prediction would soon prove accurate. In the mayhem, according to certain accounts, some workers pulled out their knives, slashing desperately at anyone in their way. Suddenly a whole section of the tunnel collapsed. 190 feet’s worth of soil plunged towards the crew, triggering an immense cave-in that spread along most of the tunnel’s length, buckling roads and swaying buildings on the surface. Most of the workmen dived under the train’s flatcars and – crawling beneath them – managed to get out of the tunnel’s eastern end. Shocked labourers poured from the entrance, hobbling with injuries, smeared with dirt and blood, gashed with cuts and gouged with wounds. Then, from among this throng of disorientated workers, there’s alleged to have appeared the most horrendous sight.

A creature staggered into view, spattered with gore and streaked with blood. This entity seemed partially decomposed, with rolls of skin hanging from its naked muscular torso and swollen arms. Fresh blood smeared the creature’s cheeks, neck and mouth, a mouth which hung open to reveal jagged fanglike teeth. Unlike the terrified men around it, the creature showed no indication of shock or concern. Accounts claim the ghoul then dashed in the direction of nearby Hollywood Cemetery. A group of men chased it, but couldn’t catch the fleet-footed monster. They did, however, pursue the creature closely enough to see it disappear into a mausoleum – that of the infamous W.W. Pool.

Some say the pursuers then tried to enter the tomb, but accounts disagree concerning what happened next. One version of the legend has the men jimmying open the door just in time to see a coffin lid closing. Another story insists they found the tomb locked from within and – despite their numbers and strength – were unable to open it. Yet another tale states the vampire screamed curses from inside the mausoleum – presumably so petrifying they caused the men to back off. Ominously, the description of the entity – with folds of skin hanging from its partially decayed flesh – would be consistent with the decomposition expected of a body treated with the burial practices of the time after about two-to-five years. Pool had been placed in his mausoleum three years previously. Some also say that, as the vampire emerged from the tunnel, he muttered something about his wife – and it’s known that Pool shared his mausoleum with his spouse.

Such narratives, unsurprisingly, have led to the notion that the Richmond Vampire was involved in the Church Hill Tunnel disaster. Some believe the vampire, angry at the disruption the engineering works were causing to his underground hangout, caused the tunnel’s collapse. He then gorged himself on the bodies of dead and injured workers, tearing and sucking with his fangs – hence the blood his mouth was smeared with – before fleeing the hazardous tunnel and hotfooting it back to his tomb.

But what really happened during the Church Hill Tunnel catastrophe? Was the apparition seen staggering from the entrance really the Richmond Vampire? Read on and we’ll find out.

What Really Happened with the ‘Richmond Vampire’ and the Church Hill Tunnel Disaster?

A more sober look at the evidence shows the vampire’s appearance during the Church Hill Tunnel disaster in quite a different light. Just before the cave-in, fireman Benjamin Mosby had been shovelling coal into the engine’s furnace. It was common for firemen engaged in such tasks – due to their intense labour and the fire’s heat – to work without a shirt. When the tunnel collapsed, it caused the train’s steam tank to explode. Mosby was struck with a tsunami of steam and scalding water, making his skin peel off in rolls while the force of the explosion flinging him back inflicted further injuries and smashed his teeth.

Mosby, however, managed to escape the engine, crawl beneath the train and stumble out of the tunnel. When he staggered from the entrance, it seems the severe shock he was in made him strangely calm. He asked that his wife be contacted and told he was alive and not to worry. Mosby then collapsed. Workers laid him on a nearby embankment and poured water over him in an attempt to soothe his terrible pain. Bystanders noted that swathes of his blistered skin had fallen away in ‘flaps measuring up to four inches in width’ and that he also had lacerations from crawling under the train and several broken teeth. Mosby was assured his message would be relayed to his wife. A taxi took him to Grace Hospital, where he died within 24 hours.

Interestingly, Mosby was laid to rest in Hollywood Cemetery, though certainly not in W.W. Pool’s mausoleum. Among Richmond working men at the time, apparently, a slang term for dying was ‘going to Hollywood’, a reference to the city’s famous necropolis.

Mosby wasn’t the only fatality the Church Hill Tunnel cave-in caused. Though Mosby was the only man who made it out of the tunnel to have died, others weren’t able to escape. The duty roster listed three men, including the train’s engineer – one Thomas Joseph Mason – as missing. In an attempt to find any lingering survivors or recover bodies, C & O dug down from the surface, getting to the train eight days after the collapse. They reached Mason’s cabin – his corpse was found upright in his chair, pinned into place by the engine’s reverse lever. At that point, the company chose not to go on with the rescue effort, citing the cost ($30,000 dollars in modern money) and the fact the rescue attempts had triggered more cave-ins. Their decision may have also been influenced by the fact that the other two missing men – Richard Lewis and H. Smith – were African-American casual labourers. There may well have been more itinerant workers – some have speculated as many as six – trapped in the Church Hill Tunnel as record keeping of such people in those days could be scanty. Whoever was left was destined be entombed in there, along with the locomotive and its 10 flatcars. In spring 1926, the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which regulated the state’s railroads, ordered the tunnel’s western end sealed for safety reasons.

The sealed western end of Richmond’s Church Hill Tunnel. (Photo: Eli Christman)

So it seems the part of the Richmond Vampire legend centred on the Church Hill Tunnel was based on the death of Benjamin Mosby. The skin hanging from the body, the blood, the ‘fangs’, and even the vampire’s apparent ‘calm’ and utterance about his wife all chime with Mr Mosby’s horrendous experience. Though newspaper reports of the accident at the time seem to have been factual – the taxi that took Mosby to hospital had just carried a journalist to the scene – it’s likely that over the years memories of the incident became distorted into something even more sinister. The fact Mosby was buried in Hollywood Cemetery and the workers’ slang phrase ‘going to Hollywood’ might have later fed into an evolving belief linking the ‘vampire’ that emerged from the tunnel with that graveyard. The vampire’s dash for the necropolis may be a garbled retelling of some accounts that claimed Mosby at one point tried to run towards the James River.

But what of the myth’s other component – W.W. Pool, his alleged vampirism and his creepy mausoleum in Hollywood Cemetery? Let’s see what we can find out about this elusive character.

Was W.W. Pool the Richmond Vampire?

Legend states that W.W. Pool was run out of England for vampirism, but it appears Pool was born in Mississippi around 1847. William Wortham Pool was the son of Samuel Pool, a merchant, and by 1860 William was employed as a clerk in the state capital, Jackson. Later in the 1860s, Pool moved to Virginia, working as a clerk in a tobacco factory in the Richmond suburb of Manchester then as a bookkeeper and private secretary. He became a well-established Richmond accountant, often working for the influential Bryans, a family of newspaper publishers. Pool married his wife Alice in 1866 and they had four children. His wife passed away in 1913, but Pool lived on until the age of 75, dying of pneumonia in February 1922. The only mildly spooky incident connected with Pool’s death was the fact his close friend, one Samuel Owens, died on the same day. Owens – Manchester’s commissioner of revenue – had, along with Pool, been a prominent member of Richmond’s Central Methodist Church and had attended the same Freemasons’ lodge. Active in civic affairs, Pool appears to have been a person of some local influence in his later life. Shortly after his death, he was described as ‘one of the oldest and most widely known residents of South Richmond’.

The mausoleum of W.W. Pool in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia – the tomb of the Richmond Vampire? (Photo: RVA all day)

So how did the outlandish Richmond Vampire legend come to weave itself around W.W. Pool, a man who appears to have led an exceptionally normal and respectable, if moderately successful, life? It’s possible that the seeds of some of the rumours were planted thanks to the elaborate funerals of Pool and Owens, funerals which included full Masonic rites. The Richmond News Leader reported: ‘Today is a virtual holiday in this section (Southside) of the city, owing to the funeral services of W.W. Pool and Samuel R. Owens, two of the most distinguished citizens of Southside. Representatives from practically all the public offices, hustings court and banks and persons from all walks of life attended the funeral of Mr Pool this morning … and the same large crowd will pay the last tribute of respect to Mr Owens this afternoon.’

Most of the vampire hysteria around Pool is, however, likely to have come from his tomb. The mausoleum’s only inscriptions are the name ‘W.W. Pool’ and the year 1913. There was a biblical quote – Isiah 11:6 – ending with the phrase ‘and a little child shall lead them’, but the slab bearing this inscription fell off a few years ago. There’s been speculation that the W’s resemble fangs, that the lack of a clear birth and death date suggests Pool is immortal, and that the ‘child’ referred to in the Isiah quote is either a small vampire or one of the ‘children of the night’. Anyone with a little historical knowledge could explain such things away. Tombs of the time often lacked birth and death dates, elaborate inscriptions or even names – part of the sense of thriftiness Pool’s generation was known for. (Unnecessary words would mean paying the stone mason extra.) Pool had the tomb constructed for his wife, hence it being chiselled with the year of her death, and seems to have left no instructions to add any more engravings when he was placed within. The Isiah quote was likely just inspired by Pool’s Methodist beliefs and the observation the W’s resemble fangs is just too silly to have much comment expended upon it.

There is, though, perhaps something eerie about Pool’s mausoleum with its Neo-Egyptian design, something that makes it stand out in a cemetery where the more conspicuous tombs tend to have Greco-Roman influences. Nods to Ancient Egypt do make people think of things spooky, mummified and magical and of the questing for immortality. (The presence of a large pyramid, unconnected to Pool, in the centre of Hollywood Cemetery has likely also added to this mysterious ambiance.) The Egyptian design of Pool’s tomb was probably inspired by nothing more than the widespread interest in Ancient Egyptian archaeological finds in the 19th and early 20th centuries, an interest perhaps made more intense in Pool’s case by his Masonic leanings. One intriguing legend the Pool mausoleum has generated, however, is that the signatures on the tomb’s land records – first inscribed by Pool then by others – are all in exactly the same handwriting.

Pyramid commemorating Confederate soldiers killed in the Civil War in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia. (Photo: David Broad)

But when might the legends around W.W. Pool’s tomb have arisen, what factors might have influenced them, and what of the sinister reports of occultists and Satanists congregating around Pool’s resting place? Let’s investigate below.

What Could Explain the Strange Rumours of the ‘Richmond Vampire’ and the ‘Occult Activities’ around the Tomb of W.W. Pool?

Spooky historic cemeteries do have a tendency to generate vampire legends. A famous outbreak of vampire hysteria occurred around London’s Highgate Cemetery in the 1970s while in the 1950s hundreds of youngsters invaded Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis searching for a child-eating vampire who’d apparently taken up residence there. It’s also interesting that the Richmond Vampire legend is linked to the dangerous working conditions of the Church Hill Tunnel. Hazardous and unpleasant working environments can give rise to a strange brand of industrial folklore. Glasgow’s vampire rumpus was connected with a steelworks that sparked and smoked just behind the necropolis and tough conditions at Pittsburgh steel mills helped create the myth of Joe Magarac, a giant superhuman steelworker who stirred vats of molten metal with his hands and rescued workmates from industrial accidents.

But, with regards to the Richmond Vampire, perhaps an institution lying close to Hollywood Cemetery was responsible for much of that legend’s fame. The graveyard is adjacent to Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and the idea a vampire slept in the necropolis seems to have spread among the students in the late 1950s and 1960s. Stories circulated of strange occurrences in the cemetery, especially after night-time adventures spent sneaking into the graveyard. Such stories were likely fuelled by that period’s vogue for horror films and the appearance of various kinds of undead creatures on late-night TV. (And many who were students in the 1960s would have grown up watching 1950s vampire movies.) As the 1960s wore on, the over-active imaginations of some undergraduates may have also been enhanced by the psychedelics widely consumed in that era. The Richmond Vampire myth established, it seems to have been handed down to new generations of students over the decades.

The tendencies of VCU students to creep into Hollywood Cemetery to visit the tomb of W.W. Pool may reflect a phenomenon known as ‘legend tripping’. ‘Legend tripping’ is a kind of rite of passage in which – usually young – people visit sites associated with supernatural or traumatic events. Such sites might include tunnels, ‘haunted houses’, the locations of accidents, and – most commonly – graveyards. These visits give youngsters a chance to prove their courage in front of their friends, to gain a sense of adventure and to feel they are – at least temporarily – flouting adult rules and norms. A widespread example of legend tripping in the United States centres on graveyard seats and benches. Legends claim those sitting on these ‘Devil’s chairs’ at certain times, such as midnight or Halloween, will invite death or curses upon themselves or even get to see or speak to the Evil One. In the case of the Richmond Vampire, it’s easy to see how excitable students – minds swarming with horror movie images and perhaps buzzing with LSD – might have enhanced, popularised or even invented that myth. It’s possible that legends of the Richmond Vampire were around before VCU students became obsessed with the creature, but the first known mention in print of the Richmond Vampire story doesn’t appear until 1976 – in VCU’s Commonwealth Times newspaper.

Virginia Commonwealth University’s Egyptian Building – did this institution’s students amplify the Richmond Vampire legend? (Photo: Crazyale)

But what, we might ask, of the component of the legend dealing with the Church Hill Tunnel collapse? The collapse occurred in 1925 so – even though the ‘vampire’ was just the unfortunate Benjamin Mosby – wouldn’t this give the Richmond Vampire legend an earlier origin? Some argue, however, that the tales of the Church Hill Tunnel disaster and the ‘vampiric’ W.W. Pool were not combined until quite recently. The first known text that weaved together these two narratives didn’t appear until 2001, online. Since then, numerous articles and blogposts have combined the two stories and their amalgamation received a boost in 2007 with the publication of the book Haunted Richmond: The Shadows of Shockoe. This book is the first known example of the meshing of these two stories in print. It is, of course, possible that oral folklore had merged the two narratives earlier, but there’s no firm evidence this was the case.

Whatever the roots of the Richmond Vampire legend, the myth has certainly inflamed the public imagination. Hollywood Cemetery staff have reported that kids and tourists appear regularly at their office asking earnestly if there’s a vampire in the graveyard. More disturbingly, there have been accounts of occult activity around W.W. Pool’s mausoleum. In the 1980s, the tomb’s door was prised open and ‘occult words and symbols’ were scrawled on the walls. Fetishes are frequently left by the mausoleum’s gates. Hollywood Cemetery officials even took the decision to move the remains of Pool and his wife from the tomb as people were allegedly stealing parts of their bodies.

Others, though, doubt that serious Satanists and occultists have been congregating at Pool’s mausoleum. The Richmond paranormal investigation group Night Shift wrote, ‘The story of occultists visiting the crypt every Halloween is not likely … the cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, is known to have a better than common security staff. If they visited on any kind of timetable, they would most certainly be apprehended … our experience with occult groups indicates that they rely heavily on ritual. This casts doubt on the theory of randomised visits … making it a more likely target of young college students proving their nocturnal machismo to their friends.’

College students may even be to blame for the thefts of bits of Pool’s body. The 1976 Commonwealth Times article stated, ‘Mr Pool is an alleged vampire. There seems to be a cult in Richmond that has grown up around him. I find this strange since I’ve heard that it used to be the ‘in’ thing among medical students to break in and steal parts of his remains.’

So it seems that Pool’s now dilapidated mausoleum never housed a vampire, that it no longer even houses Pool’s corpse, and that the ‘Satanists’ drawn to the tomb may be simply over-excited college students. Hollywood Cemetery is still, however, worth a visit. Its 130 bucolic tree-filled acres contain the tombs of two US presidents – James Monroe and John Tyler – as well as the grave of Confederacy president Jefferson Davis. There’s also the resting place of a teacher of Edgar Allan Poe – who hailed from Richmond – as well as the tombs of a couple of Pulitzer Prize winners. A 90-foot stone pyramid commemorates over 18,000 confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery. But anyone searching for a genuinely spooky experience in connection with the Richmond Vampire legend might be better advised to stray closer (but not too close) to the old Church Hill Tunnel.

The neo-gothic tomb of President James Monroe in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia. (Photo: ɱ)

The tunnel’s western entrance – plugged with concrete – stands close to the corner of 18th and Marshall Street. Though the eastern end is theoretically accessible, it’s in a state of dangerous disrepair. Surrounded by a small swampy jungle, the eastern mouth beckons ominously near the intersection of E. Franklin Street and N. 31st. Over the years, more portions of the tunnel have collapsed, with one of the largest cave-ins causing mayhem above, demolishing several houses and a church wall. Dips can be discerned in some streets that cross the tunnel’s path. The parts of the tunnel that haven’t caved in contain high water levels and a gritty, quicksand-like silt, making exploration hazardous.

The eastern entrance of the Church Hill Tunnel, Richmond, Virginia. (Photo: Jkmscott)

In June 2006, the Virginia Historical Society and other organisations, including the History Channel, announced an intention to recover the train – which they planned to preserve – as well as any bodies the tunnel held. They were, however, forced to put this project off until ways could be found to shore up the tunnel against further collapses. There was also the possibility that disturbing the Richmond Vampire’s old lair could lead to houses on Church Hill being swallowed by enormous sinkholes.

Whether or not the tunnel is ever opened again, people walking near it have claimed to hear disturbing noises: digging sounds, screams of ‘Get me out! Get me out!’ and even the screech of locomotive wheels.

(This article’s main image, showing the tomb of the alleged Richmond Vampire W.W. Pool, is courtesy of RVA all day.)

The post The Richmond Vampire – Virginia’s Tunnel-Haunting Nosferatu appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

We may think there’s nothing that unusual about the ‘typical British churchyard’. The lines of worn and lichen-spotted gravestones, the land made bumpy by centuries of burials, the narrow path winding between the tombs and the great dark bulk of the church looming over it all might seem so familiar as to hardly incite comment.

But churchyards can be the strangest and most gothic of places – outdoor emporiums of the weird, walled collections of the bizarre. What if I were to tell you that churchyards harbour oddities as striking as standing stones and stone circles, statues of pagan goddesses, smouldering footprints left by the Devil, ships’ figureheads acting as grave markers, and slabs on which corpses were laid so the vicar could check they were appropriately attired?

While researching my latest book – Church Curiosities: Strange Objects and Bizarre Legends (Shire/Bloomsbury) – I was constantly amazed by just how thoroughly odd the artefacts lurking in our churches and churchyards can be and how peculiar and intriguing the bits of folklore linked to them are. So read on to learn about ancient stones said to act as direct telephone lines to His Satanic Majesty, elaborate Victorian carts for transporting coffins, dinosaur footprints, and evidence of infernal games of leapfrog. Below are seven truly weird features of British churchyards.

Number One: Standing Stones and Stone Circles in British Churchyards

It’s strange to think that standing stones – objects associated with paganism – might lurk in the very Christian precincts of churchyards. Here and there, however, these enigmatic objects crop up. Evidence suggests many churches were built on pagan sites, with several – for instance – found within earthworks and henges, on manmade mounds or even topping barrows. This could have been a means of the new religion asserting its dominance over the old, of cleansing the neighbourhood of the influence of the old gods and of benefitting from any reverence the populace felt for such locations. Though the erectors of standing stones and builders of stone circles had disappeared long before Christianity came to these islands – and the stones were probably as mysterious to later pagans as they are to us today – it’s likely that these monuments still exerted awe over people’s minds. Taboos against damaging standing stones and burial mounds persisted into the 1800s, with one farmer on the Isle of Man recorded as sacrificing a calf before he dared disturb a barrow.

In Midmar Churchyard, Aberdeenshire, there’s not only a standing stone but an entire stone circle. The Bronze-Age circle, estimated to be around 4,000 years old, has a diameter of 17 metres, with some of the stones reaching 2.5 metres in height. This mysterious ring – whose stones contrast oddly with the later Christian grave markers – is one of Scotland’s best-preserved recumbent stone circles. In ‘recumbent’ circles, the largest stone is positioned ‘lying down’, with the two tallest stones usually flanking it – an arrangement that has led to descriptions of the Midmar Circle as ‘fanglike and demonic’. The Midmar area appears to have been a site of religious importance, as two more stone circles lie to the east and south-east of the village and other standing stones scatter the locality. Many of these stones are of a similar date and one of the other circles is also recumbent.

Midmar Stone Circle, in Midmar Kirkyard, Aberdeenshire – fanglike and demonic? (Photo: Silent Earth)

A Welsh church – St John the Baptist’s, in Ysbyty Cynfyn, Ceredigion – may have been built inside a stone circle. The round churchyard wall incorporates several standing stones, with two even serving as gateposts. More stones litter the churchyard and nearby fields and the church is ringed by a low earthen bank, all of which suggest a once significant monument. The current church is 19th century, but in the Middle Ages a hospice run by the Knights Hospitaller stood on the site. The Welsh Ysbyty translates as ‘hospital’.

A large standing stone in the wall of St John the Baptist’s Churchyard, Ysbyty Cynfyn, Ceredigion. (Photo: Scribblah)

Near the porch of St Twrog’s Church, Maentwrog, Gwynedd, is a standing stone that St Twrog apparently hurled from the Moelwyn Mountains to crush a pagan altar. The handprint of St Twrog – who seems to have boasted characteristics of both a saint and giant – is said to mark the stone. A superstition claims that if you rub the stone, you’ll one day return to Maentwrog. Another belief states that the stone indicates the grave of Pryderi, a legendary king from the Welsh cycle of myth the Mabinogion.

Standing stone in St Twrog’s Churchyard, Gywnedd – hurled by the saint or the gravestone of a mythical king? (Photo: The Modern Anitiquarian)

A 1.75-metre-high standing stone – which may have once been even taller as its upper section seems to have been broken off – guards the porch of St Gwrthwl’s Church, Llanwrthwl, Powys. The stone – which may be over 4,000 years old – might have prompted St Gwrthwl to build the first church on the site to take advantage of its spiritual associations.

The most famous – and imposing – standing stone in a British churchyard, however, has to be the Rudston Monolith, which looms next to All Saints’ Church, in Rudston, East Yorkshire. The monolith – a towering eight metres – is Britain’s tallest standing stone. The gritstone megalith – which weighs in at 40 tonnes – was studied by the antiquarian, early archaeologist and druid-obsessive William Stukeley (1687-1785). Stukeley dug around the stone and concluded it went as far into the ground as it protruded above it. Stukeley also claimed he’d found human remains buried around the monolith, indicating it was a focus of human sacrifice. Though such assertions might be far-fetched, the Rudston Monolith may well have been the centre of a ‘ritual landscape’. Henges, barrows, earthworks and traces of ancient settlements dot the vicinity and three cursuses – long, manmade trenches or ditches – converge towards the monolith. The monolith dates from the early Bronze Age or late Neolithic times, meaning it would have been set up at least 2,500 years before its site became a place of Christian worship. The name ‘Rudston’ – probably meaning ‘cross stone’ – hints at a pagan monument being adapted for Christian uses.

The Rudston Monolith in Rudston Churchyard, East Yorkshire – Britain’s tallest standing stone. (Photo: Stephen Horncastle)

Such a huge and bizarre artefact has, unsurprisingly, generated legends. One tale claims the monolith was a missile hurled by the Devil to demolish All Saints’ Church. Divine intervention deflected this diabolical projectile and the monolith embedded itself harmlessly among the graves. Another piece of folklore states the monolith dropped from the clouds, squishing some sinners who were desecrating the churchyard. This story might have grown out of garbled memories of a meteorite that fell at the nearby village of Wold Newton in 1795, landing with a colossal bang and missing a labourer by just ten yards. Though the Rudston Monolith isn’t a meteorite, its gritstone doesn’t match up with the rock types of the immediate area. The monument must have either been carved from a glacial erratic or dragged from 10-to-20 miles away, an astounding achievement considering the technology of the time. Yet another local tradition maintains there’s a dinosaur footprint on the megalith’s side, but this long-held belief was debunked by a 2015 English Heritage survey.

Number Two: Seafarers’ Graves in British Churchyards

Surrounded by ocean, Britain has long been a seafaring country and a number of churchyards reflect this fact. Unsurprisingly, Cornwall – with its miles of rugged and dangerous coast – hosts some unusual monuments honouring those who earned a hazardous living on the waves.

In the village of Morwenstow, a most unusual carving can be seen in the churchyard – a woman holding up a shield and brandishing a sword. In 1843, a Scottish ship named the Caledonia went down close the village, with 40 crew members perishing. Their bodies were interred in Morwenstow’s clifftop churchyard and the ship’s figurehead – salvaged from the wreck – was set up as their grave marker. Legend says if you walk too close to the figurehead at night, its sword will slash at you. The figurehead now in the graveyard is a replica – the worn original has been moved inside the church.

The figurehead of the Caledonia, in Morwenstow Churchyard – a grave marker for the ship’s unfortunate crew. (Photo: Easymalc’s Wanderings)

Another nautical ‘tombstone’ can be found in the churchyard of the Cornish village of St Mawgan. In 1846, 10 sailors were found frozen to death, drifted ashore in a boat. The boat’s stern was carved with their names and set up to mark their resting place.

In St Mawgan’s Churchyard, Cornwall, a boat’s stern serves as a grave marker for a group of sailors found frozen to death. (Photo: I Walk Cornwall)

At Veryan, Cornwall, 19 German sailors from a ship that sank in 1914 are buried in a single line head-to-toe, in a grave that’s an incredible 40 metres in length. The grave is thought to be the longest of its type in Britain.

A sailors’ grave – containing 19 crew members buried head-to-toe – in Veryan Churchyard, Cornwall. (Photo: CornwallLive)

Number Three: Lychgates in British Churchyards

I’m sure you’ve noticed that many British churchyards have a porch-like, pointy-roofed structure over their entrance. I suspect you might have also wondered about the purpose of these unusual buildings. These porch-like constructions are known as lychgates and once had a rather macabre function.

‘Lich’ is Old English for ‘corpse’ and corpses were laid under the lychgate to await the priest before funerals. The first part of the funeral service was also conducted beneath the structure. You can still see seats at the sides of some lychgates for pallbearers and mourners. In the Middle Ages, before mortuaries were widespread, bodies could be kept under the lychgate for up to two days. The lychgate would keep the rain off and the seats would have no doubt been a welcome feature for those watching over the corpse.

Medieval lychgate in St George’s Churchyard, Beckenham, South London. (Photo: Wheeltapper)

Under some lychgates are low, long platforms known as lych-stones. The lych-stone was where the body – sometimes coffined, sometimes just shrouded – rested. Between 1666 and 1814, an official – usually the parish priest – was obliged to inspect the corpse as it lay there. This was to ensure the body was wrapped in a woollen shroud. It was a legal requirement that corpses be dressed in this way – a measure introduced to protect the wool trade. (In many places, however, it seems this rule was ignored.)

Though most medieval lychgates have rotted away, a few can still be seen, such as at St George’s Church, in Beckenham, South London. St George’s 13th-century lychgate is thought to be England’s oldest. At St Euny’s Church, Redruth, Cornwall, is a remarkably long lych-stone. It was designed to support three coffins because accidents in the local tin-mining industry sometimes necessitated multiple funerals.

Long lych-stone in St Euny’s Churchyard, Redruth, Cornwall (Photo: Tim Green)

Number Four: Funeral Biers in British Churchyards (and Churches)

In and around certain churchyards, you might spot small, curious house-like structures. In St George’s Churchyard, Beckington, Somerset, is a building just one metre high with gothic-looking double doors while opposite St Peter and St Paul’s Church, Ospringe, Kent, stands a puzzling construction – with arched doorway and slit window – looking like some ominous stone-built garden shed. These ‘gothic garages’ are known as bier houses and once stored funeral biers – the four-wheeled trolleys that transported the bodies of parishioners on their journey to the grave.

