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.’

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? (Photo courtesy of Guilhem Vellut)

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 courtesy of Peter Poradisch)

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 courtesy of Mrs Teepot)

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.

It’s easy to see why this phenomenon so startled the people of Devon. In some villages, almost every homestead had been visited and the hoofmarks went right up the sides of houses and over roofs. They meandered through churchyards and gardens and across fields, sometimes disappearing before starting again a few metres further on, as if the diabolical being had leapt or even flown. Sometimes they’d stop on one side of a haystack and continue on the other, without any hay being disturbed. Elsewhere, the creature had squeezed through tiny holes in hedges or jumped tall fences or impossibly high walls. Two witnesses claimed the footsteps had stopped at the entrance to a pipe just six inches in diameter then reappeared at the other end, a feat many felt had to be supernatural as no animal large enough to produce such prints could have wriggled through that tube. The prints apparently halted before the Exe estuary – a two-mile-wide span of water – then casually started again on the opposite bank.

Many gardens and fields were marked with mysterious single lines of ‘Devil’s Footprints’. (Photo: Dorothy Tse)

There was also the sheer length of the beast’s damnable journey. Though accounts varied, it was estimated that the being must have walked between 40 and 100 miles on the night of 8th-9th February – an accomplishment no earthly creature could manage. The footprints seem mainly to have been concentrated in south and east Devon, travelling from Exmouth to Topsham then across the Exe to Dawlish and Teignmouth. Some stated that the prints had appeared as far south as Torquey and Totness, as far north as the outskirts of Exeter and as far east as Weymouth in Dorset. The Devil’s Hoofmarks did, however, show some variation. Within some the impress of a horseshoe could be seen; other hoofprints boasted claw marks, lending credence to the notion of their infernal origin.

Map of Devon – the Devil’s Footprints appeared mainly in the south and east around the Exe estuary. (Image courtesy of ukcider ukcider)

News of the Devil’s Footprints soon spread through Devon and beyond. Articles appeared in The Times and in the local press. The Illustrated London News published a series of letters speculating about what could have caused the demonic imprints. These reports betray the terror – mingled with curiosity – that many locals felt. Residents, sometimes in armed groups, followed the footprints. Some traced the marks for miles, though without discovering much that could explain them. It’s, however, claimed that one local hunt tracked a mysterious beast to a wood near Dawlish. The huntsmen sent in the hounds to corner the creature, but the dogs soon ‘came back baying and terrified’.

The Western Luminary and Family Newspaper stated the footprints had created ‘an uproar of commotion’ while according to The Times a ‘considerable sensation has been evoked in the towns of Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth and Dawlish, in the south of Devon … the superstitious go so far as to believe that they are the marks of Satan himself … great excitement has been produced among all classes … many superstitious people in the above towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors after night.’ A letter in Woolmer’s Exeter and Plymouth Gazette said, ‘The poor are full of superstition and consider it little short of a visit from old Satan or some of his imps’. The Western Times related that Exmouth had been ‘thrown into a state of alarm, in consequence of a report that the town and neighbourhood had been visited in the night by no less a person than his Satanic Majesty, and that the marks of his feet were distinctly to be seen imprinted on the snow.’

Various sketches of the Devil’s Footprints made by eyewitnesses, from the papers of the Devon vicar the Reverend H.T. Ellacombe

Not everyone agreed the Devil’s Footprints had supernatural causes. Journalists, naturalists, clergymen, and the more educated who looked down on their superstitious neighbours were soon coming up with theories to explain the sinister occurrence. Later writers have also tried to identify who or what made the marks. Possible culprits have ranged from untethered balloons, to swans clad in padded shoes, to badgers, otters, and escaped kangaroos and monkeys. Some have blamed weird weather patterns; others have suggested UFOs and sea monsters. Some have seen a human influence at play – from attempts by austere Protestants to frighten religious opponents to Romany Gypsies on stilts creating the marks to scare off rival bands of Travellers.

The Devil’s Footprints were certainly a strange case. Let’s look at the explanations that have been put forward and try to make some sense of this diabolical conundrum.

Donkeys, Badgers, Cats – Could an Ordinary Animal Have Made the Devil’s Footprints?

Accounts from the time describe the Devil’s Footprints as between three-and-a-half and four inches long and around three inches wide. The marks were mainly in single file, rather than alternating to the left and right as the prints of humans and many animals would. The distance separating the marks was small, between eight and 16 inches, suggesting either short hops or an almost mincing gait. If these marks could have been made by some land animal rather than ‘His Satanic Majesty’, we must enquire if any creature common in the British Isles might have produced them.

Most of the marks were cloven and traces of horseshoes were found within some so we should start by asking whether the imprints may have simply been left by donkeys or ponies. People at the time noted that the marks indeed looked like the hoofprints of such animals. The Western Luminary and Family Newspaper described the marks as ‘exactly, in shape, like a donkey’s hoof’ while The Times stated ‘the impression of the foot closely resembled that of a donkey’s shoe’. The possibility that such a creature might have left the prints, though, was quickly dismissed due to the layout of the marks. As The Western Luminary put it, they were ‘evidently done by some two-footed animal’.

Might humble donkeys have made the Devil’s Footprints in Devon? (Photo: Tom Presland)

But donkey prints can be deceptive. According to the researcher Theo Brown, ‘donkeys are the only animals that plant their feet in an almost perfect single line’, a fact that has led her to conclude that at least some of the Devil’s Footprints were made by such creatures. Though this might seem an easy answer to our mystery, the idea the prints were left by donkeys conjures up some tricky questions. Human steps weren’t seen alongside the Devil’s Hoofmarks and it’s unlikely that people would have led or ridden donkeys in the thick of a winter night through gardens and churchyards and across expanses of private land. Most of these theoretical donkeys must have, therefore, strayed and several such beasts would have needed to escape simultaneously to produce the quantities of marks seen. Also, there’s no way that donkeys could have trotted up the walls of houses or slithered through narrow pipes. And the creatures are unlikely to have walked over roofs.

We might also question why country people wouldn’t have recognised donkeys’ trails. To this objection, it might be said that significant falls of snow are uncommon in south Devon, an area with one of the most temperate climates in Britain. Might locals, agitated by the less explicable marks – such as those going up houses – have then seen the prints of stray donkeys in the unfamiliar snow and decided they were more sinister than they actually were? In opposition to this idea, we must consider a letter sent to The Illustrated London News by a correspondent calling himself ‘South Devon’, who gave the impression of being an veteran countryman who’d also spent time in Canada and who’d ‘much experience of tracking wild animals and birds upon the snow’. South Devon claimed that on the morning of 9th February the prints of well-known creatures were recognisable as ‘the snow bore the fresh marks of cats, dogs, rabbits, birds and men clearly defined’ and that – unlike the Devil’s Footprints – they excited little comment. South Devon did admit that the Devil’s Footprints ‘were the perfect impression of a donkey’s hoof’, but stressed that ‘foot had followed foot in a single line’ and that no known animal walks in a ‘line of single footsteps, not even man’. This suggests South Devon – and perhaps others in the area – were actually unaware of how donkeys’ hoofmarks can appear in snow.

A sketch of the Devil’s Footprints – sent in by the correspondent ‘South Devon’ – which appeared in The Illustrated London News

Though stray donkeys might well have made some of the hoofmarks, they can’t account for them all. Another creature accused of making the diabolical imprints was the humble badger. Also in a letter to The Illustrated London News, the well-known naturalist Richard Owen put the blame on this seemingly innocent animal. Owen emphasised that badgers are not only nocturnal but can travel significant distances while looking for food, especially in winter. Badgers also have long claws and claw marks were spotted in some of the Devil’s Hoofprints. The pawprints of badgers are, however, staggered and the creature has quite a large tread, meaning it would almost certainly leave a double line of marks. It’s also somewhat comical to imagine stout and sturdy badgers scaling walls, strolling across rooftops, and springing over haystacks and high fences.

Trails of animals that may have been mistaken for the Devil’s Hoofmarks: a. Whitetail deer; b. Cottontail Hare; c. Fox; d. Badger; e. Otter

Another everyday animal blamed for the Devil’s Footprints was the cat. On the morning of 9th February, the tenant of Aller Farm in Dawlish discovered that the night’s strange weather had distorted some pawprints his cat had left in the snow. Snow had come down heavily around midnight, but towards dawn there’d been a slight thaw and some rain. The temperature had then dropped again and there’d been a frost. Such melting and refreezing had warped the steps of the unassuming moggie ‘into the shape of a small hoof, with still the impression of the cat’s claws enclosed’. The tenant reported this to the Reverend Edward Fursdon, the vicar of Dawlish, who presumably noted it down.

The association of cats with the Devil’s Footprints is an interesting one. Cats can spring considerable distances, perhaps accounting for some of the (smaller) breaks in the lines of imprints. They’re also excellent climbers, which could maybe explain some of the marks on the sides of houses, although such prints would be unlikely to be in single file. (Also, except where snowdrifts had accumulated, the prints on house sides are likely to have been muddy ones rather than stamped in snow and so would have been recognisably feline.) Cats, though, have certainly been known to saunter across roofs. And while cats don’t create trails as linear as donkeys’, the prints of cats – and other animals like foxes – can give the impression of being in single file. Devon’s farms and villages in the mid-1800s no doubt contained lots of cats so the distorted tracks of domestic moggies might account for some of the Devil’s Footprints. It’s unlikely, however, that many cats would have taken it upon themselves to embark on journeys miles long through the snow.

More Possible Culprits for the Devil’s Footprints – Hopping Mice, Otters, Squirrels, Toads, Monkeys and Kangaroos

Yet more animals have been identified as possible creators of the Devil’s Footprints. On 8th March 1855, the Exeter Flying Post suggested the key to the mystery might be found in the form of the lowly toad. The paper reported that a Torquey man had followed a curious trail through his garden and found a large toad sitting by a tree stump at its end. It’s, however, unclear if it was the toad that made the tracks or if it just happened to have positioned itself where they stopped. It’s also uncertain whether the Devil’s Footprints did indeed extend as far south as Torquey despite what some claimed. Toads have webbed feet so it’s unlikely their trails would match the descriptions of the Devil’s Footprints unless weather conditions had substantially distorted them. The creatures can, though, presumably hop through pipes – perhaps providing an answer to the conundrum of the six-inch tube.

Comparison of eyewitnesses’ sketches of the Devil’s Footprints, made in Devon, England, from the papers of the Reverend H.T. Ellacombe

Other animals skilled at hopping, springing and jumping have been accused of making the diabolical marks. The Inverness Courier newspaper argued the Devon prints were made by a hare, as similar marks found near Inverness were thought to have been created by a hare or polecat. It remains unclear, however, whether such creatures really did leave those puzzling tracks near the Scottish town.

Rats, mice and other rodents sometimes engage in hopping and so have been viewed as possible causes of the Devil’s Footprints. In a letter to The Illustrated London News, one Thomas Fox wrote that he’d found tracks in his brother’s garden similar to those in Devon and suspected rats may have made them. In the 1950s, the zoologist Alfred Leutscher stumbled upon similar markings in Epping Forest. Leutscher knew that certain animals – including rabbits, hares, squirrels, mice and rats – sometimes leap with all four feet together. If there’s sufficient snow, their traces can resemble hoofmarks and Leutscher argued this effect is enhanced if the impressions thaw then refreeze. He believed only one animal, though, would have been the right size to make the Devon marks – the wood mouse – and claimed to have observed tracks left by this creature in Epping Forest that matched descriptions of the Devil’s Footprints. But – though wood mice might have made some of the Devon imprints – it seems unlikely that wood mice or other rodents would hop for such long distances rather than walking or scurrying or that single creatures could have made the trails that Devon villagers followed for miles.

Thomas Fox’s sketch of ‘rat prints’ in his brother’s garden – might this animal have left the Devil’s Footprints?

A more outlandish explanation for the Devil’s Footprints involved a hopping creature of a more exotic type. There were claims two kangaroos had left the marks after escaping from a private menagerie in Sidmouth. A Reverend G.M Musgrave seems to have been the first to put forward this idea, expounding it in a sermon. A letter to the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette outlined how ‘on Sunday last, the Rev. Musgrave, delivered one of his usual eloquent discourses in Lympstone Church, and in speaking of Satan as a tempter, who was continually besetting our path, though invisible, aptly alluded to this mysterious visitor who had left behind him visible evidence of his presence and expressed it as his opinion that the foot-prints were those of the kangaroo: but it must have been a busy animal indeed to have played up such pranks as this creature has done.’ Though kangaroos could have bounded over certain obstacles, even these incredible creatures would have struggled to get onto rooftops or leap high walls. Kangaroo prints are in no way similar to hoofmarks and the distance bounced by kangaroos certainly exceeds 16 inches, the maximum span recorded between the Devil’s Footprints. While there were indeed two kangaroos in the Sidmouth menagerie, there’s no evidence either of them escaped.

The Reverend Musgrave later admitted he came up with the kangaroo story to calm his congregation, who’d been terrified by the Devil’s Footprints. In March 1855, he sent a letter to The Illustrated London News: ‘the state of the public mind of the villagers … dreading to go out after sunset … under the conviction that this was the Devil’s work … rendered it very desirable that a turn should be given to such a degraded and vitiated notion … and I was grateful that a kangaroo served to disperse ideas so derogatory.’

Illustration of the tracks of a jumping wood mouse by Alfred Leutscher in his book Tracks and Signs of British Animals (1960). Might weather conditions have merged such marks into the Devil’s Footprints?

An even more incredible suggestion was that the marks were left by a monkey that had escaped from a menagerie or circus. A monkey might have had the agility to climb walls and skip across roofs, but a single monkey couldn’t have left so many footprints in one night and – again – there’s no evidence of such a creature absconding around the time the Devil’s Footprints appeared.

A more sensible notion is that otters caused some of the marks. Cold weather might have driven such creatures away from their frozen rivers and streams in search of food and all the places where the Devil’s Footprints were found were within half-a-mile of such watercourses. Even in the mid-1800s, otters weren’t common creatures so many country people may have not recognised their trails. The two witnesses who saw the prints near the pipe suspected an otter might have squeezed through it and they noticed the creature that had made the marks had slunk under low branches, like an otter would. In addition, crossing the Exe estuary would have probably not presented much of an obstacle to these semi-aquatic animals. Though some of the demonic prints may have been made by otters, it’s unlikely these creatures could have left them all, especially those running up walls or over rooftops.

Animal prints in Rupert Gould’s book Oddities (1928): a. Thomas Fox’s ‘rat prints’; b. Hind foot of an otter; C. Badger’s hind foot; D. One of the Devil’s Hoofmarks

It may be that a variety of animals were responsible for the Devil’s Footprints. Their marks may have been made somewhat more uniform by the thawing and refreezing action of the weather (though the extent of the similarity of the prints still raises questions). Early 1855 did see exceptional cold – the winter had been so intense that ‘the thermometer was one degree lower than has ever been known before by the oldest inhabitant’ and stretches of the rivers Exe and Teign froze over, allowing games and even a feast to be held on the ice. Such conditions could have driven animals to adopt unusual behaviours, travelling further in their search for food and leaving longer trails. These trails – in the excitable minds of some – could have merged into evidence of an epic trek, a journey so outlandish it could only have a supernatural explanation.

There are still many questions, however, about the Devil’s Footprints so we’ll leave behind the animal realm for now and look at the activities of birds, balloons and humans.

Might Birds Have Been Responsible for the Devil’s Footprints?

It might seem a rather obvious assertion that birds were to blame for some of the prints. Most bird species would have no trouble flapping over haystacks, walking across roofs, entering walled gardens or clearing the Exe estuary. Smaller varieties could have navigated pipes and got through holes in hedges. There’s also evidence that the freezing weather caused flocks of seabirds to come inland, which could explain why similar prints were found across a large area. The breaks in the lines of prints may have been caused by birds flying short distances before coming down and walking again.

The problem with this argument is that the feet of birds – whether clawed or webbed – leave prints that in no way resemble hoofmarks. Some have claimed the birds’ feet might have iced up, giving their tracks an unusual shape. One Reverend H.T. Ellacombe did apparently notice flurries in the snow around some of the Devil’s Footprints – flurries iced-laden birds may have created by beating their wings as they tried to take off. But it’s improbable that even iced-up bird feet would have left impressions like hoofmarks. It is possible, though, that already agitated observers – viewing, from some metres away, bird prints on roofs distorted by thawing and freezing – could have seen them as grim evidence the Evil One had visited.

Could birds have caused Devon’s Devil’s Footprints? (Photo: Nic Redhead)

An entertaining, though improbable, suggestion is that a domesticated swan sporting padded shoes caused the Devil’s Footprints. An escaped – and very much exhausted – swan is rumoured to have been caught at St Denis, near Paris, five days after the Devon footprints appeared. A silver collar round the swan’s neck showed it had come all the way from Germany, from ‘the domain of Prince Hohenlohe’. The bird’s feet were apparently padded to stop it damaging ornamental gardens and lawns. Swans can fly large distances, but it’s unlikely that even the most vigorous swan would have crossed the channel, flown all the way to Devon, left hundreds of thousands of footprints in one night then headed back to the Continent. A whole flock of such birds would have needed to abscond to produce the amount of prints seen.

Could a Stray Balloon Have Left the Devil’s Hoofmarks?

According to the novelist Geoffrey Household (1900-1988), an experimental balloon produced the Devil’s Footprints. The balloon, kept at the naval base Devonport Dockyard, somehow got free and set off on a journey across the countryside. The balloon carried two shackles on the end of its mooring ropes and these caused the balloon to continually dip down. It was these shackles – making frequent contact with the snow – that pitted Devon with its trail of curious marks. Household’s source was one Major Carter, a local man who’d heard the story from his grandad, an employee at the Devonport base. Carter’s grandfather told him that the incident had been hushed up because the balloon had damaged conservatories and shattered greenhouses and windows. The balloon finally ceased its flight at the east Devon town of Honiton.

Might an experimental balloon like this one have caused Devon’s Devil’s Footprints?

The balloon theory would explain how the Devil’s Footprints had got on roofs and how the entity that made them had bounded over haystacks and walls. It could also account for the gaps in the trails and the crossing of the Exe, during which the shackles would have presumably just hit water. It’s likely, however, that the balloon’s mooring ropes would have left marks in the snow too and there are no records of any such imprints. The balloon also would have probably sooner or later become tangled in a tree, bush, hedge or other obstruction. It seems more likely that the balloon story was invented after the appearance of the Devil’s Footprints as an attempt to explain them.

Might the Devil’s Hoofmarks Have Their Origin in a Religious Dispute?