A bier house opposite St Peter and St Paul’s Churchyard, Ospringe, Kent (Photo: Penny Mayes)

Many parishes had their own bier and these elderly implements can still be seen in certain churches and churchyards. Some churches have found creative uses for these objects. At Norton, Powys, a bier displays leaflets, notices and collection boxes whereas a bier in Balsham, Cambridgeshire, supports a scale model of the church. At Harvington, Worcestershire, and at Hampsthwaite, Yorkshire, biers have done duty in the churchyard as bases for floral displays. Fine Victorian briers can be seen at the Old Church of St Bartholomew, Botley, Hampshire; at St Lawrence’s Church, Evesham, Worcestershire; and at All Saints’, Holdenby, Northamptonshire.

 

A fine Victorian funeral bier in Botley Old Church, Hampshire (Photo: Helen Banham)

 

Victorian funeral bier in St Lawrence’s Church, Evesham, Worcestershire. (Photo: Richard Croft)

 

Bier supporting a floral display in Hampsthwaite Churchyard, Yorkshire. Unfortunately, in 2013 vandals made off with the wheels. (Photo: Hampsthwaite Village)

Number Five: Goddesses in British Churchyards

In Braunston-in-Rutland, in 1920, it was decided that the doorstep of All Saints’ Church needed replacing. The worn stone was levered up – to reveal a most curious carving on its other side, an image that had spent unknown centuries being pressed into the mud by the feet of generations of worshippers. The carving is of a female figure with protruding eyes, rubbery lips, a sticking-out tongue, ‘double nose’ and pert breasts. This intriguing character now leans against the church’s tower.

The mysterious Braunston Goddess, in Braunston-in-Rutland Churchyard (Photo: SiGarb)

Though the carving has acquired the title the ‘Braunston Goddess’, it’s not known what period she comes from or what she was intended to represent. She isn’t a gargoyle and bears little resemblance to any known style of carving though she does have some slight similarities to Sheela-na-gigs and ‘hunkie-punk’ church grotesques. There have been several attempts to explain the sculpture – that she’s a medieval ‘guardian’ of the type placed over doorways and windows to frighten off evil spirits or that she might depict a queen or even a whore. Others suggest the ‘goddess’ may pre-date the church and that she could be a fertility symbol or Celtic deity. A different hypothesis is that she might have functioned as a tribal boundary marker, placed on a border that roughly corresponded to the modern frontiers of Rutland and Leicestershire. Unless more evidence appears, however, the origins and purpose of this ‘goddess’ will remain questions we can only guess at.

Though it’s debatable whether the Braunston Goddess is a remnant of pagan antiquity, another churchyard ‘goddess’ in the British Isles is undoubtedly pre-Christian. Just outside the gate of St Martin’s Churchyard, Guernsey, stands La Gràn’Mère du Chim’tière (or Grandma of the Cemetery). This five-foot-five-inch statue – modestly robed though with rather prominent breasts – was probably sculpted in the Neolithic era, between about 2500 and 1800 BC. La Gràn’Mère – who may well have been carved from a standing stone – was probably also reworked in Roman times, between 100 BC and 100 AD.

Locals have long had a tradition of leaving flowers and coins around the sculpture, but these devotions so infuriated a pious churchwarden that he insisted La Gràn’Mère be destroyed. The statue was broken in half, but this so incensed the locals that they had her repaired with concrete and she continued to receive their reverence. Even today, La Gràn’Mère is a popular addition to wedding photos. The church La Gràn’Mère guards sits on the site of a Neolithic tomb shrine and the churchyard boasts two springs, one of which is said to have healing powers. But is La Gràn’Mère an entirely benevolent entity? In Folklore of Guernsey, Marie De Garis writes, ‘Looked at during the daytime, La Gràn’Mère wears a very benign look, but photographs taken by flashlight at night reveal quite a different aspect. She then looks a fierce and malevolent object.’

La Gran Mere, St Martin’s Churchyard, Guernsey. The crack indicates where she was broken in half in 1860. (Photo: Peter Kenny)

Number Six: Devil’s Footprints in British Churchyards

Many difficult-to-explain oddities in churches and churchyards – ranging from ‘witch’s cauldrons’ to the missing tips of steeples – have been blamed on the Devil, but perhaps the most dramatic mementos the Evil One has left are his smouldering footprints. In certain churchyards, you can still see these footprints today.

Legend claims that one night the Devil tried to steal a bell from the tower of St David’s, in Lanarth, Ceredigion. His efforts, however, awoke the vicar who drove him off. The Fiend leapt down into the graveyard and landed on a stone, upon which he left his fiery footprint.

The Devil is also held responsible for a 38-centimetre footprint which marks a stone near the gate of St Mary’s Churchyard, in Newington, Kent. As at Lanarth, the Evil One was determined to steal the church’s bells. He scaled the tower, put them in a sack and leapt down, landing on a stone with great force, thereby branding it with his demonic imprint. The bells, though, jolted from the sack and rolled into the nearby Libbet Stream. All attempts by villagers to retrieve the bells failed. An aged witch said that only four white cows would be able to tug the bells out. Four white cows were found and harnessed up and seemed to be successfully pulling the bells free. An onlooker, however, made a comment about a black spot on one of the cow’s noses. The bells tumbled back into the stream, disappeared beneath the water and have never been seen since. Local folklore claims the stream bubbles at the spot the bells sank and that the stone with the Devil’s footprint will spark if struck by a pebble.

Devil’s footprint found just outside the gate of Newington Churchyard, Kent, England. (Photo: Mapio)

Newington’s notorious stone is actually a prehistoric mudstone. Some locals say the stone was moved in the 1930s, after which a series of unfortunate events afflicted the village until the stone was moved again and placed next to the church. According to one superstition, if you rest your finger on top of the stone and walk around it three times, it will bring you good luck.

Number Seven: Devilish Stones in British Churchyards

A number of other unusual stones in and around British churchyards have connections with His Satanic Majesty. In Bungay, Suffolk, a mysterious rock known as the Druid’s Stone stands in St Mary’s Churchyard. Local folklore asserts this stone is a portal for contacting the Devil. If you’d like a direct line to the Fiend, you must either run around or knock on the stone 12 times. The Druid’s Stone is probably a glacial erratic brought to Bungay in the last ice age.

The Druid’s Stone, in Bungay Churchyard, Suffolk – a portal for contacting the Devil? (Photo: Ashley Dace)

At Marston Moreteyne, Bedfordshire, an intriguing stone stands in a field next to the parish church, also called St Mary’s. Legend says that one Sunday the Devil jumped down from the church then joined some local lads in said field, who were desecrating the sabbath by enjoying a sneaky game of leapfrog. The Devil enthusiastically participated in their sport and all were having a merry time until a hole in the ground opened, into which they all leapt and were never seen again. The stone indicates the place they vanished. This stone – sometimes referred to as the Devil’s Toenail – is actually a small Neolithic standing stone, a rarity in Bedfordshire. St Mary’s has a detached bell tower, a fact also blamed on the Fiend. The Devil tried to steal it, but – finding it too heavy – dropped it in the churchyard.

The Devil’s Leap Stone – also known as the Devil’s Toenail – in a field near Marston Moreteyne Churchyard, Bedfordshire, England. (Photo: Orion Air Sales)

More Oddities and Weird Artefacts in British Churches and Churchyards

The above items represent just a few of the thoroughly weird artefacts and peculiar tales I came across while researching my new best-selling book Church Curiosities: Strange Objects and Bizarre Legends (Shire/Bloomsbury). The book is bursting with examples of Britain’s eccentric heritage, ranging from golden balls placed on steeples by occultist aristocrats, to vampire graves, dragon-slaying swords and spears, and spooky collections of funeral effigies. Church Curiosities also explores bone crypts and secret tunnels, examines the mummified skulls of well-known statesmen, and highlights such oddities as preserved hearts hidden in pillars, the graves of beloved church cats, door knockers modelled on demons’ faces, burn marks left by black hellhounds, and ceremonies involving choirboys being suspended upside-down over the Thames. The book’s already hit the number one best-seller spot in three Amazon categories.

If you’d like to immerse yourself in a world of fascinating, disturbing, charming and deeply unusual artefacts, grab your copy of Church Curiosities now.

Get Church Curiosities Now

(This article’s main image – showing the Rudston Monolith – is courtesy of Colin Frankland)

The post 7 Really Weird Objects in British Churchyards appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

The coffin contained the body of Lizzie Siddal, the wife, model and muse of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Siddal, after years of poor health, drug use and psychological distress, had died on 11th February 1862, at just 32 years-of-age. As Lizzie had awaited burial, Rossetti – overcome by grief, tormented with guilt – made an impassioned gesture. He placed a book of his poems – the sole copy of his verses – in her casket. Rossetti wrapped the book in Lizzie’s long, striking, ginger hair; winding the tresses he adored, that he’d so often painted, that had drawn him to Lizzie Siddal in the first place, around and around the volume. This sacrifice enacted, the heartbroken Rossetti permitted his poetry – along with the woman he loved – to be lowered into the earth.

But seven years on, Rossetti changed his mind. Eager to publish a book of poems, and knowing some of his best work lay interred with his wife, Rossetti allowed himself to be persuaded Lizzie Siddal should be exhumed. Though Rosetti wasn’t at the disinterment – he couldn’t bear to be – his business agent Charles Augustus Howell would later describe to him the most astonishing scene.

After Lizzie’s coffin had been levered out of the grave, it was time to open the casket. A shudder likely went through the group as the ominous sound of a spade striking at the lid echoed across the night-time necropolis. But, when that lid came off, all – according to Howell – were amazed. Rather than the skeleton or rotting corpse they’d been bracing themselves to see, Lizzie Siddal was almost perfectly preserved and still beautiful. A kind of phantom glow added to her pallid charms and – most incredibly – her hair had grown during the seven years she’d been under the earth. The splendid red hair filled the coffin – yards of it glimmered in the firelight. So tightly wrapped was the book in the wonderous locks that they had to be cut before it could be freed. The book was then handed to the doctor, whose job was to disinfect it, making sure no diseases would pass from the grave to the living. (The lawyer was there so it could be clearly stated there’d been no foul play.)

I can imagine all those present – the labourers sweat-coated despite the cold night, the huddle of gentlemen – staring, for a moment, at the beauty they’d unearthed: at that pale – yet corruption-defying – face and, most of all, at the mass of fiery hair. But this morbidly serene image didn’t, apparently, last long. Thanks to the air coming into contact with Siddal’s corpse, she began to decompose and was hurriedly reinterred.

This exhumation marks a fascinatingly morbid chapter in the long and complex relationship between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal, a relationship that would go on – in a strange way – well beyond Siddal’s death and even disinterment. It would haunt Rossetti to his own grave. It’s a tale of art and poetry; of love and neglect; of drugs and disaster; of sex and adultery and bohemian living and the manufacture of myth. It’s a story involving all kinds of strange – and often less than respectable – characters. But is this story – and even the exhumation that was perhaps its most dramatic episode – exactly what people have long perceived it to be?

Keep reading for tales of peanut-flicking prostitutes, of window-cleaning elephants and affectionate wombats, of furious attacks from morally outraged critics, of the origins of literary vampires, of bodies found with throats slit and coins in their mouths, and of some of the most tragic and talented artists the Victorian era knew.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti – the Passionate and Rebellious Young Artist Finds His Way

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (he’d later invert his name in honour of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri) was born in London on May 12th 1828. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian political refugee, who’d fled his homeland following a failed uprising in 1820. A professor of Italian at King’s College, Gabriele also wrote literary criticism and Romantic poems. Rossetti’s mother, Francis Polidori, was from an Anglo-Italian family, which also had literary connections – her brother, John William Polidori, had served as Lord Byron’s personal doctor and had penned the first vampire novel. Rossetti’s sister Christina would become a well-known poet, his brother William a critic and his sister Maria a novelist. In this artistic and intellectual ambiance, Gabriel (as his family called him) was at first home schooled, being immersed in Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Walter Scott, Arthurian legend, medieval poetry and the Bible. He’d later attended King’s College School in the Strand.

Descriptions of the young Rossetti ranged from ‘self-possessed, articulate, intelligent and charismatic’ to ‘ardent, poetic and feckless’. At first – like all his siblings – he yearned to be a poet, but also showed interest in painting and was especially obsessed with medieval art. Following four years at a drawing school, Rossetti – aged 17 – enrolled in London’s famous Royal Academy. He soon, however, found himself hating its academic and conservative approach, despising the prissy landscapes and portraits of glossy animals and pretty young women it encouraged artists to churn out. Rossetti – who was gathering a reputation as a Romantic free spirit – didn’t react well to any form of discipline and that included the ideas of rigorous training set down by Academy’s influential former president Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). Rossetti found the prospect of spending laborious years copying ancient statues simply horrifying.

A self-portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1847, aged 19

Rossetti suspected his future might – after all – lie in poetry. In a move revealing a brash self-confidence, he wrote to the famous poet and critic Leigh Hunt for advice. Hunt wrote back, saying it was easier to survive as a painter than a poet, so Rossetti decided to stay on the painterly path though he continued to write poetry. In March 1848, Rossetti contacted the artist Ford Maddox Brown, asking to become his pupil. Rossetti admired Brown’s style – preferring its vividness to the over-polished Academy paintings – but his letter gushed with so many compliments Brown assumed the young man was playing a joke on him. Grasping a club, Brown rushed to Rossetti’s home to teach the youthful jester a lesson. Reassured Rossetti’s praise was genuine, Brown took him on as a pupil that summer. But – though the two painters would remain close for years – their master-apprentice relationship was brief. Just like in the Academy, Rossetti was unable to submit his wayward nature to formal training’s demands.

The next painter Rossetti sought out was William Holman Hunt, after admiring his The Eve of St. Agnes. This picture was based a poem by John Keats, a big influence on Rossetti at that time, and Rossetti hoped Hunt might share his interests. Hunt did and he introduced Rossetti to another young like-minded artist, John Everett Millais. All three looked with distaste on the increasing materialism of Victorian society and disapproved of the pedantic Academy painters. They longed to revitalise art by returning to a style that was heartfelt and truthful, a style in which the painter would ‘observe everything and reject nothing’. They disliked what they saw as the mechanistic attitude of the Mannerist painters who’d come after Raphael and Michelangelo (hence the term Pre-Raphaelite) and wished to revive an art of intense detail and vivacious colour, taking inspiration from the clear lines of Florentine medieval frescos, the gem-like colours of early Flemish art and the complex compositions of the Italian Quattrocento painters. Naming themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they ardently set out their principles in a secret manifesto. This secrecy at first also applied to their movement’s name and they would simply initial their paintings ‘P.R.B’. Though just three young men started the Brotherhood, as time went on more artists would join or become associated with the group.

The Age of Innocence by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1785 or 1788). Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites were reacting against this approach to painting.

Like many sensitive Victorians, the Pre-Raphaelites recoiled from the polluted, mechanical and highly commercial world the Industrial Revolution was shaping around them, often preferring to retreat into vivid dreams of medieval-inspired fantasy. Paradoxically, though, their art was also ultra-realistic, striving to depict people as they were and nature as it was. An early supporter, the wealthy and influential art critic John Ruskin, wrote, ‘Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person.’

These Pre-Raphaelite characteristics, under Rossetti’s brush, would become strongly associated with one particular subject – women. Vivid, detailed, strong, Rossetti’s depictions of women have been seen as combining the sexual and demure, the angel and the woman of the street, and the seeds of this approach can be seen in the early days of the Brotherhood. Rossetti contributed a poem to the first issue of the Brotherhood’s magazine, The Germ, which came out in late 1849. Perhaps prophetically, it depicts a painter being inspired by a vision of a woman who orders him to mix the human and divine in his art.

Rossetti was soon producing oil paintings in the early Pre-Raphaelite style. His Girlhood of the Virgin Mary had his sister Christina modelling the Virgin while his mother posed as Mary’s mum St Anne. In early 1850, Rossetti started his Ecce Ancilla Domini (or Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord). This picture, which also features Christina as the Virgin, shows an anxious Mary receiving the news she’ll bear God’s son. The Angel Gabriel – posed by Rossetti’s brother William – symbolically points the stem of a lily at the girl’s womb. Mary stares at the plant with compulsion and terror. She looks ill; she shrinks back from the angel; the interior of the house is claustrophobic, painted in a sickbed white, or a white representing the virginity soon to be lost. This painting could reflect the fear of sex Rossetti seems to have had at the time, a fear that wouldn’t have been unusual for a young Victorian. Though Rossetti was idealising women in his poetry, he seems to have had problems accepting the physical aspects of his relationships. But there’s also, if we look closely at the Virgin, an anticipation too. Christina’s red hair seems to be flickering; its strands appear charged with electricity. Red hair was somewhat disapproved of in Victorian England, with its vibrancy having connotations of moral looseness, but throughout his career, red female hair would fascinate Rossetti. The flickering hair might well portray the intriguing power of sensuality as much as the pallid Virgin symbolises anxieties around it.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini, featuring his sister Christina as a red-haired Virgin Mary

The Pre-Raphaelites may have felt they were revolutionising art, but when they began to show their work, the critics were hostile. One, perhaps thinking of Rossetti’s Girlhood of the Virgin Mary, complained of ‘reproductions of saints squeezed out perfectly flat’. Charles Dickens – mocking the Brotherhood’s medievalism –  proposed a Pre-Galileo Society for those who refused to believe the earth orbited the sun. In Spring 1850, the meaning of the initials P.R.B. leaked out, intensifying antipathy to the group. In 1848, attempted revolutions had rocked Europe so – to conservative minds – secret brotherhoods suggested cabals of plotting radicals. In a strongly Protestant England, the Brotherhood’s secrecy and medievalism also hinted at Catholic conspiracies. It seems Rossetti, to the annoyance of his Brotherhood, had been the one responsible for letting slip the name. Extremely sensitive to criticism, Rossetti soon tired of the ‘increasingly hysterical critical reaction that greeted Pre-Raphaelitism’ and decided – at the age of 22 – to stop exhibiting and just sell to private collectors. Despite the critics’ spiky words, there were always those eager to purchase his paintings. After showing the Girlhood of the Virgin Mary at the Free London Exhibition, Rossetti sold it for 80 guineas (around £12,000 today).

But the Pre-Raphaelites were about to meet a person who’d have a huge influence on them all. And especially on Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The Pre-Raphaelites’ Discovery of Lizzie Siddal and an Encounter with Death in a Freezing Bathtub

Though the Pre-Raphaelites disparaged many of the ideas of the art establishment, one practice they didn’t abandon was using models. Sometimes they persuaded friends or family members to pose; occasionally, when they could afford it, they hired professionals. But often they’d rove London’s streets seeking out ‘stunners’, the Pre-Raphaelite term for the strikingly beautiful – but also somewhat unusual-looking – women they knew would give their paintings an extra pizzazz. Or they just looked out for likely models while going about everyday errands.

One winter day in 1849, legend maintains, Walter Deverell – an artist and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites – went with his mother to a hat shop close to Leicester Square. He spotted a young woman working in the shop’s backroom – an apprentice, apparently – and was immediately amazed by her long red hair and statuesque, slim figure. Walter begged his mother for an introduction and discovered the young lady was named Elizabeth – or Lizzie – Siddal. Deverell would burst into the studio in which Rossetti and Holman Hunt were painting and blurt out, ‘You fellows can’t tell what a stupendously beautiful creature I have found … She’s like a queen, magnificently tall!’

Recent research, however, indicates that Lizzie didn’t just passively wait for an excitable Pre-Raphaelite to stumble upon her. Lizzie Siddal – who’d loved sketching since she was a child – had her own artistic aspirations.  She’d taken some of her drawings to show Walter’s mum, whose husband was the secretary of the London School of Design. Hearing about Lizzie, Walter rushed round to the hat shop and – upon seeing her – was determined she should sit for him

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (she’d later drop the last ‘l’ of her surname) was born in London on July 25th 1829. Her father ran a cutlery business and Lizzie was the third of eight children. One brother, Harry, appears to have had a mental impairment. Though little is known of her early life, it seems Lizzie liked to draw and read poetry. One of her favourite poets was Tennyson and it’s said she discovered his work when she spotted one of his poems on a sheet of paper that had been used to wrap butter. The family – though respectably lower-middle class – were poor. It’s not known if Lizzie attended school though she definitely learned to read and write, but when still quite young she had to go out to work to help support the family. She laboured long hours in the milliner’s shop under often tough conditions and her family fretted about her fragile health.

These circumstances – along with the fact artists’ models could earn far more than milliners’ apprentices – likely inclined Lizzie’s mother to contemplate allowing her to pose for Deverell. The Victorians, though, viewed such an occupation as disreputable, even a little like prostitution. Too frightened to approach Mrs Siddall himself, Walter sent his mother round in a grand coach. Awed by this carriage rocking up outside her modest home on the Old Kent Road, Mrs Siddall agreed to Walter’s request though the 20-year-old Lizzie continued part-time for a while at the hat shop. Walter introduced Lizzie to other artists and Rossetti said that when he met her, he felt his ‘destiny was defined’.

Deverell had Lizzie Siddal model as Viola in his Twelfth Night (1850) and she also appeared in paintings like Holman Hunt’s A Converted British Family Sheltering a Priest from the Persecution of the Druids (1850) and Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1850-1). She posed for Rossetti for the first time for Rossovestia (1850), one of his lesser-known paintings. The use of such a model – like much connected with Pre-Raphaelitism – was controversial. Though in the modern era Lizzie might have found work as a supermodel, her willowy limbs, gaunt face and coppery hair weren’t considered conventionally attractive in the early Victorian epoch. (One female journalist labelled red hair ‘social suicide’.) Through featuring in famous paintings, however, Lizzie helped change such perceptions.

Even the Pre-Raphaelites’ close circle didn’t quite know what to make of the delicate, reserved young woman with her tendency towards sadness and unusual brand of beauty. A female acquaintance recalled, ‘Elizabeth’s eyes were a kind of luminous golden brown agate colour, slender, elegant figure, tall for those days, beautiful deep red hair that fell in soft heavy wings … She did not talk happily, (was) excited and melancholy, though with much humour and tenderness.’ A male friend remembered Lizzie Siddal as ‘sweet, gentle and kindly, and sympathetic to art and poetry … Her pale face, abundant red hair and long thin limbs were strange and affecting, never beautiful in my eyes.’ Rossetti’s brother William felt she was ‘a most beautiful creature with an air between dignity and greatness; tall, finely formed with a lofty neck and regular though somewhat uncommon features; greenish-blue “unsparkling” eyes, brilliant complexion and a lavish heavy wealth of copper-golden hair … a modest self-respect and disdainful reserve; her talk had a sarcastic tone.’ Though impressed with her looks, William still considered Lizzie ‘not physically beautiful enough’ to represent Viola in Deverell’s Twelfth Night. It’s interesting that perceptions of Lizzie could differ markedly, with her eyes – for instance – described as both ‘agate brown’ and ‘greenish-blue’, as if people tended to project their own notions onto the quiet though striking woman.

One of the most famous pictures Lizzie posed for was John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1852). The painting depicts a scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which Ophelia – sent mad by her father’s death and her rejection by Prince Hamlet – commits suicide by allowing herself to fall into a river, which she then floats down. In the obsessive Pre-Raphaelite manner, Millais wanted his picture to be as true to life as possible and this obsessiveness would mean the threat of death was not limited to his canvas. After spending hours on the banks of the River Ewell near Kingston-upon-Thames painting water, flowers and plants, Millais decided it was time to place Lizzie in his picture. In his quest for realism, he had her pose in a bathtub – filled with water from the filthy Thames – wearing a silver-embroidered antique wedding dress. It was January and the studio was freezing. Millais put candles and lamps under the bath to keep the water warm, but they kept going out. Millais relit them yet – as he became more and more absorbed in the details of his painting – he forgot to check the flames.

John Everett Millais’ famous Ophelia, for which Lizzie Siddal posed in a freezing bath

Lizzie lay in the bitterly cold bath for five hours and never complained once or asked Millais to relight the lamps. Maybe she didn’t dare – her family were poor, one brother had just died of TB and she knew she was set to earn more in that afternoon than she would in a whole year as a milliner’s apprentice. Jerking from his artistic trance, Millais realised Lizzie was shivering and looking feverish. He helped her out of the tub, but it was clear she was desperately ill, probably with pneumonia. Her family called a doctor – an enormous and unusual expense for people in their financial straits – and Lizzie’s father threatened to sue Millais, who agreed to pay the medic’s bill. The doctor probably prescribed laudanum – a tincture of opium in alcohol. Lizzie – though she recovered from her ordeal in the bath – would become addicted to this substance, a dependency which may have begun in the aftermath of that freezing episode. Her decline into addiction would lead to worsening physical and mental health.

Sketch of Lizzie Siddal painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Lizzie Siddal, however, went on posing for the Pre-Raphaelites. She modelled frequently for, and became especially close to, one particular artist – Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She’d visit him – often secretly – in his new home and studio at Blackfriars in the City of London. (Located just north of Blackfriars’ Bridge, the studio’s site is now entombed below Blackfriars’ Station.) Lizzie and Rossetti became lovers. Though, after modelling for a couple of years, Lizzie had earned enough to quit the hat shop, Rossetti – perhaps jealous – would persuade Siddal to give up modelling for other artists and pose just for him. Charles Allston Collins, the younger brother of the author Wilkie, asked Lizzie to sit and remembered the ‘freezing’ refusal he received. Lizzie, at some point, moved in with Rossetti at Blackfriars –  a scandalous arrangement in Victorian times. The extreme reserve of Lizzie’s character, however, appears to have extended to sexual matters, a factor that would soon cause issues in her relationship with Rossetti. Together in Blackfriars, the couple would experience intense creativity and intense strife, struggling with the demons of drugs, frustration, infidelity, failing health, depression and death.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Life with Lizzie Siddal – Drug Addiction, Affairs and the Looming Spectre of Death

Over the next decade or so, Rossetti had Lizzie model for numerous oil paintings and watercolours, as well as sketching her obsessively. Between 1850 and 1862, he made over 60 drawings of her, drawings that were often relaxed and personal. She featured in his medievalist fantasies depicting queenlike figures and the restraints of courtly love, such as King Arthur and the Weeping Queens and the 1860 painting Regina Cordium.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Regina Cordium (1860), featuring Lizzie Siddal

Rossetti frequently sketched her drawing and painting and Lizzie had certainly not given up her artistic ambitions. She made pen drawings and painted oils and watercolours as well as writing subtle melancholy poems. Life was challenging for aspiring female artists in the Victorian era. They couldn’t study at the Royal Academy schools despite the fact that when the Academy had been established in the previous century, two of its founders had been women. Female artists were usually dependent on males for financial assistance so an artistic life would probably be impossible without a supportive husband or well-off family. In this respect, Lizzie Siddal was, for a time, luckier than most. Rossetti encouraged her to draw and paint and tutored her. John Ruskin declared her a ‘genius’ and even gave her an allowance of £150 a year to enable her to paint, a sum that compared favourably to the £24 she would have earned in the hat shop. She was the only female painter included in the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition of 1857. Though, as other Pre-Raphaelites had, she received mockery from critics, she sold a painting –  Clerk Saunders (1857) – to an American collector.