One explanation for the Devil’s Footprints is that they were left as a hoax, a somewhat sinister prank arising out of disputes within the Church of England. The Church at the time was divided between High-Church followers of the Oxford Movement and more puritanical Low-Church Anglicans. The Oxford Movement – put simply – sought to reintroduce medieval elements into Anglicanism, with a stress on ritual, vestments, incense and the beauty of worship and the belief that religious services should be whole-body experiences rather than just appealing to the intellect. To more radical Protestants, this smacked too much of Catholicism and they wanted more focus on the Bible and sermons, with churches and ceremonies kept plain and austere.

Some suspect the Puritans – feeling their opponents were basically in league with the Devil – used the snowfall as an opportunity to frighten them. With some sort of implement – perhaps a horseshoe attached to a long pole – they made trails in the churchyards of vicars who supported the Oxford Movement, as well as across the landscape more generally. The use of such an implement might explain the marks going up houses, emerging from pipes, and on either side of undisturbed haystacks. It could also account for the similarity of many of the imprints. If an implement had been employed, however, one might expect all the Devil’s Footprints to be identical – which they weren’t – though thawing and refreezing may have distorted some.

The main objection to such a theory lies in the sheer number of marks – it would have taken a conspiracy of hundreds of Puritans to produce so many. What’s more likely is that – noticing the commotion the Devil’s Hoofmarks had caused – some Puritans took advantage of the uproar to make a religious point. This might explain the prints found in Topsham Churchyard on 13th February – several days after the bulk of the marks had been discovered on the morning of the 9th. Ominously, the tracks at Topsham went up ‘to the very door of the vestibule’. Though the vicar at Topsham was High Church, not all the churches where prints were found had vicars who adhered to the Oxford Movement. At Dawlish, a more Puritan parish, hoofmarks led ‘from the vicarage to the vestry door’ and prints were discovered ‘all over the churchyard and between the graves’.

Interestingly, the trauma of religious disputes does sometimes give rise to alleged experiences of the supernatural. For instance, a vampire legend in Croglin, Cumbria, may have its roots in the religious conflicts that arose around the time of the English Civil War. The Croglin legend even includes rumours of a vampiric bat flying out of the tomb of an unpopular clergyman.

Might the Devil’s Footprints Have Been Made by Gypsies on Stilts?

According to the autobiography of Manfri Frederick Wood In the Life of a Romany Gypsy (1973), the Devil’s Footprints were made as part of an elaborate plan hatched by Gypsies to frighten off rival travelling groups. Rather than Devon, Wood places the incident in Somerset though he admits, ‘I am not sure about the exact area or even the approximate date when this occurred – but it is a true story as I got it from one of my uncles and it filled the newspapers at the time and caused a great sensation.’

Wood goes on: ‘That night, as everybody in the area found first thing in the morning, the Devil walked right across the county of Somerset. Only it wasn’t the Devil at all but some seven Romany tribes using over 400 sets of measure stilts with size-27 boots at their base. The whole operation took over 18 months to plan and prepare.’

The issue the Romanies had was they felt their territory was being overrun by Didekais (people of part-Romany heritage) and ‘Pikies’. (‘Pikey’ is generally a derogatory term for Gypsies and Travellers, but in Wood’s account it probably refers to non-Romany travelling people.) The idea was to frighten away these competing groups by exploiting their fear of ‘the Mulo’. According to Wood, in Gypsy lore a Mulo is a vampire-type figure that ‘came out of its tomb every night as the dead man’s double’ and would also emerge for half-an-hour at high noon. Gypsies had once been so terrified of the Mulo that they ‘made a point of stopping at a camping site in time to get out of the Mulo’s way inside their tents or wagons. So the old Gypsies years ago never travelled at noon and were out of sight by dusk.’ Some Gypsies, though, saw the Mulo not as a revenant of a dead man but rather as the Devil in the deceased man’s guise.

Wood states that, having long ago converted to Christianity, most ‘of the pure Romanies in this country no longer bother about Mulos and travel at any time of the day or night’ whereas ‘a good many of the Didekais and Pikies are still very particular about keeping out of the Mulo’s way. In our family, the belief in Mulos was a very useful weapon for clearing an area more or less permanently of Pikies.’

A group of Gypsies in the snow – could Romanies have created the Devil’s Footprints?

The ‘measure stilts’ the Romanies used ‘consisted of a pair of step ladders that could be lengthened or shortened by means of slides and hinges. They were joined at the top by a wheel. The bottom of the step ladder stood in the great big boot and the man operating the stilts stood on one of the ladders and joggled about on it to make as deep a foot impression as possible. Then he would either swing the second ladder over the top by the wheel – if there was enough head room – or … he would raise the ladder by the slide and move it forward in one “Devil’s stride”. Either way, he got an exact measure of a stride, as the measure stilts were constructed so they could not over- or under-stride the three yards it was meant to do.’ In order to avoid being spotted when on public highways, the stilt-walkers would ‘throw a sheet over the whole works so the Devil would be seen walking rather than a man with ladders.’

The Romanies made it look as if the Devil had walked ‘right across Somerset in as straight a line as possible’, which even meant that ‘his footsteps had to go straight up one wall’ of any building in his path then ‘over the roof and down the other wall. The stilt-walker could not walk up walls – he had to straighten out his stilts to turn them into a long ladder and then make a muddy line of “devil’s strides” … Halfway over the top, he had to hoist the ladder up and swing it right round, and without too much noise, to the other side of the building. This was the snaggiest part of the whole business as it required exceptional strength and poise.’

Apparently, ‘the route was planned very carefully and every part of it studied … When the plan was put into operation, it went off without a single hitch … The next day, the Devil’s Footprints could clearly be seen along the whole route. It put the fear of God into all the locals – but that was not the point of the exercise. For the next few years it kept the area free from Pikies and Didekais who swore blind it was a Mulo that had crossed and they were not going to take any chances.’

As strangely fascinating as this account might be, this explanation for the Devil’s Footprints has flaws. Wood places the incident in Somerset rather than Devon (though he admits his memory may be faulty with regards to location). The size-27 boots the Gypsies attached to their stilts would have produced prints far bigger than the Devil’s Footprints and of a different shape. The stride between the marks left by the Romanies would have also been much larger. In addition, the Romanies made their trail in a straight line whereas many of the Devon tracks meandered. It’s difficult to believe that 400 people traversing the countryside on stilts wouldn’t have set dogs barking or that at least some of them wouldn’t have been apprehended or had accidents. There’s also no evidence – as far as I know – of Gypsies elsewhere using similar techniques to clear areas of rivals.

One detail might, however, hint that stilt-walkers could have left some of the marks. In 1889-90, the journal Notes and Queries discussed the Devil’s Footprints and one correspondent claimed that the impression of ‘a point of a stick’ had been left at lengthy but regular intervals besides the prints. Could such sticks have helped stilt-walkers balance? This detail was, however, reported decades after the footsteps appeared and the fact the stick-marks were regular wouldn’t fit with someone using such an implement whenever they feared they might topple over.

I suspect that the Devon incident entered Gypsy folklore and that the telling of the tale became ever more elaborate and ever more intertwined with Romany history as the years passed. Or perhaps – like the Puritans above – the Romanies heard of the Devil’s Footprints and hoaxed more marks (though on a smaller scale than claimed) to serve purposes of their own.

Could the Devil’s Footprints Have Been Formed by Weird Weather Patterns?

Another possible cause for the Devil’s Footprints was proposed by the Scotsman J. Allan Rennie. Rennie suspected the footsteps had been made by a strange weather phenomenon, one he claimed to have witnessed. In 1924, in northern Canada, Rennie saw a line of mysterious tracks in the snow while crossing a frozen lake. His companion, ‘a French-Canadian dog skinner’, became agitated, blaming the prints on a monster called the Windygo. So disturbed was the dog skinner that he deserted Rennie’s expedition. Not long afterwards, it was Rennie’s turn to be petrified. He saw tracks approaching him in the snow though no visible creature seemed to be making them:

‘The tracks were being made within 50 yards of me – 20 – 10 – then smack! I shouted aloud as a large blob of water struck me in the face. I swung around, brushing the moisture from my eyes, and saw the tracks continuing across the lake.’

When he’d recovered from the shock, Rennie reasoned that the prints had been caused by ‘some freakish current of very warm air coming into contact with the very low temperature which had set up the condensation.’ Rennie claimed to have observed similar tracks in Kent in 1939 and in Strathspey, Scotland, in December 1952 and January 1953.

Did a strange weather phenomenon cause Devon’s Devil’s Footprints? (Photo: Alexander Grafe)

If such a phenomenon does exist, it could explain the Devon marks left in difficult-to-access places like rooftops, and presumably walls and high fences wouldn’t present obstacles to currents of air. The prints Rennie observed, however, travelled in straight lines rather than meandering as in Devon and were bigger than the Devon marks. Those Rennie saw in Canada looked as if snowshoes had made them while the marks in Strathspey were 19 inches long, 14 wide and 7 feet apart. Furthermore, meteorologists are dubious about whether air currents could produce such tracks. Those the naturalist and author of Animal Legends (1995) Maurice Burton consulted declared such claims ‘impossible’.

So What’s the Conclusion – What Did Cause the Devil’s Footprints?

This post shows that an incredible range of causes have been suggested for the Devil’s Footprints – from kangaroos, to stray balloons, to hopping mice, to Devil-obsessed Puritans to Gypsies teetering on stilts. But even more outlandish ideas have been proposed. In 1972, one George Lyall, writing in Flying Saucer Review, asserted a UFO had made the prints, by hovering over Devon and firing laser beams at the snow, apparently as part of a measuring exercise. The ex-navy officer Rupert Gould, on the other hand, put forward the idea that an unknown sea creature had emerged from the ocean to leave the marks. Gould’s theory mainly relies on the fact that all the prints appeared close to the sea or the Exe estuary. He also noted that pony-like footprints had once been found on the Antarctic Kerguelen Islands, at a time when that territory had no land animals.

Leaving aside the more offbeat suggestions, might we attempt a hypothesis for the Devil’s Footprints? No one explanation is completely satisfactory, but perhaps a combination of some of the ideas above could go some way towards accounting for the diabolical marks. I suspect most of the footprints were left by a variety of animals. Stray – or ridden – donkeys are likely to have created some, hence the hoofprints with horseshoes. Other marks could have been caused by creatures such as cats, otters and badgers or by the hopping of toads, mice, rats and other rodents. The thawing and refreezing that occurred on the night of 8th-9th February might have then distorted these prints into hoof-like shapes. Additional marks – also distorted and seen from a distance – could have been left by birds, which might account for some of the prints on roofs and on opposite sides of high walls and haystacks. The extreme cold weather might well have driven animals to stray from their regular territories and travel farther in search of food, meaning prints appeared where they wouldn’t normally. Though the correspondent South Devon claimed that the marks of ordinary animals were also visible in the snow and caused no excitement, these could have been left after the melting and refreezing that distorted earlier steps.

Could some of the Devil’s Footprints have been left by hopping rodents? (Photo: Jess Wood)

Observing the commotion these unusual prints provoked, human pranksters could have then created more over the next few nights. The activities of such people might account for those marks leading ominously up to churches or walking straight up house walls. The hysteria the Devil’s Footprints triggered also likely led to descriptions of them being exaggerated and over the years memories of the phenomenon were probably embellished further.

Even eye-witnesses at the time may have been prone to exaggerate. South Devon, for instance, rather than being a mature countryman was later revealed to be the 19-year-old William D’Urban, who’d go on to be the first curator of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum at Exeter. D’Urban was responsible for getting certain notions into the press: that all the marks were ‘exactly the same size and the step the same length’ (which, as we have seen, wasn’t quite true), that the prints extended for 100 miles (others estimated it was more like 40), were in a straight line (they often meandered) and were found as far south as Torquey and Totness. South Devon also mentioned a 14-foot wall being jumped and prints on the roofs of houses. It’s possible that youthful enthusiasm gave extra colour to South Devon’s account and some of his contemporaries did dispute his claims. The Reverend G.M. Musgrave (he of the ‘kangaroo theory’) wrote to The Illustrated London News about South Devon’s assertions: ‘The outline accompanying your intelligent correspondent’s recital of the circumstances hardly conveys a correct idea of the prints in question.’

As for the excitable account of hounds being terrified by a sinister creature near Dawlish, suggestions have been made that the passage of time has in fact enhanced a different tale – that of the hunt closing in on nobody more threatening than a village idiot. This imbecile – who was fond of ‘decking himself in layers of chicken and goose feathers’ and roaming through woods imitating animal noises – was almost lynched by the nervous party. With regards to the footprints’ audacious crossing of the Exe, the river is two miles wide only where it meets the sea. It can be waded across in places at low tide and may have even been frozen on the 8th-9th February, meaning many animals could have crossed it without occult help.

Phenomena similar to the Devil’s Footprints have been observed elsewhere, suggesting that certain combinations of circumstances may produce marks like those seen in Devon. In 1922, the Daily Mail reported that tracks ascribed to the Devil had appeared in Norfolk and the Cotswolds, including on rooftops. In January 1855, prints similar to a deer’s were discovered on the walls and roofs of several pubs near Wolverhampton. (The fact only pubs were targeted might suggest local moralists were responsible.) In 1957, cloven prints – 12 inches apart – were found in a Hull back garden. Prints found in Belgium towards the end of World War II are said to have run for two miles ‘in a dead straight line’. In March 1855, The Times reported that hoofmarks manifested annually in the snow on a certain hill in Russian Poland. Locals blamed the hoofmarks – which, if no snow had fallen, would appear in the hill’s sandy soil – on malign supernatural influences. Though the Devon case is the most famous – and seems the most extensive – example of mysterious footprints, the fact it isn’t the only one could indicate that natural conditions – with perhaps some added human hoaxing – may occasionally result in such spooky occurrences.

Mysterious tracks sketched in Belgium towards the end of World War II by Eric Frank Russell

But What If the Devon Footprints Really Were Left by a Devilish Creature?

By peering into English folklore, we can see why Devon locals decided the Devil had taken a night-time hike across their county. The single lines of prints suggest a hopping motion while the clearing of haystacks and high fences indicates spectacular jumps. The Devil has long been famous for his hops and leaps. Near Frensham, Surrey, three hills known as the Devil’s Jumps were apparently created by Satan kicking up mounds of earth as he bounded across the countryside. The London demon Spring-heeled Jack – who terrorised that city in Victorian times – was said to leap improbable distances, jump fences and bound onto rooftops thanks to springs hidden in his boots. Indeed, some blamed Spring-heeled Jack for the Devil’s Footprints.

Our nightmares of leaping devils don’t, however, seem to have completely faded, even in modern times. According to an article on the British Paranormal Website, in 2007 a well-respected couple from Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex – a teacher and businessman – were driving home from a restaurant at about 10.00 pm on an especially dark night. Passing a wood, they became aware of movement in the undergrowth and thought it was a deer. Suddenly a strange creature leapt from the trees. The couple described it as a cloven-hoofed, very thin and bearded biped. This Pan-type figure trotted into the middle of the road, stared at the couple and unleashed a cry ‘half-way between a tyre’s screech and a cow’s moo’. The creature then disappeared back into the wood with a ‘movement like that of a stop-motion figure from an old claymation movie, being both disjointed and angular.’

The couple saw this character near a gorge called the Devil’s Dyke, an area that’s been the location of many ‘devil sightings’. The article’s writer, A.L. Cuin, states the couple ‘are known personally to me and they are definitely not the kind of people to indulge in fantasies and then make them known. They are convinced by what they saw and will accept no challenge to their account.’ Make of that what you choose.

(This article’s main image is courtesy of Paul Chapman. An excellent summary of the Devil’s Footprints phenomenon, and copies of primary and secondary sources, can be found in this resource edited by Mike Dash.)

The post The Devil’s Footprints – Devon’s Diabolical Hoofmarks in the Snow 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 Peter McDermott)

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.

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.)

The post The Vampire of Croglin Grange – a Genuine & Ancient British Bloodsucker? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

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: Leimenide)

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: Leimenide)

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.

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: Leimenide)

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 an angels and elaborate cross. The dragon is receiving its comeuppance, via the stem of a foliate design which is thrust into its mouth like a spear. 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 tomb of the dragon slayer Piers Shonks with its inscription, in Brent Pelham, Hertfordshire, England. (Photo: William Blyth Gerish)

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.

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.

Engraving of the tomb of dragon slayer Piers Shonks, Brent Pelham. Note the Christian symbol of the 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!

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.

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

Interior of the Conyers Chapel, Sockburn Church, which houses an effigy (centre) said to be of Sir John Conyers, slayer of the Sockburn Worrm (Photo: Ataffo)

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 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. (From a photo by Ataffo)

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 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.

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: Laura Stephens)

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. The current hall was built in 1834 on the site of an earlier structure. (Photo: Tony Roberts)

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.

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 dragon slayer St George in The Wedding of St George and Princess Sabra, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.)

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

Sometimes the dog is headless. Sometimes it merely appears before you ominously; at other times it follows or pads around you, sometimes with the sound of dragging chains. Sometimes the beast is silent; at other times packs of black dogs hurtle over moors or fens, barking and howling in a frenzied hunt. The creature is associated with electrical storms and is notorious for haunting crossroads, prisons and the sites of gallows and gibbets. The beast has worked its way into Britain’s literature, with Emily and Branwell Brontë, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle and J.K. Rowling among those inspired by black dog legends.

In different parts of the country, the black dog has different names: Barghest, Gytrash and Padfoot in Yorkshire; Moddey Dhoo on the Isle of Man; Old Shuck in East Anglia; Yeth or Whist Hound in Devon; and Gwyllgi – or ‘dog of darkness’ – in Wales. While these manifestations of the black dog archetype have their dissimilarities, they no doubt represent variants of the same haunting presence – the hulking, burning-eyed cur whose apparition has long been dreaded.

Phantom black dogs are rumoured to haunt many parts of Britain. (Photo: Borderslass)

But how do the antics of this petrifying pooch differ around Britain? Where might the legends of black dogs come from and what dark obsessions deep in the human psyche could they symbolise? How far back does the folklore of these fearsome creatures go? And does the black dog belong in a superstitious past or has anybody glimpsed it in recent decades?

I’ve selected seven black dog legends to look into. While it might generally not be a good idea to walk alone over moors or venture down unlit urban snickleways late at night, you might be even more reluctant to do so after reading these accounts.

Number One: the Black Dog of Newgate Prison, London

From 1188 to 1902, Newgate Prison was one of London’s most notorious features. Evolving from cells in a gatehouse in the city walls, the prison was at various times extended, burnt down, demolished, rebuilt, reformed and allowed to fester, but the stories coming out of the jail were always grim, not to say horrific.

In the ill-lit, badly ventilated, overcrowded, filthy jail disease spread rapidly. Warders beat, abused and extorted inmates, sometimes even chaining them to walls and leaving them to starve. Lice and bedbugs were so prevalent, you could hear them crunch under your feet. While having financial means could secure you a modicum of comfort, the jail’s worst conditions saw people chained in the basement in what was basically a sewer. Newgate did, however, have a bar and the prisoners who could afford it seem to have been perpetually drunk. The stench from the jail was so bad that passers-by clasped vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their noses. Newgate was demolished in 1904 and the Old Bailey now occupies most of its site though some cells are preserved in the cellar of a nearby pub.

The exercise yard in Newgate Prison by Paul Gustave Dore

It’s perhaps inevitable that such a sinister institution evolved its own black dog legend, with its canine ghost darkly symbolic of centuries of suffering. The story goes that in the reign of Henry III (1216-1272), a scholar accused of sorcery was sent to Newgate to await trial. Unfortunately for him, his imprisonment coincided with a terrible famine that was sweeping through England, a famine so bad it had prompted some inmates of Newgate to resort to cannibalism.

The weedy scholar, unable to defend himself, soon fell victim to these depraved inmates and was killed, dismembered and gobbled up. Shortly afterwards, prisoners began seeing the spectre of a huge black dog padding the jail’s corridors, a spectre they became convinced was the sorcerer come back to take revenge on those who’d eaten him. Sure enough, the dog began to hunt down and consume those responsible for that crime.

The remaining prisoners who’d scoffed the sorcerer were so terrified they plotted to break out of the jail and managed to escape by murdering some guards. But while they were free of Newgate, they were not free of the dog. One-by-one, the black dog sought them out, killed and ate them.

The first written evidence for this story appears in a publication with a woodcut cover, dated 1596 and entitled The Discovery of a London Monster, called The Blacke Dogg of Newgate: Profitable for all Readers to Take Heed by. The legend is probably, however, older than this. The pamphlet’s author is one Luke Hutton, an inmate of Newgate who claimed a stranger – ‘a poor thin-gut fellow’ – had once narrated the tale to him in the Black Dog Public House. Upon concluding his terrifying account, the stranger tells Hutton the legend is untrue, saying the only black dog in Newgate is ‘a great blacke Stone standing in the dungeon called Limbo, the place where the condemned prisoners are put after their judgement’ against which some anguished felons have dashed their brains out.

An illustration from a 1638 edition of the book ‘The Discovery of a London Monster Called the Black Dog of Newgate’

Hutton appears to have written the pamphlet as a morality tale, to draw attention to prison conditions and the behaviour of his fellow inmates during a period in which life in Newgate was especially appalling. Hutton dedicated the booklet to the Lord Chief Justice John Pophame in the hope its moral message might help secure his release, which it seems to have done.

Despite such scepticism, the black dog has been sighted in and around Newgate over the centuries, especially on evenings before executions. Within the prison there was once an alleyway called Dead Man’s Walk – the snicket acquired its name because condemned criminals walked down it to their executions. The names of all the convicts who plodded this grim passage were etched into its walls and many were buried under its flagstones. Dead Man’s Walk was demolished along with the rest of the prison in 1904. Where it ran is, however, close to Amen Court, a precinct attached to St Paul’s Cathedral containing canons’ houses. Part of Amen Court is bounded by what was once a wall of Newgate.

Amen Court is said to be haunted by Newgate’s black dog. The spectre appears as a shapeless black form which glides around the court and nearby streets and slithers along the top of the prison’s remaining wall. The ghost gives off a disgusting stink and is often accompanied by the sound of footsteps dragging, a noise reminiscent of prisoners trudging to their deaths.

Amen Court with the former wall of Newgate Prison on the left – does the black dog’s ghost slither along its top? (Photo: Matt Brown)

Number Two: the Barghest of Yorkshire – a Sinister Black Dog and Herald of Death

A particularly ominous black dog – the Barghest – can be found in the folklore of Yorkshire and north-east England. The Barghest heralds death. If a Barghest lays down across the threshold of your house, it’s a sign you’ll pass away soon.

If a person of local importance is about to die, the Barghest will appear and all the other dogs of the neighbourhood will fall in behind it in a kind of funeral procession, barking and howling mournfully. If, while the Barghest is leading its solemn parade, anyone obstructs it, the dog will gouge them with its claws, leaving wounds that never heal. In his Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879), William Henderson recalled that his ‘informant, a Yorkshire gentleman, lately deceased, said he perfectly remembered the terror he experienced when a child at beholding this procession before the death of a certain Squire Wade, of New Grange.’

A Barghest is said to haunt Troller’s Gill, a lonely limestone gorge south-east of Grassington in the Yorkshire Dales. A ballad – The Legend of Troller’s Gill – is recorded in William Hone’s Everyday Book (1830). This folksong tells of a man who clambered up to ‘the horrid gill of the limestone hill’ to try to summon the Barghest with ritual magic. The man’s body was found with uncanny maul marks on its breast. Another Barghest was rumoured to prowl a tract of wasteland called the Oxwells between Wreghorn and Headingly Hill, near Leeds.

Some argue ‘Barghest’ comes from the term ‘Berg-geist’ meaning ‘mountain ghost’; others claim the name derives from  ‘Bur-ghest’ or ‘town ghost’. Perhaps both etymologies are right as the Barghest seems equally comfortable in the countryside and the city. It’s whispered that a Barghest haunts York, preying after dark on lone wanderers in the city’s winding narrow alleys, known as snickelways. With its massive jaws and yellow fangs, the dog devours these wayfarers.

Might a phantom black dog haunt York’s narrow snickelways? (Photo: Jaione Dagdrommer)

A Barghest is rumoured to roam Whitby, the coastal town that appears in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In the Whitby section of the novel, the Count transforms into an enormous black dog – a beast that may have been inspired by local Barghest legends. The Barghest also roves the moors around Whitby – locals say if you’re unlucky enough to hear its chilling howl at night, it means death is coming soon. Soon claim you’ll pass away before dawn.

Though usually depicted as a large shaggy black dog with blazing red or green eyes, the Barghest has shapeshifting powers. In Northumberland and County Durham, the Barghest can appear as a type of household elf. A Barghest that lived close to Darlington could manifest as a headless man who’d vanish in a flash of flame, a headless woman, a white cat and even an unearthly rabbit. The Barghest can also make itself invisible. Perhaps this shapeshifting ability is reflected in the fact some think its name originates from ‘Bar-geist’ or ‘bear ghost’. Others, though, maintain – again referencing the animal’s links with death – that ‘Barghest’ comes from ‘bahr geist’, meaning ‘ghost of the funeral bier’.

Some say the Barghest is accompanied by the sound of rattling chains and that – like vampires – the beast can’t cross running water.

A Barghest was said to haunt the treacherous moors around Whitby (Photo: Dafydd Parri)

Number Three: the Gytrash of Northern England – an Ambiguous Shapeshifter with a Brontë Connection

The Gytrash is a black dog that lingers by the lonely moorland and marsh roads, forest paths and high passes of northern England. Often malevolent, the dog delights in leading travellers dangerously astray, but sometimes it can be helpful, guiding them onto safe tracks.

Like its cousin the Barghest, the Gytrash is a shapeshifter and can appear as a crane, mule or horse. In its equine aspect, the Gytrash is known in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire as the Shagfoal – a phantom horse, mule or donkey with burning eyes. In this form, the creature is utterly wicked. The Gytrash could be partly a personification of the dangers that plagued travellers in the days of substandard unlit roads, highway men, and unreliable maps and methods of transport.

The Gytrash – again, like the Barghest – can be a portent of doom. According to the English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), the Gytrash could adopt the guise of ‘an evil cow whose appearance was formerly believed in as a sign of death.’

The most famous mention of the Gytrash – and possibly the first ever committed to print – occurs in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Before Jane’s first meeting with the Byronic hero Mr Rochester – out in a lonely country lane – she’s reminded of the spooky tales she’s heard of this black dog:

‘As this horse approached, and as I watched for it to appear through the dusk, I remembered certain of Bessie’s tales, wherein figured a North-of-England spirit called a “Gytrash”, which, in the form of a horse, mule or large dog, haunted solitary ways, and sometimes came upon belated travellers, as this horse was now coming upon me. It was very near, but not yet in sight; when, in addition to the tramp, tramp, I heard a rush under the hedge, and close down by the hazel stems glided a great dog, whose black and white colour made him a distinct object against the trees. It was exactly one form of Bessie’s Gytrash – a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head … with strange pretercanine eyes … The horse followed – a tall steed, and on its back a rider. The man, the human being, broke the spell at once. Nothing ever rode the Gytrash: it was always alone.’

Jayne Eyre encounters the ‘Gytrash’ – a ghost legend says can appear as a black dog or horse.

And so these fearsome Gytrashes turn out to be Mr Rochester’s utterly ordinary horse and harmless dog, Pilot. Charlotte Brontë uses the scene with the ‘Gytrash’ to subtly mock the overly romantic and gothic associations Jane will soon attach to Rochester. Having said that, Rochester is in some ways like the Gytrash: a dark, haunted, ‘spectral’, often solitary character prone to shifting shape and generating illusion.

It’s also interesting that Jane’s formed her ideas of the Gytrash from the stories of her maid, Bessie. In Victorian culture, servants were often assigned the function of transmitters of folklore, reflecting the notion that – in a world scarred by industrialisation and filled with mechanical progress – the ‘lower orders’ still retained a vital connection with the mythic past. Jane says, ‘All sorts of fancies bright and dark tenanted my mind: the memories of nursery stories were there amongst other rubbish; and when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give.’

Charlotte wasn’t the only Brontë whose literary output was influenced by the Gytrash. Branwell Brontë wrote a short story called Thurstons of Darkwall. Branwell’s tale – based around Ponden Hall, a real-life house which may have been a model for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights –  features a Gytrash. The story emphasises the Gytrash’s shapeshifting capabilities. In addition to appearing as a black dog, the spectre can take the form of ‘an old dwarfish and hideous man, as often seen without a head as with one’, as well as a calf and even a flaming barrel. Branwell’s phantom was based on an apparition that people claimed to have witnessed on the wild and isolated moors around Haworth.

Number Four: East Anglia’s Old Shuck – a Devilish Black Dog and Destroyer of Churches

Old Shuck – also known as Black Shuck – is a terrifying, even demonic, phantom in the form of a black dog that haunts Norfolk, Suffolk, northern Essex and the Cambridgeshire fens. Sometimes Old Shuck attacks wayfarers; sometimes the dog’s appearance foreshadows deaths – either of the person who glimpses it or of someone close to them. The term ‘shuck’ may derive from an old word for ‘devil’ or ‘fiend’ or from a word meaning ‘terrifying’ or it might simply refer to the shagginess of the dog’s coat.

The first mention of the name ‘shuck’ in print comes from an 1850 edition of the journal Notes and Queries, in which the Reverend E.S. Taylor writes about ‘Shuck the dog fiend’, stating, ‘This phantom I have heard many persons in East Norfolk, and even in Cambridgeshire, describe as having seen as a black shaggy dog, with fiery eyes and of immense size, who visits churchyards at midnight.’

East Anglian black dog legends, however, go back far earlier. On Sunday 4th August 1577, a fiery demon in the form of a black dog appeared at Blythburgh Church, Suffolk, during a tremendous storm ‘consisting of raine violently falling, fearful flashes of lightning, and terrible cracks of thunder, which came with such unwonted force and power … the church did as it were quake and stagger.’ A service was taking place and the dog sprinted up the aisle, killing a man and boy, badly burning a man’s hand, ‘blasting’ other congregants, and bringing the church steeple crashing down through the roof. As the fiend exited the church, he left burn marks and incisions from his flaming talons on the doors.

The front cover of the 1577 pamphlet ‘A Straunge and Terrible Wonder’

The demon then headed over to St Mary’s Church in Bungay. Here, in an assault described in the pamphlet A Struange and Terrible Wonder (1577) by Abraham Fleming, this ‘black dog or the divel in such a likeness’ was soon ‘running all long down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste’. The dog ‘passed between two people as they were kneeling … occupied in prayer … (and) wrung the necks of them both at one instant cleane backwards, in somuch that … where they kneeled, they strangely died.’

Not content with this slaughter, Old Shuck continued the carnage. A piece of local verse states: ‘All down the church in midst of fire, the hellish monster flew, and passing onward to the quire, he many people slew.’ Like at Blythburgh, the dog left scorch marks on the door of St Mary’s.

The accounts of Old Shuck’s rampages in Blythburgh and Bungay are probably overdramatic memories of a catastrophic storm. It seems Abraham Fleming put his booklet together from exaggerated oral testimonies. Fleming worked as an editor for several London printers so it may have been in his interest to make sure his rendering of the story was suitably spectacular. The burn marks on the churches’ doors – still referred to as ‘the Devil’s fingerprints’ – are more likely to have been inflicted by candles.

A large, mysterious black dog photographed in Cambridgeshire – could it be Black Shuck? (Photo: Richard Humphrey)

Legends of spooky black dogs in this part of England have, however, persisted over the centuries. In Highways and Byways in East Anglia (1901), W.A. Dutt describes Old Shuck as a being who ‘takes the form of a huge black dog, and prowls along dark lanes and lonesome field footpaths, where, although his howling makes the hearer’s blood run cold, his footfalls make no sound.’ Dutt ascribes a curious feature to Old Shuck: ‘You may know him at once, should you see him, by his fiery eye; he has but one, and that, like the Cyclops’s, is in the middle of his head.’

Encountering Black Shuck will ‘bring you the worst of luck: it is even said that to meet him is to be warned that your death will occur before the end of the year. So you will do well to shut your eyes if you hear him howling.’

An artist’s impression of Old Shuck, based on W.A. Dutt’s description. (Image: Mattias Thatch)

Despite all this, Old Shuck, like other black dogs, can be ambiguous and there have been accounts of the creature being companionable and guiding lost travellers.

But do legends of Black Shuck belong firmly in the past? The poet Martin Newell – while doing research for his epic poem Black Shuck: The Ghost Dog of Eastern England – talked to East Anglian locals. He was surprised by how many believed the legends and claimed to have seen Black Shuck.

‘Ah, you’re writing about that now, are you?’ a Norfolk shopkeeper stated. ‘Well, be careful.’

A woman Newell spoke to said she’d seen Black Shuck near Cromer in the 1950s when coming home from a dance and a man told him he’d spotted the dog while crossing marshes near Felixstowe. Newell also found a newspaper article from the 1930s about a midwife who – cycling on a winter night near the Essex village of Tolleshunt Darcy – had been followed by Old Shuck. However fast she pedalled through the country lanes, the black dog kept up with her. Eventually, the apparition vanished.

Number Five: the Isle of Man’s Moddey Dhoo – a Sinister Black Dog That Haunted Peel Castle

According to a legend recorded by the English poet and topographer George Walden (1690-1730), Peel Castle on the Isle of Man was once haunted by a Moddey Dhoo. ‘Moddey Dhoo’ simply means ‘black dog’ in the Manx language and this specimen apparently looked like a giant shaggy-haired spaniel. Though such a creature might sound somewhat comical, all who came into contact with this entity soon realised there was something otherworldly and sinister about it.

The Moddey Dhoo had been seen in every room in the castle, but – during the reign of Charles II – it began frequenting the guard chamber. As soon as the guards had lit the candles in the evening, the black dog would come padding along a certain corridor and into the room, where it lay down before the fire in front of all the soldiers. Then, as day began to break, the Moddy Dhoo would rouse itself and trot off back down the same passage.

Was Peel Castle home to the phantom black dog known as the Moddey Dhoo? (Photo: Joseph Mischyshyn)

This corridor – via an ancient church – connected the guardroom with the captain of the guard’s quarters. The soldiers had to walk along it to return the castle’s keys at the end of the night. After the dog started padding down the dark narrow passageway, they never did this alone, but always went in twos.

The guards had been in the habit of drinking ale and telling stories to make their nightshift pass more quickly, but after the dog began visiting their room, they became more sombre. Still, they pretended to ignore the apparition and after some time grew accustomed to the presence of the phantom pooch, though they were still unsettled by it.

One soldier, however, became too relaxed around the strange spaniel. One night, he got drunk and boasted loudly that he’d be the one who’d take the keys back to the captain in the morning and that – moreover – he’d do it by himself. He wasn’t scared of any dog, whether normal or supernatural. It wasn’t even the soldier’s turn to take the keys and his friends tried to talk him out of his mad plan, but – when daylight started to appear – he snatched the keys from their hook and strode out of the guardroom. The Moddey Dhoo got up calmly from its place by the fire and followed him.

A couple of tense minutes passed before the most terrifying screams and wails resounded from the passage. The soldiers wanted to help their comrade, but were all too frightened, and soon they heard someone staggering back towards their room. The door swung open and their colleague tumbled in, his face utterly white and contorted with terror, his eyes bulging with fear. The man was unable to speak so he couldn’t tell his friends of the horrors he’d endured. He soon sickened and a few days later was dead. As for the black dog, no one ever saw it again anywhere in Peel Castle.

There seems to have sometimes been a tradition in Britain and Scandinavia of burying black dogs in graveyards or in the foundations of churches in the hope their ghosts would protect such sites from evil spirits and the Devil. The Moddey Dhoo’s corridor ran through an old church and excavations there in 1871 uncovered the grave of a bishop who’d died in 1247. At the bishop’s feet was the skeleton of a large dog.

Though the Moddey Dhoo may have disappeared from Peel Castle, phantom black dogs have been seen elsewhere on the Isle of Man. A black dog that haunts a field near Ballmodda is termed an ‘ordinary Moddey Dhoo’ in contrast to the headless variety, one of which is said to appear in a farm lane in Ballagilbert Glen. A Moddey Dhoo – which, according to some, is as big as a calf and has burning plate-sized eyes – has been spotted at Milntown Corner on the outskirts of Ramsey.

Number Six: the Black Dogs of the South West – Yeth Hounds, Whist Hounds, the Devil’s Dandy Dogs and The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles may be based on black dog legends from the south west. (Photo: Aaron)

Devon folklore states that large black dogs known as Yeth Hounds are the souls of children who passed away before they could be baptised. The Yeth Hound – which is headless – wanders through woods at night howling.