Lady Clare (1857) by Lizzie Siddal

But things were still difficult. Lizzie’s health was not improving. It’s not clear what malady Lizzie Siddal suffered from – suggestions have ranged from tuberculosis to anorexia to bulimia to a gastrointestinal ailment – but she was often weak and sick. Her laudanum addiction was becoming more severe, not helped by the fact the drug could be bought in any apothecary’s shop without a prescription. Strains were showing in her relationship with Rossetti. When, in 1855, Ford Madox Brown and his wife Emma visited the couple, the two women went out shopping, but when they got back Rossetti accused Emma of encouraging Lizzie to complain about him. The ravages of Lizzie’s illness were also becoming more apparent. Arriving at the Rossetti apartment one day, Brown – perhaps somewhat morbidly – noticed her ‘looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever, a real artist, a woman without parallel for many a long year.’

An ink drawing by Lizzie Siddal showing two lovers listening to music

As Lizzie grew sicker, Rossetti became more restless. Despite his gregarious personality, with Lizzie his social life was restricted. As well as the Browns, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and his wife sometimes visited their apartment. The poet Algernon Swinburne also popped round and – knowing Lizzie’s enthusiasm for poetry and literature – would read to her. Rossetti, Lizzie and Swinburne sometimes went to the theatre. Swinburne noted Lizzie was ‘quick to see and so keen to enjoy that rare and delightful fusion of wit, humour, character painting and dramatic poetry in Elizabethan drama.’

In addition to Lizzie’s illness and addiction, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was finding it increasingly hard to deal with her sexual restraint. Rossetti had begun seeking other models and sometimes his relationships with these women went well beyond the professional. On returning from a trip to France, Lizzie found out about an affair – which was probably not Gabriel’s first – with Annie Miller, a frequent model for Holman Hunt and also Hunt’s lover. Annie posed for Rossetti as Helen of Troy. Lizzie was enraged, telling Ford Maddox Brown she wanted nothing more to do with the painter. She decamped for a while to Bath, in the forlorn hope its famous spa might help her illness.

Helen of Troy by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1863), featuring Annie Miller

One night in 1856 Rossetti was walking through Central London when he became aware of someone flicking peanuts at him. The peanut flicker turned out to be a prostitute called Fanny Cornforth. Struck by her voluptuous figure and thick wavy ginger hair, Rossetti immediately asked her to model and she agreed. Unlike the restrained and semi-respectable Lizzie, Fanny was an earthy girl, a blacksmith’s daughter from Sussex with a strong lower-class country accent. Though he couldn’t resist praising Fanny’s beauty, William Rossetti wrote she had ‘no charm of breeding, education or intellect’. Fanny soon began an intimate relationship with Gabriel, exhibiting none of Lizzie’s sexual reserve. Rossetti was profoundly affected by this carnal awakening, with his poems becoming more explicit and erotic, scattered with passionate metaphors and phallic symbols.

His portraits of Fanny are far more sensual than those of Lizzie. They’re fleshy and voluptuous with little hint of moral condemnation, all fiery hair and glowing skin, taking their influence right from the lustiness of the Venetian High Renaissance. One painting, 1859’s Bocca Baciata (or The Kissed Mouth) has Fanny pouting spectacularly, a rose in her hair and an apple of temptation positioned in front of her. The picture was inspired by a legend of a Saracen princess who – despite having sex 10,000 times with eight different lovers – still managed to present herself to her intended husband as a virgin bride. Rossetti had often combined his paintings with bits of poetry and on the back of Bocca Baciata he wrote: ‘The mouth that has been kissed loses not its freshness, Still it renews itself as does the moon.’ 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata, featuring Fanny Cornforth

Another well-known painting Fanny posed for was Found. This picture depicts a young farmer who, bringing a lamb to market in London, meets an old sweetheart by Blackfriars’ Bridge. His sweetheart has become an urban prostitute and the farmer unsuccessfully tries to ‘rescue’ her. Rossetti considered the painting – his sole attempt at tackling a contemporary subject – to be a failure. He couldn’t finish it and soon retreated back into his medieval dream world. But, in getting Fanny to pose as the prostitute, he certainly maintained the Pre-Raphaelite preference for vivid realism.

Found, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, featuring Fanny Cornforth

It’s unclear how much Lizzie knew about Rossetti’s relationship with Fanny Cornforth, but one thing that did anger her was that Rossetti kept putting off the prospect of marriage. Though Lizzie had met Christina, she wasn’t introduced to Rossetti’s mother until 1855. His mother was against the match because of Lizzie’s lower social status, her poor health and lack of formal schooling. But, as her illness worsened, Lizzie eventually lost patience. She gave up Ruskin’s allowance and – via the spa town of Matlock – travelled to Sheffield (her father’s birthplace). There, determined to find success on her own terms, she enrolled in Sheffield School of Art. Rossetti made occasional journeys to see her, but his letters to friends from this period hint at liaisons with other women. Though not much is known about this phase of Lizzie’s life, she ended up in Hastings, a town popular with recuperating invalids.

By early 1860, Lizzie’s family had become very concerned about her health. They contacted John Ruskin, who alerted Rossetti. Ruskin wrote to Brown, ‘Lizzie is ready to die daily and more than once a day.’ Brimming with remorse, Rossetti finally promised to marry her. Their wedding took place in Hastings on May 23rd 1860 though Lizzie was so weak she had to be carried from the hotel to the church. The newly-weds enjoyed a lengthy honeymoon in Paris they could barely afford before returning with two street dogs they’d adopted. Lizzie’s health seemed to recover somewhat, she was happier and even became pregnant. Rossetti blissfully painted and drew her though ominously – while Lizzie seemed entranced at the prospect of motherhood – she was still hooked on laudanum. On 2nd May 1861, a stillborn daughter was delivered. Lizzie plummeted into depression. A friend recalled her rocking an empty cradle and saying, ‘Hush, you’ll waken it.’ She also suspected Rossetti was once again cheating on her. As for Rossetti, in later life he’d claim sounds in his house were the phantom footsteps of his stillborn daughter at the age she would have been then.

The Death of Lizzie Siddal and the Burial of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poetry Book

In the early evening, on February 10th 1862, Gabriel and Lizzie went out to dinner with Swinburne. During the meal, Lizzie seemed sleepy, but maintained she was OK. The couple returned to their apartment and Rossetti went out again at about 8.00 pm, to teach an art class at the Working Men’s College. He left his wife preparing for bed and noticed she’d taken half-a-bottle of laudanum. Coming back a few hours later, Rossetti found her comatose. The vial of laudanum on the bedside table was now empty. There were claims – never substantiated – that Lizzie had fastened a note to her nightdress reading, ‘Please take care of Harry’ (her mentally handicapped brother).

Rossetti, it’s said, slipped the note into his pocket before calling a doctor and one of Lizzie’s sisters. After they arrived, Rossetti left again, to call on Ford Maddox Brown. Brown insisted the note be burnt. This was to ensure Lizzie wouldn’t be declared a suicide and, therefore, refused Christian burial. The two then returned to Rossetti’s apartment. During the night, Rossetti summoned three more doctors but it became increasingly obvious Lizzie had no hope. She passed away in the morning, just after 7.00 am. An Inquest the next day ruled she’d died from an accidental overdose. At the time of her death, Lizzie was pregnant again. It’s possible she feared the baby had stopped moving and was unwilling to face the trauma of losing another child.

William Rossetti’s daughter Helen Rossetti Angeli would claim, ‘Lizzie’s last message, as reported, is touching and romantic, but she did not write it.’ Helen may have been attempting to suppress a rumour that Gabriel had pushed Lizzie towards suicide or even murdered her. Oscar Wilde had spread a story that Rossetti had shoved the bottle of Laudanum into Lizzie’s hands and yelled ‘Drink the lot!’ before storming out.

The idea Lizzie wrote a note may, however, be based on a misunderstanding concerning her last poem. This poem was written in an unsteady hand and William Rossetti suspected it had been composed under influence of laudanum. Rossetti may have been talking about this poem when he told his friend Hall Caine about a message Lizzie had left. The poem’s entitled O Lord May I Come:

Life and night are falling from me,

Death and day are opening on me,

Wherever my footsteps come and go,

Life is a stony way of woe.

Lord have I long to go?

Hallow hearts are ever near me,

Soulless eyes have ceased to cheer me:

Lord, may I come to thee?

Life and youth and summer weather

To my heart no joy can gather.

Lord lift me from life’s stony way!

Loved eyes long close in death watch for me:

Holy death is waiting for me –

Lord, may I come to-day?

My outward life feels sad and still

Like lilies in a frozen rill;

I am gazing upwards to the sun,

Lord, Lord, remembering my lost one.

O Lord, remember me!

How is it in the unknown land?

Do the dead wander hand in hand?

God, give me trust in thee.

Do we clasp dead hands and quiver

With an endless joy forever?

Do tall white angels gaze and wend

Along the banks where lilies bend?

Lord, we know not how this may be:

Good Lord we put our faith in thee –

O God, remember me.

Devastated by grief, racked with remorse, Rossetti wouldn’t let Lizzie’s coffin leave their apartment for six days. He wrapped the manuscript of his poems –  a pretty much complete book of verse, which he felt was the finest thing he’d ever produced – in her hair and let it rest next to her cheek. Lizzie ‘the beautiful wraith’ was buried in Highgate Cemetery, interred – despite their previous misgivings about her – in the Rossetti family plot. Some claimed Gabriel saw her ghost every night for the next two years.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Life after Lizzie Siddal – Drink, Drugs, Wombats and Naked Sliding down Banisters

Feeling his Blackfriars apartment contained too many agonising memories, Rossetti moved to a large Tudor house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The move didn’t, however, prevent him suffering from insomnia and nightmares, problems which would plague him for the rest of his life. Perhaps fearing loneliness, in Cheyne Walk he created a menagerie of bizarre and exotic animals. Rossetti owned a Pomeranian puppy named Punch, an Irish deerhound called Wolf, dormice, rabbits, peacocks, armadillos, a llama, a kangaroo, a zebu and parakeets. His animals often absconded, causing mayhem in his neighbours’ gardens and even attacking, killing and eating each other. Rossetti’s favourite pet was a Wombat named Top, a creature he brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep on it during meals. Rossetti even dreamed of acquiring an elephant and training it to clean his windows, in the hope passing pedestrians would be intrigued, inquire about the house’s occupant and consider purchasing a painting.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s home at 16 Cheyne Walk. (Photo courtesy of Edward X)

Rossetti opened his house to eccentric humans too. Algernon Swinburne lodged with him and there were rumours of Swinburne and the painter Simeon Solomon sliding naked down banisters during riotous parties. Rossetti also reconnected with Fanny Cornforth and moved her into Cheyne Walk as his housekeeper, lover, model and muse. Tales abounded of all-night boozing sessions, nocturnal poetry readings and passionate arguments, with Rossetti said to have once flung a cup of tea in the face of George Meredith. (A novelist who achieved immortality by posing as the doomed poet Thomas Chatterton for the Pre-Raphaelite Henry Wallis.) On a darker note, Rossetti was prescribed the powerful sedative chloral hydrate to help him sleep. To rinse the chloral’s disagreeable taste from his mouth, Rossetti – who until then had been a teetotaller – started glugging down whiskey. He became addicted to both substances.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted in the drawing room of 16 Cheyne Walk by Henry Treffy (1882)

Despite – or maybe even because of – all this chaos, Rossetti continued to paint. In fact, his works were becoming increasingly popular and selling well, perhaps something to do with their subject matter. He developed his new sensual style, painting Fanny Cornforth obsessively, focusing on her majestic head of loose hair (which to many Victorians signified loose morals). She posed – disdainfully combing her locks – for his Lady Lilith, Lilith being a dangerous and seductive female demon in Jewish mythology. In a poem he wrote to accompany the picture, Rossetti praised ‘Adam’s first wife, Lilith’ the ‘witch he loved before the gift of Eve’ whose ‘enchanted hair was the first gold, And still she sits, young while the earth is old.’

Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, featuring Fanny Cornforth (1867). In a more famous version of the painting, Rossetti substituted Fanny’s face for that of another model,  Alexa Wilding.

In spite of his artistic triumphs, Rossetti suffered from doubts, fearing that – by churning out endless variations on the Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunner’ – he might be prostituting his art for commercial advantage. In a sombre moment, he reflected, ‘To be a painter is just the same as to be a whore.’ Perhaps such fears explain why Rossetti couldn’t finish Found – maybe he saw a little too much of himself in the picture. Some of Rossetti’s friends and supporters did suspect he was abandoning his Romantic ideals. Ruskin, for one, disapproved of his new paintings, declaring they were ‘as course as the prostitute who modelled for them’.

He also couldn’t escape memories of his wife. He made something of a return to his old preoccupations with medieval courtly love and queenly beauties admired from afar when in 1864 he began his Beata Beatrix. This picture depicts Beatrice – the great love of Dante Alighieri, who the poet adored despite only meeting twice – at the moment of her death. Beatrice – of course, modelled on Lizzie – is being mystically taken up to heaven. Her closed eyes hint at both deathly bliss and a drug-induced daze. A red dove, capped with a halo, drops a poppy – symbolising opium, sleep and death – into Lizzie’s hands. Rossetti always felt uneasy around the painting and bitterly reflected that artists often despise their best work. He knocked out numerous inferior versions of the picture for his clients, as if determined to besmirch its purity.

Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, featuring Lizzie Siddal

Fearing he’d betrayed the true spirit of his painting, Dante Gabriel Rossetti felt he had to seek artistic immortality via another means. He turned more of his attention towards his poetry and began to seriously consider putting a book of it out. This desire to grasp artistic renown was likely spurred on by the fact he knew his addictions to chloral and alcohol were worsening. There was also his belief that – despite his doctors’ reassurances – his sight was starting to fade. Rossetti, however, had a problem. Though he liked his recent verse, he felt much of the best stuff he’d ever penned was inaccessible. Much of his best work lay buried with Lizzie Siddal, deep in the earth of Highgate Cemetery.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Exhumation of Lizzie Siddal, Vampire Legends and a Tsunami of Critical Hate

Rossetti was in a delicate position. Needing the manuscript, yet hating the thought of an exhumation, he worried about a disinterment becoming a subject of public gossip and about having to explain his intentions to his family, in whose plot Lizzie lay. Rossetti’s business agent, Charles Augustus Howell – perhaps motivated by the thought of how well a book from the famous artist might sell – seems to have soothed Rossetti’s doubts and persuaded him to go ahead with having Lizzie dug up. Rossetti signed power of attorney in the matter over to Howell, who knew the home secretary and so obtained an exhumation order without much fuss and without the other Rossettis finding out.

Gravestones marking the Rossetti family plot in Highgate Cemetery, where Lizzie Siddal is buried. (Photo courtesy of The Midnight Society)

It seems much of the mythology about Lizzie being perfectly preserved also came from Howell. He likely invented this piece of macabrely Romantic folklore to ease Rossetti’s conscience. Howell may have also hoped that concocting an outlandish legend around Rossetti would boost the value of his work. None of the facts support Howell’s account of Lizzie’s pristine condition. After the manuscript was rescued from the grave, pieces of putrefaction had to be scraped off. Then – before Rossetti could start transcribing the poems – the book needed to be soaked in disinfectant for a fortnight. Rossetti found wormholes in the pages, which had obliterated some words. Despite having been thoroughly disinfected, the book gave off a revolting stench. Once he’d finished his grim undertaking, Rossetti destroyed the manuscript. Three pages, however, survived and are still held in libraries. The notion Lizzie’s hair had grown to a spectacular length is also likely to be little more than legend. The idea the hair of corpses can grow probably just results from the skin shrinking towards the skull, making the hair seem longer.

A page of the book of poetry Dante Gabriel Rossetti rescued from the grave of Lizzie Siddal. (Held in Houghton Library, Harvard University)

The claims about Lizzie’s ‘undead’ state may have, however, had quite a cultural impact. It’s thought the inspiration for the beautiful vampire Lucy Westerna in Bram Stoker’s Dracula might have come from accounts of Lizzie’s exhumation. Lucy, even more stunning in death than while alive, was laid to rest in ‘Kingstead Churchyard’, which many see as a fictional depiction of Highgate Cemetery. Stoker knew Rossetti – they were for a time neighbours – and he also knew and worked closely with Rossetti’s friend, the Manx writer Hall Caine. The exhumation of Lizzie Siddal seems a central event pulling together several strands of the Western vampire myth. Rossetti’s uncle wrote the first vampire novel while the disinterment of his wife possibly influenced Bram Stoker. And, in the 1970s, Highgate Cemetery would find itself the focus of a famous outbreak of vampire hysteria, with rumours a bloodsucking resident of the necropolis was prowling North London’s suburbs.

Despite having to deal with the gruesome manuscript and its scents of the grave, Rossetti felt his artistic resurrection might well be imminent. And, buoyed by getting his old verses back, he composed a new batch of poems, many of them – for the time – outrageously sensual. Much of the impetus for this came from a new mistress, Janey Morris. Rossetti and Burne-Jones had spotted Jane – the daughter of an Oxford stableman and laundress – in 1857 when they were painting murals at the Oxford Union Library. Amazed by her dark thick curly hair and queenly – almost haughty – features, they asked her to model. She sat for Rossetti as Guinevere and ended up marrying Rossetti’s friend William Morris in 1859. Morris – a poet, designer, socialist, free thinker, entrepreneur and crafts enthusiast – put his working-class wife through a programme of education. Due to her keen intelligence, Jane soon grew accomplished, learning several languages and becoming a skilled embroiderer. Her designs were sold through William’s interior decor firm, Morris and Co, in which Rossetti was a partner.

Rossetti’s affair with Janey seems to have begun in 1865. She’s said to have ‘consumed and obsessed him in paint, poetry and life’. He deluged her with verse and – as with his other muses – painted her constantly. While Lizzie had been the distant queen of courtly love and Fanny a symbol of sensuality, Janey was cast as a goddess. As Proserpine, she clutches a fateful pomegranate, resplendent in a loose flowing medieval gown. This goddess, however, deigned to accept Rossetti as her earthly lover. Rossetti wrote: ‘This hour be her sweet body all my song, now the same heartbeat blends her gaze with mine, One parted fire … her arms lie wide open, throbbing with their throng of confluent pulses, bare and fair and strong, and her deep freighted lips expect me now, amidst the clustering hair that shrines her brow, five kisses broad, her neck ten kisses long.’

Janey Morris poses as Proserpine, the Greek goddess of death and the underworld

Rossetti’s collection of verse – which mixed the poems salvaged from Lizzie’s casket with newer, more sensual efforts – was published in 1870. The poems, tragically, turned out to be too advanced for their epoch. Society was only just starting to become more open to the erotic. Rossetti’s verse perhaps also foreshadowed the development of a capitalist commodity culture, in which consumers are encouraged to eagerly – and greedily – look, touch, taste, feel, smell and experience. Though Rossetti may have heralded an emerging modern identity, his poetry was too much for most people in his own time. Rossetti had hoped his poems would make his name immortal, but the critics weren’t impressed.

The critic – and rival poet – Robert Buchanan was particularly disgusted. ‘There was no soul in this verse only body,’ he ranted, thundering against its ‘females who bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, writhe, wriggle, twist, foam and in a general way slather over their lovers.’ Frothing with outrage – and perhaps a little jealousy – Buchanan accused Rossetti and his circle of encouraging ‘a morbid deviation from healthy forms of life … all the gross and vulgar conceptions of life, which are formulated into certain products of art, literature and criticism, emanate from this bohemian class … There lies the seat of the cancer, there in the bohemian fringe of society, spreading daily like all cancerous diseases, foul in itself and creating foulness.’ Buchanan was suggesting Rossetti’s ‘impure’ art and poetry had their wellspring in the life Rosetti led as an adulterer and libertine.

Rossetti was distraught. As well as launching a frenzied assault on Rossetti’s good name, Buchanan had spelled out certain fears Rossetti held about himself. He’d long fretted that his more spiritual and idealistic aspects had become just a façade and that his erotic adventures had reduced him to little more than a seedy sensualist. Rossetti expressed this anguish in a poem called Lost Days, in which a man is confronted with past versions of himself. ‘I am thyself, what has thou done to me?’ each doppelganger demands before vowing to haunt the man forever.

So Rossetti felt his efforts to establish himself as a serious poet had failed. According to Hall Caine, he’d bitterly regret the grisly disinterment, castigating himself for yielding to the pull of literary ambition. The thought of Lizzie’s exhumation tormented Rossetti for the rest of his days. And the man who’d persuaded him to do it, Charles Augustus Howell, would soon acquire a reputation as a con artist and blackmailer. For Swinburne, Howell was ‘the vilest wretch I ever came across’  while Edward Burne-Jones characterised him as ‘a base, treacherous, unscrupulous and malignant fellow’. Howell attempted to gain control of John Ruskin’s finances, persuaded a lover to create fake Rossetti drawings and was even rumoured to be enmeshed in a plot to assassinate the French emperor Napoleon III. After Swinburne had entrusted Howell with some ‘burlesque and indecent letters’, they found their way to a publisher who used them to blackmail Swinburne into given up the copyright of a poem. Howell was discovered dead near a Chelsea pub on 21st April 1890 with his throat slit and a ten shilling coin in his mouth, the traditional death meted out to a slanderer. At Howell’s home, letters from many highly placed people were found carefully filed. On hearing Howell had died, Swinburne said he hoped he was in the eighth circle of Dante’s hell, where those who flatter then exploit others are covered in ‘a coating of eternal excrement’.

The Dark Goddess Foreshadows Death – the Decline of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Devastated by the criticisms he’d received, Rossetti’s mental health declined. Increasingly paranoid, he suffered from hallucinations. But a piece of good fortune then came along from an unlikely source. As Janey and Rossetti had got closer, William Morris had developed a philosophy of free love, according to which husbands and wives shouldn’t stand in each other’s way of finding fulfilment. In early 1871, Morris even took out a joint lease with Rossetti on Kelmscott Manor, a fine Oxfordshire country house. That summer, Morris took off on a lengthy trip to Iceland, leaving the lovers behind to enjoy their affair. In bucolic surroundings and in the company of his beloved muse, Rossetti felt much better, his health improved and he again started to paint. The couple took long walks and lounged blissfully around Kelmscott’s garden, reading Shakespeare to each other. Rossetti would say it was the happiest summer of his life.

Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire, where Dante Gabriel Rossetti spent a blissful summer with his muse Jane Morris (Photo: Boerkevitz)

In Autumn 1871, Rossetti returned to London. Though his paintings were more popular than ever and were selling for ever more astronomical amounts, his problems again seemed to cloud in on him: his addictions, the traumas of his wife’s death and exhumation, and the critics’ savaging of his poetry. In June 1872, he suffered a mental breakdown. One night – as his wife had years before – he gulped down an overdose of laudanum, but unlike the luckless Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti survived. That September, he again joined Janey at Kelmscott and – though she tried to nurse him back to health – his days there were spent ‘in a haze of choral and whiskey’. By the next summer, he’d improved. He went back to Kelmscott, where Janey sat for him, but it was becoming clear their on-off relationship couldn’t continue. Janey was increasingly disturbed by his addictions, her two daughters had begun asking embarrassing questions about ‘Uncle Dante’, and Morris had restructured his firm, cutting Rossetti out. The polite charade that the two men were simply sharing the manor was becoming harder to maintain. In 1874, Janey had to banish Rossetti from Kelmscott. Rossetti would never return and he dropped into deep despondency.

Back at Cheyne Walk, Rossetti slid into an increasingly reclusive existence. Ill, addicted and depressed, he found it harder to work, but – when he did – the results could still be astounding. His paintings – which often featured Janey – took on a darker tone. In 1874, he produced the picture of her as Proserpine, the pomegranate she held symbolising death and entrapment in the underworld. An 1877 painting depicted her as the deity Astarte Syriaca. Rossetti’s take on this Near-Eastern love goddess – a more sinister counterpart of the Roman Venus – is full-lipped and prominently bossomed. Her solemn attendants, however, hold torches around which plants twine – plants that might be deadly nightshade. Though some clients were disturbed by Rossetti’s darker turn, he had no trouble selling his paintings. Astarte Syriaca went for £2,100 (over £250,000 in modern money).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca, featuring Jane Morris

One source of support was Fanny Cornforth. She stayed on at Cheyne Walk until 1877, when Rossetti’s family – more involved now in his life due to his failing health – forced her to move out. Rossetti funded a house for her nearby and gave her several of his pictures. They exchanged humorous notes about their swelling waistlines. He called her ‘My Dear Elephant’ and sent her elephant sketches. Her name for him was ‘Rhino’ and he’d sign letters to her ‘Old Rhinoceros’.

By 1878, Rossetti could no longer paint. He spent his last four years overweight, sick, depressed, addicted and abandoned by many friends. He became housebound due to paralysis of the legs and suffered from Bright’s disease, a kidney ailment. On April 9th 1882 – while staying at a friend’s house in Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, in an attempt to improve his health – he died, aged 53. He’s buried in Birchington Churchyard.

No painter before Rossetti had worked so hard to merge the personal, psychological and sexual with archetypal myths. Rossetti tackled the huge themes of sex, life and death by drawing on his own struggles, traumas and loves. His work foreshadowed a whole stream of modern art in which painters would strive to do the same, with notable examples being the Symbolists and also Picasso, who was a fan of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelites.

But through all the chaos of Rossetti’s tragedies and triumphs, he was always haunted by the death of his first love and would never shake off the influence she had over him. Shortly before he passed away, Rossetti said of Lizzie Siddal: ‘As much as in a hundred years she’s dead, yet is today the day on which she died.’

(This article’s main image – showing Lizzie Siddal in John Everett Millais’ bathtub – is courtesy of The Kissed Mouth.)

The post Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lizzie Siddal & an Infamous Exhumation in Highgate Cemetery appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

The Croglin Vampire is a strange tale of villagers breaking open vaults determined to destroy the beast, of vampiric bats flying out of churchyards, of ‘vampiric corpses’ burnt next to sacred holly bushes, of escaped asylum inmates, of bitter religious conflict, and of starving circus monkeys rampaging through the Cumbrian landscape. It’s also a tale that ends with a bricked-up window festooned with lucky horseshoes, an alteration designed to stop the entry of any similar creatures.

The tale of the Croglin Vampire was made known to the wider public thanks to its inclusion in Story of My Life, the autobiography of one Augustus Hare (1834-1903). A biographer, travel writer and raconteur, Hare felt his life’s story merited a whopping six volumes, which were published in two batches in 1896 and 1900. Hare – like many Victorians – was fond of a good ghost story and included plenty in his books. He claimed to have heard the fantastical account of the Croglin Vampire during an after-dinner chat involving a Captain Fisher-Rowe. Having impressed the assembled company by rattling off some of his eeriest tales, Hare was surprised when Fisher-Rowe responded with an even spookier story.

Fisher-Rowe stated that his family owned a large house named Croglin Grange and that the oddest legend was associated with it. After moving down to Surrey, the Fishers had let the Grange out. But one of their tenants – a young female – soon endured a petrifying ordeal. She found herself menaced by a vampire from a nearby churchyard – an incident that kicked off the most remarkable succession of events.

Claims have been made that the Croglin Vampire tale has over the years been embellished both by local folklore and excitable writers. A long series of researchers have queried, debunked and rehabilitated the legend then questioned it again. There have been accusations of plagiarism and of contamination from the copious gothic horror stories and penny dreadfuls clattered out by the printing presses of the vampire-obsessed Victorian age. Earnest investigators have spent days tramping over the bleak Cumbrian countryside, interviewing locals, searching for the remnants of chapels and poring over archives and property deeds.

The Croglin Vampire is indeed an elusive story. But let’s start with a summary of what’s alleged to have gone on, drawing mainly from Augustus Hare’s narrative with a little admixture from other accounts and from the folklore of the district.