Another species of Devon black dog is the Whist Hound. Though some regard them as similar to Yeth Hounds, they seem more sinister. They hunt in packs across Dartmoor and it’s rumoured the huntsman is the Devil himself. Whist Hounds are said to haunt Wistman’s Wood – a spooky high-altitude tangle of moss-covered oak trees – as well as the area surrounding the Dewerstone, an Iron-Age hillfort on a rocky outcrop above the River Plym. Any mortal dog who hears the horrendous howling of the Whist Hounds soon dies.

A different Devon legend claims the spirit of Sir Francis Drake – as a punishment for his obsession with the occult – is forced to drive a black hearse coach through the night between Taverstock and Plymouth. Headless horses pull the coach, which is followed by demons and black headless hellhounds. This story could be a variant on the wild hunt motif, in which a mythological figure leads a band of phantom huntsmen and yelping spectral dogs. Those who, in various places, are made to lead the hunt – usually as a penalty for some sin – include Cain, the Devil, King Arthur, King Herod, Odin and Herne the Hunter. The black coach could be viewed as a relatively modern addition to this ancient archetype.

Yet another piece of Devon black dog folklore tells of an aristocrat named Richard Cabell. Cabell, a ‘monstrously evil man’ and a squire of Buckfastleigh on Dartmoor’s southern fringe, is – among other crimes – rumoured to have murdered his wife and sold his soul to the Devil. When he died, local people were relieved, but they soon realised they were far from free of the wicked squire.

Cabell had been an obsessive hunter and it seems he saw no reason why death should interfere with his enjoyment of this pastime. On the night of his burial, a pack of ghostly black dogs came across Dartmoor to stand howling at his tomb. Cabell’s ghost began leading these dogs – in his own version of the wild hunt – over the moors at night, especially on the anniversary of his death. If Cabell didn’t feel like going out hunting, the dogs hung around his grave, disturbing Buckfastleigh’s residents with howling, barking and unearthly shrieks. Determined to quieten Cabell’s evil soul, his neighbours laid a heavy slab over his grave and built a ‘prison-like’ mausoleum above it, a plan which appears to have been successful. Even to this day, Buckfastleigh youngsters dare each other to stretch their arms through the mausoleum’s barred window and touch Cabell’s tomb while hoping his wicked spirit won’t seize them.

Some say Arthur Conan Doyle heard about this legend while visiting a friend in the area and that this prompted him to write his Sherlock Holmes mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles. Apparently, Baskerville was the name of one of the coachmen at the house he stayed at. Set mostly on Dartmoor, the book tells the story of a devilish dog – ‘an enormous coal black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen’ – that has for many years haunted the aristocratic Baskerville family. This haunting began as a punishment for the debased behaviour of Hugo Baskerville, a character with similarities to Richard Cabell. The dog appears just before the deaths of the family’s heirs, deaths which are often disturbingly premature.

An illustration by Sidney Paget from The Hound of the Baskervilles

It’s not clear, however, how such apparent influences square with Doyle’s own statements. When asked about the origins of his novel, Doyle said, ‘My story was really based on nothing save a remark of my friend Fletcher Robinson that there was a legend about a dog on the moor connected with some old family.’ Bertram Fletcher Robinson, a Daily Express journalist, explored Dartmoor with Doyle, supplying him with local legends and accounts of Devon oddities. Doyle paid him a third of the profits from the serialisation of the novel in gratitude.

Some, on the other hand, claim the influences for The Hound of the Baskervilles came from outside the south west. Doyle once holidayed in North Norfolk, near Cromer, an area where legends of Black Shuck are well-known. During his trip, he stayed at the pre-Gothic Cromer Hall, which in many ways matches Doyle’s fictional Baskerville Hall. Another possible source of inspiration was Crowsley Park in Oxfordshire. The gates to this estate feature statues of hellhounds with spears through their mouths while another fearsome dog can be seen above a lintel on the front of Crowsley Park House. This estate was owned by the Baskerville family and a daughter, Florence Baskerville, married one of Doyle’s friends. Perhaps all these things came together with the legends Doyle heard in the south west to inspire his idea of a hellhound-haunted family.

As for Richard Cabell, the mausoleum supposedly put up to quieten his unruly spirit contains Cabell family tombs older than his. It’s unlikely, therefore, to have been built after his death. Cabell is also unlikely to have killed his wife as she’s mentioned in his 1671 will.

If we travel further west, we’ll find black dog legends in Cornwall. Black dogs in that county have been known to haunt tumuli, lonely roads and the scenes of tin mining accidents. Dark-coloured canines also feature in Cornish versions of the wild hunt. The vicinity of the village of St Germans is haunted by a pack of dogs that belonged to a wicked priest named Dando. Dando was a keen huntsman who regularly committed the sacrilege of hunting on the Sabbath. He was also a heavy drinker who – after one Sunday hunt – declared that if his companions couldn’t give him enough booze he’d go to hell to get it. A strange huntsman stepped forward and offered Dando a drink before seizing and dragging him down to the netherworld. Dando’s Dogs can still be heard on Sunday mornings, running after game or seeking their lost master.

Phantom black dogs allegedly roam the moors 0f south-west England. (Photo: cskk)

Another legend – sometimes confused with that of Dando – concerns the Devil’s Dandy Dogs. Satan himself is in charge of this pack and his dogs are not just phantoms but genuine flame-breathing hellhounds. This terrifying hunt roams the moors and any travellers who hear it are urged to kneel and pray that the Dandy Dogs don’t come in their direction. Black hellhounds are also rumoured to pursue Jan Tregeagle, a damned soul who escaped from hell. Jan is said to have once haunted the eerie Dozmary Pool high on Bodmin Moor, where – on stormy nights – his shrieks could be heard along with the howls of the infernal dogs chasing him.

Number Seven: the Church Grim – a Guardian Spirit in the Form of a Black Dog

Legends from Britain and Scandinavia state that certain churchyards are haunted by a ‘Church Grim’, a spirit that usually appears as a large black dog. Rather than being a malevolent entity, the Grim protects the churchyard from all who would desecrate it, including vandals, witches, warlocks, thieves and even the Devil.

A tradition, apparently, once maintained that the spirit of the first person to be buried in a churchyard would be tasked with guarding it. In Scotland, the last person buried in a cemetery would have to be its guardian until a new interment took place. To save the spirits of the departed from these onerous duties, a large black dog would be buried either in the churchyard or in the foundations of the church itself, especially under its cornerstone.

Some say the black dog’s ghost tolls the church bell at midnight on the eve of the death of a local resident. During the funeral service, the clergyman might spot the Grim staring out from the church tower and from the dog’s behaviour be able to tell if the deceased will go to hell or heaven. The Church Grim is also associated with stormy weather. Though normally manifesting as a black dog, the Grim has been known to take the form of a horse or pig.

Honourable Mentions from Britain’s Many Black Dog Legends

Black dog legends are widespread across the UK and versions of this myth have been recorded in almost every English county. Yorkshire, especially, seems a centre of black dog folklore. As well as the Barghest and Gytrash, there’s the Padfoot. You might encounter this creature close to Leeds, Wakefield or Bradford. It apparently follows people with a soft padding sound, sometimes augmented by the clanking of chains. A harbinger of death, the Padfoot can let rip a roar like no earthly animal. You shouldn’t attack or try to speak to the Padfoot – doing so will put you in its power. A man who once kicked the dog found himself seized by the supernatural hound. Pulled through a ditch and hedge, the man was dragged all the way back to his house before being dumped under a window.

Yet another black dog that roves Yorkshire – and parts of Cumbria – is the Cappelthwaite. This dog first appeared on a farm near Milnthorpe, Cumbria. He lived in a barn called Cappelthwaite Barn, from where he got his name. The dog was helpful to the farm’s residents, rounding up sheep and assisting with chores, but was malevolent and mischievous towards everyone else. The dog was eventually expelled by the local vicar and has since roamed the countryside. Though the Cappelthwaite prefers the form of a black dog, he can materialise as any four-legged animal.

Some particularly curious black dogs are known as Gabriel Hounds. They are hounds with human faces that fly yelping through the air and are heard far more frequently than seen. If they hover noisily over a house, it’s a sign death or calamity will afflict those living there. Some say the dogs are spirits of unbaptised infants; others that Gabriel, their owner, must lead them across the sky as a punishment for hunting on a Sunday. Legends of Gabriel Hounds may have evolved from flocks of night-flying geese, whose honks can sound like dogs barking.

Not all ghostly black dogs are evil, however. The Gurt Dog of Somerset is a friendly, protective beast. Mothers in the Quantock Hills once let their children play unsupervised as they felt the Gurt Dog would look after them. The dog also guides and defends travellers.

Various legends speak of benevolent black dogs. Manx folklore relates the tale of a fisherman who wanted to get to his boat, but met a black dog on the way who – however much the fisherman tried to dodge around it – refused to let him pass. The fisherman eventually gave up and returned home. That night, a terrific storm blew up that would have pulverised his ship. A number of tales have solo travellers passing through dark and lonely woodlands who suddenly find a black dog accompanying them. The dog doesn’t leave them until they exit the forest. The travellers later invariably find out that bandits have been watching them and would have murdered and robbed them if not for the presence of the dog. Tales of guardian black dogs seem to have become more common around 1900, perhaps showing the influence of late Victorian sentimentality.

Ghostly black dogs have been known to guard travellers in lonely woodlands. (Photo: Mark Hougaard Jensen)

A benign black dog is said to have haunted a farmhouse near Lyme Regis, Dorset. The dog never caused any trouble, but one night the farmer got drunk and attacked the dog with a poker. He chased it into the attic, where the creature escaped by jumping straight through the ceiling. The farmer struck at the dog as it disappeared and – at the spot where his poker crashed down – he found a hidden hoard of gold and silver. The man used this loot to set up an inn – a bed and breakfast, called The Old Black Dog, claims to stand on its site today. The black dog still prowls a nearby lane – pet dogs wandering down this road have mysteriously vanished. Black dogs in Scotland are also believed to guard treasure. If you dare to move a standing stone near the village of Murthly in Perth and Kinross, you’ll uncover a treasure chest protected by a black dog.

Cannock Chase,  a spooky tract of countryside in Staffordshire, is reputedly haunted by a number of black dogs, such as the Hednesford Hellhound and the wonderfully named Slitting Mill Bastard. Local folklore alleges Cannock Chase has also played host to UFOs, werewolves, big cats and even Bigfoot.

The sites of gibbets seem popular hangouts for black dogs. Such an animal has haunted Galley Hill, near Luton, Bedfordshire, since lightning set fire to a gibbet in the 18th century. In Tring, Hertfordshire, a chimney sweep was hung in 1751 for drowning a woman he suspected of witchcraft. His corpse was then suspended in chains from a gibbet. The sweep’s ghost is said to haunt the spot where the gibbet stood in the guise of a black dog and you can sometimes hear the clattering of his chains. The dog once appeared before two men in a flash of fire – the size of a newfoundland, it had blazing eyes and long fangs.

Black dogs also sometimes haunt tumuli. One has been sighted around the Six Hills, a group of Roman barrows in Stevenage, Hertfordshire – mounds, folklore asserts, the Devil constructed.

A particularly frightening black dog is the Welsh Gwyllgi – known as the ‘Dog of Darkness’ or ‘Black Hound of Destiny’. The dog – described as a huge mastiff or black wolf with noxious breath and burning eyes – appears to individuals after dark, especially on isolated roads. Glimpsing the dog is a prediction you’ll suffer a horrendous death.

Where Might Britain’s Black Dog Legends Come from and What Could Account for Them?

Though Britain has an especially high concentration of black dog legends, the menacing ghostly black dog is an archetype found in many regions of the world. Tales of phantom black dogs have been recorded in Belgium, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, the United States, Mexico, Central America and Argentina and more stories could probably be found of these spooky canines in other parts of the planet.

The archetype also seems an old one. The earliest-known written record of a black dog legend is from France – in 856 AD, one manifested in a church even though the doors were shut. The oldest document attesting to black dogs in England is from 1127. It describes a wild hunt that haunted the surroundings of Peterborough Abbey. The huntsmen ‘rode on black horses and black he-goats and the hounds were jet black with eyes like saucers and horrible’. It’s likely black dog legends go back quite some time before these sources, however.

Most black dog legends cast the beast as some sort of harbinger of death or messenger from the otherworld. The more sinister black dogs are associated with the Devil and hell; others are linked to tormented souls forced to conduct wild hunts. The dogs predict death for those who see them or – less commonly – guard people from such a fate, but in both cases the animals know the spectre of death is near. The connection with death could account for them haunting graveyards and gibbets. The black dogs’ deathliness is also emphasised by the fact some are headless and drag chains – both of which are general characteristics of ghosts.

The ability of black dogs to pass between the otherworld and this one might explain their manifesting at liminal spaces like crossroads and tumuli. Folktales describe ancient barrows as entrances to other realms and crossroads have long been seen as spots at which one reality might intersect with another. The ambiguous nature of the black dog is also expressed in its shapeshifting.

But why, we might ask, are dogs associated with death? This largely comes from their scavenging habits. Though dogs can certainly hunt, they often prefer to feed on carrion, a tendency that has likely linked them to decay and death in the popular mind. Another scavenger with similar folkloric associations is the raven – a bird notorious for banqueting on battlefields and haunting gallows and gibbets. This bird’s links with executions seem to have been a powerful factor connecting ravens in legend with the Tower of London. The colour black – in the case of both the black dog and the raven – is also symbolic, being a colour of death and mourning in Western cultures.

If we delve back beyond folklore and into mythology, we can also find dogs associated with death, the underworld, and liminal spaces and thresholds. The entrance to Hades is guarded by Cerberus, a multi-headed dog whose eyes – according to some accounts – flash with fire. The gate of the gloomy Norse underworld Hel is guarded by Garmr, a terrifying blood-bespattered wolf or dog. Some equate Garmr with Fenrir, the ferocious cosmic wolf who – by bursting out of his chains – will help usher in the Viking end times Ragnarok.

Vase showing Cerberus, the guardian of the Greek underworld – was he a prototype of the ghostly black dog? (Photo: Eagle Painter)

In Welsh Myth, the Cwn Annwm are the hounds of the lord of the otherworld, Annwm. These dogs – rather than being black – are white with red ears. Celtic culture associated the colour red with death and white with the otherworld. Annwm leads his dogs in a wild hunt, especially at liminal ‘turning points’ of the year, such as Christmas and midsummer.  To hear the dogs howling is a portent of death and the hounds are sometimes thought of as escorting souls to the next life.

Dogs have been domesticated for thousands of years and many of their traits can be found in black dog legends. Dogs can be companionable; they can work at useful tasks, protect humans and guard property; but – encountered under the wrong circumstances – they can be vicious and dangerous. The wolf has not been completely bred out of the species. All this probably helps account for the ambiguity and unpredictability of black dogs in folklore. How many of us would shudder, even today, if – walking alone on a remote, twilight path – we were to see a large, unaccompanied dog padding towards us or silhouetted, staring in our direction, down the road?

(This article’s main image is courtesy of Lyse BxHell.)

The post Britain’s Black Dog Legends – 7 Spooky Canines & Hellhounds appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

‘For God’s sake, bring me a light!’ the man shouted. ‘For we have caught Spring-heeled Jack here in the lane!’

Jane hurried into the house and rushed back bearing a candle. As soon as she handed the candle to the policeman, however, he flung off his cloak to reveal ‘a most hideous and frightful appearance.’

His eyes glowed like ‘red balls of fire’, and – as she trembled with terror and shock – Jane saw that he wore a large helmet and tight-fitting clothes that resembled white oilskin. The man opened his mouth and vomited a stream of blue-and-white flames in the direction of Jane’s face.

The man sprang forward, grabbed Jane and – placing her head under his arm – tore at her gown with claws that were ‘of some metallic substance’. Miss Alsop screamed, managed to slip away and ran back towards the house. The man bounded after her, caught her on the steps, mauled her arms and neck with his metal talons and wrenched out some of her hair. But Jane’s shrieks had alerted one of her sisters, who came running to help. After a short but intense struggle, the man fled.

This incident was widely reported in the newspapers, even making it into The Times. Far from being seen as an isolated attack, for those living in and around London, the Alsop case fitted into a pattern of bizarre assaults perpetrated by a man – or phantom or demon – known as Spring-heeled Jack.

Some described Spring-heeled Jack as a ghost, some as a bear, an armoured man, a devil; others suspected he might be a dissolute aristocrat. As well as his flaming breath and burning red eyes, many claimed he had the astounding ability to spring or leap great distances, bounding over walls and hedges and even onto house roofs.

But who was this strange entity who terrorised the London area – and other parts of the country – throughout the Victorian age and beyond? Was Spring-heeled Jack just one person or several, could there have been any supernatural element involved, and how does Jack fit into an urban folklore rich with ghosts, devils and sadists – beings that many genuinely believed haunted the dark and narrow streets of 19^th century Britain?

Let’s see what we can discover about the peculiar phenomenon of Spring-heeled Jack.

Spring-heeled Jack Terrorises London and Its Suburbs

The first sightings of Spring-heeled Jack occurred in 1837. In October that year, Mary Stevens, a servant girl, had been walking along the edge of Clapham Common. A tall figure jumped at Mary from a dark alley. He grabbed hold of her, tore at her clothes with claws and forced kisses on her face. His hands felt ‘cold and clammy as those of a corpse.’ Mary screamed and the attacker fled. Her cries alerted several locals, who searched for her assailant, but could find no one.

The next day, a similar figure sprang in front of a carriage. The carriage crashed and the coachman was badly injured. According to witnesses, the figure then escaped by leaping over a nine-foot (2.7-metre) wall while emitting a stream of high-pitched laughter.

News of this strange attacker soon spread through London and the surrounding settlements, and it wasn’t long before this sinister being was christened ‘Spring-heeled Jack’. The idea arose that his leaping abilities might be due to springs hidden in the heels of his boots, with newspapers like The Morning Chronicle crediting him with ‘spring shoes’.

Jack, however, didn’t always stick with his tall, jumping, metal-clawed persona. In early September 1837, a ‘ghost, imp or devil’ in form of ‘a large white bull’ was rumoured to have attacked a number of people, especially women. Over the next two months, Jack was said to have appeared in the guises of a ‘ghost, bear or devil’ in over twenty villages around London. In – the suitably named – Cut-throat Lane, Isleworth, a carpenter called Jones was attacked by Spring-heeled Jack clad in armour. Jones resisted and a fight began, but two more ‘ghosts’ joined the fracas on Jack’s side and carpenter was severely beaten.