The Truly Weird Tale of the Croglin Vampire

In Hare’s account, Captain Fisher begins by informing him that while ‘Fisher may sound a very plebeian name’ his family was ‘of a very ancient lineage, and for many hundreds of years they have possessed a very curious old place in Cumberland, which bears the weird name of Croglin Grange. The great characteristic of this house is that never at any period of its very long existence has it been more than one storey high, but it has a terrace from which large grounds sweep away towards the church in the hollow, and a fine distant view.’

Hare goes on to tell us that when ‘the Fishers outgrew Croglin Grange in family and fortune, they were wise enough not to destroy the long-standing characteristic of the place by adding another storey to the house, but they went away south, to reside at Thorncroft near Guildford and they let Crouglin Grange.’

Augustus Hare, who publicised the story of the Vampire of Croglin Grange

The Fishers were ‘extremely fortunate’ in the tenants they found – two brothers and a sister. Though Hare doesn’t name them, later sources give their surname as Cranswell, with the brothers called Edward and Michael and the sister Amelia. And while Hare doesn’t give a date for their tenancy, it’s been assumed they occupied the house at some point in the 1870s, as this was when the Fishers moved out.

The Cranswells loved living at Croglin Grange and soon made themselves popular in the surrounding area. Hare states that ‘to their poorer neighbours they were all that is kind and beneficent, and their neighbours of a higher class spoke of them as a most welcome addition to the little society of the neighbourhood.’

The Cranswells passed a winter and spring ‘most happily’ in Croglin Grange ‘sharing in all the little social pleasures of the district’ and found that the Grange, despite its unfortunate lack of a second floor, was ‘in every respect … exactly suited to them.’ During the summer, however, there came a day which was ‘dreadfully, annihilatingly hot’. The brothers could do nothing more active than lounging under trees reading books. Amelia positioned herself on the veranda and tried to work, though ‘in the intense sultriness of that summer day, work was next to impossible’.

After dinner, the siblings sat on the veranda, appreciating the evening’s slightly cooler air. Looking out over the grounds, towards the band of trees that separated the Grange’s lands from the adjacent churchyard, they watched the sun set and moon rise. Soon they were enjoying the sight of ‘the whole lawn … bathed in silver light, across which the long shadows from the shubbery fell as if embossed, so vivid and distinct were they.’

The Cranswells retired for the night, but Amelia found it too hot to sleep. Though her windows were closed, she hadn’t fastened the shutters, feeling that – in such a tranquil and unthreatening location – this wasn’t necessary. As she was unable to drop off, she just stared out at ‘the wonderful, the marvellous beauty of that summer night.’

After some time, though, she noticed a perplexing addition to the scene of moon-drenched gardens, trees and lawn. Two bright lights were flickering around the strip of trees close to the churchyard. Amelia found her gaze being drawn towards, being fixed on them. The lights soon stopped dodging in and among the tree trunks and started to advance across the lawn towards the house. Unable to stop staring at those eerie lights, Amelia released they part of some figure, a figure that – in a shambling walk – seemed to be heading in the direction of her window. Sometimes this being was obscured by the shadows of the trees, but the lights were always visible, getting closer and closer.

Amelia’s heart was now pounding, shivers were passing over her skin, and she knew she had to get away. The room’s door was, however, near the window that the beast was approaching and Amelia knew that unlocking it would put her closer to the creature for a moment. She wanted to scream, but her throat seemed paralysed, her tongue felt clamped to her mouth’s roof.

The being then turned aside and appeared to stumble away from her window. Amelia had the impression it was going around the house and wasn’t coming for her at all. Breaking out of the terror that had made her motionless, Amelia leapt from the bed, dashed to the door and fumbled the key into the lock. But then she heard a ‘scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window, and saw a hideous brown face with flaming eyes glaring in at her. She rushed back to the bed, but the creature continued to scratch, scratch, scratch’.

Somewhere in the panic of her mind, Amelia knew at least that the window was locked so the creature was unlikely to gain entry. The scratching did indeed stop, but now there came a pecking sound. An awful realisation flooded over Amelia – the beast was unpicking the lead that held the window in the frame. The peck, peck, pecking went on until the pane fell into the room, shattering into diamonds on the floor. Then ‘the long bony finger of the creature came in and turned the handle of the window, and the window opened.’

The creature clambered in and strode across Amelia’s room, but ‘her terror was so great that she could not scream … it came up to her bed, and it twisted its long, bony fingers into her hair, and it dragged her head over the side of the bed and – it bit her violently in the throat.’

As the fiend pierced Amelia’s flesh ‘her voice was released’. She let out a horrifying scream and her brothers were right at her door. Finding it locked, they searched for a poker to lever it open with, losing a vital minute as the creature bit deeper into their sister’s neck. With the fire iron, they got the door ajar and rushed into the room – just in time to see the creature escaping through the window. Their sister was unconscious, draped over the side of the bed, ‘bleeding violently from a wound in her throat’. One brother chased the vampire, but it scurried across the lawn ‘with gigantic strides’ and vanished over the churchyard wall.

Might the Vampire of Croglin Grange have taken a bite like this?

When Amelia had recovered consciousness and her shock had subsided a little, she said, ‘What has happened is most extraordinary and I am very much hurt. It seems inexplicable, but of course there is an explanation and we must wait for it.’

Amelia ‘was of strong disposition, not even given to romance or superstition’ and she soon came up with an idea to account for that night’s events. She said, ‘It will turn out that a lunatic has escaped from some asylum and found his way here.’

Amelia’s wound healed and she appeared to be getting over the trauma of her experience. Her doctor, however, insisted that – to fully recover – she must have a change of scene. Her brothers took her to Switzerland, where they undertook the typical pastimes of earnest Victorian tourists, such as climbing mountains, picking and preserving plants, and making sketches. As Autumn came on, however, Amelia agitated to go back to Croglin Grange.

‘We have taken it,’ she said, ‘for seven years, and we have only been there one; and we shall always find it difficult to let a house which is only one storey high, so we had better return there; lunatics do not escape every day.’

Amelia’s brothers were also missing their – vampire attacks excepted – pleasant life at Croglin so they agreed to her suggestion and the three headed back. As Croglin Grange, however, had only one storey it was difficult to make their living arrangements more secure. Amelia occupied her former bedroom, but always closed the shutters at night. As was typical for many old houses, though, the shutters left the top of the windowpane uncovered. The brothers now shared a room opposite Amelia’s and kept loaded pistols by their bedsides.

The siblings spent a happy and uneventful winter at the Grange though they did hear some disturbing reports of animals found dead with gashes in their throats. Then one spring night an ominously familiar noise woke Amelia up – a scratch, scratch, scratch at the window. She looked up and saw the same hideous shrivelled face she’d seen the previous summer, staring down at her from the top of the window with its blazing eyes. Amelia let out a huge scream, her brothers leapt from their beds and were soon charging out of the house’s front door clutching their pistols. The creature bolted across the lawn, scampering in its ungainly stride. One of the brothers fired and lodged a bullet in its leg. Though limping, the creature kept up its run, and again escaped by clambering over the churchyard wall. Although it was too dark to make out much, one brother – as he sprinted after the vampire – thought he saw it disappearing into the crypt of a long-extinguished family.

The following day, the brothers told Croglin Grange’s tenants about the ghastly episode of the night before. They assembled a band of men and went to investigate the vault. Breaking open the doors, they were confronted by the sight of shattered coffins and mangled human remains strewn across the ground. Just one casket was reasonably intact. Its lid – though not attached to the rest of the coffin – lay on top of it loosely. The brothers lifted it to reveal a withered, mummified creature similar to the one they’d chased. The vampire had a tell-tale pistol wound in its leg.

The brothers – or, more likely, their tenants – knew there was only one way a vampire could be quietened. They dragged the hideous corpse out of the crypt with the intention of burning it. Some say they pulled the vampire towards a holly tree in the churchyard, as holly was considered by the local folklore as beneficial in such an operation. There they incinerated the dreadful cadaver and all the outrages of the Croglin Vampire ceased. You can still see the holly tree’s stump in Croglin Churchyard.

Croglin Church, Cumbria, England – did the Croglin Vampire issue forth from a vault in its graveyard? (Photo courtesy of News & Star)

Might the Croglin Vampire Story Have Been Lifted from a Victorian Penny Dreadful?

The Croglin Vampire legend ensnared the imagination of the late-Victorian public and it remains known among vampire aficionados today, with some making the pilgrimage up to Croglin to mooch about the churchyard. Some even say the Croglin story inspired Dracula author Bram Stoker. As the tale, however, appeared in Augustus Hare’s second chunk of autobiography – which was only published in 1900 – and Dracula came out in 1897, this would seem unlikely, unless Stoker had heard the story some other way.

It wasn’t long, though, before the Croglin Vampire’s status as a creature of genuine folklore began to be challenged. One writer of note who expressed scepticism was Montague Summers (1880-1948). Summers was a highly eccentric character who posed as a Catholic priest, though there’s no firm evidence he was ever ordained. Obsessed with witchcraft, vampires and werewolves – all of which he claimed to literally believe in – Summers produced the first English translation of the notorious 15th-century witch hunters’ guide, the Malleus Maleficarum. Summers was known for waltzing around the reading room of the British Museum in a black cloak and buckled shoes, clasping a black portfolio with ‘vampires’ written upon it in large blood-red letters.

Despite his reputation for gullibility, Montague Summers queried Hare’s account of the Vampire of Croglin Grange.

Although Summers didn’t dismiss the idea there might have been a vampire at Croglin, he felt much was questionable about Hare’s account. In his 1929 book The Vampire in Europe, Summers republished Hare’s story along with the first chapter of a work known as Varney the Vampire. This exercise was intended to reveal the similarities between the two texts, thereby suggesting Hare’s narrative had been heavily influenced by Varney.

Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood is an enormously long tale that was first published in a series of penny dreadfuls. (Cheap sensationalist stories that were printed in pamphlet form, put out in weekly instalments and aimed at working-class men.) The Varney the Vampire penny dreadfuls came out between 1845 and 1847 and in 1847 they were also cobbled together as a book. The writers – James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest – were paid by the line, an arrangement which didn’t encourage brevity. As a complete book, Varney the Vampire comprises 876 double-columned pages, 232 chapters and almost 667,000 words. By comparison, the Bible weighs in at around 807,300.

Varney the Vampire – inspiration for the Vampire of Croglin Grange?

The story follows the adventures of the aristocratic vampire Sir Thomas Varney. Though Varney wasn’t the first publication to make the shambling, zombie-like vampire of Eastern European folklore into a suave aristocrat – that honour goes to John William Polidori’s novella The Vampyre (1819), whose antagonist is based on Lord Byron – Varney the Vampire did much to establish certain vampire tropes in the popular consciousness. It was the first story to refer to vampires as having sharpened teeth, containing the line: ‘With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fanglike teeth.’ (Though Polidori describes teeth marks in victims’ throats, he doesn’t claim fangs have inflicted them). Varney also turns a female character into a vampire and has incredible strength and hypnotic powers.

Vampiric bites aren’t the only similarity between Varney the Vampire and the Croglin Vampire story. We read of Varney ‘standing on the ledge immediately outside the long window. It is its finger nails upon the glass … the pattering and clattering of the nails continue … long nails, that appear as if the growth of many years had been untouched’. As well as sharing glass-tapping tendencies with the Croglin Vampire, Varney enters a woman’s room in a similar manner to his Cumbrian counterpart: ‘a small pane of glass is broken and the form from without introduces a long, gaunt hand, which seems utterly destitute of flesh. The fastening is removed.’ Like Amelia, the heroine in Varney ‘tries to scream … but a choking sensation comes over her and she cannot’ and she finds she ‘cannot withdraw her eyes from the fiend’. She is soon lying ‘half across the bed and half off it … her long hair streams across the entire width of the bed’. Varney then clasps ‘the long tresses of her hair’ and ‘twining them round his bony hands, he held her to the bed.’ As with the Vampire of Croglin Grange, Varney is chased off by the lady’s menfolk.

Varney the Vampire – like the Vampire of Croglin Grange – touches a woman’s hair with his bony fingers.

Varney the Vampire wasn’t considered worthy or respectable literature and probably wouldn’t have been the type of publication Captain Fisher or Augustus Hare would have admitted to possessing. Full of purple sentences – ‘She drew her breath short and thick. Her bosom heaves, her limbs tremble.’ – Varney also suffers from a convoluted plot. The setting pings between the 1730s, the mid-1900s and the Napoleonic Wars while Varney’s motivations lurch from the need to drink blood to an urge to extort money to a desire for revenge. At times Varney is depicted as a real vampire; at other times as a human who behaves like one. Despite the work’s shortcomings and the lower-class audience it was targeted at, Varney – like the tackier fringes of the horror genre today – may have been a guilty pleasure for some educated individuals. The parallels between Varney the Vampire and the Croglin Vampire tale do suggest that either Augustus Hare or Captain Fisher had a copy of this much-disparaged publication lurking in their home.

Rebuke, Ridicule and Resurrection – the Croglin Vampire Tale is Both Dismissed and Defended

Even before Montague Summers started comparing vampire tales, another researcher – Charles G. Harper, an expert on haunted buildings – was snooping around in Cumbria. In his 1907 book Haunted Houses, Harper claimed he’d found no evidence Croglin Grange had even existed. He did stumble across two buildings – Croglin High Hall and Croglin Low Hall – but neither really matched Hare’s depiction of Croglin Grange. Croglin Low Hall came the closest, but it has two floors, a fact that would have probably obliged the vampire to shinny up the wall to get to Amelia’s window. Also, rather than having a spooky churchyard nestled in an adjacent hollow, Croglin Low Hall is around a mile from the nearest place of worship, St John the Baptist’s Church in the village of Croglin. And, though that church has a crypt underneath, there’s no vault in the churchyard dedicated to an extinct family nor any structure that even vaguely concurs with Hare’s description of the vampire’s mausoleum.

The next researcher to have a crack at the legend was Francis Clive-Ross. In a 1963 article for the journal Tomorrow, Clive-Ross stated he’d discovered information that might lend some truth at least to the setting of Fisher’s tale. Clive-Ross found out that Croglin Low Hall had actually been known as Croglin Grange until the beginning of the 18th century. The house had originally had only one storey and a second floor had been added later – Clive-Ross observed the corbels that would have once supported the roof. A chapel had also stood nearby, which Clive-Ross felt had been demolished around the time of the English Civil War (1642-51). He discovered the stubs of its walls and evidence of its foundations. (Historic England’s webpage about Croglin Low Hall also mentions the chapel, but states it was knocked down in the 19th century.) Clive-Ross found that the vampire story indeed seemed to be a long-standing legend in the Fisher-Rowe family. Croglin residents, however, told him that the incident hadn’t occurred in the 1870s, but rather way back in the 1680s.

Croglin Low Hall, Cumbria, England – site of the Croglin Vampire attack? This sketch must have been made after the building acquired its second storey.

In 1968, the American psychical researcher D. Scott Rogo had an article published in Fate magazine, which went into more detail about the similarities Montague Summers had noted between Hare’s account and Varney the Vampire. It was, however, a revelation in a book put out 10 years later that really added a new dimension to the Croglin Vampire conundrum. In his Haunted Churches and Abbeys of Britain, Marc Alexander stated he’d unearthed an account from a former Croglin rector, the Reverend Dr Matthew Roberts. Roberts linked a series of vampire attacks to sightings of a bat-like creature in Croglin Churchyard. Among the victims of this flying fiend was the daughter of one of Robert’s predecessors, the Reverend Joseph Ireland, who’d officiated at Croglin from 1804 to 1837. During the assault on Miss Ireland  – as was the case with the Croglin Vampire – the creature was wounded and fled back to a tomb. The tomb it escaped to was that of the Reverend George Sanderson, who’d served at Croglin in the 17th century. Local rumour asserted the bat had appeared from Sanderson’s grave before other vampiric incidents.

The findings about the bat were later expanded on by the writer and researcher Geoff Holder. In Paranormal Cumbria (2012), Holder suggested the bat legend may be linked to the religious traumas of the mid-to-late-17th century. After the English Civil War, Parliament had imposed radical Puritan vicars on a lot of parishes, men who were often unwelcome and disliked. Then, after the Monarchy came back, the 1662 Act of Conformity dismissed many of these Puritan priests, replacing them with men loyal to the re-established Monarchy and the mainstream Church of England. This double upheaval caused anger, division and resentment in communities. George Sanderson had at first sided with Parliament, being one of the ‘intruding vicars’ it had imposed. At the Restoration, however, he abruptly switched sides and – as an orthodox Church of England priest – was forced on Croglin in 1671, after the sacking of its previous vicar. A turncoat such as Sanderson, who remained at Croglin until his death in 1691, may well have been less than popular. Holder suspects that, in the 1680s and 1690s, gossip about Sanderson grew more outlandish and – as the years passed – transformed itself into rumours of malevolent supernatural beings. These legends could have perhaps merged with tales about Croglin Low Hall and the demolished chapel that once stood next to it.

Also, as  far as the Croglin Grange Vampire is concerned, Holder sees the 1950s as a ‘period of invention’ when a great deal of gothic baggage got added to Hare’s fairly sparse story. Hare’s narrative seems to have been combined with the vampire motifs widespread in fiction, film and the mass media at that time. During this decade, the young woman seems to have acquired the name Amelia, a suitable moniker for a gothic heroine. The brothers also appear to have got their names in this era, with one even referred to by the very un-nineteenth-century title of ‘Mike’.

In 2005, another twist was put on the Croglin Vampire saga by the crime historian Richard Wittington-Egan. Whittington-Egan discovered that Captain Fisher’s family were not the age-old owners of Croglin Grange as Hare had been led to believe. They were just tenants, who took on Croglin Low Hall’s lease in 1809. Whittington-Egan suspects the vampire legend was passed on to them, possibly by the Hall’s real owner – a man called Johnson – or by members of the Towry family. The Towries had owned Croglin Low Hall from the late 1680s to 1727 and some still lived nearby.

Fisher may have linked his family more firmly to both the Hall and its legend out of class consciousness. This might be seen in the fact that – while admitting to Hare that Fisher was a ‘very plebeian name’ – the Captain insisted his family was ‘of a very ancient lineage’. Finding himself at dinner with a well-known writer and other distinguished guests – who apparently included the Earl of Ravensworth – could Fisher have been tempted to invent an impressive ancestry, one that encompassed not only the generations-long ownership of a family seat but an aristocratic ghost story to go with it? In addition, it’s been suggested that the property the Fisher-Rowes moved to in Surrey, Thorncombe Park, also has resemblances to the Captain’s description of Croglin Grange.

This is all quite a jumble of information, spanning several centuries and involving varied characters each with their own motivations. Let’s try to untangle this heap of fact, rumour and legend in the next section and see if we can rearrange the threads and form some tentative conclusions about Croglin Grange’s vampire.

Revenants, Red-eyed Owls, Peckish Circus Monkeys and Blood-glugging Aristocrats – What Exactly Was the Vampire of Croglin Grange?

It’s my suspicion that the genesis of the Croglin Vampire story can be found in the traumas and upheavals of the English Civil War and the decades after it. I’d guess the story was then given – by Augustus Hare and Captain Fisher – a Victorian gothic gloss and was subjected to further gothic overlays in the mid-20th century.

We’ve already seen how the legend of the vampiric bat is linked to the tomb of the 17th-century vicar George Sanderson. I suspect the bat – as such creatures were staples of Victorian gothic horror – was an imposition on an earlier legend, especially as our clearest record of the creature has it attacking the maidenly daughter of a man who was the local vicar right before Queen Victoria came to the throne. But other things do point to Croglin’s vampire legends as having links to the mid-to-late 17th-century – the fact the house was then known as Croglin Grange and had just one storey and a chapel next to it; the period of George Sanderson’s reign as rector; the assertions of the villagers about when the legend took place; and the fact that period of history was a most traumatic time.

Supernatural occurrences and a fascination with the occult are often associated with eras of rapid change, disorientation and tragedy. As well as the death, maiming, sieges and general destruction caused by the English Civil War, the conflict also severely shook the mental worlds of many people. The King’s head was chopped off and a republic set up, both occurrences that would have been utterly unthinkable in the strictly hierarchical, semi-feudal society of just a few decades previously. Radical religious doctrines were preached and religious disputes grew more bitter. Political agitation also intensified and the roots of ideas like liberalism, socialism and democracy can be traced back to this tumultuous epoch, an epoch many termed ‘the world turned upside down’. In terms of economics, the emerging capitalist system was overturning old certainties, enriching some and impoverishing others, and straining social bonds. We might ask what all this has to do with vampires, but societal anxieties often manifest in rumours of such monsters. At the time of the Victorian vampire craze, for instance, society was undergoing rapid industrialisation and urbanisation and a realignment of gender roles.

People who know a little about bloodsuckers might be shocked to hear of a creature like the Vampire of Croglin Grange appearing in England. The folkloric vampire is much more associated with Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Turkey. Unlike the later aristocratic vampire popularised by writers like John Polidori and Bram Stoker, this rustic creature was of peasant stock. In no way suave or sexually alluring, this being was a stinking corpse that couldn’t rest, usually because it had been murdered or improperly buried. The folkloric vampire would shuffle out of its tomb at night to feed on the blood of its relatives and ex-neighbours, thereby prolonging its miserably undead existence until a stake through the heart brought an end to its nocturnal wanderings.

Was Croglin’s vampire more of a folkloric nosferatu than a literary Victorian bloodsucker?

Though such creatures are uncommon in English folklore, there are occasional records of similar beings known as revenants. The term ‘revenant’ can simply refer to a ghost – the word derives from an Old French verb revenir, which means ‘to return’. A revenant, however, can also be a corpse that issues from its grave to cause mischief and – sometimes – to feed on the living. These entities mostly appear in England at times of turmoil.

Many revenant legends date from around the time of the Anarchy (1135-1153), a period of civil war in which law and order broke down and in which Stephen of Blois and the Empress Matilda contended for the English throne. William of Newbury (1136-1198) wrote that ‘it would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony.’

William related the case of ‘a man of evil conduct’ who’d fled from York to a country village. The man died and was buried, but soon issued ‘by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and didn’t dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night till sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.’

The revenant, however, managed to kill some people – and the way the locals dealt with it is interesting. ‘Hastening to the cemetery’ they began to dig and it wasn’t long until they had ‘laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood.’ Some young men ‘inflicted a wound on the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile, and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal’ the body was ‘now consigned to the flames’.

Another 12th-century writer, the Welshman Walter Map, wrote of a ‘wicked man’ in Herefordshire who rose up from the dead and got into the habit of wandering through his village at night, shouting out the names of those who’d die of sickness within the next three days. A bishop advised the locals to ‘dig up the body and cut off the head with a spade, sprinkle it with holy water and re-inter it.’

So we can see that English revenants do have at least some similarities to Eastern European vampires. The Vampire of Croglin Grange to me seems more like a revenant than a Byronic, aristocratic bloodsucker from Georgian or Victorian literature. It has the appearance of a hideous corpse and it shambles from its tomb at night to cause mayhem and feed. Like William of Newbury’s revenant, it is dealt with by being burnt. If Croglin’s vampire does date from the time of the Civil War, might it be an example of societal stresses being expressed through fears of the supernatural, as happened in the earlier upheavals of the Anarchy? The only aristocratic aspect of the Croglin Vampire is the fact it retreated into the tomb of an extinct – though presumably well-to-do – family. Unlike in some Victorian vampire chronicles, there’s no suggestion of Amelia herself being turned into a vampire. Another folkloric feature of the Croglin beast is its blazing eyes, something British legend ascribes to a number of supernatural creatures, such as phantom black dogs.

The Croglin Grange tale has similarities to another Cumbrian legend involving a revenant-like being. In the village of Dent in 1715, a man died at the suspiciously advanced age of 94. Despite having a decent Christian burial, he was soon seen roaming around the village and was suspected of feasting on animals’ blood. A farmer one day saw a black hare, shot it and followed the injured animal as it fled. The hare disappeared into the revenant’s old house. The farmer looked through the window and saw the man bandaging a gunshot wound. (It’s common in folklore for evil beings to be identified by the wounds inflicted on them.) This revenant’s – or vampire’s – activities ceased when the corpse was reinterred in a new grave and a metal pole was pounded through its heart.

But what about the Victorian elements in the Croglin Vampire case? There are the influences from Varney the Vampire and the fact that the rather passive but sensible and resourceful Amelia shares traits with the heroines of writers like Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker. I suspect that either Augustus Hare or Captain Fisher or both of them couldn’t help mixing some of the gothic themes popular in Victorian fiction into an old legend. Hare had his book to sell and Fisher may have updated the story to lend a more aristocratic aura to his family tree.

Other explanations have been put forward for the Vampire of Croglin Grange: the young woman later known as Amelia might have spotted the eyes of an owl hovering over the lawn or flitting around the trees and – hypnotised by the moonlit night – let her imagination carry her off. A more outlandish suggestion is that an escaped circus monkey – who found himself starving and lost in Cumbria’s bleak terrain – launched the attack. But – unless I find out more about this curious story – I suspect the most likely scenario is that a legend stemming from Civil War trauma was later augmented with Victorian gothic outpourings.

Croglin Low Hall, with the window the vampire apparently came through bricked up and protected by lucky horseshoes. (Photo courtesy of Darren W. Ritson from The Spooky Isles)

Vampire commotions have occurred in modern times, as if the powerful archetype of the bloodsucker refuses to be laid to rest. In the 1950s, a vampire was rumoured to prowl Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis while the 1970s saw an outbreak of vampire hysteria focused on London’s Highgate Cemetery. But what of the Vampire of Croglin Grange? Does anyone still believe in or care about the legend, except for the occasional vampire obsessives who straggle into Croglin village? Lionel and Patricia Fanthorp’s 1997 book The World’s Greatest Unsolved Mysteries contains a photo of Croglin Low Hall, showing the window through which the vampire is alleged to have entered. A more recent photograph – exhibited in 2019 in a presentation given by Deborah Hyde, editor of The Skeptic Magazine – shows the same window. The window has been bricked up and is festooned with lucky horseshoes. Someone, it seems, doesn’t want to take chances.

(This article’s main image is from the 1922 German Expressionist vampire film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.)

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Intrigued by how the tomb towers over the other grave markers, you might move closer and observe its Neo-Egyptian design. You might suspect this mausoleum has generated legends. Coming closer still, walking up the steps, you’d see the tomb’s huge bronze door bears a band of hieroglyphs. Scarab beetles are prominent – Ancient Egyptian symbols of the defiance of death and time and the embrace of the eternal.

You’d be right to think this mausoleum has become a node of London legend, a focus for urban myths, a nexus of the most incredible folklore. Some believe the tomb contains a working time machine or teleportation device, cobbled together by an eccentric Victorian inventor with the help of an Egyptologist who’d discovered scientific secrets while decoding hieroglyphs on the walls of tombs or carved into sarcophagi.

The tomb is the resting place of Hannah Courtoy – a wealthy London heiress obsessed with Ancient Egypt – and her two spinster daughters. The men responsible for the time machine the Courtoys allegedly share their mausoleum with also lie in Brompton Cemetery. Just a few metres from the Courtoy tomb is the grave of the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi, his headstone carved with a depiction of the jackal-headed god Anubis. And near the graves of Bonomi and Courtoy – in an unmarked plot – lies Samuel Alfred Warner, an idiosyncratic inventor whose ideas for ‘teleporting torpedoes’ so interested the British Navy they allowed him to blow up boats in the English Channel.