Rumours of Spring-heeled Jack were soon terrifying London

Jack is said to have haunted St John’s Wood in late December 1837 and early January 1838 dressed in armour and in the guise of a bear. On the western edge of London, he put in an appearance as a devil armed with iron claws, with which he attacked a blacksmith and several women. There were rumours Jack had been seen climbing over the walls of Holland Park and Kensington Palace at midnight to dance ‘fantastic measures on the wooded lawns.’ A woman in Dulwich had been ‘nearly deprived of her senses’ by the sight of a ghost ‘enveloped in a white sheet and blue fire’ and a nine-year-old boy from Hammersmith had been ‘terribly frightened’ by a glimpse of Spring-heeled Jack in the shape of a bear.

Stories of Jack’s assaults kept circulating. According to one account, a servant girl, Polly Adams, was attacked on Shooter’s Hill by a man who vomited fire in her face and attempted to rip her clothes off. She suspected the man was a gentleman who’d tried to seduce her earlier the same day. London’s outskirts swarmed with rumours of a man who’d hide in unlit lanes before springing out at travellers. After accosting them, he’d escape with the most incredible leaps, sometimes clearing hedges and gates with just one bound.

With the metropolis humming with tales of this strange predator and the populace’s fear and agitation intensifying, the authorities felt they had to be seen to take action.

 Spring-heeled Jack’s Outrages Prompt London’s Lord Mayor to Act

On 9^th January 1838, the Lord Mayor of London announced – during a public session at the Mansion House – that he’d received a letter from ‘a resident of Peckham’. A part of the letter read:

‘It appears that some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) have laid a wager with a mysterious and foolhardy companion, that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises – a ghost, a bear and a devil … The wager, however, has been accepted and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover …

At one house the man rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned and has never from that moment been in her senses.’

Spring-heeled Jack in his guise as a devil

Though the Lord Mayor was sceptical of such reports, members of his audience told him that ‘servant girls around Kensington, Hammersmith and Ealing tell dreadful stories of this ghost or devil.’ The revelations from the Lord Mayor’s meeting were reported in The Times on the same day and in a number of other papers on January 10^th. On the 11^th, the mayor showed another meeting – packed with anxious citizens – a heap of letters detailing similar ‘wicked pranks’ committed in and around London.

One correspondent claimed Jack had frightened several women into ‘dangerous fits’ in the Hammersmith area and another asserted that in Brixton, Stockwell and Vauxhall people had even died of fright upon encountering the monster. One writer claimed Spring-heeled Jack had been spotted several times in Lewisham and Blackheath. Another complainant stated that a servant girl in Forest Hill had been sent into fits by a figure in a bear’s skin.

There were especially strong rumours about a gang of aristocratic ‘rascals connected to high families.’ Letters alleged ‘that bets to the amount of £5,000 are at stake upon the success or failure of the abominable proceedings’ and that the ‘object of the villains is to destroy the lives of not less than 30 human beings! Viz eight old bachelors, 10 old maids and six ladies’ maids, and as many servant girls as they can, by depriving them of their reason, and otherwise accelerating their deaths.’

The mayor still thought the hysteria around Spring-heeled Jack had inspired the ‘greatest exaggerations’ and said he doubted that ‘the ghost performs the feats of a devil upon earth’. But he promised that the man responsible for these ‘pantomime displays’ would be apprehended and punished. The mayor instructed the police to search for the culprit and offered rewards for information leading to his capture.

Spring-heeled Jack Gains More Infamy and Commits Fresh Crimes

In spite of the mayor’s determination to catch Spring-heeled Jack, reports of fresh outrages kept coming in. On 20^th February 1838, the attack on Jane Alsop occurred and on 28^th February another young woman, Lucy Scales, was the victim of a similar assault. Lucy and her sister were walking through Limehouse, passing along Green Dragon Alley, when they saw a person in a large cloak standing in that narrow thoroughfare.

As Lucy passed the person, he vomited ‘a quantity of blue flame into her face’, temporarily blinding her. Lucy fell to the ground and began having violent fits, which would go on for several hours. Lucy’s assailant, who hadn’t attempted to touch her, then strode away. He was described as being tall, thin and of gentlemanly appearance, to have been carrying a lamp similar to those used by the police and to have been wearing some sort of headgear.

A few days later, in East London’s Turner Street, off Commercial Road, a servant boy responded to a vigorous knocking on his master’s door. He opened it to see a man wrapped in a cloak. The man threw his cloak back to reveal a bizarre costume and hideous features similar to those that had confronted Jane Alsop. The boy screamed so loudly it caused the man to flee. As the man turned to run, the boy is said to have noticed the letter ‘W’ embroidered on his cloak as part of an ornate, aristocratic-looking crest.

After the attacks on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales, a number of suspects were arrested and questioned, but all were let go. The man most strongly suspected of being Spring-heeled Jack was one Thomas Millbank, a carpenter who lived near the Alsops. Millbank – who had apparently made drunken boasts of carrying out the Alsop assault and had been wearing white overalls and a greatcoat on the day it occurred – escaped being charged because the police were convinced he had no ability to breathe fire. Millbank had also been drunk on the night of the attack and Jane and her sister insisted their assailant was sober.

Spring-heeled Jack, as depicted in a penny dreadful of 1904

The assaults by Spring-heeled Jack – or, due to his growing fame, those imitating him – went on. On 28^th February 1838, a well-dressed man informed the landlady of the White Lion pub in Vere Street that he was Spring-heeled Jack. The man then produced a club and swung it at a group of women. A man dressed in a cloak seized hold of a lady in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and slapped her face, and in Islington a blacksmith called James Priest was arrested after attacking a number of females. Priest was given three months’ hard labour. In March, two tall men in dark cloaks – their faces painted with ochre – frightened a boy in Westmoreland Mews. In Kentish Town, a youth was cautioned after being caught with a mask with blue glazed paper arranged around its mouth – paper meant to mimic Jack’s flaming breath. A Kilburn man was fined four pounds after pulling off several pranks wearing a bearded mask and sheet.

Spring-heeled Jack was also becoming more active outside the capital. In April, a woman was attacked on the cliff tops at Southend by a ‘gentleman’ who ripped her clothes and shoved grass into her mouth, prompting the local paper to run the headline ‘Spring-heeled Jack at Southend’. On 14^th April 1838, an article in the Brighton Gazette claimed that a gardener in Rose Hill, Sussex, had been terrified by a being ‘in the shape of a bear or some other four-footed animal.’ After startling the gardener with a growl, the ‘bear’ had scaled a wall and trotted along it on all fours before leaping down and chasing the gardener. The ‘animal’ then clambered over the wall and made its escape. This incident was picked up by The Times, with the newspaper commenting, ‘Spring-heeled Jack has, it seems, found his way down to the Sussex coast.’

Spring-heeled Jack, meanwhile, was turning into a figure of urban legend. As well as his frequent appearances in the newspapers, sensationalist pamphlets about his exploits were published and plays about him performed at cheap theatres. Three pamphlets were rushed out – claiming to be based on fact, but probably also including some fictional embellishments – in January and February 1838. A play of 1840 – Spring-heeled Jack, The Terror of London – depicted Jack as an outlaw driven to attack women because of a betrayal by his own sweetheart. In some Punch and Judy shows, the devil character was rechristened Spring-heeled Jack.

The Years Pass, But Spring-heeled Jack Keeps Appearing

Despite his rising fame, reports of encounters with Spring-heeled Jack began to dwindle. In 1843, however, there was a fresh surge of sightings across the country. Jack was spotted in Northamptonshire, where he was described as ‘the very image of the Devil himself, with horns and eyes of flame.’ In East Anglia, Spring-heeled Jack was held responsible for a series of assaults on the drivers of mail coaches.

In 1845, Jack apparently bounded up to a prostitute – Maria Davis – on Jacob’s Island, a notorious South London slum located where the River Neckinger met the Thames. Jack is said to have grasped Maria in his claw-tipped hands and belched his trademark blue flames into her face. He then lifted her above his head before flinging her into one of the open sewers – called Folly Ditch – that ran through the neighbourhood. Maria struggled vainly before she sank beneath the foul waters.

In July 1847, Spring-heeled Jack was alleged to have committed a number of outrages in Teignmouth, Devon, ‘disguised in a skin coat, which had the appearance of a bullock’s hide, skullcap, horns and mask’. The ensuing investigation resulted in one Captain Finch being convicted on two counts of assaulting women. Some also blamed Spring-heeled Jack for the strange phenomenon of the ‘Devil’s Footprints’ – a 40-mile-long line of mysterious cloven hoof marks, mostly in single file, that appeared in the snow in Devon overnight in 1855. Whoever made the hoofprints seems to have been able to jump over rivers, haystacks and houses with ease.

Sightings of Spring-heeled Jack once more decreased until there was another panic in the 1870s. In 1872, the News of the World reported that Peckham was ‘in a state of commotion owing to what is known as the Peckham Ghost, a mysterious figure, quite alarming in appearance.’ This spectre, the paper claimed, was actually ‘Spring-heeled Jack, who terrified a past generation.’ The ghost was said to be tall and dressed in white. There were references to the phantom having a flaming face, the ability to leap fences and a fondness for wearing spring-heeled boots. In Sheffield, local residents began glimpsing a ‘Park Ghost’, who would also come to be identified with Spring-heeled Jack.

In one of his most infamous escapades, Jack was accused of harassing soldiers at the large military base in Aldershot, Surrey. At Aldershot’s North Camp one evening in March 1877, a sentry saw a strange figure emerge out of the darkness. The sentry shouted a challenge, but the figure strode straight up to him and slapped him several times across the face, with an icy corpse-like hand. Other soldiers fired at the intruder, but their bullets had no effect. The figure then vanished into the darkness ‘with astonishing bounds.’ More incidents occurred in April and the soldiers grew so unsettled that sentries were given live ammunition and told to shoot the ‘night terror’ on sight. But Jack would return to torment more sentries at the end of the summer. At Aldershot, Spring-heeled Jack is even said to have leapt the Basingstoke Canal – a channel 15 paces across.

In the autumn of 1877, Spring-heeled Jack appeared in Lincoln, wearing the skin of a sheep. A mob chased him, but with his usual bounds and jumps, Jack escaped. Jack apparently leapt distances of 20 feet or more as he sprang across rooftops and he even bounded right over a Roman monument called Newport Arch. A few citizens shot at him, but Jack seemed impervious to their bullets.

A somewhat sensationalist illustration of Spring-heeled Jack – in the guise of a bear – in Lincoln

In 1888, in the Everton district of Liverpool, Spring-heeled Jack was spotted on the roof of a church and – in 1904 – there were reports of him in the same city, in nearby William Henry Street. Here he is said to have taunted residents by bounding 25 feet up onto house roofs then jumping down into the street again. Locals described him as sporting a mask, long boots and a black cloak.

After the incident in William Henry Street, Jack seems to have faded into history and folklore, but I’ve found one reference to a hunt for Spring-heeled Jack in Glasgow as late as the 1930s. It’s not known if Jack was accused of committing any crimes against Glaswegians, but – interestingly – Glasgow seems to have been a frequent venue for ‘monster hunts’ in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The city saw searches for hobgoblins, banshees, maniacs and even a being known as the Gorbals Vampire, who was said to haunt Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis.

So Who, or What, Might Spring-heeled Jack Have Been?

A number of explanations have been put forward to account for the strange phenomenon of Spring-heeled Jack. Read on for ideas about mad marquesses, phantom attackers, mass hysteria, ghosts, devils and notions about how Jack might have sprung, evaded bullets and breathed fire.

Could Spring-heeled Jack Have Been the Consequence of an Aristocratic Bet?

The Marquess of Waterford in 1840. Could he have been Spring-heeled Jack?

Even at the time of his first assaults, most people didn’t consider Spring-heeled Jack to be a supernatural being, but rather an individual – or individuals – in disguise who had a macabre sense of humour. Many – like the writer of the letter to the Lord Mayor – suspected Jack’s outrages were perpetrated by a group of noblemen as part of a wager. Popular rumour pointed to the young Irish aristocrat the Marquess of Waterford as the main culprit.

The Marquess was frequently in the news for his drunken brawling, violent practical jokes and participation in outlandish bets. The term ‘paint the town red’ comes from an episode involving the Marquess and his friends. After finding some red paint lying around in Melton Mowbray, they went on a drunken rampage, daubing houses and pubs while beating and painting red any police officers who tried to stop them. 

There’s evidence the Marquess of Waterford might have been Spring-heeled Jack. The Marquess was famous for his disdain towards women. He already had a reputation for amusing himself by ‘springing on travellers unaware, to frighten them’ and he is known to have been in London around the time of the first Spring-heeled Jack assaults. The Marquess was noted as a sportsman, boxer and equestrian so – though no human could have performed Jack’s more outlandish feats – an athletic man like the Marquess may have been able to leap surprising distances and bound over gates. The boy in Turner Street, apparently, noticed a ‘W’ on Jack’s cloak as he fled.

As well as having the sadistic character and physical capabilities to undertake at least some of Spring-Heeled Jack’s crimes, the Marquess had the money and resources. In the days before mass public transport, few commoners would have had the cash or time to criss-cross London and its suburbs in the way Jack did, but this would have been less of a challenge for a nobleman in a coach. Wealth would also have been needed to procure items like suits of armour and bearskins. Many – including the authorities – felt a whole group of noblemen might be involved and there’s some evidence Jack didn’t act alone. Three men beat Jones the carpenter and Jane Alsop’s father suspected his daughter’s assailant may have had a helper.

The lull in Jack’s activities after 1839 could have resulted from the bet being fulfilled or those posing as Spring-heeled Jack becoming alarmed by the attention the press and police were focusing on the case. Imitators or spreading mass hysteria could then explain the later incidents.

The Marquess of Waterford may have carried out the earlier assaults – like those on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales – but he couldn’t have been the perpetrator of Spring-heeled Jack’s later outrages. Around 1842, the Marquess seems to have reformed. He married and settled down in County Waterford, where he apparently led an exemplary life before dying in a riding accident in 1859.

Was Jack’s Legend the Product of Press Sensationalism and Mass Hysteria?

Even at the time of the early Spring-heeled Jack incidents, there was a certain amount of scepticism from the authorities and press. While many accepted that Jack’s escapades may have resulted from a sinister wager, some sightings of ‘Jack’ and some of the powers ascribed to him were suspected of being the product of an over-excited popular imagination.

Investigations by journalists showed that the glimpses of Jack in the form of ‘a large white bull’ were caused by nothing more uncanny than a white-faced heifer. Some of the accounts of ‘ghosts’ were shown to stem from the sight of a police officer in a white uniform on a horse. The reports of Jack scaling the walls of Kensington Palace to dance on its lawns were found to be inspired by an unrelated episode from 1822. As Jack’s fame expanded, it seems that a number of sexual assaults, crimes and acts of hooliganism – which, while distressing for their victims, weren’t exceptional in themselves – were added in the popular mind to Jack’s reign of terror. In addition, pranksters, criminals and sexual predators appear to have mimicked aspects of Jack’s legend to disorientate and terrify their victims.

Though some pressmen may have been sceptical about Jack, others were less so. The more outlandish accounts of Jack’s escapades in Lincoln, for example, come from The Illustrated Police News, a publication that reported crimes in a sensationalist and sometimes exaggerated manner.

There was also the influence of the numerous plays and penny dreadfuls churned out about Jack. These may have reminded people about Jack’s legend at times when it was fading from the collective memory. The play Spring-heel’d Jack or the Felon’s Wrongs was staged in 1863 while 1867 saw the release of the penny dreadful Spring-heel’d Jack, the Terror of London, A Romance of the Nineteenth Century. Another 40-part penny dreadful was published in 1863 and reprinted in 1867. Could these plays and publications have resurrected Jack in the popular mind and helped inspire the outbreak of sightings in the 1870s? More plays and pamphlets appeared between the mid-1880s and early 1900s. Could these have contributed to the reports of Jack’s final outrages around the turn of the century?

Spring-heeled Jack in the 1867 penny dreadful series ‘Spring-heeled Jack: The Terror of London’

Certain incidents weren’t even seen as the work of Spring-heeled Jack until declared so by the press. The case of the ‘Peckham Ghost’ of 1872 was extensively covered by two local papers, but they simply described this entity as a ‘ghost’ and made no mention of Spring-heeled Jack. The Peckham incidents were only linked to Jack – no doubt helping to reawaken memories of him – by the national papers The News of the World and The Illustrated Police News.

Later writers may also be guilty of exaggerating Jack’s legend. Mike Dash – in his excellent long essay Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost – suspects Peter Haining, the author of the 1977 book The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-heeled Jack, of embellishing or even making up a number of incidents. Dash has found absolutely no contemporary reports of the attack on Polly Adams on Blackheath and suspects Haining’s account of it may be an attempt to push his theory that the Marquess of Waterford was Spring-heeled Jack. Dash even suspects that the aristocratic ‘W’ seen on Jack’s cloak in Turner Street might be an invention of Haining’s.

Dash has also been unable to find any contemporary references to the murder of the prostitute Maria Davis, an incident that features prominently in Haining’s book. Dash suspects the Maria Davis story may have come from a woodcut showing two men in a boat apparently recovering a prostitute’s body from Folly Ditch. A closer examination rather suggests they are collecting drinking water.

Are these men pulling a body from Folly Ditch or just collecting water?

 Alarming – though not particularly uncanny episodes – have sometimes been incorporated into the Spring-heeled Jack myth. The stories of Jack’s activities in Liverpool in 1904 seem to have their source in the behaviour of a mentally ill man. 60 years after the events, a Mrs Pierpont, who had lived in the neighbourhood all her life, said ‘Jack’ was a local man who ‘was slightly off-balance mentally …. He had a form of religious mania and he would climb on to the rooftops of houses crying out: “My wife is the Devil!”’

‘They usually fetched police or a fire-engine ladder to get him down. As the police closed in on him, he would leap from one house roof to the next. That’s what gave rise to the Spring-heeled Jack rumours.’

It does seem, however, that some of the Spring-heeled Jack incidents really did occur and really were something out-of-the-ordinary, especially the assaults on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales. But even here, there seem to be some discrepancies about what Jack actually did. Jane and her sisters, for instance, insisted that Jack had breathed fire while two eye-witnesses – men called Richardson and Smith – maintained that Jack didn’t belch any flames.

Smith said, ‘I saw no light but that of a candle’ and Richardson reportedly stated that the assault on Jane didn’t ‘impress him with the idea that it had been so furious as he subsequently saw it described in the newspapers.’    

What Could Explain Jack’s Leaps, Fiery Breath and Other Startling Characteristics?