The hieroglyph-inscribed door of the Neo-Egyptian Courtoy tomb, Brompton Cemetery, London – note the scarab beetles, symbolising victory over death. (Photo: Royal Parks)

But what were the connections between Hannah Courtoy, Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Warner? How did Hannah come by the immense wealth needed to build such a spectacular tomb? Could there be any truth in the legend that a time machine lurks in the Courtoy mausoleum? And might Hannah Courtoy, her daughters, Bonomi and Warner still be zipping through time and space today, having cheated aging and death and just occasionally returning to their Brompton Cemetery base?

Keep reading for tales of disagreeable French wigmakers, knife-armed prostitutes, bitterly contested wills, murders undertaken to protect national security, and secret teleportation passages to other London Victorian graveyards and even Paris cemeteries.

Hannah Courtoy’s Tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery is one of London’s so-called Magnificent Seven – the ring of large Victorian graveyards built in the countryside on the then-outskirts of the capital to relieve pressure on the rapidly growing city’s gruesomely overcrowded churchyards and burial grounds. Kensal Green Cemetery opened in 1833 while the highly gothic West Norwood Cemetery was accepting burials by 1837. Highgate Cemetery opened in 1839; Abney Park, Nunhead and Brompton Cemeteries were in business by 1840; and Tower Hamlets Cemetery opened in 1841.

Victorian angels in Brompton Cemetery, London. (Photo: Edwardx)

These graveyards – with typical Victorian enthusiasm – were grandly laid out, with vast gates, long tree-shaded avenues, landscaped grounds and elaborate networks of catacombs. Much of the design drew inspiration from ancient civilisations and earlier epochs. Highgate Cemetery boasts an imposing Egyptian-style gate leading into the Egyptian Avenue while the padlocked doors to Brompton Cemetery’s extensive catacombs are emblazoned with the age-old occult symbol of snakes curling around staffs. In both Brompton and Highgate, urns are kept in buildings known as Columbariums, a custom which draws from Roman mortuary practices. Brompton was planned in the form of an enormous outdoor cathedral, in the style of Rome’s St Peter’s Square and Basilica, with its ‘nave’ running from Old Brompton Road towards the central colonnade and chapel. The cemetery was luxuriantly planted with shrubs and trees. Ornate graves and mausoleums – ranging from pseudo-gothic chapels and Arts-and-Crafts faux-medieval reliquaries to Egyptian-style obelisks (symbolic of the sun god Ra) – have added to Brompton Cemetery’s gloomy yet appealing grandeur.

The Main Avenue in Brompton Cemetery, looking towards the chapel. Note the Neo-Egyptian obelisks. (Photo: Russell Trebor)

Those buried at Brompton include the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, John Keats’s muse Fanny Brawne, the founder of the Cunard shipping line Samuel Cunard, and the murdered Victorian actor William Terriss, whose ghost apparently haunts Covent Garden London Underground Station. Beatrix Potter would stroll the cemetery and pick out names from gravestones for her characters – with Peter Rabbett and Mr Nutkins among those chosen. But – out of all the broken pillars and shrouded urns and praying angels and other Victorian memento mori and funerary art – it’s the Courtoy mausoleum that stands out most.

Completed in 1854, the Courtoy tomb is twenty feet tall and made from polished granite. Its bronze door is ornately inscribed with what appear to be Hannah’s initials, H.C. Egyptian hieroglyphs decorate one of its steps and the tops of its walls, as well as a rectangular band on the door. The mausoleum’s crowned with a structure resembling a stepped pyramid and attractive Egyptian designs adorn its cornices. One thing that’s perhaps drawn the attention of psychogeographers and occultists is the fact the tomb stands on its own kind of island, its own circle of ground in the middle of a crossroads. Crossroads in folklore are liminal places, with the intersection of two roads suggestive of a spot where different states or dimensions might meet – life and death, this world and the otherworld, perhaps even different eras. Crossroads were for a long time sites of gibbets and gallows. Suicides were buried at these junctions and magical rituals conducted. Crossroads were even viewed as places where – as in the case of the blues musician Robert Johnson – you could approach the Devil to ask a favour.

The Courtoy Mausoleum – or Victorian time machine – in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Flickering Lamps)

Those with a fondness for the esoteric have also pointed out that – in addition to the hieroglyphs – the tomb bears strange decorations. There are wheel-like motifs at the door’s bottom, which some claim are symbols for – or components of – the time machine. High on the walls, on all four sides of the tomb, are large circular holes. Each of these contain what appears to be a glass orb and each has eight smaller holes in a ring around it. Some say these patterns resemble clocks or dials; others assert the glass spheres are crystals that power the time machine; yet more enthusiasts maintain the holes suck in the sun’s energy or are connected in some way to Bonomi’s explorations of the occult. Many indeed claim Bonomi designed the Courtoy tomb.

Wheel motifs on Brompton Cemetery’s Courtoy tomb – are they components of a time machine? (Photo: Dead Good Travel)

A mausoleum like this must have cost a huge amount of money and we must ask where Hannah got it from, especially as she started life at a humble level, working as a servant and barmaid. Also, we might wonder exactly how Bonomi and Warner are said to have collaborated with regards to the strange tomb and the weird machine it supposedly contains. Read on and we’ll try to find out.

The Unusual Life and Strange Egyptian Obsessions of Hannah Courtoy

Hannah Courtoy was born Hannah Peters, most sources say in 1784. She left home young, escaping an abusive father, and worked as a housekeeper and in taverns. In 1800, a friend introduced her to John Courtoy, a 70-year-old man in bad health. Of French descent and originally a wigmaker, Courtoy had made an enormous fortune from lending money. He appointed Hannah his housekeeper and a close relationship soon developed between the two. The sources are unclear about what Courtoy’s malady was, but some hint it had been caused by a psychological trauma triggered by a prostitute slashing at him with a knife.

Whatever effect this incident had on Courtoy’s physical health, it appears – at least – to have had a lasting mental impact, making him antisocial and taciturn. He warmed to his young housekeeper, however, and – within a year of entering his employment – Hannah gave birth to the first of what would be three daughters. Hannah always claimed the daughters were John Courtoy’s and she took his name though they never married. Some, however, suspecting Hannah of gold-digging, believed the friend who’d introduced her to Courtoy – one Francis Grosso – had fathered the girls.

Despite managing to get closer to the grumpy Courtoy than anyone else, Hannah still struggled with living with a man who could be profoundly unpleasant. She appears to have escaped into the fascinating world of Ancient Egyptian civilisation and myth, topics which obsessed many Georgians and Victorians. The colonial opening up of Egypt by the British and French and advances in archaeology fuelled these fixations. In 1877-8, the almost-3,500-year-old obelisk Cleopatra’s Needle was shipped to London stand next to the Thames. Plundered objects filled the British Museum while newspapers were full of the exploits of archaeologists and – sometimes – the curses placed upon them by the angry Pharaohs whose tombs they broke into. One particularly outlandish story had a mummy’s screaming ghost haunting not only the British Museum, but also a nearby London Underground Station the spook accessed via a secret tunnel. Another strange episode had an English doctor attempting mummification himself, turning a Manchester heiress into a mummy that ended up exhibited in one of that city’s museums. Egyptian motifs appeared on products as diverse as jewellery and furniture, Egyptian themes invaded operas and novels, and miniature pyramids even popped up in British graveyards to hold the remains of eccentric squires and wealthy professional men. Hannah – like so many of her compatriots – appears to have become more and more engrossed with the mystical society that once flourished on the banks of the Nile.

The gates to the catacombs of Brompton Cemetery, London, decorated with the occult emblem of snakes curling around staffs. Note also the memento mori symbols of downward-facing torches and a winged hourglass. (Photo: Royal Parks)

As John Courtoy aged and his health further declined, Hannah seems to have gained more influence over him. In 1810, Courtoy made a will leaving most of his fortune to an ex-wife named Mary Anne Woolley and their five children. This will was amended in 1814 to award Hannah the largest share of Courtoy’s assets. When Courtoy died in 1818, both Woolley and Courtoy’s French relatives challenged the amended will, claiming Courtoy had developed dementia and hadn’t been completely in his senses when he’d altered the document. Court battles dragged on until 1827, but by this date Hannah and her daughters had secured most of Courtoy’s wealth.

Hannah, boosted by her inheritance, lived a lavish life, a life that meant she could indulge even more in her ‘Egyptomania’. Indeed, her wealth and status gave her access to some of those most knowledgeable about Ancient Egypt. Diaries kept by a Courtoy servant, Maureen Sayers, show a regular visitor to the house was the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi. Hannah and Bonomi soon struck up a friendship and spent hours discussing Egyptian hieroglyphs, religion, magic and astrology. All this led Hannah to conclude the Egyptians had possessed a deep understanding of the cosmos and its workings. One subject Hannah and Bonomi may have dwelled on was time travel. The Victorians frequently speculated that the Ancient Egyptians had knowledge of this art. H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, for instance, features the motif of the Sphinx. During their lengthy chats about Egyptian lore, the idea seems to have been raised of Hannah funding one of Bonomi’s expeditions. (Cynics might say this could explain the amount of time Bonomi dedicated to his female disciple). The two also arranged for the construction of a 175-foot monument to the Duke of Wellington, a structure they made sure resembled an Egyptian obelisk.

Hannah Courtoy’s friendship with Bonomi continued as the years passed. Many claim Hannah chose him to design her tomb and its Neo-Egyptian style certainly pays homage to their obsessions. The elaborate mausoleum was, however, not ready when Hannah passed away on 26th January 1849 at 14 Wilton Crescent, Belgravia, one of London’s most exclusive addresses. It would be half-a-decade before Hannah’s body could be moved into its final – though opulent – abode. Two of Hannah’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth – neither of whom married, reputedly because they didn’t want men chasing their money – joined her in the mausoleum, in 1876 and 1895 respectively. Hannah’s other daughter Susannah – who married the barrister Septimus Holmes Godson – is buried elsewhere in Brompton Cemetery.

The Courtoy tomb – rumoured to be a Victorian time machine – in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Mirella Pastrav)

Mysteriously, no plans of the Courtoy tomb can be found in Brompton Cemetery’s archives: some claim it’s the only tomb for which plans are unavailable. But couldn’t the tomb just be opened so we can know what’s inside? The mausoleum’s key is missing and – as a large key of archaic design would have to be specially made to unlock the tomb – the door cannot simply be opened by a locksmith. Perhaps tellingly, the cemetery authorities seem reluctant to have such a key created. But did Bonomi really design Hannah’s mausoleum? And could the Courtoy tomb really contain a Victorian-Egyptian time machine or teleportation device? To answer such questions, we’ll need to know a little more about the lives of Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Alfred Warner.

Joseph Bonomi the Younger – Did He Deduce the Secrets of Time Travel during His Egyptian Research?

Joseph Bonomi the Younger was born in London in 1796. His father – the unsurprisingly named – Joseph Bonomi the Elder was an Italian immigrant, who grew famous for his skill as an architect and draughtsman and as a designer of country houses. An older brother, Ignatius Bonomi, was also a noted architect.

Joseph the Younger – who would become well-known as a sculptor, artist, Egyptologist and museum curator – began his artistic journey by studying at the Royal Academy. In 1822, he travelled to Rome – his father’s native city – to continue his education there, but after several months found himself in debt. He was rescued by the Scottish antiquarian and Egyptologist Robert Hay, who offered him a modestly paid commission to join an expedition to Egypt. Thus began a lifelong fascination for Bonomi.

Portrait of the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi the Younger, by Matilda Sharpe (1868) – did he discover the secrets of time travel?

In Egypt, he sketched antiquities and temple interiors, even inventing a kind of drawing-frame-cum-viewfinder to record such ancient remains more accurately. Bonomi also produced plaster casts of the reliefs of the famous temples of Kalabsha. After two years with Hay, Bonomi – resentful at his low salary – fell out with him. He stayed in Egypt, however, living in Cairo, where he illustrated the pioneering Egyptologist James Burton’s Excerpta hieroglyphica. His finances restored by such work, Bonomi re-joined Hay in 1832 and – after a couple more years in Egypt – undertook tours of Syria and Palestine. In 1839, he contributed illustrations to Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians by Sir John Gardiner Wilkinson, a man described as ‘the father of British Egyptology’.

Upon his return to England, Bonomi followed his family tradition by branching out into architecture. He co-designed the entrance to Abney Park Cemetery, ensuring the gateway was built in an Egyptian style, complete with hieroglyphs signifying the graveyard was ‘the Abode of the Mortal Part of Man’. Bonomi masterminded the famous Egyptian facade for the Temple Works flax mill in Leeds, which opened in 1841, and in 1850 he designed an ‘Egyptian spring’ at Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire, for the mathematician, antiquarian and numismatist Dr John Lee. Between 1842 and 1844, he even fitted in another tour of Egypt, this time as part of a Prussian expedition.

Abney Park Cemetery’s Neo-Egyptian gateway, designed by Joseph Bonomi the Younger. (Photo: Tarquin Binary)

Bonomi kept up his practice of being an illustrator and was considered one of the most skilled reproducers of hieroglyphs in Britain. He  published books on Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia illustrated with his own drawings and wrote well-received works on obelisks and other Egyptian monuments. He also compiled and illustrated many Egyptian collections, including that of the Egyptologist Samuel Birch, who produced a hieroglyphical grammar and dictionary and translated The Book of the Dead. Along with the architect Owen Jones, Bonomi set up the Egyptian Court in the spectacular Crystal Palace when – after it had housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 – it was rebuilt in Sydenham, South London, in 1854. Bonomi also helped arrange the Egyptian exhibits in the British Museum and became the curator of the Sir John Soames Museum in 1861. Joseph Bonomi the Younger died in March 1878 and was laid to rest in Brompton Cemetery.

The Neo-Egyptian Facade of Temple Works flax mill in Leeds, designed by Joseph Bonomi the Younger. (Photo: Sarah Grice)

So Joseph Bonomi had a profound understanding of hieroglyphs and Ancient Egyptian culture and had worked closely with many of Britain’s leading scholars of Egyptology. He’d also proved himself as a architect of Neo-Egyptian buildings. It’s therefore entirely possible that Hannah Courtoy would have asked him to design her mausoleum and that – as he was close to her – Bonomi would have accepted the job. While we don’t know if this is what took place, those who argue there’s a connection between Bonomi and the Courtoy tomb point to an intriguing detail on Bonomi’s own headstone.

Bonomi’s tombstone is fairly modest, certainly in comparison to the lavish Courtoy mausoleum. At its top are the Christian symbols of a cross and the Greek letters alpha and omega, but further down things get a lot more Egyptian. Towards the stone’s foot is an engraving of the Egyptian deity Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, mummification, embalming, tombs, cemeteries and the afterlife. There are two intriguing things about the depiction of the deity. One is that the god is facing in the direction of the Courtoy tomb. The other is that Anubis is positioned on some sort of structure or plinth. Some have remarked on this edifice’s similarity to the Courtoy mausoleum. While the dimensions of Anubis’s plinth don’t exactly match the trapezoid shape of the Courtoy tomb, you have to admit – if you allow just a little imagination to colour your thinking – that the resemblance is curious to say the least.

Joseph Bonomi’s gravestone in Brompton Cemetery – note the depiction of the Egyptian god Anubis: is he looking towards the Courtoy tomb? (Photo: Edward Hands)

But what of the more outlandish notion that Bonomi – while deciphering hieroglyphs – stumbled upon the secrets of time travel and helped build a time machine that he hid in the tomb? And if he did make such a bizarre discovery, how might Bonomi have transformed this esoteric knowledge into a practical invention? Bonomi – despite his many talents, deep learning and artistic skill – wouldn’t have had the technical know-how to create such a cutting-edge contraption. In fact, no one in Victorian England would have unless they’d managed to crack some of the most difficult scientific puzzles facing humanity and made a technological leap centuries ahead of their time. One name has been proposed for a man who might just have accomplished such things – Samuel Alfred Warner.

Did Samuel Alfred Warner Invent Brompton Cemetery’s Time Machine?

Samuel Alfred Warner was born in 1793 in Heathfield, East Sussex. His father, William, a carpenter, was rumoured to have a sideline in smuggling. Little is known of Samuel’s early life, but by 1819 he appears to have been working with a London chemist on an explosive. For some time, he served King Pedro I of Brazil and on returning to England managed to capture the interest of King William IV with claims he’d invented secret weapons.

From around 1830, Warner maintained he’d produced two startling innovations. One was what he termed an ‘invisible shell’, a kind of high explosive underwater mine or torpedo ‘no bigger than a duck’s egg’. The other he called the ‘long range’, which, it appears, was a balloon that dropped the ‘invisible shells’ automatically. Warner seems to have attempted an unsuccessful trial of these weapons in collaboration with Charles Green, a pioneering hot air balloonist.

Undeterred, Warner pressed on, conducting a demonstration on an Essex lake that was watched by the prime minister Sir Robert Peel – a demonstration that saw a boat blown up. The government were intrigued and committees were appointed to look into Warner’s inventions. The problem was that, when questioned by the committees, Warner refused to reveal any details of his gizmos until he’d been assured of a payment of £200,000 for each, a staggering sum for the time. Warner – seen by many as a charlatan today – further complicated matters by claiming that during the Napoleonic Wars he’d served under his father on a ship chartered by the British government for espionage purposes and that he’d destroyed two enemy vessels using his inventions. He provided no proof for this narrative, which was marred by anachronisms.

Nevertheless, a further trial of Warner’s devices was arranged, in the English Channel off Brighton in 1844. A substantial crowd watched another ship being destroyed, but officials deemed they couldn’t ascertain what exactly had caused this. Sceptics suspected Warner had attached explosives to an already weakened vessel before the demonstration began. The establishment, however, didn’t lose faith in Warner’s gadgets and in 1852 the House of Lords appointed another committee to examine his claims. After this committee had existed for only one week, though, the Duke of Wellington decided that – as the matter was of military importance – the Ordinance Department should investigate it. The Ordinance Department, however, doesn’t appear to have followed through with any inquiry and official enthusiasm for Warner’s ideas lapsed.

In the early days of December 1853, Warner died in unclear circumstances, leaving a widow and seven children. The fact that he was buried in an unmarked grave indicates he made little – if any – money from his supposedly revolutionary inventions.

So what could connect this offbeat inventor with Joseph Bonomi and Hannah Courtoy and what might link him to the Courtoy tomb and the time machine it allegedly contains? Some say Warner knew or was friends with Bonomi or that for a time the pair were business partners. There’s also the mystery of what exactly Warner’s weapons were capable of. It’s claimed that – as the remote detonation of a bomb would have been impossible with the technology of the era – Warner’s torpedo could have only worked via some kind of teleportation or time slip. This – it’s asserted – Warner achieved thanks to secret knowledge gleaned from hieroglyphs by his friend Bonomi. Funded by Hannah’s fortune, the duo then developed their ideas and constructed a time machine, which they hid in Brompton Cemetery’s Courtoy tomb.

Hannah Courtoy’s Neo-Egyptian tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery – does it conceal a Victorian time machine? (Photo: Edwardx)

Mythmakers have also seized on the date and unexplained manner of Warner’s death. He died not long after official interest in his theories ended. Might the government have decided his weapons were simply too dangerous to be unleashed on the world or feared them falling under the control of an enemy nation? Could the powers-that-be have therefore murdered Warner to prevent him offering his services to another state or inflicting mass carnage on the planet? Some have even suggested it was Bonomi who bumped Warner off, perhaps out of jealousy or to keep the knowledge of their remarkable invention secret. Others say it isn’t Warner who lies in the unmarked grave – the body in there’s just a decoy and Warner’s actually alive and traversing the aeons in his contraption.

Questions, those fond of a good urban legend assert, do remain. Warner was buried around the time the Courtoy tomb was completed. And Bonomi’s Egyptian-themed headstone was set up not long before Warner’s death. Though Bonomi wouldn’t pass on till many years later, the stone was erected to mark the resting place of four of his children who died of whooping cough in 1852. Might there be more than coincidence here? And why did Hannah’s tomb take so long to finish if there wasn’t some project of great scientific complexity going on? Let’s plunge deeper into this myth and see if we can find any answers to its riddles.

A Teleportation Chamber and the Making of a Surprisingly Modern Myth

It’s been claimed the Courtoy tomb isn’t actually a time machine at all, but rather a teleportation device. This idea was floated most famously in a 2011 blogpost by the London musician Stephen Coates, otherwise known as the Clerkenwell Kid. Coates maintains that teleportation passageways were created to connect the Courtoy mausoleum to tombs with similar designs in London’s other great Victorian graveyards. In fact, all the Magnificent Seven cemeteries were graced with these Neo-Egyptian teleportation buildings. On his blog, Coates provides photos of tombs in Highgate and Kensal Green with resemblances to the Courtoy mausoleum. Another, at Abney Park, is rumoured to have been designed by Bonomi. Coates admits, however, that the ‘teleportation chambers’ in the other cemeteries ‘appear to have entirely vanished’.

A Neo-Egyptian tomb in Kensal Green Cemetery, London – one of Coates’s alleged teleportation chambers. (Photo: Philafrenzy)

The purpose, Coates claims, of all this teleportation malarkey was to create ‘a transportation grid around London to reduce the time taken to travel the large distances of the vast congested metropolis.’ So, then, a kind of precursor to the London Underground was planned using a hieroglyph-derived method of occult propulsion rather than steam or electricity. Some have taken Coates’s theories further, claiming the metaphysical metro even connects to an Egyptian mausoleum in a Paris graveyard – though it’s uncertain whether this Victorian Eurostar links up with Père Lachaise Cemetery or the burial ground in Montmartre. As for Samuel Alfred Warner’s mysterious demise, Coates feels he may have became ‘lost while teleporting’.

As entertaining as Coates’s blogpost is, I suspect that much of the myth of Brompton Cemetery’s ‘time machine’ grew up from articles like it. An influential article seems to have been one published by the international news agency Reuters on 29th October 1998. This piece, written by Helen Smith and likely with an eye on the upcoming festival of Halloween, features quotes from a little-known author called Howard Webster. Webster states that he began researching the Courtoy tomb after being struck by it while visiting Brompton Cemetery for an unrelated project. The article tells us Webster ‘now believes the twenty-foot-tall building was a time machine built by a maverick Victorian genius, Samuel Warner.’ Webster also makes the now familiar claims that Warner was murdered by the government, that he collaborated with Bonomi and that Hannah Courtoy financed their endeavours. In addition, Webster mentions the engraving of Anubis on Bonomi’s headstone, emphasising that the god is looking towards the mausoleum and that the direction the deity faces also ‘suggests in Egyptian mythology a soul lost out of time.’

Smith’s article also quotes a ‘spokesman at Brompton Cemetery’ called James Mackay, who has a somewhat sober take on Webster’s claims. While Mackay admits it’s possible that ‘some of the papyri they (archaeologists at the time) were decoding dealt with time travel’, he thinks that Warner was ‘an ingenious hoaxer who used tricks to blow up ships for his weapons demonstrations and managed to dupe the Courtoy spinsters into believing he could build them a time machine.’ Mackay does, however, acknowledge that if Warner did believe he was constructing such a device ‘his choice of a cemetery was a shrewd and appropriate one … it was one of the few places where one could work unobserved and where even the most eccentric structures could be explained away.’ Mackay points out that ‘a cemetery where the wealthy and famous are buried is also a location that one could say with great certainty is unlikely to be the subject of redevelopment over time.’ Just like the Egyptian tombs Bonomi imitated, these ‘structures could remain intact over centuries’.

A Victorian gothic mausoleum in London’s Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Edwardx)

Adding to the mystery, the Reuters article claims ‘there is almost no trace of the Courtoy spinsters. They left no will or other record of their existence, even though the size and opulence of their tomb suggests they were wealthy and influential.’ The article also states the Courtoy mausoleum is the only one in Brompton Cemetery for which no plans can be found, with Mackay remarking ‘the biggest mystery is that you couldn’t build anything in the cemetery without plans and there are no plans’. In addition, Smith’s piece stresses that ‘there is no surviving key’ and that the tomb’s ‘huge bronze door … has not been opened for more than 120 years.’ It also has Webster raising the possibility that ‘Warner’s is not the body in the unmarked grave … I like to believe … he is still alive and travelling through time in his machine.’

I’d suggest this article is the genesis of Brompton Cemetery’s time machine myth. Most of the legend’s central ideas seem to have been arrived at by Webster in his ‘research’. Smith does feature the ‘cemetery spokesman’ Mackay, but it’s not clear from the article if he’s just responding to Webster’s notions or referencing more established folklore. One point he does make, however, is wrong – the Courtoy tomb isn’t the only one in Brompton Cemetery missing its plans. Blueprints are unobtainable for a number of major mausoleums. Likewise, it isn’t in any way exceptional for the keys of old tombs to be lost. The article’s assertion that the Courtoy’s left no will is also incorrect – Hannah Courtoy’s will can be found in the National Archives and is even available online. And I haven’t been able to find any trace of the writer Howard Webster anywhere else despite a thorough trawl through the internet. It’s my suspicion that Webster, an obscure author – having seen the unusual tomb and discovered that a famous Egyptologist and erratic inventor were buried nearby – concocted most of the, admittedly impressive, legend during the 1990s. Popularised by Smith’s widely read article, the myth become a piece of accepted London folklore and others over the years embellished it.

Many of these embellishments, while quaintly fascinating, can also be discounted. The idea that the circular motifs carved into the door’s bottom are components of the time machine is highly questionable. Such indentations are common in Victorian mausoleums – a means of allowing any foul vapours to escape the tomb, thereby preventing gases building up to dangerous levels. As for the ‘crystals’ and ‘dials’ set in the stone near the top, the glass could simply be decoration and the smaller holes also openings through which the fumes of decomposition could disperse.

The ‘missing key’ may have been lost as late as 1980 – some suggest during a visit by Hannah’s descendants though it’s unclear whether they went inside the tomb. The reluctance of the cemetery to replace it is probably down to the fact that having such an implement forged by an expert artisan would be quite an expense, especially for a graveyard full of ancient and precious monuments that must be maintained. The exterior of the Courtoy Mausoleum was, however, repaired in 2009 as frost-cracked chunks of granite had started dropping off the sides.

The Arts-and-Crafts tomb of Frederick Richards Leyland, in the style of a medieval reliquary, Brompton Cemetery. (Photo: Edwardx)

Fresh attention was focused on the Courtoy tomb and its legend when the mausoleum featured on the cover of a 2003 album by the Scottish Musician Drew Mulholland, who records as Mount Vernon Astral Temple. The cover of the album – entitled Musick that Destroys Itself  – shows an spooky vortex radiating from the tomb’s entrance. Stephen Coates’s popular blogpost then added more to the myth. Interestingly, in his post, Coates suggests the Courtoy tomb inspired Dr Who’s Tardis – an intriguing idea for which there’s, unfortunately, no proof. For anyone, however, looking at the tomb and knowing its legends, the realisation it resembles some stone-walled Tardis must inevitably spring to mind. As for his concept of the seven Victorian-Egyptian teleportation chambers, Coates – while admitting he ‘came up with the whole teleportation system as the background to a short story’ – prefers to characterise his idea as an ‘alternative theory based on historical fact’. Maybe there’s just something about creepy Victorian graveyards and their tendency to generate weird folklore – it’s been rumoured, for instance, that vampires have lurked in both Highgate Cemetery and Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis.

Enthusiasm for Brompton Cemetery’s myth shows no sign of abating. For those with an inclination towards the gothic, the cemetery runs moonlight tours, which inevitably stop at the tomb-cum-time-machine. Storytelling sessions have also been organised at the graveyard, by Coates and the storyteller Vanessa Woolf. The money raised will go towards the funding of a key by which the mausoleum could be opened as well as contributing to renovation efforts in the cemetery. The first event took place in 2015 and, Woolf says, ‘We were absolutely overwhelmed with bookings.’