Some of Jack’s outlandish attributes – his ability to make massive leaps, his fire-breathing, his metal claws, his apparent imperviousness to bullets – seem so impressive that people have wondered whether he was in some way supernatural or not of this world. Later writers have speculated that Spring-heeled Jack might have been an alien – perhaps from a planet with stronger gravity than our own – or that he could have been a demon summoned, deliberately or accidently, by occultists.

During the Victorian era, Jack was mostly seen as human though the frequent references to him as a ‘ghost’ or ‘devil’ do suggest some suspected his powers might have uncanny origins. But could there be any rational explanations for the astounding abilities Jack was credited with?

Spring-heeled Jack’s Fiery Breath

One of Spring-heeled Jack’s most alarming features was his fire-breathing. Only four incidents, however, are said to have involved Jack belching flames – the Polly Adams and Maria Davis attacks (which might not have occurred) and the assaults on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales. As we’ve seen, there’s some debate about whether the Alsop assault involved fire, but – assuming Jack did breathe fire during the attacks on Jane and Lucy – how could he have managed it?

It’s likely Jack used a fire-breathing trick of the kind performed in circuses and at carnivals, by filling his mouth with a flammable fluid and spurting it onto a flame. This could explain the blue-and-white colour of Jack’s fire. In the attacks on Jane and Lucy, Jack needed a flame to pull off his trick – he asked Jane for a candle and he was holding a lamp when he assaulted Lucy. In both attacks, he is said to have held the light at the level of his chest, which is what fire-breathers do. The police at the time suspected Jack was using some sort of carnival technique and they talked to circus fire-breathers to try to work out how he could have done it.

This sort of stunt would be very dangerous. Because the slightest breeze can result in the flame igniting the liquid while still in the fire-breather’s mouth, the trick is usually only performed indoors. The evenings when Jack attacked Jane and Lucy seem to have been calm, but perhaps the hazards of such a prank meant Jack wasn’t keen to undertake it more than twice. After the attacks on Lucy and Jane, he may have decided to lay aside the flame-spurting part of his repertoire or given up his attacks altogether, to be replaced by lesser imitators incapable of fire-breathing. Jack’s costume of a helmet and white oil-skin may have been designed to lessen his risk of injury if an accident did occur.

It’s unlikely that Jack breathed fire straight into his victims’ faces. This would have resulted in horrendous injuries, but there’s no record of Jane or Lucy receiving burns and Lucy is said to have only been blinded temporarily. If Jack did breathe fire, the reports of him vomiting flames directly into faces are probably exaggerations. 

Spring-heeled Jack’s Leaping Abilities

What could explain Spring-heeled Jack’s incredible leaps?

If attempted by humans, Jack’s most spectacular leaps – jumping over high walls and down from roofs – would have led to smashed ankle bones.

In the earlier accounts of Spring-heeled Jack, his leaps – while impressive – are often less incredible than those of his later career. Sometimes, he didn’t leap at all. Following the attack on Lucy, Jack just strode off; after the assault on Jane, he merely ‘scampered away across the fields.’ But Jack’s leaping abilities were soon emphasised. This could have been the result of exaggerations among the public – as in the 1904 Liverpool case – or in the press, as in the Illustrated Police News account of Jack in Lincoln. Some of his most spectacular jumping feats don’t appear until they’re featured in accounts written years after the incidents they proport to describe. There are no contemporary records of Jack leaping the Basingstoke Canal – such a claim doesn’t appear until 1907, three decades after the events at Aldershot.

An interesting account of Spring-heeled Jack was given by a lady who claimed to have seen him fleeing across Tooting Bec Common. The lady observed Jack ‘jumping over good-sized furze bushes and clumps of grass with no apparent effort, though she came to the conclusion that any greater leap would have been impossible. He was doing far more than any ordinary man could have accomplished without mechanical aid, but nothing resembling the exploits with which he had been credited by rumour. Had a good horse been near, he could have been overtaken, but as it was, he escaped, the mist and gathering night helping him.’

Might Jack have been a vigorous and athletic young man, whose leaping feats, though astonishing, didn’t become superhuman until they were exaggerated?

It’s also unlikely that Jack wore spring-heeled boots. Such boots would only be of use on firm, fairly even ground and many of Jack’s exploits took place on the rougher terrain of parkland, heaths, fields, county lanes and badly paved city alleys. In addition, springs wouldn’t have been powerful enough propel Jack over high walls and houses.

Jack’s Talons and Imperviousness to Bullets

Spring-heeled Jack’s metal talons are easy to explain – they could have been fitted to specially designed gloves. What’s more puzzling is Jack’s apparent ability to deflect bullets.

In Lincoln, (assuming Jack was fired at and such accounts aren’t exaggerations) the locals’ pot shots may have missed or been deflected by Jack’s sheepskin. But in the Aldershot case, it seems stranger that Jack could have dodged the bullets of trained soldiers.

When Jack first appeared at the base, the shots fired at him were blanks. Jack was fired on with real bullets when he turned up again in April 1877, but escaped harm thanks to poor shooting on the part of startled sentries.

The Times reported, ‘A soldier, in his excitement, loaded his rifle, fired but missed his aim. From here, the ghost went towards the military cemetery and in a similar manner attempted to frighten a private … and was fired at again, but without being hit.’

By the time Jack returned at the end of summer, the guards were no longer using live ammunition. According to the Illustrated Police News, sentries had ‘been ordered to fire on the ghost, and were loaded with ball, but this precaution being lately given up, Jack pursued his old tactics on Friday last …’

This suggests Jack was aware of the order to use live rounds and also knew when that order was rescinded. This leads one to suspect Jack had inside knowledge of the workings of the camp and was probably a soldier stationed at Aldershot.

It’s likely the Aldershot Jack was a young, athletic army officer fond of playing pranks on his fellow soldiers. Some serving at Aldershot had their suspicions about Jack’s identity.

A retired colonel, looking back 30 years later, said, ‘The pranks were popularly attributed to a lively young officer of the Rifles … a very big, powerful man, extraordinarily active … he certainly was not convicted of them and I do not know that he ever acknowledged himself to be Spring-heeled Jack.’  

Spring-heeled Jack’s Legend Could Be Built on Strong Urban Traditions of Ghosts, Devils and Phantom Attackers

The tales of Spring-heeled Jack could have been influenced by earlier urban legends of ghosts, devils and bogeys. Jack’s outrages likely reawakened such terrors in the collective mind. These terrors then became linked to Jack’s myth, strengthening it further.

London has a long folklore of ghosts haunting its streets – pale, human-like entities that assault lone travellers. In 1803-4 and again in 1824, a being known as the Hammersmith Ghost was said to rove the city’s western fringes. This spectre – suspected to be the spirit of a local suicide – was accused of attacking pedestrians. The ghost had similarities to Spring-heeled Jack. He was described as being very tall and dressed in white clothes, over which he wore a long dark coat with shiny buttons. Other descriptions have the ghost sporting a cow-skin, horns and large glass eyes. Like Jack, the Hammersmith Ghost was good at outrunning and evading pursuers and several of his victims were said to have died of shock. Another famous urban spectre was the Southampton Ghost. This phantom was said to be 10 feet (3 metres) tall and – like Spring-heeled Jack – fond of jumping over houses. Jack’s ‘ghostly’ aspects can also be seen in the fact he never seemed to age. He was just as athletic and vigorous in the 1870s as when he first emerged in 1837.

Spring-heeled Jack in the guise of a ghost

Another ‘ghostly’ or ‘devilish’ aspect of Jack was his ability to manifest in different forms. In addition to his spring-heeled persona, he could appear as a white-sheeted ghost, a bull, a bear, a devil or ‘an unearthly warrior clad in armour of polished brass’. Sometimes Jack even mixed his personas – for example, appearing as an armoured man draped in a bearskin and sporting horns.

This drew on an old tradition that evil spirits often disguised their identities, including by masquerading as animals. So it would have seemed less puzzling to the Victorians than to us that Jack could assume different forms while remaining the same entity. Jack’s flaming breath and occasional cloven hooves also drew on traditional representations of devils and demons. The animal hides Jack sometimes sported reflect ancient associations between animal skins and fertility, especially the skins of bulls. Such associations emphasised Jack’s sexually predatory characteristics. Jack’s sexually aggressive imitator Captain Finch wore a bull’s hide.

Spring-heeled Jack’s devil-like aspect is depicted by the sensationalist ‘Illustrated Police News’.

Spring-heeled Jack also fits into the tradition of ‘phantom attackers’: criminals that – though human – are so sadistic and strange they have an aura of the uncanny or demonic. One of Jack’s predecessors was the London Monster, a man reported to have stabbed over 50 women between 1788 and 1790. Some accounts of the Monster claimed he had knives attached to his knees, others that he hid blades in bunches of flowers, which he then encouraged women to smell.  

Another assault by a ‘phantom attacker’ is said to have occurred in 1826. A young man walking down Commercial Road at midnight was attacked by a cloaked and masked individual with cloven hooves for feet. The attacker grasped the man and squeezed him against his body, which seemed to be on fire. During his desperate struggles, the badly burned victim pulled the mask away to find his assailant was his younger brother.

Many of Jack’s characteristics seem to stem from universally held architypes of springing, devil-like, sometimes fire-breathing characters who leap out of the darkness to attack or terrify their victims. Accounts of Spring-heeled-Jack-like creatures can be found in various parts of the world. In 1926, a ‘ghost’ plagued Bradford’s Grafton Street. The ghost – described as tall, athletic, ‘glowing’ and ‘on springs’ – escaped his pursuers by bounding over rooftops.

In 1951, a tall, thin, cloaked spectre haunted a housing project in Baltimore. This highly athletic entity was fond of leaping onto rooftops and scaling high walls. A being known as the ‘Black Flash’ or ‘Phantom’ menaced Provincetown, Cape Cod, from 1938 to 1944. Black Flash was said to jump incredible distances and spit blue flames. He had eyes like balls of fire and some suspected he wore springs on his feet.

During the Second World War, a ‘Spring Man’ was rumoured to roam the blacked-out streets of Prague, leaping at passers-by from alleyways. In the 1950s, white-clad, hopping, mannequin-like creatures caused a panic in East Germany. In 2001, mass hysteria was sparked by a ‘Monkey Man’, who apparently attacked people in Delhi at night. Victims described the Monkey Man as having glowing red eyes and metal claws. He was said to wear a helmet and tight-fitting clothes and to be capable of leaping four storeys.

So What’s the Conclusion? What Could Account for the Strange Phenomenon of Spring-heeled Jack?

I suspect there was a ‘real’ Spring-heeled Jack – active around 1837 and 1838 – and that this Jack was definitely human. The original Jack was probably responsible for the assaults on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales and for some of the other outrages that occurred around that time. It’s likely Jack and his cronies were young rich men – possibly engaged in a bizarre wager – and that Jack was exceptionally athletic. Jack may have also been capable of fire-breathing tricks.

The sheer strangeness of Jack’s assaults caused an upsurge of mass hysteria, rumours, exaggerations and press sensationalism. Pranksters aped some of Jack’s actions while crimes carried out by ordinary criminals and sex offenders were blamed on Spring-heeled Jack, further fuelling his notoriety. Penny dreadfuls and lurid plays amplified Jack’s fame as did embellishments by authors writing years after the events.

Jack’s antics dredged up archetypes of devils, ghosts and sadists from the collective memory, adding even more sinister colour to his legend. At times of panic, trauma or uncertainty, such archetypes can indeed coalesce around certain folkloric figures, figures that soon take on aspects of the myth-drenched past. Examples of such beings that have – like Jack – incongruously appeared in relatively modern epochs include the Highgate Vampire, the Manchester Mummy and the Cardiff Giant.

But perhaps Spring-heeled Jack – as an updated ‘devil’ or ‘phantom’ – was also a personification of the injustices and cruelties of the Victorian era, representing the tendencies of the rich and powerful to prey on lower social classes and men to prey on women. In addition, Jack – with his iron claws, metal springs and chemical breath – could be seen as a spectre of the emerging machine age, personifying the dangers of urban life in a rapidly industrialising country.

Though Jack’s fame has faded somewhat, he has featured over the years in comics, novels, TV programmes, video games and films. In parts of Britain, he has lingered on as a bogeyman figure, threatening to spring in through the windows of children who refuse to go to bed. One Exeter man recalled:

‘My maternal grandmother, who died at an advanced age, was accustomed to tell me, when I was a little lad, uncanny stories about Spring-heeled Jack, who, she asserted, was the Marquess of Waterford. The monster was credited with hiding at night in dark and lonely places and, when some chance pedestrian came along (by preference a solitary female), Spring-heeled Jack would suddenly leap out at one bound, and pin his unlucky victim to the ground.’

(This article’s main image is from the 1904 penny dreadful Spring-heeled Jack)

The post Spring-heeled Jack – Did a Fire-breathing Phantom Haunt Victorian London? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Reports soon came from Highgate of tombs being broken into. Graves and bodies were desecrated and black magic rituals allegedly performed. Vampire hunters claimed to have broken open coffins, and plunged stakes into – and even burnt – the corpses of the ‘undead’.

Newspapers obsessed over these strange occurrences. TV programmes were made about a supposed nest of vampires in Highgate Cemetery and those promising to root out this ancient evil were interviewed.

On Friday 13^th, March 1970, hundreds of would-be vampire hunters invaded the Victorian graveyard and engaged in a search for what was becoming known as the ‘Highgate Vampire’.

But did any sort of vampire exist? Who were those self-proclaimed vampire hunters, some of whom would dedicate years to trying to understand the phenomenon and to hunting the vampire down? And how could a late-20^th-century city be gripped by a panic more at home in the pages of a Victorian gothic novel?

It’s time to pick up our stakes, grab our bulbs of garlic and go off in search of the elusive Highgate Vampire.

The Roots of the Highgate Vampire – Strange Sightings in a Decaying Graveyard

Highgate Cemetery was a far more ramshackle place than it is now. Once one of London’s most fashionable burial grounds, the graveyard was by the 1960s overgrown and neglected. Graffiti was scrawled across headstones; vandals had pulled doors off vaults; cracks and holes in tombs offered glimpses of coffins and – in some cases – bodies.

It’s not surprising that the dilapidated grandeur of this cemetery – with its ivy-entwined gothic monuments – would generate legends of hauntings and sinister creatures, and draw those with an interest in the occult and macabre.

At the time of the Highgate Vampire, much of the cemetery was neglected and overgrown. (Photo: John Armagh)

According to David Farrant, a young local man with a passion for the paranormal, the first murmurings about a strange being began in late 1969. Farrant claimed that he spoke to two people – an old lady who’d been out walking her dog and a middle-aged accountant – who told similar stories about what they’d seen in the cemetery.

The old lady had been walking down Swain’s Lane, a road running through the graveyard, when she saw a tall dark figure with glaring eyes that seemed to be floating towards her. She felt the air turn icy cold. The accountant had got lost in the vast cemetery. A bell started to clang and he walked towards the sound, hoping it might guide him out of the necropolis. Instead, as the bell tolled, he became aware of something behind him and noticed the temperature plummeting. He turned round to see a tall dark figure that stared at him intensely before it vanished.

Intrigued, Farrant decided to investigate by spending a night in the graveyard. Farrant said, ‘At first I suspected it might just be an animal or someone dressed up or messing about because all these stories about vampires were in the news.’

David Farrant in Highgate Cemetery (Photo from welcometonocturnia)

‘But around midnight I caught sight of a figure, about seven feet tall, that appeared to be floating just above the ground. I saw its face and two points of intense red light.’

‘The area turned icy cold as if I’d stepped into a refrigerator. The figure seemed to be draining me of energy and I felt I was losing control of my normal faculties. It felt like a vivid dream, like I wanted to wake up, but couldn’t.’

‘Realising I was under intense psychic attack, I repeated mentally a Kabbalistic incantation used to repel evil forces. It disappeared, but I decided the reports were true.’

In February 1970, Farrant wrote a letter to a local newspaper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express (also known as the Ham and High), asking if anyone had seen anything similar. A number of people responded, saying they had glimpsed apparitions in Highgate Cemetery and Swain’s Lane. These phantoms, though, were of a variety of descriptions, including a tall man wearing a hat, a ghostly cyclist, a lady dressed in white, a face grimacing through the bars of a gate, a person wading into a pond and a pale gliding entity. There were also reports of the sounds of bells and voices calling. There was little coherence in the types of spectres people claimed to have seen.

But another local young man with an interest in the supernatural, Sean Manchester, was intrigued by what he read. And Manchester would soon make public his ideas about what the apparition in the graveyard might be.

The Legend of the Highgate Vampire Emerges

Though Farrant had never claimed the dark figure he’d encountered was a vampire, Sean Manchester had little doubt that a genuine nosferatu was stalking suburban North London.

Manchester contacted the Ham and High and, on 27^th February 1970, the newspaper published an interview – entitled Does a Wampyre Walk in Highgate? – in which Manchester outlined a theory to explain the monster’s presence.

Manchester alleged that ‘a King Vampire of the undead’ was buried in the graveyard. This vampire, who in life had been an aristocrat and practitioner of black magic in medieval Romania, had been transported to England in a coffin by his followers in the early 18^th century. The vampire had been interred on the site that would later become Highgate Cemetery and his followers had also purchased a house for him in London’s fashionable West End.

The reason for the Highgate Vampire’s reappearance, Manchester said, was that rituals recently carried out by Satanists in the cemetery had reawakened this evil presence.

Manchester claimed to have spoken to local people who’d experienced vampiric activity. A schoolgirl, Elizabeth Wojdyla, had seen the vampire when walking down Swain’s Lane. Wojdyla began having nightmares, in which something evil tried to come into her bedroom. Eventually, two wounds appeared on her neck and she started to display symptoms of anaemia. Manchester and Elizabeth’s boyfriend filled her room with garlic, crucifixes and holy water and her condition soon improved.

Manchester spoke to another young woman, called Jacqueline, who said she’d woken in the night to find something cold clutching her hand. The next morning, she noticed deep tears in the flesh where she’d tried to force her hand free. Jacqueline and her younger brother soon developed a fascination that kept drawing them to the more dilapidated, western side of Highgate Cemetery, where – Manchester suspected – the vampiric ‘infection’ had occurred.

Manchester claimed that – after details about the Highgate Vampire became public – more people contacted him, all describing a similar tall dark being with blazing eyes.

Could There Have Been Any Truth in These Claims about Vampires and Occult Rituals in Highgate Cemetery?

In his interview, Manchester didn’t supply any proof to back up his ideas about the vampire coming from Eastern Europe. He would later state this part of the article was a journalistic embellishment, but in a book he published in 1985, The Highgate Vampire, Manchester does mention a foreign nobleman’s coffin being brought to Highgate.