‘There’s a huge interest in the story in London,’ Woolf told the website Mental Floss. ‘This is a story rooted in the secret, in the occult, but no one is quite sure what actually happened.’

But what if a new key could be fabricated? Woolf said, ‘It’s much nicer in a way not having it. It’s all really in the minds of the audience. It’s a slab of rock. The real magic is in their minds.’

Coates, while eager to get a look inside the tomb, still feels that ‘opening it may not establish it’s not a time machine. It may just deepen the mystery.’ He indeed suspects – even if the tomb’s interior proves to be that of an ordinary mausoleum – the really interesting stuff might be concealed in a secret subterranean chamber. Getting access to that would be the next step.

(This article’s main image – of the Neo-Egyptian Courtoy tomb in London’s Brompton Cemetery – is courtesy of Edwardx.)

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But where there are dragons, there are also dragon slayers. Most of the time, these monsters met their nemeses: usually in the form of a sword- or lance-wielding hero. These gallant souls – ranging from farmhands to passing knights to notable landowners – are commemorated up and down the country: in legends and folksongs, in stained glass and on carvings on church bench ends.

But, we may wonder – if such bold individuals existed – might we not expect to find some of their tombs? This blog post will be a search through the churches of drowsy villages, a probe through ruined chapels, a poke around isolated manor houses on fog-shrouded peninsulas in a hunt for the worn memorials, the dragon-decorated grave-slabs, the scale-and-sword-inscribed tombs rumoured to conceal the remains of those still celebrated today for ridding their localities of pestilent reptiles.

In our quest, we might stumble across the swords said to have killed such monsters. We’ll also explore how the tombs of dragon dispatchers have influenced Britain’s best-known Romantic poets and absurdist authors. We’ll unearth accounts of giants’ bones being exhumed, in addition to learning of bottomless pools, dragons over a mile long, eccentric ceremonies involving bishops, the most enormous pies and puddings ever baked, and desperate attempts to outwit the Devil. We’ll also investigate the dark obsessions, sinister fears and strange archetypes that lurk behind tales of dragons and those who cull them. Come with me and we’ll see if we can find England’s three best dragon slayers’ tombs.

Number One: The Knucker and the Slayer’s Slab, Lyminster, Sussex – Bottomless Pools, Greedy Dragons and Massive Pies

A horrendous water dragon – known as a knucker – was reputed to live in a deep pond, called a knucker hole, near Lyminster, Sussex. This knucker – which had the appearance of a winged and hideous sea serpent – would slink out of its pool to rampage around the countryside. It destroyed whole fields of crops right before harvest, gobbled up livestock and even ate humans, though – according to some accounts – it only wolfed down beautiful maidens.

One version of the story states that the King of Sussex – this all occurred in Saxon times, around the 5th century – grew so vexed with the dragon he offered the hand of his daughter in marriage to any man who could kill the monster. A young wandering knight, hearing of this hazardous deal, took up the challenge. After a bloody and exhausting battle, he managed to slay the beast. Following his wedding with the princess, the knight settled down in Sussex. He lived a long and happy life and – after he passed away – the locals gave him a special tombstone to honour his achievement.

A medieval knight slays a dragon.

That gravestone can still be seen in Lyminster, in St Mary Magdalene’s Church. The stone – known as the Slayer’s Slab – is very worn: it originally lay in the churchyard but was moved inside to prevent further damage. If you examine it, locals say, you can make out a sword sculpted against a background of dragons’ ribs. A different piece of folklore claims these ridges were instead caused by a vengeful dragon trying to claw its way down to the slayer in the grave.

Variations on the knucker legend have – rather than knights – men of humbler origin taking the dragon on. Some claim a Lyminster farm boy called Jim Pulk challenged the beast; others say it was a young man named Jim Puttock from the village of Wick or the nearby town of Arundel.

Jim Pulk is said to have baked the most enormous pie and laced it with poison. He loaded this gargantuan pastry onto a cart, which needed two horses to pull it, and took it to the knucker hole. The knucker devoured the pie – and the horses and the cart, but the poison soon worked its effects and the monster died. Jim chopped off the dragon’s head with his scythe and took it as a trophy to the Six Bells Inn, where he intended to enjoy a pint to celebrate.

Seated in the pub, lauded by all as a hero, Jim took a hearty swig of ale and wiped his hand across his mouth to clear away some froth. Tragically, he still had some of the dragon’s noxious blood on his skin or – according to some legends – some poison from the pie. Jim swallowed a few drops, which was enough to kill him. Jim was buried in the churchyard under the Slayer’s Slab, which the local people had carved out of gratitude.

The Slayer’s Slab – can you make out the sword and the dragon’s ribs? (Photo: Odd Days Out)

The Jim Puttock take on the legend has the Mayor of Arundel offering a reward to anyone who could slay the knucker. A record of this tale – told in dialect – was taken down from an old hedger by one Charles G. Joiner in 1929 and published in Sussex County Magazine. According to the hedger, no one at first accepted the mayor’s challenge. The mayor was, however, desperate to get rid of the beast. This was perhaps understandable as the dragon would go ‘spannelling about the brooks by night to see what he could pick up for supper, like a few horses, or cows maybe, he’d snap ’em up as soon as look at ’em.’ Another unpleasant habit the monster had was sitting at a high point on a causeway and if ‘anybody come along there, he’d lick ’em up, like a toad licking flies off a stone.’

The mayor, therefore, doubled his offer and Jim Puttock stepped forward. The mayor commanded everyone to give Jim whatever he asked for, no matter the expense. Jim ordered a ‘gert iron pot’ from the blacksmith, masses of flour from the baker, vast quantities of apples from orchards, and enough lumber from woodsmen to make a ‘gert stack-fire in the middle o’ the square’. He then cooked ‘the biggest pudden that was ever seen’. Jim transported the pudding on a cart to where the knucker was lying, with his immense body sprawled across a hill while ‘tearing up the trees in Batworth Park with his tail.’ His curiosity aroused, the knucker spoke to Jim:

‘How do, man?’

‘How do dragon?’ said Jim.

‘What you got there?’ said dragon, sniffing.

‘Pudden,’ said Jim.

‘Pudden?’ said knucker. ‘What be that?’

‘Just you try,’ said Jim.

In a few seconds, the dragon snaffled up the pudding, the horses and the cart. Jim himself almost got eaten, but avoided being sucked into the dragon’s mouth by hanging onto a tree.

‘Twern’t bad,’ said the knucker, licking his chops.

It soon, however, became clear that the gigantic pudding was more than even the greedy knucker could cope with. The knucker was soon rolling around, roaring, bellowing, vomiting, swivelling his massive eyes and lashing his tail. Jim, meanwhile, had somewhat casually nipped to the pub for a beer. When he came back, the knucker was complaining of a terrible bellyache.

‘Never mind,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve got a pill here, soon cure that.’

‘Where?’ said the knucker, bending his great head forward.

‘Here,’ said Jim.

Jim brought out an axe from behind his back and cut the dragon’s head clean off. Unlike the other Jim, though, Jim Puttock didn’t die after decapitating the monster. He lived out his years and – when his time came – he was buried under the Slayer’s Slab.

The famous Lyminster knucker hole – from where a horrid dragon slithered forth. (Photo: dellagriffiths)

Knucker holes are a common feature of Sussex. These curious pools might only be 20 feet or so across, but are exceptionally deep. They’re often reputed to be bottomless. A story says that, after the knucker’s time, the men of Lyminster tied six bell ropes from the church together and fed them down into the pool, but they didn’t touch the bottom. The pool was eventually explored by divers, who discovered it had a depth of around 30 feet. Knucker holes are fed by underground springs, keeping the water fresh and relatively warm. Though you’d imagine Lyminster’s knucker hole would have been polluted by the poisonous dragon, the pond’s water was actually thought to have healing properties. Locals used to bottle it as a cure for all ailments. Today, sadly, the famous knucker hole is fenced off with barbed wire and used to breed trout.

A knucker hole at Lancing was believed to be bottomless or to go down to the other side of the world. More knucker holes could be found at Shoreham, Binstead, Worthing and in other places and many were reputed to have their dragons. People noticed the warm pools gave off steam in frosty weather – perhaps the legends of dragons partly came from that. Maybe the supposedly fathomless ponds connected the knucker holes in the popular mind with another bottomless pit – that occupied by the great dragon, the Devil. Or parents might have used stories of knuckers to scare their children away from the dangerous pools.

A knucker hole on the Sompting Estate, Sussex, England – apparently, a cart was once lost in its depths. (Photo: Sompting Estate)

It’s interesting that the tale of the Lyminster knucker is set in Saxon times. ‘Knucker’ probably comes from the Saxon word ‘nicor’, meaning ‘water monster’. This term can be found in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, in which the epic’s hero clambers ‘o’er stone-cliffs steep … narrow passes and unknown ways, headlands sheer, and the haunts of the nicors.’

Similar words exist across European cultures. The word ‘nixie’ can mean water spirit. In Iceland, nykur means water horse; in German, a nickel is an underground goblin while a similar creature is known as a knocker in Cornwall. Water spirits are called neck in Scandinavia and näkki in Finland. Näcken are Scandinavian water men while näkineiu are mermaids in Estonia. Most of these words describe some kind of frightening or supernatural being, often connected – like knuckers – with water. Maybe a similar connotation can even be found in the colloquial term for the Devil ‘Old Nick’.

As for the Slayer’s Slab, the gravestone bears no inscription so it’s impossible to know who it commemorates. A close examination, however, will show that – rather than a sword lying on a dragon’s ribs – the stone actually depicts a cross on a herringbone background. This unusual stone may have been co-opted to add colour to a local knucker legend or might have actually generated the legend itself, with the story being invented to explain the stone. I’d suspect the former explanation is more probable. One child in the 1930s, however, believed the tales about the dragon so implicitly he’d regularly leave snapdragons on the grave. A stained glass window in St Mary Magdalene’s Church shows Jim Pulk offering the dragon his pie, but it’s hardly the size of the pie of legend or likely to finish the beast off.

Window showing dragon slayer Jim Pulk, with the knucker, Lyminster. The pie is rather smaller than in the legend. (Photo: Odd Days Out)

Number Two: Tomb of Piers Shonks, the Dragon Slayer of Brent Pelham, Hertfordshire

If you were to browse around St Mary’s Church, in the village of Brent Pelham, Hertfordshire, you might come across the strangest tomb in an alcove in the nave’s north wall. There’s an ornately carved slab of black marble – it’s well-worn, but if you examined it, you’d make out a dragon and flames as well as angels and an elaborate cross. The dragon – via a spear thrust in its mouth – is receiving its comeuppance. Above the slab is an inscription leaving no doubt this tomb commemorates a dragon slayer:

‘Nothing of Cadmus nor St George, those names

of great renown, survives them but their fames;

Time was so sharp set as to make no Bones

Of theirs, nor of their monumental Stones.

But Shonks, one serpent kills, t’other defies,

And in this wall, as in a fortress lies.

Piers Shonks was a local lord who slew the infamous dragon of Brent Pelham, a winged serpent with armour-like scales. This monster had made its home in a cave beneath the roots of an ancient yew tree that stood just outside the village, a den that proved a perfect base from which to terrorise the neighbourhood. Some time around the Norman Conquest, Piers Shonks – who resided in a moated manor house whose ruins can still be seen in Brent Pelham – promised to rid his domains of this reptilian menace.

Shonks, however, seems to have been more than just a noble – he had something of the magical and monstrous about him. A giant who – according to some accounts – stood at 23 feet tall, Shonks was famed as a hunter: rumour claimed his hounds were winged. Piers set out to face Brent Pelham’s terrifying dragon accompanied by just one servant and these faithful and swift dogs.

The inscription on the tomb of the dragon slayer Piers Shonks, in Brent Pelham, Hertfordshire, England. (Photo: Stepneyrobarts) 

He confronted the beast at its lair and – after a long and bloody combat – killed it by shoving his spear down its throat. But Shonks wasn’t able to enjoy his triumph for long. There was an almighty crash of thunder, an overpowering stench of brimstone and the Devil himself appeared. The Fiend was furious about the slaughter of one of his favourite monsters and he promised that – when Shonks died – he’d claim his soul. Just to make sure the dragon slayer understood his spirit was doomed, the Devil pledged that Piers wouldn’t escape his scaly clutches whether he was buried in the church or outside it.

Piers didn’t seem worried about the Devil’s threat. He lived a fulfilled life and – when he lay dying in 1086 – he asked a servant to bring him his bow. With the last of his strength, Piers fired an arrow and demanded he be buried wherever the arrow came down. The arrow flew through a window of the church and collided with its north wall so that was where his tomb was built. As Shonks was interred neither in the church nor outside it, the Devil was thwarted from stealing his soul.

But, as I said, Piers Shonks had something uncanny about him. Even the obstacle of death didn’t prevent him protecting the people of Brent Pelham. A man – named Jack O’Pelham – once stole a faggot, but just before he reached his home, the spirit of Piers Shonks appeared. Jack fainted from shock and was so shaken he vowed he’d never again commit a criminal act. Shonks also haunts the churchyard and church, frightening any who’d cause mischief in these holy precincts.

The dragon on Piers Shonks’s tomb, Brent Pelham – does this depict the manner in which Shonks disposed of the beast? (Photo: Icknield Indagations)

To any sceptics who might doubt the legend of Piers Shonks, villagers have a few things to say. Folklore states Shonks was a giant and its said that – in 1835 – Shonks’s tomb was opened. The bones found within might not have quite been those of a 23-foot man, but the skeleton was of a person who’d have measured nine feet. Some think that, before the dragon took up residence near Brent Pelham, it lived close to the village of Barkway. Out of gratitude for the slaying of the monster – until 1900 – Barkway paid Brent Pelham six shillings a year ‘dragon rent’. There’s also Brent Pelham’s name. ‘Brent’ means ‘burnt’, which refers to the destruction the dragon wreaked.

The sceptics might, however, have a few things to say back. A stylistic analysis of the marble tomb suggests that – if Piers Shonks died in 1086 – the tomb would have been constructed about 200 years too late. The tomb – like the Slayer’s Slab – has no inscription to indicate who lays within it, but its carved motifs don’t prove it holds a dragon slayer’s bones. The fiery dragon likely represents the Devil. The tomb is also decorated with the emblems of the Four Evangelists: an angel, eagle, lion and bull. These, along with the cross, are likely to symbolise Christianity overcoming Satan’s power. A devilish dragon being skewered in the mouth is also a common medieval image.

The inscription on the wall above the tomb is a much later addition, probably dating from the late 16th or early 17th century. Perhaps an antiquarian of that time – knowing Piers Shonks’s legend and seeing a dragon on the slab – erroneously connected the two. Some suspect a vicar of Brent Pelham, the Reverend Raphael Keen (died 1614), had the lines chiselled there.

The tomb of dragon slayer Piers Shonks, Brent Pelham. Note the Christian symbols of an angel and cross as well as the Four Evangelists’ emblems. The angel is carrying a man up to heaven in a piece of fabric, but he looks a little small for the gigantic Shonks! (Photo: Icknield Indagations)

As for ‘Brent’ meaning ‘burnt’, this is far more likely to refer to a 12th-century fire that destroyed the village rather than flames a dragon vomited. Interestingly, though, ‘Pelham’ means ‘place of springs’, perhaps suggesting a link between dragons and water like in the case of the knucker above. The date the dragon slaying reputedly took place is also intriguing. Piers Shonks is said to have been a Norman knight and a number of dragon-slaying legends are set in the years around the 1066 Conquest. Norman-descended families could have propagated these myths to bolster their claims to their new lands.

Several common folkloric motifs can be seen in the Piers Shonks story. There’s the idea of a churchyard guardian. Some folktales claim the soul of the first – or last – person interred in a graveyard is tasked with guarding it. As a result, black dogs were sometimes buried in churchyards or church foundations – so their spirits could relieve human ghosts from such burdensome duties. At Brent Pelham, it seems, these responsibilities were assumed by the protective spirit of Piers Shonks.

As for the burial in the church wall as a ruse to evade Satan, similar tales can be found elsewhere. In Yspytty Ystwyth, Dyfed, a wizard who’d promised the Devil his soul ‘whether buried within a church or out’ tricked the Evil One by pulling off the same stunt. The Brent Pelham tale may have partly grown up to explain the tomb’s presence in the wall. The church was rebuilt in the middle of the 14th century so it seems the tomb is older than the church – might the tomb have originally not been in the wall but been incorporated into it during this reconstruction?

Number Three: The Sockburn Worm and the Tomb of Sir John Conyers, County Durham – Alice in Wonderland, Romantic Poets and a Dragon Slaying Sword

Effigy said to be of Sir John Conyers, slayer of the Sockburn Worm. (Photo: Brian Combs)

On the bridge across the River Tees between the villages of Croft (North Yorkshire) and Hurworth (County Durham) the oddest ceremony takes place. Whenever a new Bishop of Durham is selected, he must pause upon this bridge on his journey north, where he’s confronted by the sword-brandishing mayor of the nearby town of Darlington. The mayor tells him:

‘My Lord Bishop. I hereby present you with the falchion wherewith the champion Conyers slew the worm, dragon or fiery flying serpent which destroyed man, woman and child; in memory of which the king then reigning gave him the manor of Sockburn, to hold by this tenure, that upon the first entrance of every bishop into the county the falchion should be presented.’

This custom is a revival of a tradition that used to involve the Lord of the Sockburn (an eerie and isolated peninsula in a bend of the Tees) and every newly appointed Prince Bishop (who were once the powerful ecclesiastical and secular rulers of County Durham). The lord would make the speech above and present the falchion (a type of medieval sword) to the Prince Bishop who’d then give it back and bid the lord enjoy the possession of his lands. The ceremony was obviously a way in which the lord could show loyalty to the Prince Bishop while still having considerable freedom over his estate.

The Bishop of Durham receiving a replica of the falchion that killed the Sockburn Worm. (Photo: The Durham Cow)

The ceremony – for several centuries – seems to have been a big occasion. Bishop Cosin wrote about going through it in 1661 when fording the Tees. He stated that ‘the numbers of gentry, clergy and other people was very great, and at my entrance through the river Tees there was scarce any water to be seen for the multitude of horse and men that filled it, when the sword that killed the dragon was delivered to me with all the formality of trumpets and gunshots and acclamations that might be made.’

Legend does indeed claim that Sir John Conyers, a young local noble, slayed a dragon. The Sockburn Worm – either a wyvern (two-legged dragon) or flying serpent – had terrorised the peninsula for seven years, devouring farm animals as well as any humans who got in its way. The creature had exceptionally bad breath. A manuscript in the British Museum, dated from the first half of the 1600s, complains of its ‘monstrous venoms and poysons …. for the scent of the poyson was so strong, that no person was able to abide it.’

Shortly before the Norman Conquest, some say in 1063, Sir John decided something had to be done. He went in armour to Sockburn’s All Saints’ Church and pledged the life of his only ‘sonne to the holy ghost’. Hoping God was now on his side, he went out to face the horrid worm, armed with his falchion. Sir John hacked bravely at the beast while dodging its corrosive breath and – after an intense struggle – was triumphant. He kicked some of the worm’s stinking carcass into the River Tees before burying the rest on the peninsula. A grey stone – which you can still see today – marks where the dragon lies. News of Conyers’ victory spread through the nation and the king was so relieved to have his realm freed from the beast he granted Sir John and his descendants possession of Sockburn in perpetuity.

But though we can see the worm’s grave, what of Sir John’s tomb? All Saints’ Church is now a ruin, but for many years it contained a fine stone effigy of a recumbent knight, an effigy local people have always claimed decorated the resting place of Sir John Conyers. The knight is clad in a coat of mail; he holds a triangular shield and clutches a sword in his right hand. There’s a carving of a dog and wyvern fighting at his feet, which – it’s asserted – is a reference to the very wyvern Conyers killed. As the church fell into ever-greater disrepair, the effigy was moved into the somewhat more robust Conyers Chapel, which was added onto the church in the 14th century and reroofed in 1900. Sir John’s effigy remains there today.

A wyvern and dog fight at the foot of Sir John Conyers’ effigy, in Sockburn, County Durham, England. (Photo: Hypnogoria)

Though Sir John’s falchion was presented in the ceremony for hundreds of years, the sword used in the modern ritual is a replica. You can, however, still see the original, dragon-slaying sword. The sword was kept in Sockburn Hall manor house until 1947, when it was donated to Durham Cathedral. It’s displayed in a glass case and – for a small fee – you can see it as part of the Cathedral’s Open Treasure Exhibition.

The Conyers Falchion in Durham Cathedral – did this sword slay the Sockburn Worm?

The Sockburn Peninsula occupies a deep bend in the Tees. It’s sparsely populated and not on the way to anywhere else, giving it a spooky, isolated feel. There’s just an expanse of flat fields, the calm river, eerie silence; the only human structures are the manor house, the ruined church, and a few farm buildings. It’s as if the dragon’s ghost looms over the vicinity, injecting the venom of gloom into the air or hovering on the mist that rolls off the river. Despite its dreary quiet, however, Sockburn has managed to make some impressive contributions to literature and history.

The peninsula was a site of early Christian importance. Bishops were crowned there – with Higbald, Bishop of Lindisfarne, undergoing this honour around 780 AD and Eanwald, Bishop of York, in 796. A much later churchman associated with the area was the father of Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. From 1843 to 1868, Carroll’s father was the rector of Croft, whose attractive church, rectory and churchyard jut out into the Tees next to the bridge where the falchion ceremony is performed. Carroll spent most of his adolescence in the village, having come there aged 11. Carroll’s fictional monster, the Jabberwock, might owe much to the legends of the Sockburn Worm:

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the jubjub bird and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!’

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought –

So he rested by the Tum Tum tree,

And stood a while in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O’ frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’

He chortled in his joy.

Was Jabberwocky inspired by the dragon-slaying legends around the Sockburn Worm? Illustration by John Tenniel 1871.

Might the Jabberwock be the Sockburn Worm and the vorpal blade Sir John Conyers’ falchion?  One of 11 siblings, Carroll seems to have started making up stories to amuse his large family and the first verse of Jabberwocky was written at Croft. Carroll’s time there may have inspired other literary motifs. In Croft church is a sedilia – a kind of seat for the clergy, built into a wall – upon which is carved the face of a lion or cat. Looked at from a certain angle, when sitting in the pews, this creature appears to have an incredibly wide smile. If you stand up, however, the grin disappears, a kind of reverse of what happens to Carroll’s Cheshire Cat: ‘Well, I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice, ‘but a grin without a cat. It’s the most curious thing I’ve ever seen in my life!’

In 1950, Croft Rectory’s floorboards were levered up, revealing a number of Victorian artefacts, including a child’s shoe – and a white glove, a glove of the kind the white rabbit might have worn in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll may have taken even more inspiration from the north east of England. His sisters lived in Whitburn, now in Tyne and Wear, where he often visited them and where he wrote parts of Jabberwocky. He’s said to have met a carpenter while walking on a local beach and to have seen a stuffed walrus in the town. He also visited a house named Whitburn Hall – and played crochet on the lawn. The hall’s owner had recently introduced white rabbits into the grounds.

The grinning ‘Cheshire Cat’ in Croft Church that may have inspired Lewis Carroll

Some other literary figures linked with Sockburn were the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. In 1799, one Tom Hutchinson built a farmhouse at Sockburn, in which he lived with his sisters, Mary and Sara. Tom’s most famous achievement seems to have been breeding a 17-and-a-half-stone sheep, but his siblings would affect literary history. Wordsworth was distantly related to the family and he visited, bringing Coleridge. Wordsworth soon fell for Mary and the pair married in 1802. Coleridge – though married already – succumbed to Sara’s charms. She inspired a poem, Love, in which Coleridge depicts his sweetheart leaning against a statue that sounds similar to Sir John Conyers’ effigy:

She leant against the arméd man,

The statue of the arméd knight

She stood and listened to my lay

Amid the lingering light.

All this takes place in the moonlight  ‘beside the ruined tower’ of a ‘ruin wild and hoary’ that could well be the remains of All Saints’ Church.

Despite all the inspiration it’s given, there’s plenty to query about the Sockburn Worm legend. Various explanations have been suggested for the tale. It may have evolved from memories of dragon-prowed Viking ships that raided up the River Tees or it may have simply been inspired by the wyvern on Sir John’s tomb. The Conyers family appear to have been of Norman descent and the story is set just prior to the 1066 Conquest. The tale then might – like some other English dragon legends – have been created to justify these newcomers’ landholdings in the area.

And what about Sir John Conyers’ falchion? We’re told Sir John slew the Sockburn Worm in 1063. The sword on display in Durham Cathedral features the heraldic decorations of a black eagle on one side of its pommel and the three lions of England on the other. This indicates the sword couldn’t have been made earlier than 1194, when the three-lion motif first appeared on the royal crest. Other details of the sword would probably date it to about 1260-70, around 200 years after Sir John supposedly slew his dragon. It’s possible that the weapon in Durham Cathedral was made to replace an earlier sword, but this must remain speculation. The legend is true in its claim that the Conyers were granted the manor of Sockburn, but this seems to have happened around the start of the 12th century, before the forging of the sword but after the reputed dragon slaying. The sword’s crossguard is, interestingly, decorated with dragons. All this would suggest sword and myth may have been created around the same time to boost the claims of the Norman interlopers, the Conyers, to their estates. The Conyers Falchion is still, however, a precious artefact, as only about half-a-dozen medieval falchions are thought to have survived.

The ruins of Sockburn Church, in which Sir John Conyers prepared to slay the dragon. Behind the ruins is the Conyers Chapel, in which the ‘dragon slayer’s’ effigy lies.  (Photo: Ataffo)

As for the effigy of ‘Sir John’ which Coleridge so romanticised, it cannot be of the legendary dragon slayer. It dates to the middle of the 13th century. A memorial brass near the effigy in the Conyers Chapel does commemorate a Sir John Conyers, but – the plaque’s gothic lettering tells us – he died in 1394.

The idea the Conyers would hold their estates in perpetuity thanks to Sir John’s heroics has also proved false. The Conyers were at Sockburn for centuries, but in the late 1500s or 1600s they moved their family seat a little further north to Horden, near Peterlee, and sold Sockburn to the Blacketts, a family of Newcastle industrialists. This perhaps reflected the slow shift of wealth and power from feudal lords to merchants and manufacturers as the capitalist system took shape, but Sockburn’s new masters still treasured the falchion and still faithfully presented it to each new Bishop of Durham. The Blacketts seem to have sold off or rented out bits of Sockburn to various people as the years passed. As for the Conyers, some went to America, but the English branch of this once proud dragon-slaying clan fell into decline. In 1809, the 9th Baronet, Sir Thomas Conyers, was found living in a workhouse in Chester-le-Street and the family died out completely in 1910.

Sockburn Hall, viewed across the tombs of Sockburn’s abandoned All Saints’ Church. The current hall was built in 1834 on the site of an earlier structure.

The ceremony with the falchion on the bridge also dropped into sad decay. The last time the sword was publicly presented was in 1826, when Sir Edward Blackett handed the weapon to Bishop Van Mildert. There was a rather desultory ritual in June 1860 when the sword was presented to Bishop Villiers when he was crossing the Tees, but this was a private ceremony in which the bishop didn’t even bother to leave his train carriage. The custom then lapsed until it was revived in its modern form with the 1984 appointment of Bishop David Jenkins, with Darlington’s mayor taking on the role of Sockburn’s lord. The falchion – well, its replica, anyway – has been presented to all new bishops ever since.

A Bonus Dragon Slayer’s Tomb: the Case of the Slingsby Serpent, North Yorkshire

The three dragon slayers’ tombs above are probably England’s best-known, but I’m going to tell you of another dragon killer’s grave. Let’s journey to the edge of those mysterious uplands, the North Yorkshire Moors.

Half-a-mile outside the village of Slingsby – beside the road to the town of Malton – a huge and hideous serpent was said to inhabit a deep hole. This serpent – according to the antiquarian Roger Dodsworth (1585-1654) – ‘lived upon the prey of passers-by.’

The dragon was so feared that the road was even diverted so travellers could avoid becoming the beast’s next meal. Dodsworth wrote, ‘The street was turned a mile or so on the south side, which does still show itself if any take pains to survey it.’ By the time the Reverend Thomas Parkinson wrote his Yorkshire Legends and Traditions in 1888, it seems this kink had been ironed out – presumably thanks to the serpent being long slain.

The Slingsby Serpent – a snake with a nasty habit of snacking on travellers

The credit for dispatching this nightmarish creature is given to a knight from the local Wyvill family and his dog. Wyvill attacked and managed to kill the serpent, but in doing so received his death wound. A monument was set up to this hero in Slingsby’s All Saints’ Church. A stone effigy of the dragon slayer was placed on his tomb, with his faithful hound depicted at his feet. The dog is also said to have died due to the delayed effects of the dragon’s poison.

The Wyvill family have lived around Slingsby since 1215  and there’s indeed an effigy of a knight in Slingsby Church, bearing the Wyvill’s coat of arms. It probably commemorates the 14th-century Sir William Wyvill and there was once, apparently, a dog at the statue’s feet. This dog was, according to Dodsworth, ‘a talbot coursing’. A talbot is a – now extinct – light-coloured hound and ‘coursing’ means hunting so the memorial might have represented Sir William’s enjoyment this pastime rather than any dragon-slaying adventures.

A Wyvill effigy in Slingsby Church – does it depict a dragon slayer? The lower part of the statue, where the dog might have been, seems to have been broken off. (Photo: Slingsby Village)

One story claims the dragon was over a mile long. This, however, doesn’t tally with Roger Dodsworth’s descriptions. Though Dodsworth has the dragon living ‘in a great hole, round within’, he depicts it as ‘three yards broad and more’. Hardly big enough for a mile-long creature to curl up inside.

It’s possible, nevertheless, that locals noticed an unusual hole by the road – a pothole or sinkhole maybe – and looked for ways to explain it. Dragons have often been blamed for odd landscape features. The Lambton Worm – a dragon that once plagued County Durham – liked to wrap itself around hills. Two hills – Penshaw Hill near Sunderland and Worm Hill in nearby Fatfield – have strange ridges running around them, marks said to have been left by the worm’s body. The Linton Worm – which terrorised the Scottish borders, causing much land to become desolate – was killed by a local laird. As the worm thrashed about in its death throws, it created a range of hills, a tract of terrain now known as Wormington. Northern Scotland was once harassed by the Stoor Worm, a hideous sea serpent whose breath could contaminate plants and kill animals and humans. When the creature was finally slain, its teeth fell out – becoming the Orkney, Shetland and Faroe Islands – while its body became Iceland.

What Could Lie Behind Myths of Dragon Slayers?

We’ve already looked at a few explanations for the dragon-slaying stories above: the legends could have been invented to explain unusual tombs or landscape features, to justify claims to landholdings or to scare children away from places of danger. But, at a deeper level, what might myths of despatching dragons represent? Remarkably similar dragon-killing stories can be found in many parts of the world and across historical epochs and not all of them can be explained away by weird tombs or Norman nobles anxious to cement the ownership of their estates.

Many dragon myths are connected to two interlinked factors: water and fertility. We’re used to thinking of dragons as fiery beasts, but water plays a role in numerous dragon tales. The knuckers of Sussex lived in deep pools and the Stoor Worm appeared from the sea to cause havoc. The Linton Worm was known for skulking around a loch or bog. The Lambton worm was first pulled from the River Wear by a sinful knight fishing on a Sunday. The shocked knight cast it into a well, where – over several years – it grew to a terrifying size. The Sockburn Worm haunted a river-engirdled peninsula while the etymology of Brent Pelham links its dragon to springs. Some legends of St George say the dragon he killed came out of a lake.

St George slays the dragon in a painting by Johann Konig c. 1630. Notice the water nearby.

A common mythological pattern is the slaying of a dragon or serpent by a god associated with thunder or storms. The dragon, we’re told, has been blocking the rightful flow and distribution of water, thereby causing a drought. This harms the fertility of the land and plunges the world into chaos. A god or hero must fight the beast to restore the natural balance and get the waters flowing again. The fact a storm god usually steps up for this task is obviously connected to the releasing of water.

So, in Indian myth, we have the storm and river god Indra killing a multi-headed serpent who’d caused a drought by trapping waters in his mountain cave. In Greek myth, the serpent Typhon is chaos itself – it has a massive number of heads, many of different animals, with which it babbles a cacophony of disturbing sounds. The monster lays waste to the land, gobbles livestock, and either poisons waterways or drinks them up, turning rivers to dust and sucking seas dry. Typhon challenges Zeus for control of the cosmos, but the sky god defeats the snake with his mighty thunderbolt. Zeus buries the beast’s carcass and good order and natural balance return. The monster’s corpse beneath the earth is, though, blamed for volcanic activity. In Hittite myth, the storm god Tarhunt kills the giant serpent Illuyanka. The Norse thunder god Thor takes on the monstrous sea snake Jörmungandr, who’s destined to threaten the order of the universe during Ragnarök, the Viking Apocalypse. In the Bible, the serpent Leviathan represents the watery primal chaos upon which God imposes order by creating the world.

In the legends of dragon slayers explored in this blogpost, we can see how dragons cause chaos and threaten the fertility of the land. The dragons munch livestock, decimate crops, lay waste to whole regions and poison plants with their foul breath. Only by killing such creatures can our heroes reimpose order and make the land bountiful again.

The dragon slayer either rescuing or marrying the king’s daughter – as in Sussex – could also indicate a concern with fertility. The female (the earth) has been liberated from the monster and – now through her marriage – can be fruitful. The common motif of dragons guarding treasure or a reward being offered for slaying them is probably fertility related too. The ‘treasures’ the dragon hordes symbolise the vital waters, which need to be set free so abundance and prosperity can spread through the land. Interestingly, St George is associated with fertility, sometimes being depicted as green or surrounded by foliage. The name ‘George’ translates as ‘farmer’. 

St George killing the dragon, as depicted by Vitorre Carpaccio 1502-7. Again, water is present.

Dragon legends may also reflect remnants of a darker tradition – that of human sacrifice. This can be seen in the dragon’s penchant for snaffling human beings and – especially – kidnapping or wolfing down young maidens. In Greek myth, the sea monster Cetus ravages the land and it’s felt the only solution is to chain the princess Andromeda to a rock as a sacrifice to the beast. The hero Perseus, however, turns up, kills the creature and receives the hand of the beautiful Andromeda in marriage. Such tales could represent societies moving away from the idea that human sacrifice is necessary to appease the gods and to ensure the land yields sufficient supplies.

The motif of dragon slayers dying while defeating their monsters may also have roots in these disturbing customs: the young man willingly offers up his life for the good of his community and the fertility of the land. At Ragnarök, Thor is destined to kill Jörmungandr as the serpent sprays his poison over the skies and seas. This venom, sadly, will prove too much for Thor who’ll die shortly after slaughtering the creature. Jim Pulk at Lyminster and Wyvill at Slingsby succumb to their dragons while also managing to slay them. Conyers offering up his only son to the Holy Ghost in Sockburn is a Christianised version of ideas of sacrifice.

A different take on dragon legends is put forward by the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961). For Jung, if I’ve understood him right, dragons represent the watery chaos of the subconscious mind, from which the ego must break free. We must, therefore, slay our dragons so we can develop mentally as individuals. This is a vital step in moving from youth to adulthood so that’s why the dragon slayers of legend are usually young. The treasure the dragon guards represents the precious potential for personal development. Entering the dragon’s dark, horror-filled cave is like plunging into the subconscious mind, from which we’ll hopefully emerge – having faced down our fears – with the riches of a profound psychological experience. Such a process might also be understood as a rebirth in the subconsciousness’s dark womb.

Jung, though, didn’t see dragons as entirely negative creatures. Serpents represent nature – albeit in a chaotic untamed form – and so can heal and nurture as well as destroy. A serpent curling around a stick or glass is a widespread symbol of medicine and it’s interesting that the water of the knucker hole at Lyminster was thought to have curative properties. Serpents, for Jung, can also transmit a primal wisdom. There’s the serpent proffering knowledge in the Garden of Eden and even Christ urged his followers to ‘be wise as serpents’. For Jung, the depiction of dragons as completely evil points to a weakness, a kind of immaturity in the fabric of Christian and Western cultures.

All this might seem a long way from worn slabs and crumbling effigies in rural churches. But perhaps these ‘dragon slayer’s tombs’ and the strange legends around them are our homely English versions of inspiring, terrifying and deeply held archetypes, archetypes of that universal, nightmarish yet ambiguous creature, the dragon.

(This article’s main image shows the face of an effigy that once decorated what was rumoured to be the tomb of the dragon slayer Sir John Conyers in Sockburn, County Durham, England. Photo: Joe Wood)

The post England’s Top 3 Dragon Slayers’ Tombs appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

You’d not be the only person to consider them spooky. Known as ‘Devil’s chairs’, ‘haunted chairs’ or ‘witches’ chairs’, these pieces of graveyard furniture have generated the weirdest and most alarming legends. Those unwise enough to sit in them are variously said to hear spirits; to see the Devil; to invite misfortune, tragedy or mental illness; or to gain their desires, though often at the expense of exchanging their souls. Some Devil’s chairs, apparently, even enable you to travel back through time.

But what, we might ask, are these chairs even doing in cemeteries? Why would they have been put there if they could be used for such abominable purposes?

The chairs – mostly from the 19th century – were originally not thought of as spooky at all. Called ‘mourning chairs’, they were installed so people would have somewhere to sit when visiting loved ones’ graves. Some are found in touching locations, such as by the graves of children – obviously set up so parents could spend time there. A few ‘mourning chairs’ weren’t even intended to be used as benches or seats, but are rather tombstones sculpted to resemble such structures.

As time went by, however, mourning chairs fell out of fashion, with people tending to linger less at gravesides and unremarkable park-style benches being provided for anyone needing to rest. New generations didn’t know what the strange stone chairs were for and – thanks to changing architectural trends – their gothic designs began to seem sinister. Stories sprang up – especially among youngsters – about the chairs being portals to contact the Devil, witches or spooks. Groups of young people started visiting the chairs at night, especially at Halloween. The braver dared each other to sit on the accursed artefacts, despite all the chilling consequences promised for those doing so.

In the United States, an elaborate folklore has grown up about Devil’s chairs, a folklore that has twined all kinds of superstitions and macabre tales around these once innocent objects. Though certain common patterns of myth can be discerned, each ‘Devil’s chair’ has its own legends. I’ve therefore chosen seven of the most infamous to investigate. We’ll then explore where the bizarre beliefs and practices around Devil’s chairs might have emerged from.

Number One: Devil’s Chair, Lake Helen-Cassadaga Cemetery, Cassadaga, Florida

What might well be America’s most famous Devil’s chair, in Cassadaga-Lake Helen Cemetery, Florida. (Photo: Orlando Adventuring)

Unlike the intricately carved specimens found in some cemeteries, this Devil’s chair at first seems disappointingly plain. It’s a redbrick bench built into a redbrick wall that surrounds two gravestones. The tombstones’ inscriptions face the chair, each commemorating a woman named Thatcher. The only thing that really seems disturbing about the site are the pentagrams and words like ‘Lucifer’ scratched into the wall and bench.

This Devil’s chair is probably, however, America’s most famous. Every Halloween and on any Friday the 13th, large numbers of young people descend on the cemetery and try to sit in the chair, to the great annoyance of nearby residents. Residents and police guard the graveyard on these nights, turning back or arresting young adventurers. Youngsters have been accused of vandalising gravestones, throwing paint at houses and bothering locals by asking if they can direct them to Casper. The police have detained hundreds over the years.

Several legends are attached to the chair. One claims that if you leave a can of beer on the bench and come back the next morning, you’ll find the beer has been drunk – according to some, without the can having been opened. Another piece of folklore states that if you sit in the chair at midnight, you’ll meet the Devil himself, who’ll be quite happy to chat with you. Some claim the Evil One built the chair and that the things he’ll whisper to you in the witching hour will haunt you forever. Others maintain that if you lower yourself onto the seat, the Fiend will appear to you at midnight some time in the next few days, wherever you might be.

What no doubt adds to the attraction of this Devil’s chair is the fact that Cassadaga, the small town about two miles down the road, has been home to a community of spiritualists since around 1875. Sometimes called the ‘Psychic Capital of the World’, the town boasts a spiritualist church, mediums who’ll do readings for you and new-age shops. It seems the community has vacillated over recent decades between using the influx into the town around Halloween to boost the local economy and resenting the invasion of often rowdy tourists with ghoulishly stereotypical ideas about the place. But attempting to make it to the Devil’s chair by midnight is considered a no-no by virtually everyone.

The story locals tell about the ‘Devil’s chair’ is more poignant than legends of beer-guzzling demons, but no less spooky. In 1926, a 90-year-old man lost his wife and daughter in a house fire. The man, who had no other relatives, had the bench built next to their graves so he could spend as much time as possible near their burial places. He’d visit every day, sitting for hours on his chair. (He’d had the names carved facing the seat so he could gaze at them.) After some time, locals began to view him as eccentric. Though some mocked him, most were tolerant of the grief-stricken aged man.

About 11.00 pm one Halloween night, two youths – perhaps forerunners of the many who’d later descend on the graveyard – were sneaking around the cemetery. They spotted the old man crying on his bench and – concerned about him being there so late – went to tell the police. The police officers looked at them in shock and confusion.

‘What are you talking about?’ one said. ‘That old man passed away a few days ago.’

Number Two: Devil’s Chair (Baird Chair), Highland Park Cemetery, Kirksville, Missouri

This ornate, lovingly sculpted and moss-speckled chair – with the word ‘Baird’ chiselled into it – is associated with a terrifying legend.

The Baird Chair, a famous Devil’s chair in Kirksville, Missouri. (Photo: David Oaks)

Local folklore contains dire warnings for those foolish enough to sit on the chair at midnight or on certain nights like Halloween. The first time you sit on the chair, you’ll suffer a string of bad luck. If you’re crazy enough to go back and sit on it again, a curse will be placed upon you. But the scariest fate awaits those deranged enough to park themselves on the Devil’s chair a third time. If you do so, an undead hand will emerge from the adjacent grave, seize you and – ignoring your screams – drag you down to hell. Other legends, however, say those who sit in the Baird Chair will be rewarded for their courage.

The seat isn’t actually a traditional mourning chair, but rather serves as a tombstone. John C. Baird was a stone mason and businessman, dealing in marble funerary monuments along with his partner, a Mr Grassle. It seems that Grassle, on a trip to Italy, saw a carved chair among some ancient ruins. Admiring its workmanship, Grassle sketched it and sculpted his own version when he got home. Grassle couldn’t, however, help adding some typical Victorian features – such as the ‘memento mori’ symbol of a discarded piece of fabric draped over the seat’s back, representing us slipping out of our ‘fleshy garments’ when we die.

Grassle and Baird showed off the chair at their marble workshop to draw in customers. In 1891, the Kirksville Weekly Graphic enthused over the ‘mosaic chair that attracts general attention. It is the latest product of Mr Grassle’s chisel.’

It seems Baird and his wife decided the impressive piece of sculpture should be used for their own monument. Mr  Baird, however, couldn’t have been buried before 1914 as in that year he’s listed as one of the elders of the local Presbyterian church.

Number Three: Witch’s Chair, Brookside Cemetery, Tecumseh, Michigan

Would you sit in the witch’s chair in Brookside Cemetery? (Photo: Dawn Dubois)

Brookside Cemetery is a somewhat spooky and atmospheric graveyard – dating back to 1853, it contains many old settlers’ tombs. If you were to walk towards the back of the burial ground, you’d find the Stacy family plot, which includes an ornate granite mourning chair.

The Stacys were prosperous – Mr Stacy was a judge and he and his wife Mary had five children. After the judge died, Mary visited his grave every day for 17 years, sitting for hours on the granite seat.

The chair’s connection with witches comes about because one of the Stacey children, Loanna, never married and came to be considered the ‘town spinster’. Old widows and spinsters – often being both needy and vulnerable – tended to be resented in their communities. Scapegoated for things that went wrong, they were sometimes accused of causing these misfortunes through witchcraft.

In Tecumesh, a number of occurrences led to Loanna being labelled a witch. The fact she long outlived her parents and siblings generated suspicion. A spate of locals getting sick and their farm animals mysteriously dying also saw fingers jabbed toward Loanna.

A ghost – some say Loanna’s, some say Mary’s – has been spotted on the granite seat. People have also seen Loanna floating through the corridors and halls of the family mansion, which still stands in the town. But what does local folklore claim will happen if you’re rash enough to sit on the ‘witch’s chair’? The answer is simple – shortly afterwards, you’ll die.

The Stacy mansion – said to be haunted by the ‘witch’ Loanna’s ghost. (Photo: Aurora Momcilovich)

Number Four: Witch’s Chair, Southside Cemetery, Pontiac, Illinois

Southside Cemetery – a creepy burial ground of moss-covered tombstones, elaborate grave markers and subsiding mausoleums – is a place of much legend and folklore. Its proximity to the Vermilion River has seen the graveyard flooded and coffins borne off downstream. The cemetery also hosts a ‘goblin tree’ – during the day the tree simply appears old and knotted, but at night reveals the outline of a hideous evil face.

It’s not surprising that such a location boasts a witch’s chair. The chair is said to mark the grave of a witch hung for murdering her own child. Some say that if you stand on the grave at midnight, you can hear the crying of the witch’s baby. Another legend states that if a young person sits in the chair and reads the epitaph carved upon it aloud, they’ll die before their 18th birthday. This pleases the child killer resting under the soil.

Apparently, on Halloween night in 1975, a youngster visited the cemetery with a friend. He sat in the chair and started reading out the epitaph, but – before he could finish – the back of the chair broke off and tumbled to the ground. The terrified youths sprinted from the graveyard. They were, however, curious enough to go back the next day. The chair was whole again, with no signs of any ruptures. According to another piece of folklore, if you sit in the chair and rub the arms, you’ll hear the witch scream.

A bit of sober investigation soon dispels these myths. There are no records of anyone being hung for child murder or a witch in Pontiac around the time the grave’s occupant died. And it would actually be impossible to read out the tomb’s inscription as most of the words carved on the concrete chair have worn away, with much of the damage probably caused by overexcited teenagers. The words ‘Perry’ and ’49 years’ are visible, along with – possibly – the word ‘missed’. If the ’49’ refers to an age, the woman would have been a little old to be the mother of a new born. But such facts haven’t stopped generations of youngsters daring each other to sit in the ‘witch’s chair’ and spreading outlandish tales about it.

Number Five: Devil’s Chair, Greenwood Cemetery, Decatur, Illinois

Greenwood Cemetery in Decatur, Illinois – allegedly one of the most haunted graveyards in America. (Photo: a grave interest)

Greenwood Cemetery is said to be one of the United States’ most haunted. Originally a Native American burial ground, the graveyard was used by settlers in the early 1800s and would later see masses of Civil War dead interred. Though once an attractively wooded, garden-style cemetery, the bankruptcy of the company that ran it led to the graveyard becoming overgrown and neglected in the 1920s. Gangs roved it after dark and cults carried out bizarre rituals there. Maybe this long and sometimes sinister history has fuelled the graveyard’s reputation as a centre of ghostly occurrences.

People have spotted spook lights and witnessed phantom funerals. A young woman who was engaged to a bootlegger but died before she could marry him was buried in her wedding dress and is said to haunt the cemetery in her bridal attire. Voices, crying and screams have been heard from a mass grave used for the burial of unclaimed bodies from a demolished mausoleum. Another mass grave – of Confederate soldiers, some of whom were rumoured to be not quite dead when they were interred – was disturbed when a nearby river flooded. Soon afterwards, reports began of ghostly lights, glimpses of phantoms in Confederate uniform, and moans and wails coming from the mound where the bodies salvaged from the river were reburied.

Greenwood Cemetery also, as you might expect, contains a Devil’s chair. This mourning chair is of a naturalistic design, with its stone carved to resemble a tree trunk and branches. The name ‘Houston’ is etched into the seat. The chair would have simply been used for family members to sit on when visiting the next door grave, but the object’s straightforward purpose hasn’t stopped the most incredible legends growing up.

The Devil’s chair in Greenwood Cemetery, Decatur, Illinois. (Photo: a grave interest)

Stories claim those who sit on the chair will die within one year or bring bad luck upon themselves. On the contrary, other tales state that those brave enough to place their backsides on the seat will be rewarded with good luck or riches. Another legend asserts that if you sit on the chair at certain times – midnight or Halloween, presumably – the Devil will appear and grant you anything you desire. But you can only enjoy his munificence for seven years. At the end of this period, the Evil One will return and demand your soul as payment.

The engraved seat of the Devil’s chair in Greenwood Cemetery. (Photo: a grave interest)

Number Six: Devil’s Chair, Union Cemetery, Guthrie Center, Iowa

Local legend says that if you have psychic abilities and sit in this chair, you’ll hear the dead talk. Other folklore, however, states that sitting in the seat will result in bad luck. More disturbingly, several stories link the chair with the Devil. He’s said to appear in it every Friday the 13th and – more puzzlingly – every Friday the 17th, at precisely 3.00 a.m. on both dates. Some claim that if you position yourself upon the seat, the Fiend will grant you magical or psychic powers, but only if he likes you and feels he has a great use for you. If you experience strange smells in the vicinity of the chair, it’s a sign the Evil One’s close by.

The ‘Devil’s chair’ is located between two graves though its uncertain which it belongs to. It’s similar in design to the Baird Chair, but is cast from cement rather than carved from stone. Though the Union Cemetery opened in 1885, it seems all the wild stories connected with the dastardly chair only go back about 35 years.

The Devil’s chair in Guthrie Centre, Iowa. (Photo: Blackhawk Paranormal Investigations)

Number Seven: Devil’s Chair, Congress Park, Saratoga Springs, New York

Saratoga Springs – a resort town in New York State – has quite a collection of ghosts. Civil War phantoms have been spotted on the site of the Battle of Saratoga, a few miles from the town. But many of Saratoga’s spooks have more to do with pleasure than conflict. Saratoga – thanks to the fame of its medicinal springs – became a popular tourist destination in the late 1700s. Visitors also flocked to Saratoga for less wholesome reasons as the area gained a reputation for casinos and horseracing.

One of the town’s most glamourous venues was the Canfield Casino, built by a boxer called John Morrissey in the late 1800s. Now a museum, the Casino, however, seems reluctant to let go of its hedonistic past. Spectres of the guests who drank and gambled there have been seen as has the ghost of John Morrissey. Visitors have smelt mysterious wafts of cigar smoke. A woman in Victorian attire is said to wander the building – in 2007 she walked up to a group of tourists and asked them a question. An upsurge in hauntings apparently occurred between 2007 and 2010, a phenomenon some blamed on an exhibition at the museum featuring the clothes of prominent Victorian ladies. An unseen entity slapped a glass out of a guest’s hand while another sent the lid of a rubbish bin sailing through the air. The lid landed between a museum volunteer and employee.

Perhaps a strong connection with the past accounts for the legends centred on Saratoga Springs’ Devil’s chair. This Devil’s chair is unusual as it isn’t in a cemetery. It can be found on the corner of the city’s Congress Park. The chair was intended to be the corner stone of a Presbyterian church, but the Presbyterians found out about plans to build a casino right next to their new house of worship. Believing gambling to be the Devil’s work, they fled, but left behind some stones, one of which was chair-shaped.

The Devil’s chair in Saratoga Springs can supposedly transport you back in time.

It’s said that if you sit on the chair, you’ll be transported back to the early 1900s. Perhaps this means you can join in the good times Saratoga enjoyed before an anti-gambling law of 1907 brought them to an end. Maybe the Devil’s chair would also enable you to teleport back to the present, leaving any gambling debts in the past. Some claim, however, that the chair will only transport you if you’re a teenage girl and sit on it after midnight.

Honourable Mentions and More Devil’s Chair Folklore

The examples above are just some of the Devil’s chairs found across the United States. While some cemeteries have removed so-called ‘Devil’s chairs’ due to them being magnets for vandalism and anti-social behaviour, quite a few of the chairs that remain are surrounded by interesting folklore.

Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse, New York, contains a child-sized Devil’s chair and legends have grown up around the Duncan Monument in Fletcher Cemetery, Ohio. The spooky-sounding Empty Chair in Hope Cemetery, Barre, Vermont – an armchair-like structure with the name ‘Bettini’ carved into it – has, unsurprisingly, generated local myths.

The spookily named ‘Empty Chair’ in Hope Cemetery, Barre, Vermont. (Photo: Stacy Artis)

A number of Devil’s chairs are said to exist in the cemeteries of New Orleans, including a wrought-iron Devil’s Throne. Apparently, the legendary voodoo master Dr John sat in this chair, thereby learning many rituals and the secrets of zombification. Texas is home to some particularly horrifying Devil’s chairs. If you sit on a certain cemetery seat in Galveston, you’ll have visions of all your family members suffering terrible deaths. If a couple sit on a Devil’s chair in Marshall and one asks the other to marry them, the pair will be married, but only for one day after which they’ll die.

Another chair in Marshall is known as the Devil’s Hot Seat. Anyone who sits in it is thereafter unable to tell a lie so all their dirty secrets are spread throughout the state. This chair is greatly feared by criminals, politicians and lawyers. Maybe the most terrifying Devil’s chair in Texas is in Jefferson. Anybody sitting in it will immediately lose control of their bowels. More seriously, they are then said to be cursed to lose a limb or suffer a lifetime of disability. Somewhere in Houston there’s rumoured to be a Devil’s footstool. If you lower yourself onto this child-sized bench, you’ll gain immense popularity but at the cost of giving Satan your soul.

A Devil’s chair in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is reputed to have had tragic consequences for those who constructed it. The man who made the chair lost both his hands so his son finished it off, losing three fingers in the process. One of the men who delivered it to the cemetery lost an arm while another delivery worker who sat in the chair to check its strength died on the spot. If a visitor to the graveyard touches the chair, they’ll lose the finger they prodded the seat with.

In Ocean City, New Jersey, local folklore says a Devil’s chair was once stolen from a cemetery. The thief was detected when they were found sitting in the chair dead in the middle of the street. A Devil’s chair in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, however, seems more benign than most of its counterparts. If a woman struggling to get pregnant sits in the seat, she’ll be expecting within a year.

The Duncan Chair in Fletcher Cemetery, Ohio – legend says that if you sit in it, you’ll die before the year is up. (Photo: Julie Ette) 

A complex knot of folklore seems to have grown up around Devil’s chairs in general, a folklore whispered through high schools and colleges and bandied about on social media. You should never, apparently, let a single drop of blood fall on such a chair as this will allow the Devil to drag you straight down to hell. For this reason, women should never sit on a Devil’s chair during their periods. The Devil will also claim your soul if you are presumptuous enough to ask him to appear rather than waiting for him to manifest at his pleasure. And you must never sit in such chairs and mock the Evil One – if you do, you’ll drop into a deep depression and be dead in seven days.