There, however, appears to be more solid evidence concerning the occult ceremonies Manchester believed were taking place in the graveyard. Farrant said that in Highgate Cemetery he often found the ‘discarded remains of Satanist rituals … stubs of black candles, Satanic markings on the floors of tombs. In one small chapel-like tomb – with a marble floor and stained-glass windows – an inverted pentagram had been drawn on the floor.’

Like Manchester, Farrant felt such activities might have woken a long-dormant presence. Farrant claimed his research showed that – though the dark figure had not been glimpsed for many years before the rash of sightings in the sixties and seventies – people had seen a similar entity in the Victorian epoch.

According to Manchester, the police were well aware of black magic practices going on in the cemetery. It’s worth pointing out that Farrant himself was a member of a group that used the cemetery for rituals, though pagan Wicca ones rather than anything Satanic. Farrant stated that his group never interfered with graves or bodies, but – as many of their rituals had to be conducted outdoors – they used the cemetery because it was a secluded open space.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a revival of interest in all aspects of mysticism and the occult, including paganism, Eastern mysticism, Satanism, witchcraft and the teachings of Aleister Crowley, as well as the emergence of a number of less conventional Christian sects. It’s clear that an overgrown and secluded place like Highgate Cemetery could offer those engaged in the more outlandish aspects of this resurgence a suitably atmospheric space to carry out their ceremonies.

But little concerning the Highgate Vampire was likely to stay secluded for long.

The Highgate Vampire Heads into the Limelight

The Hampstead and Highgate Express continued to follow the ‘vampire’ story, re-interviewing Farrant and Manchester several times over the next months. In an article published on 6^th March 1970, Farrant said he’d found dead foxes in the cemetery but couldn’t work out how they’d died, though he thought a vampire might have been responsible. Manchester claimed he’d also seen the foxes and suggested the vampire may have been using them as a food source. Soon it was alleged the animals had been found drained of blood with their throats ripped open.

A press report about the dead foxes – food for the Highgate Vampire? Both Farrant and Manchester can be seen in the picture. (Image from moviesandmania)

Reports of the Highgate Vampire commotion soon reached the national and even international media. Articles appeared in the national press, television programmes were made by both ITV and the BBC, and even the international news agency Reuters featured the case.

The anxiety around the Highgate Vampire was part of a growing obsession with such creatures in British society. A number of TV programmes and horror movies had focused on vampires. One film – the Hammer Horror production Taste the Blood of Dracula (released 1970) – had actually been shot in Highgate Cemetery just a year before the Highgate Vampire incidents began. More chillingly, on the night of Halloween 1968, an act of desecration was discovered in nearby Tottenham Park Cemetery. Flowers had been taken from graves and arranged in circles with arrows pointing to a new grave, which was uncovered. A stake had been driven through the coffin lid and into the heart of the corpse.

As interest in the Highgate Vampire mounted, a rivalry grew up between David Farrant and Sean Manchester, with each belittling the other’s skills as an exorcist and each stating that he would be the one to expel the spectre lurking in Highgate.

A Mass Hunt for the Highgate Vampire

On the evening of Friday 13^th March 1970, a programme aired on ITV featuring Farrant, Manchester, and others claiming to have seen supernatural figures around Highgate (as Friday 13^th is an ominous day according to British superstition, this date is often chosen to broadcast programmes dealing with the occult). The programme even included live outside reporting from Highgate Cemetery. Within two hours of the programme being shown, hundreds of would-be vampire hunters began arriving in Highgate. They surged over the locked gates and walls of the necropolis despite the efforts of police officers to stop them.

The vampire hunters – many armed with weapons – searched frantically among the Victorian tombs. Those interviewed at the scene appeared to genuinely believe in the vampire, saying they were determined to find the monster and put an end to its diabolical actions. The mob caught no vampires that night though some insisted they’d glimpsed the tall dark figure.

Mobs invade the cemetery to search for the Highgate Vampire. (Image from welcometonocturnia)

The anxiety and terror certainly seemed real. Manchester would later say the Highgate Vampire furore provoked ‘panic and fear and disbelief on a scale which one might anticipate if an alien had landed from outer space … the collective imagination had no defence against what we unearthed back in the late sixties in Highgate.’

Farrant, meanwhile, still unconvinced the spooky presence was a nosferatu, complained that media hysteria and local superstition had turned the Highgate entity into a vampire.

Attempts to Exorcise the Highgate Vampire

On that Friday the 13^th, as the amateur vampire hunters swarmed over the cemetery, Manchester and some companions made their way to the entrance of one particular catacomb. Manchester had previously been led there by a sleepwalking girl, who claimed to have been bothered by the Highgate Vampire and had been exhibiting symptoms similar to Elizabeth’s. Unable to open the door, the group used a rope to climb down into the catacomb through a window. They found themselves in a vault with several coffins, one of which – a sinister-looking casket made of nearly black wood – didn’t seem to fit. Manchester and his companions performed an exorcism with holy water and garlic, and sprinkled salt around.

Some dilapidated catacombs in Highgate Cemetery. (Photo: Isaac Alvarez Brugada)

A few months later, on Lammas Day (1^st August), the charred, decapitated remains of a woman were found near the catacomb. The police suspected this mutilated corpse had been used in a black magic ritual. After this, both Farrant and Manchester seemed to become more active. Farrant was apprehended by the police in the churchyard next to the cemetery one night, clutching a crucifix and wooden stake. Farrant was arrested, but the case against him collapsed when it came to court.

Manchester and his followers, meanwhile, were led to a different family vault by a female psychic helper. After forcing open the doors, they found a black coffin similar to the one they’d seen in the catacombs. Manchester, suspecting it had been moved by black magic devotees, levered open the lid.

‘It was only when we discovered – in the putrid chamber of that tomb in August 1970 – what we did and looked upon the horrific countenance of what was inside,’ Manchester said, ‘that we had absolute confirmation of what we were dealing with.’

Manchester wanted to drive a stake through the body, but a member of his entourage persuaded him not to, as interfering with remains was a crime in England. Instead, the group performed a ritual that used ‘seven crucifixes, four white candles and seven cups of holy water in a ceremony carried out by four men and a woman … to banish the spirit of evil or evil presence using the Latin formula. News of the spoken exorcism did indeed bring a sigh of relief to many living in the area.’

Manchester says the cemetery officials then bricked up the vault, with a crucifix and holy water left inside. But, Manchester reflected, the vault ‘didn’t remain bricked up for long.’

Farrant Also Attempts to Deal with the ‘Highgate Vampire’

Farrant and his group were also making efforts to deal with the strange presence. They decided to try to communicate with the entity and discover its purpose. In Highgate Cemetery, they conducted rituals using two circles, incense, candles and a medium. The first time they tried this, the press interrupted them. A year later, according to Farrant, another attempt saw the entity clasping the medium ‘by the throat. We had to break the circle. The area turned cold; she felt she was being enveloped by blackness; she felt something was trying to strangle her.’

Farrant was now convinced the entity was malignant. After hearing of incidents in which a sinister force had pushed people over in Swain’s Lane, he did more research. Farrant came up with a theory that the being wasn’t a vampire at all, but an evil presence that travelled along a ley line.

This ley line began at the Columbarium – a part of the cemetery where urns are kept – and ran across Highgate through two old public houses, Highgate Wood, and a block of flats built over a nunnery. Farrant claimed he found evidence of disturbing supernatural activity in all these places. Some people he spoke to said they’d glimpsed a tall dark figure. A manager in one of the pubs, apparently, saw a sight so horrific it turned his hair white and one of the flats built over the nunnery had to be exorcised.

Sean Manchester Hunts the Highgate Vampire Down

Despite the ceremony that Manchester and his colleagues conducted in the tomb, any relief was short-lived. Manchester said, ‘Strange occurrences failed to cease and more horrifying incidents ended any hope that we’d quietened the disturbance with a mere spoken exorcism rite. Further vampiric outrages were to follow.’

About three years later, Manchester claims, he and his associates discovered the same ominous black casket in the cellars of an abandoned and – suitably – gothic mansion on the borders of Highgate and Crouch End. Manchester suspected the coffin had been moved there to avoid all the attention the media and enthusiastic vampire hunters had focused on Highgate Cemetery. Manchester’s group dragged the coffin out of the basement, up the stairs and into the grounds of the mansion.

Manchester said, ‘Dawn was about to break, starting to send spears of bright illumination onto the macabre spectacle below.’

‘When the lid was removed, we beheld the same thing we’d seen in August 1970 – this was now the early part of 1974. Our quarry this time looked even more exaggerated, even more distorted than I remembered it, far worse than even that time in the Highgate vault. Its burning fierce eyes, under the many-furrowed brow, were staring … yellow at the edges with blood-red centres, unlike anything imaginable. The mouth was set in a cruel expression, the lips drawn back.’

Manchester drove a stake into the Highgate Vampire: ‘With a mighty blow, a sharpened shaft of wood impaled the creature’s heart. We witnessed the body shell cave in and quickly turn filthy brown and that itself soon became a sluggish flow of inhuman slime and viscera in the bottom of the casket.’

As Manchester believed that ‘cremation is recommended as the ultimate deterrent and preventative to the vampire’s nightly wanderings’, he and his followers then burned the coffin and what was left of the body. This took several hours, after which ‘all that remained was a great scorch mark and some bones that needed to be ground down and cast to the four corners or four winds of the earth.’

Following this exhaustive process, Manchester pronounced that ‘Highgate Cemetery is purged.’

Magician’s Feuds and the Aftermath of the Highgate Vampire Rumpus

Manchester’s claims to have destroyed the Highgate Vampire did little to end the feud between him and Farrant. There had even been rumours that the two would meet in a magician’s dual on Parliament Hill on Friday 13^th April 1973, but this never happened. In 1974, Farrant was jailed after being convicted of interfering with remains and vandalising memorials in Highgate Cemetery. Farrant asserted that the damage had been caused by Satanists rather than him, but both Farrant’s imprisonment and the rumoured duel served to keep the Highgate Vampire in the public mind for several years.

The Circle of Lebanon, in Highgate Cemetery (Photo: duncan cumming)

The quarrel between Farrant and Manchester dragged on for decades, with each claiming to be an expert exorcist while dismissing the other’s abilities. Both spent many years investigating paranormal phenomena, and both produced books, articles and websites – and gave many interviews – about the Highgate Vampire. The two men – and their followers –  frequently sparred on social media. David Farrant died, aged 73, in April 2019, but Manchester still works as an exorcist and bishop in the British Old Catholic Church, a conservative sect that broke away from Roman Catholicism. After slaying the Highgate Vampire, Manchester maintains, he has destroyed dozens of bloodsuckers.

One of these incidents, apparently, involved a secondary contagion from the Highgate Vampire in Finchley’s Great Northern London Cemetery in 1982. A bite from that infamous nosferatu had corrupted the body of a woman called Lusia. Arriving at the cemetery, Manchester saw a spider-like creature about the size of a cat. He staked it and felt sure he’d put an end to the pollution of the Highgate Vampire for good.

But has the Highgate Vampire – or whatever it is – really been laid to rest? Farrant thought not and – ominously – a number of sightings of tall dark figures with burning eyes have occurred from the 1990s until the present day.

One witness – who claimed to have glimpsed the spook in 1991 – said, ‘He was very tall, well over six feet in height, and very thin.’

‘He wore a long black cape-like cloak and a top hat. His dress looked Victorian in style and he appeared all in black.’

‘He also appeared to glide and there was no sound. The ground was littered with leaves yet I heard no sound from him.’

Are There any Rational Explanations for the Incredible Tale of the Highgate Vampire?

As colourful and dramatic as the accounts of Farrant and – especially – Manchester are, there are those of a sceptical turn-of-mind, like myself, who feel tempted to question the Highgate Vampire narrative. Are there any explanations – social, cultural or psychological – that could account for the hysteria and bizarre events afflicting North London in the 1960s and 1970s? The Highgate Vampire was a strange case, but below are some attempts to rationally understand the phenomenon.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Allure of ‘Legend Tripping’

‘Legend tripping’ is a term used by folklorists and anthropologists to describe a common pattern of behaviour in which groups of young people make expeditions to sites associated with horrific, tragic or supernatural events. These visits, which normally take place at night, can be seen as ‘rites of passage’ which enable the youngsters to demonstrate their courage and daring.

The sites of such ‘legend trips’ can include caves, tunnels, abandoned buildings and, especially, cemeteries. While most examples of legend tripping are relatively harmless, some expeditions may involve trespassing, vandalism and even occult rituals.

Both Farrant’s and Manchester’s entourages were groups of young people led by charismatic young men and their escapades did definitely tend towards the ritualistic. And these two groups were not the only ones engaged in legend tripping. There were also the hundreds of other vampire hunters and those practising the black arts. Might one bunch of legend trippers have been in competition with Manchester’s group, hiding the ‘vampiric corpse’ and doing their best to thwart Manchester’s attempts to track it down?

Could the search for the Highgate Vampire have been an example of legend tripping? (The gate to Highgate Cemetery’s Egyptian Avenue, photo John Armagh)

A related phenomenon is ‘ostentation’, which refers to the literal acting out of well-known legends and lore. Such ‘acting out’ can become a kind of game in which the borders of fantasy and reality get blurred. It’s been noted by many that the Highgate Vampire saga bears strong resemblances to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

In Dracula, the Count mostly attacks young women and likewise young women, Manchester claimed, were those the Highgate Vampire chiefly pestered. Bram Stoker’s novel also includes sleepwalking victims; coffined vampires being discovered in putrid vaults; and the use of crucifixes, garlic and holy water to repel such monsters. Other similarities are the vampire’s Eastern European origins, his purchase of a fashionable house in the West End, and his red burning eyes. The Highgate area itself features in Dracula, as it’s where the aristocrat-made-vampire Lucy Westerna is entombed. The neo-gothic mansion is a reasonable stand-in for Dracula’s spooky castle and the Count – like the Highgate Vampire – is finally despatched by a stake through the heart.

The name Lucy (Lusia) is also connected with the secondary infestation in the Great Northern London Cemetery. Like in Dracula, the vampire there, according to Manchester, had trouble crossing running water, in this case the brook that skirts the graveyard’s northern side. Manchester’s hunt for the Highgate Vampire also bears similarities to the books of horror author Dennis Wheatley. Even the language Manchester uses to describe his adventures has a ring of the gothic novel about it.

Manchester has downplayed the similarities of his vampire hunting to works of literature, stating, ‘I certainly haven’t encountered anything that can be described as a Byronic figure from a gothic romance … that tradition in fiction has a lot of Byronic input largely due to John William Polidori’s novel The Vampyre … but no, the eyeless sockets of impenetrable darkness I’ve encountered bear no relation to that glamorised image.’

Still, it would seem that much of the Highgate Vampire mythos may well have been moulded by the propensities of local youngsters for legend tripping and ostentation.

Life Imitates Art then Art Imitates Life Again

It’s worth pointing out that popular culture at that time was awash with vampire images, which may also have inspired legend-tripping escapades. From the turn of the 20^th century till the early 1970s, scores of vampire movies were made across the Western world. Between 1958 and 1970, the British-based Hammer studios alone produced five Dracula films, one of which – as mentioned above – was shot in Highgate Cemetery.

Numerous TV programmes and comics also featured vampires. In the 1950s, Glasgow saw a vampire hunt, in which hundreds of children invaded the city’s Southern Necropolis in search of a being known as the Gorbals Vampire. This incident was blamed on lurid American horror comics.

If the young vampire hunters in Highgate were proof of life imitating art, perhaps ironically, art was soon to be imitating life again. The Hammer Horror film Dracula A.D. 1972 was inspired by the Highgate Vampire case. The film – starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing – features a group of young hippies who, by participating in an occult ritual in an abandoned cemetery, reawaken a vampire.

The Highgate Vampire has also made it into comic books, including the Italian Il Vampiro de Highgate and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Series Nine. There is, apparently, even a video game under development, in which a computerised Bishop Sean Manchester prowls Highgate Cemetery, in a quest to impale the graveyard’s ‘head vampire’.

We might, however, ask why –  around the time of the Highgate case – there was such interest in vampires, and the occult generally, in British culture.

The Vampire Haunts the Age of Social Anxiety

Vampire legends seem to be associated with times of social upheaval and change. Published in the dying years of the Victorian era, Bram Stoker’s novel has ancient folklore running up against innovations like railways, telegrams and phonographs. The exotic, immigrant figure of the Count embodies fears linked to colonialism, immigration, miscegenation and globalisation while frequent references to the ‘new woman’ reveal anxieties about the emerging feminist movement and changing gender roles. The eroticism of the vampire could be connected to the fact Victorian sexual mores were just starting to loosen.

Similar obsessions marked the resurgence of the vampire myth in the 1960s and early 1970s. The 1960s counter culture had unleashed the Sexual Revolution and in the seventies such changes were spreading out into wider society. Immigration was an issue as people streamed into Britain from its ex-colonies. And there were intimations of the tumultuous decade to come with its strikes, class conflict – class is continually emphasised in Stoker’s novel – increasing unemployment and economic uncertainties.

Highgate Cemetery (Photo: Panyd)

In societies undergoing turbulence and rapid change, there is often a fascination with the occult as people wish to flee, transcend or find answers to the troubles they’re experiencing. In the stormy decades of late Tsarist and early Soviet Russia, for instance, interest surged in Theosophy, Kabbalah, yoga, spiritualism, the practices of Siberian shamans, esoteric Christian cults and the semi-pagan folklore of the peasantry. With the uncertainties following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, enthusiasm for such beliefs revived.

Reviewing the social changes that have taken place in his lifetime, Bishop Sean Manchester – in a 2013 interview with the Faith the Slayer podcast – said, ‘I have been amazed by how people on a day-to-day basis absorb and digest a diet of pure violence, pornography, depravity, decadence, degeneracy, in what they look at on the television, the films they watch, the things they read, the magazines they choose … It is beyond belief, this steady diet, hour after hour.’

‘It’s death, carnage, murder, awful court cases, ugly images of dead bodies, war zones … there is a drip-drip effect of something very ugly happening … it probably started way back in the seventies … in the early 1970s … The state of the world today would allow for evil to manifest almost anywhere.’

During times of change and social anxiety, monsters can come bursting out of the folkloric past and into the modern world. As well as the Highgate Vampire, examples include the Cardiff Giant, the Manchester Mummy, London’s Spring-Heeled Jack and Cumbria’s Vampire of Croglin Grange.