Devil’s chairs are notorious for bringing on mental illness. A psychic who sat in the Baird Chair is said to have lost her ability to speak and is now in a psychiatric hospital, having never come out of the trance she fell into. You should never have your photo taken when sitting in a Devil’s chair as it will be the last photograph of you ever made. Pregnant women especially should avoid sitting on these seats – as the child they’re carrying will be cursed. Rumour has it that the mother of a serial killer unwisely perched on such a chair. And, most importantly of all, you should never have sex on a Devil’s chair – any child you conceive may grow up to be the Anti-Christ!

Just to make things more confusing, though, some myths state that any curses associated with a Devil’s chair will not apply to the person who sits in the seat, but rather the one who dared them to do it.

So it appears an incredible tangle of folklore has enmeshed itself around items that were once simply intended to be grave markers or functional cemetery furniture. What’s more astonishing is that this folklore is quite new – in many cases just a few decades old. But what might have inspired such legends and what could have prompted them to spread so quickly in the modern United States? We’ll go searching for answers in the next sections.

Haunted or Cursed Chairs Are Common in Folklore

Though the folklore around Devil’s chairs in American cemeteries is far from ancient, older legends can be found that predict tragic or at least magical consequences for those sitting in ‘cursed’ or ‘haunted’ seats.

The Busby Stoop Inn, Yorkshire, England, was once home to an infamous chair. According to local folklore, anyone who sat in it soon died. The chair is said to have been the favourite seat of the pub’s landlord, a notorious criminal who was hung in 1702 for battering his father-in-law to death. Before going to face the rope, the landlord was allowed one last drink in his pub and he, of course, enjoyed it in his beloved chair. When he got up, he cursed the seat and there are numerous tales of people foolish enough to have sat in the chair who met their ends soon after.

A cursed chair that was once housed in the Busby Stoop Inn, Yorkshire – sitting on it meant death. (Photo: TheHauntedPalace)

In England, there are even natural features of the landscape known as Devil’s chairs. In Shropshire, a rocky outcrop – the Devil’s Chair – is the subject of local legends. Some say the protrusion was built by the Fiend himself or that he was carrying a load of rocks in his apron and lay down for a rest. When he got up, his apron strings snapped and the rocks tumbled out, forming the Devil’s Chair and the smaller outcrops surrounding it. Apparently, you can still smell brimstone coming off the rocks on hot days. On Midsummer’s Night, Satan is said to seat himself on the Devil’s Chair and summon his local supporters – witches and wicked spirits – who then select their king for the next year. In Ulverston, Cumbria, there’s a feature known as the Devil’s Armchair – a chair-like rock formation big enough for four adults to sit in. Whether it’s natural or manmade is not known.

There are various legends of haunted household chairs, which will inflict consequences on those brash enough to sit on them. People sitting in such chairs might feel an intense chill or suffer nausea or hot sweats. The chair might start vibrating or even throw them out. Others receive tragic news on the day they sit on the seat. Some chairs won’t let a person sit in them unless their death is approaching. Certain chairs supposedly scoot around floors with supernatural energy.

A 200-year-old ‘chair of death’ – kept in the Baleroy Mansion, Philadelphia – is alleged to have killed four people who sat in it and will kill anyone else reckless enough to do the same. The chair – said to have once been owned by Napoleon – is apparently haunted by a young woman called Amanda, who appears in a red haze. The chair is thought to have been constructed by an evil warlock in the 18th or 19th century. The Baleroy Mansion is viewed as one of the most haunted houses in the US, with manifestations of ghosts, angels, demons and jinn being reported.

The Devil’s Chair, part of the Stiperstones, Shropshire – does the Fiend seat himself upon it at Midsummer? (Photo: Jeremy Bolwell)

On the island of Torcello, near Venice, is a stone seat known as the Throne of Atilla. Probably a magistrate’s or bishop’s chair, this seat is actually thought to have been made around 100 years after the death of the famous king of the Huns. A legend says that if a young woman sits in the seat, she’ll marry within a year; another piece of folklore asserts that all who sit in it will return one day to Torcello.

These examples show that folklore about magical or sinister chairs is widespread and that much of it predates the Devil’s chair legends of America’s cemeteries. The stories above all link certain chairs with the Devil or ghosts and/or claim there are consequences for people who sit on them. In this way, these tales are similar to the legends that have arisen in connection with chairs in US graveyards. Could it be that older myths have been resurrected or reapplied to express the concerns, fears and desires of modern American youngsters? Might these older folktales and archetypes have transferred their focus to previously innocuous cemetery benches and grave markers?

But we still might ask why such a process should have occurred. Why would American youths bother to build up such elaborate legends about their local graveyards and why – considering what these legends say – would they even want to sit on Devil’s chairs? Most of the folklore promises dire results for those who park themselves on these benches and – even when good things are guaranteed – this is often at the price of trading in one’s soul. The answer might lie in a phenomenon that’s been labelled legend tripping.

Devil’s Chairs and Legend Tripping

Legend tripping is an activity in which groups of young people visit spooky or threatening places – such as caves, tunnels, graveyards and old houses – associated with tragedies or the supernatural. Engaging in legend tripping is a way for youngsters to demonstrate their daring and courage as well as their independence from parents, teachers, preachers and other authority figures.

Legend tripping is often linked to a phenomenon called ostentation, in which people act out pieces of legend and folklore or the contents of books or films. Ostentation is a kind of game in which the borders between reality and fantasy become fuzzy. Going to a creepy cemetery at night and ‘role playing’ local legends by sitting on ‘cursed chairs’ is a copybook example of both ostentation and legend tripping.

Bill Ellis, an American academic specialising in the occult who has studied legend tripping, sees it as having positive features, such as encouraging creativity and providing a fairly safe outlet for rebellious feelings. Ellis argues legend trips are ‘ways of expressing independence from adult norms and the kind of social mores that govern people in school, society or church. It’s an opportunity to go visit the Devil’s half-acre, which I think people have to do to prove they’re not social robot adults.’

Ellis states, ‘The irony is (legend trips) are so commonplace. But when they come to the attention of some crusader, who starts talking to the police, they begin to think it’s Satanists teaching this stuff to kids. So these things go from trivial to “a menace that threatens our country”.’

Examples of legend tripping can be found in many parts of the world – and the results have occasionally been dramatic. In the 1950s, hundreds of children invaded a Victorian cemetery in Glasgow determined to hunt down a vampire. This incident led to media panic, debates in Parliament and even a law being passed to limit the availability of American horror comics. In 1970s London, rival groups of young people suspected a vampire was lurking in Highgate Cemetery. The case got into the press and a TV programme was made, resulting in a mass invasion of the graveyard one Friday the 13th.

Rather than vampires, American youngsters seem to have fixated on long-disused mourning chairs and have woven a hysterical though impressive mythology around them. I also can’t help thinking that the rise of the horror film genre in the 1970s and 80s added to this trend. It’s interesting that the same period witnessed the rapid growth of Christian fundamentalism, which must have made all the associations of mourning chairs with the Devil even more thrilling.

But can legends of Devil’s chairs be completely dismissed with these rational arguments? I wonder how many of us would feel rational looking at the gothic contours of an empty beckoning seat in a midnight cemetery while remembering all the terrifying lore we’ve heard.

As a young researcher, Bill Ellis sat on the Stone Couch, an allegedly cursed roadside bench near the town of Weatherly, Pennsylvania. Some say a hex was put on it by a Native American woman whose baby died there. The first time you sit on the couch, you’ll hear an infant crying.  The second time, you’ll receive a ominous warning, like being involved in a non-fatal car wreck. After the third time, you’ll die.

Ellis sat on it twice – and after the second time lost much of his hearing. He didn’t sit on the bench again. He saw no reason to take the risk.

(This article’s main image shows an ornate bench in Lake View Cemetery, Seattle, Washington. Photo: Joe Mabel)

The post Devil’s Chairs – 7 Cemetery Seats that Acquired Macabre Legends appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Then you trudge around the corner of the church building, look up, gasp, blink, look again. Your eyes are not tricking you – in front of you, there really does stand a 25-foot (7.6-metre) pyramid. It rises from the green land, against a background of bare trees; sheep bumble around it; moss patches its stones; its point tears at the mist, but – in this most English of scenes – it’s there: a pyramid, a miniaturisation of Ancient Egypt seemingly transported from the shores of the Nile and plonked down in a British churchyard.

And it’s not the only one. A number of such pyramid mausoleums are scattered across England – brooding in dark stone next to modest churches, crowning green hilltops or rising incongruously from the lush grass of aristocratic estates.

These pyramid tombs are magnets for bizarre legends – tales tell of glass strewn over their floors to repel the Devil, of occupants seated with bottles of wine to await the Resurrection. There are stories of the dead clutching playing cards in the hope of outwitting demons, of attempts to stop people dancing on ex-lover’s graves, of glimpses of tragic ghosts and of desperate schemes to keep family fortunes intact.

England’s pyramid tombs were the product of ‘Egyptomania’ – the passion for all things Ancient Egypt that gripped Europe and North America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Freemasons became fascinated with the Pyramids’ ‘sacred geometry’ and the esoteric secrets supposedly hidden in their designs. Neo-Egyptian buildings sprouted on European streets; Egyptian themes invaded literature, opera and art; and Egyptian motifs appeared on products as diverse as furniture, jewellery and dinner services.

And, as so much of Ancient Egyptian culture revolved around death, it’s not surprising that pyramid tombs began popping up in English churchyards and beyond. Though England boasts quite a range of wonderful pointy-topped mausoleums, I’ve attempted to compile a list of the ten best. So let’s go for a quick tour and see what we can make of England’s strange pyramid tombs.

Number 1: Mad Jack Fuller’s Pyramid in Brightling Churchyard, Sussex

The pyramid tomb described above is England’s most famous. It was erected to house the body of one ‘Mad Jack Fuller’ – the squire of the hamlet of Brightling, Sussex. The pyramid stands, dark and moody, in the corner of Brightling’s St Thomas a Beckett Churchyard, dominating the gravestones and even seeming to challenge the primacy of the church itself.

Mad Jack Fuller’s pyramid tomb in Brightling Churchyard, Sussex, England. (Photo: Plumbago)

Born in 1757, the famous eccentric John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller served as a Member of Parliament for Southampton and Sussex. The Fuller family had made their fortune from iron foundries and Jack’s wealth was further boosted when he inherited his uncle’s Sussex estates and Jamaican slave plantations in 1777 at the age of just 20. Fantastically fat and a well-known drunk, Fuller was ejected from Parliament in 1810 by the Serjeant-at-arms after a passionate and alcohol-fuelled denunciation of the government. This incident resulted in public disgrace, effectively ended his political career and even led to Jack being threatened with imprisonment in the Tower of London.

Fuller used his substantial wealth to support scientific developments – including mentoring Michael Faraday, who conducted pioneering studies into electricity and magnetism. Jack also bought and commissioned a number of paintings from J.M.W Turner. But Mad Jack Fuller’s urge to be remembered went beyond sponsoring science and art – like the Egyptians, he wished to bequeath a legacy in stone. He constructed a number of follies on his estates – such as an obelisk, a mock Greek temple and a cone-shaped structure rumoured to have been built to win a bet – in addition to his pyramid mausoleum.

As the pharaohs had, Jack ordered that work should begin on his pyramid while he was still very much alive. The tomb was built between 1810 and 11, many years before his death in 1834. According to legend, Mad Jack Fuller was interred at the centre of his pyramid dressed for dinner, seated on an iron chair and wearing a top hat. On a table in front of him were a bottle of port and roast chicken, so that when the trumpet blast of the Resurrection came he wouldn’t be hungry or suffer thirst. Apparently, Fuller ordered that bits of glass should be scattered over the tomb’s floor – to prick the Devil’s cloven hooves and thereby discourage him from coming to claim Mad Jack’s soul.

Another story says that to get permission for his pyramid mausoleum – which takes up a quarter of the churchyard – Jack had to make serious efforts to persuade the vicar. Local folklore claims Jack even promised to move his pub – the Green Man – from opposite the church, as the tavern’s rowdiness was distressing for the devout. The pub was relocated to a converted barn and renamed The Fuller’s Arms.

When restoration work on the pyramid was done in 1982, the stories about Jack’s interment were found to be false. Mad Jack Fuller was buried rather prosaically beneath the floor of his mausoleum and there were no signs of roast chickens, bottles of port or broken glass. The tale about Jack having to move his pub is also untrue. The parish register states that – to be allowed to build his fantastical monument – Mad Jack Fuller was merely required to erect a new churchyard wall, along with an iron gate and two pillars.

Number Two: Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Pyramid in St Anne’s Churchyard, Limehouse, London

Nicholas Hawksmoor’s pyramid in St Anne’s Churchyard, Limehouse, London. (photo: cosmictigger)

A much smaller – but possibly more curious – pyramid stands in the churchyard of St Anne’s, Limehouse. Green and mossy, this slim structure reaches a height of 9 feet (2.74 metres) and bears the strange inscription ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’ in English and Hebrew.

No one knows the exact purpose of the pyramid. Some suggest it’s a grave marker; others suspect it was intended to decorate the church’s tower but – being surplus to the builders’ needs – was left in the churchyard. The architect of St Anne’s was Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736). Known as ‘the Devil’s Architect’, Hawksmoor was a noted Freemason fond of peppering his buildings with ‘pagan’ symbols like obelisks and pyramids.

Perhaps only Hawksmoor knows why the pyramid is there and what its mysterious inscription refers to, though King Solomon – as builder of the Great Temple in Jerusalem – is revered by Freemasons. Hawksmoor apparently made plans for a full reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple, a monument which – like the Pyramids – was thought to express the universe’s secrets within its geometry. Another of the churches Hawksmoor designed, St Mary Woolnoth, is based on the Temple’s supposedly cubic shape. Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s pyramid is divided into five segments, which is reputedly another piece of Masonic symbolism.

Number Three: William MacKenzie’s Pyramid Mausoleum in St Andrew’s Churchyard, Liverpool

William Mackenzie’s pyramid tomb, in St Andrew’s Churchyard, Liverpool. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Another pyramid linked to ‘sinister’ mysteries can be found in St Andrew’s Presbyterian Churchyard, in Rodney Street, Liverpool. The pyramid is the tomb of William MacKenzie (1794-1851), a civil engineer and contractor who worked on some of Europe’s most important railways and canals. According to legend, MacKenzie was a gambler who had a wager with the Devil. To stop Satan claiming his soul, MacKenzie was interred sitting upright in his pyramid holding a winning hand of cards – as the Devil could never beat him, McKenzie hoped his soul would be safe.

The churchyard in Rodney Street is said to be haunted by MacKenzie’s ghost, a shadowy phantom in a top hat and cape that walks through the locked gates of the graveyard before entering the pyramid. A man who ‘saw’ the ghost in 1871 – and shortly afterwards died of fright – described MacKenzie’s face as being lit up with fire and his eyes as black and lifeless.

A slight variation on his legend says that one night MacKenzie played poker with a Mr Madison, who turned out to be the Devil. MacKenzie sold his soul in exchange for a winning streak and went on to request interment above ground in a bid to evade the Evil One’s clutches.

These stories, however, have little basis in fact. The pyramid tomb was commissioned by MacKenzie’s brother 17 years after his death. The inscription on the monument states ‘in the vault beneath lie the remains of William MacKenzie’, suggesting the pyramid’s occupant was interred neither above ground nor sitting up.

Another local legend has MacKenzie – in addition to his exploits on the railways and canals – operating as a body snatcher. He would – apparently – dig up fresh Liverpool corpses, pickle them in barrels and send them by ship to Scottish medical schools. There’s no evidence, however, to suggest that William MacKenzie led anything other than an upright and sober life, driven on by a ferocious Protestant work ethic.

Number Four: The Pyramid Tomb of Dr Francis Douce in Nether Wallop, Hampshire

Dr Francis Douce’s pyramid tomb at Nether Wallop, Hampshire, England. (Photo: Random encounters with the unusual)

At Nether Wallop in Hampshire, a 15-foot (4.6-metre) pyramid can be seen in St Andrew’s Churchyard. Built for the physician Dr Francis Douce (1675-1760) in 1748, the pyramid boasts a flaming torch – a symbol of immortality – on its pinnacle. On the structure’s side are a coat-of-arms and an inscription proclaiming Douce ‘a Doctor of Physick’. In smooth sombre dark stone, this grade-II-listed tomb stands somewhat ominously in front of the church’s tower.

For the Ancient Egyptians, it was vital that the body was mummified and preserved and Douce seems to have had similar concerns. A member of the Company of Surgeons, he was obsessed with embalming, subscribing to a book in 1705 entitled The Art of Embalming Wherein Is Shown the Right of Burials and Funeral Ceremonies, especially that of Preserving Bodies after the Egyptian Method. This book laments the decay of unembalmed corpses – and stresses how easily they can be desecrated by animals and body snatchers – as well as recommending the pyramid as ‘the most durable structure’.

Douce’s will goes into exhaustive detail about how his pyramid should be maintained, and he left money to the parish – to support the elderly and educate poor children – on the condition his pyramid was well looked after. John Blake, the architect of Douce’s pyramid mausoleum, stated of the structure: ‘the area of the vault … is curiously paved with stone: the walls being very substantial … so it is a receptacle or lodging room fit for the remains of a prince … and the doctor’s bones may sleep undisturbed “till the Last Day”.’

Number Five: The Loudon Pyramid, St John the Baptist’s Churchyard, Pinner, Middlesex

The Loudon Pyramid in Pinner, Middlesex, England. (Photo: speel.me.uk)

If you were wandering through St John the Baptist’s Churchyard in Pinner, you might be startled by the sight of a pyramid with a stone coffin thrust through its centre. Legend claims the architectural writer John Claudius Loudon designed this tomb as an ingenious response to a problem plaguing his family.

John was in danger of forfeiting his inheritance as a strange legal clause only permitted the Loudons to keep their fortune for as long as John’s parents ‘remained above ground’. By having the pyramid support his parents’ coffin, John made sure they did indeed stay ‘above ground’ and so their fortune could be passed down to him.

Number Six: Pyramid in St Thomas’s Churchyard, Box, Wiltshire

A small pyramid on a grave in Box, Wiltshire, England. (Photo: Brian Robert Marshall)

A small pyramid-like structure stands on a grave in St Thomas’s Churchyard, in the village of Box, Wiltshire. The tomb bears no legible inscription and no records have been found that can account for its unusual shape. A local legend, however, maintains that the widow of the tomb’s occupant planned to dance on his grave to celebrate his passing. To prevent this indignity, his friends erected a small pyramid over his resting place.

Number Seven: ‘His and Hers’ Pyramids in Staverton, Gloucestershire

The ‘his and hers’ pyramid tombs of the St Clairs, Staverton, Gloucestershire, England. (Photo: BBC)

In Staverton Churchyard, identical ‘his and hers’ pyramids commemorate David St Clair and his wife Elizabeth. Built upon Elizabeth’s death in 1855, the monuments proclaim the St Clairs ‘an ancient family’. For centuries, the St Clairs had been associated with the Freemasons, so this connection may well have influenced the unusual design of David and Elizabeth’s tombs.

Number Eight: Pyramid to a Horse on Farley Mount, Hampshire

This attractive white pyramid on Farley Mount commemorates a horse. (Photo: gothisplace)

Not all English pyramids commemorate humans. On Farley Mount, Hampshire, an impressive white pyramid honours a horse that – a plaque tells us – in ‘September 1733 leaped into a chalk pit twenty-five feet deep a fox-hunting with his master on his back.’ Both horse and master survived and the horse went on to win ‘the hunter’s plate on Worthy Downs and was rode by his owner.’

That owner, Sir Paulet St John, was so grateful to his horse for both saving his life and winning him – no doubt – a substantial amount of money that he erected the pyramid. The Egyptians sometimes mummified animals, and creatures as diverse as cats and fish have been found in their tombs. Could the Farley Mount pyramid be a similar attempt to conserve the memory of a beloved non-human companion?

In Leckhampton, Gloucestershire, a more basic memorial – a rough pyramid of large stones – marks the grave of The Continental, a favourite horse that died in 1902.

Number Nine: Memorial to ‘The World’s Oldest Man’, in Bolton-on-Swale, Yorkshire

A pyramid-shaped memorial to Henry Jenkins, in Bolton-on-Swale. (Photo: Tom Courtney)

In the churchyard of Bolton-on-Swale, Yorkshire, there stands a pyramid-shaped memorial to Henry Jenkins, a local man said to have lived to the age of 169. Even after he reached 100, Henry apparently fathered a child and swam regularly across the Swale, England’s fastest-flowing river. 

Supposedly born in 1501, Henry claimed to have helped transport arrows to the Battle of Flodden Field (1513) and to have met the Abbot of Fountains Abbey (closed by Henry VIII in 1539) while working as a butler. Henry Jenkins died in 1670 and his pyramid memorial was erected in 1743. In Ancient Egypt, after 30 years on the throne – and every three or four years thereafter – the Pharaoh would take part in the Heb Sed festival, during which he would run around a ritual course four times to prove his continued vitality and fitness to rule. A pyramid is perhaps, therefore, a suitable monument to Henry Jenkins’s long life and incredible vigour. 

Number Ten: The Earl of Buckingham’s Pyramid Mausoleum, Blickling Hall, Norfolk

The Earl of Buckingham’s pyramid, Blickling Hall, Norfolk, England. (Photo: geoview)

If you wander through the very English gardens of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, you’ll come across a pyramid tomb. An incredible 45 feet (13.7 metres) high, the pyramid contains the bodies of the Second Earl of Buckingham (died 1793) and his two wives. The Earl’s arms are prominently displayed, over an enormous portico. Inside, the pyramid mausoleum boasts a marble pavement and three stone sarcophagi, which were brought by water from London.

The pyramid was commissioned by the Earl’s daughter Caroline – who inherited his estates – and her husband. This display of mortuary grandeur set the couple back by the equivalent of £200,000 in today’s money, a cost met in part by Caroline selling her jewellery. The pyramids of Ancient Egypt were intended as impressively-sized legacies to the pharaohs’ importance that would endure down the ages. Perhaps Caroline’s outlay of cash was made in the hope of similar results for the Earl.

Honourable Mentions

A number of impressive pyramid tombs are scattered around England and – though there isn’t space to describe them all here – I want to mention a few pointy-topped memorials that didn’t quite make the top ten.

In Sharow, Yorkshire, can be found the pyramid of Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900). A professor of astronomy, Smyth became obsessed with Ancient Egypt. Convinced the Great Pyramid held the secrets of the universe, he travelled to Egypt, where he studied its every stone and calculated its every angle. He took the first photos of its interior, using coils of magnesium wire to produce a bright light. Out of all this came several books, most notably Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. Smyth’s ideas provoked both praise and ridicule though towards the end of his life the mockery outweighed the plaudits. Perhaps as a compensation, Smyth is buried under his own pyramid, with its inscription declaring him ‘a Bright Star in the Firmament of Ardent Explorers of the Works of their Creator.’

The pyramid tomb of Charles Piazzi Smyth in Sharow, Yorkshire, England. (Photo: teessidepsychogeography)

Near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, a dilapidated pyramid lies on the edge of a wood. It marks the place where in 1827 Anna Maria Reade glimpsed the ghost of her son John, who was away working in India. Anna Maria was so convinced her son was dead that she organised a memorial service for him at Ipsden Church. News of John’s passing came the day after the service had taken place.

Pyramid-shaped memorial to John Thurlow Reade, near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, England. (Photo: Britishlistedbuildings)

In the churchyard of Attleborough, Norfolk, is the pyramid of one William Henry Brooke, who died in 1929. Brooke, a solicitor, left a will which – with lawyer-like precision – gave exact instructions for how his tomb should be constructed. The pyramid is six feet (1.82 metres) high and built of white limestone. The Ancient Egyptian pyramids were originally clad in white limestone too, so they would shimmer in homage to the sun.

Lawyer Brooke’s pyramid tomb in Attleborough, Norfolk. (Photo: curiousbritain)

Pyramid tombs seem especially common in the churchyards of Gloucestershire. A three-sided pyramid – in honour of the Holy Trinity – serves as a memorial to the Dunn Family at Woodchester. Handsome pyramids also mark the graves of textile titan Joseph Ellis at Stonehouse, the Dyer family at Prestbury, and the famous stonemason (possibly also a Freemason) John Bryan at Painswick.

The Dunn’s pyramid, in Woodchester, Gloucestershire, is three-sided, in homage to the Holy Trinity. (Photo: BBC)

What Might Have Inspired the Georgians and Victorians to Build England’s Pyramid Tombs?

The English pyramid tombs described above were largely the result of Egyptomania. This craze intensified as the 18^th and 19^th centuries progressed, with explorers and colonialists bringing back more accounts of Egypt and scholars and archaeologists uncovering more of its ancient secrets.

Ancient Egypt especially chimed with the growing Victorian obsession with death. We can see this in the Egyptian Avenue in the grand Victorian necropolis of Highgate Cemetery and in the high society parties during which ‘Ancient Egyptian mummies’ – some genuine, some fake – would be ‘unwrapped’ before a fascinated audience. In one particularly bizarre case, the body of a respectable Manchester heiress even ended up being mummified and displayed in a local museum alongside mummies from Peru and Egypt. It’s not surprising that Egyptomania inspired a number of English people to have pyramids – albeit miniature ones – constructed for their own tombs.

The gate of the Egyptian Avenue in Highgate Cemetery, London. (Photo: John Armagh)

But perhaps the pyramid – though more popular in some eras than others – is an archetype that prevails through the ages, an archetype that represents common human hopes, desires and fears. It seems to me that the whole concept of the pyramid – and the mummification rituals linked to it – is centred on the idea of having things preserved.

This could be people wishing – whether Egyptian Pharaohs or English aristocrats – to have their grandeur embodied by a striking stone monument that will last through the centuries. It could also be people wishing to conserve their wealth, whether we’re talking about an inheritance in Pinner or the treasures discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, which included ‘strange animals, statues and gold – everywhere the glint of gold.’

The pyramid tomb of Joseph Ellis in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire. (Photo: BBC)

There is also, of course, the obsession with resurrection and the fate of the soul in the afterlife. There’s speculation that early stepped pyramids were seen as staircases that allowed the Pharaoh’s soul to ascend to heaven. In addition, pyramids may have been viewed as devices designed to ‘shoot’ the Pharaoh’s spirit into the dark section of the night sky. This area – around which the stars appear to revolve – might have been seen as the gateway to the realm of the gods. The legends attached to England’s pyramid tombs also show a desire for resurrection and concerns over the safeguarding of the soul.

The pyramid of John Bryan in Painswick, Gloucestershire. (Photo: BBC)

The 18^th and 19^th centuries were times of growing individualism and this was apparent in the culture of death. The idea that an individual could ever cease to exist was becoming difficult to deal with. This led to a greater focus on the fate of the corpse. As with Doctor Douce, there was a fixation on the embalming and coffining of bodies, as well as a growth in the number of individualistic tombs. It’s easy to see why the mummified bodies, pyramids and stone sarcophagi of the Egyptians resonated so significantly with the Georgians and Victorians.

All this has left some very special monuments in our churchyards though whether these English pyramid tombs will ever enjoy the longevity or fame of the pharaohs’ mausoleums remains to be seen. 

(This article’s main image – showing Mad Jack Fuller’s pyramid mausoleum – is courtesy of Urban Ghosts.)

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