In 1970s North London, we can see how the presence of an atmospheric and dilapidated graveyard; the enthusiasm of youngsters for vividly acting out the contents of books, films and legends; and social anxiety driving an obsession with the mystical and occult could have all contributed to the bizarre episode of the Highgate Vampire.

(The main image on this post is courtesy of David McConway.)

The post The Highgate Vampire – Did a 1970s Nosferatu Stalk a London Cemetery? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

An obsession with mummies and all things Egyptian had been raging through Britain for some time, but this particular exhibit hadn’t been plundered from a pyramid or snatched from a colony. The mummy was the body of one Hannah Beswick, a wealthy Manchester woman who’d died seventy years earlier.

Hannah’s remains – displayed in a glass case between mummies from Egypt and Peru – proved popular with the paying public. In fact, she was the museum’s star exhibit. But how did a lady from a respectable Manchester family end up as the attraction that became known as the Manchester Mummy?

The following tale includes duplicitous doctors, fears of being buried alive, ‘corpses’ rising up out of coffins, glimpses of Hannah’s ghost, macabre collections of ‘curiosities’, rumours of hidden treasure, and a society negotiating shifting perceptions of life, death, science, entertainment and medicine.

Let’s see if we can unwrap the peculiar case of the Manchester Mummy.

The Origins of the Manchester Mummy: A Resurrected Relative and a Fear of Being Buried Alive

In 1688, Hannah was born to John and Patience Beswick of Cheetwood Old Hall, Manchester. She inherited substantial wealth when her father died in 1706. Hannah moved to a manor house called Birchin Bower, in Hollinwood, near Oldham, where she led an unremarkable and comfortable life. This agreeable existence, however, was disturbed by the ‘death’ of her brother John.

Just before the funeral, as the mourners were about to close the coffin, somebody saw John’s eyelids flicker. The family physician Dr Charles White stepped up, examined the body and declared to John’s astounded friends and relatives that he wasn’t actually dead. The funeral was abandoned, John recovered consciousness a few days later and lived for many more years.

A terror of being buried alive was widespread in Georgian and Victorian times.

This incident must have been shocking for Hannah and all those present, but such cases weren’t as unusual as we might think. The medical understanding of phenomena such as comas and resuscitation techniques was primitive compared to today. There were well-publicised cases of people waking up in mortuaries, at their funerals or on the dissection or embalming table. Evidence also sometimes emerged of those who hadn’t been so lucky and who’d suffered a dreadful death after being entombed or buried alive.

It seems Hannah developed a deep fear of such a fate befalling her. As well as the dramatic incident with John, it’s likely she was affected by the widespread terror of premature interment that haunted the Georgian (1714-1837) and Victorian (1837-1901) epochs. Horrific stories circulated, and lurid books and newspaper articles were published, giving details of those who’d been found – their fingers bloodied, their shrouds torn – who’d died while trying to escape their coffins and tombs.

When Hannah wrote her will – dated 25^th July 1757, less than a year before she died – she was still under the shadow of such fears. She demanded her body be kept above ground and regularly examined for signs of life until it was certain she was dead.

A Disputed Will, a Possibly Dishonest Doctor and the Making of the Manchester Mummy

Dr Charles White, the creator of the Manchester Mummy

There seems to be some confusion over the terms of Hannah Beswick’s will. It’s rumoured she left £25,000 (equivalent to about three million pounds today) to Dr Charles White provided he delay her burial until he was sure she was dead. But her will actually states that White should get only £100 and that £400 should be spent on funeral expenses. It’s been suggested that Hannah might have permitted White to keep any of the £400 left over. Some think he may also have been in debt to Beswick and would therefore have been expected to repay what he owed following the funeral. So it could have been in White’s interest to find a way to make sure no funeral took place. Hannah’s will, however, lists Mary Graeme and Esther Robinson as executors rather than White. Hannah Beswick’s will was still being disputed over a century after her death.

What we do know is that White embalmed Hannah’s body. This was despite the fact her will didn’t request embalming and stated that burial should only be postponed until there was no doubt she was dead. As well as the financial motives mentioned above, White may not have been able to resist possessing a mummified human. Like many scientifically inclined gentlemen of his period, White had a ‘collection of curiosities’ – a sinister hoard that boasted both ‘wet and dry’ specimens, among them the skeleton of Thomas Higgins, an infamous highwayman who’d been hanged. White – a founder of the Manchester Royal Infirmary and a pioneer of obstetrics – seems to have been obsessed with anatomy.

The exact method White used to create the Manchester Mummy isn’t known. White, however, had been a student of the anatomist Dr William Hunter, who’d developed the technique of ‘arterial embalming’. This involved filling the body’s veins and arteries with a mixture of turpentine, vermilion and oil of lavender and rosemary. Also, under this method, the organs were removed and shrunk in water, blood and fluids were squeezed from the corpse, and the body was washed with alcohol. The organs were then put back and the body’s cavities filled with plaster of paris. Finally, the body was sewn up, the openings were stuffed with camphor and the corpse was coated with tar. It’s likely White used such a procedure to transform Hannah Beswick into the Manchester Mummy.

The Manchester Mummy Is Displayed and Hannah Acquires a Fame She Never Found in Life

Hannah’s mummy was first kept at Ancoats Hall, the house of a member of her family. Soon, however, she was moved to White’s home in nearby Sale, where she was kept in the case of a grandfather clock. News of the Manchester Mummy soon spread and visitors streamed to White’s house to view her. White entertained them by whipping back a curtain that covered where the clock’s face would have been – to reveal the embalmed face of Hannah. Celebrities, like the author Thomas de Quincy, were among those who flocked to see Hannah’s corpse. It’s not known if any of them commented on how the remains of a rich heiress propped up in a clock made a fitting piece of memento mori art.

When White died in 1813, he left the Manchester Mummy to a friend and colleague, one Dr Ollier. Upon Ollier’s death in 1828, the mummy was given to the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society. It soon became one of the museum’s most popular items and began to be widely referred to as the Manchester Mummy or the Mummy of Birchin Bower. Hannah was exhibited in the entrance hall between considerably more ancient mummies from Egypt and Peru. Her relatives were allowed to visit her for free.

The Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society, where the Manchester Mummy was displayed.

No photos or sketches of the Manchester Mummy have survived, but the local historian Phillip Wentworth described Hannah thus: ‘The body was well-preserved, but the face was shrivelled and black. The legs and trunk were tightly bound in a strong cloth … and the body, which was that of a little old woman, was in a glass coffin-shaped case.’

A visitor in 1844 observed that Hannah was ‘one of the most remarkable exhibits in the museum’. According to the writer Edith Sitwell, the ‘cold dark shadow of her mummy hung over Manchester.’

In 1867, the museum – which was experiencing financial difficulties – was bought by Owens College, a forerunner of the University of Manchester. Around the time of this sale, it was decided that Hannah was ‘irrevocably and unmistakably dead’. With all doubts concerning her mortality resolved, it was felt the terms of her will should be respected and she should be given burial. It’s also worth pointing out that the public’s fascination with the Manchester Mummy was finally starting to wane.

The Manchester Mummy Is Laid to Rest

Burying the Manchester Mummy wouldn’t be a simple matter. Since 1837, UK law has stated that burials cannot take place unless a doctor has issued a death certificate. As Hannah had been dead for over a century, no such certificate could be drawn up. An appeal had to be submitted to the Secretary of State, who then ordered her burial.

With permission also granted from the Bishop of Manchester, Hannah Beswick could finally be laid to rest. On 22^nd July 1868, Hannah was buried in Harpurhey Cemetery, over 110 years after she had died. The Manchester Mummy was interred in an unmarked plot as there were fears such a famous corpse might be a target for graverobbers.

Rumours of Hidden Treasure and Reports of Hannah Beswick’s Ghost

In 1745, the Scottish rebel Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived in Manchester with his army. It’s said this caused Beswick concern over her money, prompting her to bury some of her fortune. Hannah, however, died without telling her relatives where she’d hidden the loot.

After Hannah’s death, Birchin Bower was converted into workers’ tenements. Some residents reported seeing a phantom figure in a black gown and white cap and the belief grew up this was the ghost of Hannah Beswick. This spectre would, apparently, float across a parlour then disappear when it reached a certain flagstone. Some claim a man living there levered that flagstone up, found a stash of gold and sold it to the Manchester dealer Oliphant’s, getting £3 10s (equivalent to around £450 in 2020) for each gold piece.

Hannah Beswick’s former home of Birchin Bower was reputedly haunted by her ghost.

The tenements were later knocked down and a factory for the electrical company Ferranti was built on the site. Glimpses of the black-gowned spook, however, continued. Perhaps the ghost is Hannah’s, angry at the way her remains have been treated.

A bizarre coda to the Manchester Mummy case came in 1890 when Cheetwood Old Hall was being demolished. A double coffin was unearthed beneath the drawing room. The mystery of this coffin has never been explained, but many suspected this grim discovery was linked to the Beswicks and Dr Charles White. The good doctor had lived for a time at the Hall after Hannah had moved out to Oldham.

What Does the Peculiar Case of the Manchester Mummy Tell Us?

The story of the Manchester Mummy is certainly a strange saga, but what does it tell us about the dark anxieties and obsessions from which such an artefact emerged? What does this sinister tale reveal about the epoch in which the Manchester Mummy was created, displayed and eventually laid to rest? Read on to learn of Georgian and Victorian terrors of being entombed alive and how Victorian respectability finally did battle with the freakish and macabre.

Hannah Beswick’s Phobia Was Just One Instance of a Widespread Fear of Being Buried Alive

Though people have always feared premature burial, the terror of such a fate became far more common in Georgian and Victorian times. This was largely due to advances in medical knowledge. By the 1740s, evidence was accumulating that people who seemed dead could sometimes be revived by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Doctors also started experimenting, occasionally successfully, with reviving patients using electrostatic machines. In 1774, a London doctor used a portable electrostatic generator to resurrect a ‘dead’ child who’d fallen from a window.

Medics were also realising that the symptoms indicating death could be deceptive. The new disease of cholera sometimes made it hard to feel a pulse and some doctors even suggested the symptoms of scurvy could be mistaken for putrefaction. As the public became aware that the boundaries between life and death were fuzzier than they had imagined, it caused great concern. If you could appear dead but were in fact revivable, surely this meant there was a significant danger of being buried alive.

Books and articles gave horrifying accounts of those who’d been buried too early. In 1885, the New York Times reported that a North Carolina man had been found turned over in his coffin with much of his hair pulled out and scratch marks on the casket’s insides. In 1886, when the coffin of a Canadian girl was opened, she was found with her knees tucked up under her body and her shroud ripped to pieces. In 1883, a Boston doctor published a book entitled One Thousand Persons Buried Alive by their Best Friends.

The terrors of premature interment resulted in some ingenious designs for coffins and tombs. Robert Robinson, from Manchester, who died in 1791, insisted his coffin should be fitted with a glass plate and his mausoleum with a door. A cemetery watchman was to check the glass to see if Robinson’s breath had misted it. Timothy Clarke Smith, who died in Vermont in 1893, stipulated his tomb should contain a window positioned six feet above his face so his friends could periodically check on him. Designs for ‘safety coffins’ were patented, equipped with air pipes or elaborate systems of flags and bells to attract attention. One casket even came fitted with a ladder to allow those mistakenly presumed departed to ‘ascend from the grave’.

A common fear of being buried alive led to a range of ‘safety coffins’ being patented.

Others, like Hannah Beswick, insisted in their wills that burial should be delayed until there was no doubt they were deceased. Creative ways of ascertaining a person’s demise ranged from making surgical incisions and touching the corpse with red-hot irons to applying scalding liquids and even blowing smoke into the rectum!

There were perhaps good reasons why Hannah’s dread of premature burial was shared by many in her epoch. In 1895, the physician J.C. Ouseley estimated that 2,700 people might be buried prematurely in England and Wales each year. In 1896, one of the founders of the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial stated he’d uncovered 219 incidences of narrowly escaped premature burial, 149 cases of actual premature burial, 10 cases of bodies being dissected before death and two instances of embalming being attempted on people still alive.

Such estimates may have been exaggerations. According to the folklorist Paul Barber, the normal effects of decomposition can make it seem like corpses have been twisting around in their coffins. But the problem at the time was that while medicine was advanced enough to recognise that the signs of death could be misleading, it was still too basic to have found reliable ways of dealing with this issue. Though some physicians advocated electric shocks and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as means of revival, such techniques would not achieve full medical respectability until the mid-1900s.

Hannah Beswick’s fears were an early example of the terrors that gripped the Georgian and Victorian worlds. Such anxieties can be seen in the literature of the era. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories The Premature Burial, The Cask of Amontillado and The Fall of the House of Usher all deal with the horror of being interred too soon. Frankenstein, published in 1818, examines the murky frontiers that divide the dead from the living while darkly exploring the possibilities of reanimation. A fascination with the ambiguous spaces between life and death can also be discerned in the growing popularity of the vampire genre.

Respectable Victorian Society Begins to Separate the Educational, the Medical, the Entertaining and the Freakish

Hannah Beswick’s transformation into the Manchester Mummy came in an age in which the boundaries between science and curiosity, education and amusement were much looser than today. Collectors hoarded items that could advance scientific and medical knowledge alongside objects that were merely status symbols or sources of entertainment for their friends. Some artefacts – such as the Manchester Mummy – could fulfil all these purposes.

Dr White probably enhanced his anatomical expertise thanks to his mummification of Hannah, but he also enjoyed the showmanship of tugging his curtain back to reveal Hannah’s face to his astonished guests. He no doubt also appreciated the celebrity the Manchester Mummy gave him. White’s mentor Dr Hunter possessed an eclectic collection of around 10,000 artefacts, ranging from books, coins and shells to geological and medical specimens to items that were utterly macabre. Hunter’s collection, for instance, included the skeleton of the famous ‘Irish Giant’, the seven-foot seven-inch tall Charles Byrne.

Such an approach was also common in the museums of the period. With their disorganised and frequently bizarre collections, museums were viewed not just as places of education, but as centres for satisfying one’s curiosity and even morbid voyeurism. And the epoch did have a fascination with human remains. As well as Hannah’s corpse, the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society boasted a bitumen-covered Peruvian mummy, a preserved Maori head and an Egyptian mummy called Asroni, who still resides in Manchester Museum today. Indeed, a popular pastime in the era was watching the unwrapping and dissection of Egyptian mummies (some genuine, some fake). These events, despite having an educational veneer, were primarily spectacles. Some unwrappings were organised as high society parties, with fancy invitations sent to guests; others were ticketed public events, which often sold out.

In such a ghoulishly curious epoch, in which enthusiasm for new knowledge and science mingled with the desire to be entertained, it’s not a surprise that the Manchester Mummy was a popular attraction.

A Victorian mummy unwrapping session

This attitude, however, began to change as the Victorian age progressed. At the same time as scientific knowledge was expanding, an educational and moral earnestness started to grip Britain. Museums were becoming more professional and their displays better organised into distinct categories. Macabre exhibits like the Manchester Mummy – which had little obvious educational value and didn’t fit into any scientific classification – began to fall foul of both moral and academic outlooks. 

These strengthening ideals of educational virtue and civic culture can be seen in the fact that – a few years after the Manchester Mummy’s burial – Owens College moved from its city-centre, crime-plagued location on the insalubrious Quay Street. Here, according to one critic, ‘the entrance from Deansgate was guarded by a very Scylla and Charybdis of disreputable public houses’. The college fled to Oxford Road on what were then the more wholesome outskirts of the city. A grand Victorian Gothic building – designed by Alfred Waterhouse, also responsible for London’s Natural History Museum and Manchester’s splendid town hall – was built to house both the college and the revamped Manchester Museum. (As the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society was now known.)

All this could be seen as a seizing of control of culture, leisure and learning by a rising, confident and respectable middle class. The Manchester Mummy – with its ghoulish aura of the freakshow – didn’t fit into this new world and so Hannah was decently buried.

Manchester Museum is housed in a Victorian Gothic building designed by the famous architect Alfred Waterhouse (Image courtesy of David Dixon)

In both life and death, Hannah Beswick made a strange, centuries-spanning journey. This journey took her from being an individual person to a source of wealth and bequests to a scientific experiment to a macabre curiosity to an embarrassing inconvenience to a person deserving of basic respect once more. Thus, to the sound of the shovelled earth of Harpurhey Cemetery, the Manchester Mummy’s bizarre odyssey came to its end.

But perhaps mythological and ancient archetypes – such as mummies – will always have the ability to break free from the past and intrude into more modern cultures, especially cultures undergoing intense anxiety or change. Similar folkloric characters that have invaded later eras include Glasgow’s Gorbals Vampire, the Cardiff Giant, the Highgate Vampire and London’s Spring-Heeled Jack. Both modern innovations and modern fears can encourage such interlopers. With the Manchester Mummy, we can see how the archaic and up-to-date, the gruesome and clinical, the superstitious and scientific were all wrapped up in one sinister figure.

The post The Manchester Mummy – How a Respectable English Woman Got Embalmed Egyptian Style appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

The labourers gawped at the colossus they’d uncovered. They could make out pores in his petrified skin, a ‘skin’ under which veins and arteries appeared to run. The giant boasted nails, nostrils, an Adam’s apple; an enigmatic half-smile was frozen on his face.

One workman blurted, ‘I declare some old Indian has been buried here!’

The Cardiff Giant – as the creature soon became known – would shake American society. His discovery would trigger a strange series of events, involving fiery preachers, competing conmen, rival freakshows, massive sums of money, arguing experts and thousands of ordinary citizens desperate to glimpse the stony colossus.

Some would even see the Cardiff Giant as evidence of the literal truth of the Bible. Genesis 6:4 states that, in ancient times, giants – known as Nephilim – stalked the earth.

Was the Cardiff Giant really a remnant from some superhuman, mythological past? Was he an elaborate hoax? Why were so many people – in an America hurtling into an age of railroads and skyscrapers, science and capitalism – keen to believe in this relic from the dawn of the world?

Let’s dig down and see what we can unearth about the Cardiff Giant.

The Giants of Ancient Times and Their Petrified Remains

‘They lie with the warriors, the Nephilim of old, who descended to Sheol with their weapons of war. They placed their swords beneath their heads and their shields upon their bones, for the terror of the warriors was upon the land of the living.’ Genesis 6:4

Most systems of myth make some mention of giants. Giants are usually seen as a bad lot – aggressive, violent, and representing unpredictable natural forces that the gods must subdue so order and civilisation can flourish. In Greek myth, the giants – offspring of the titan Uranus and earth mother Gaia – fought the Olympian Gods for control of the cosmos. In Norse legend, the ominous frost giants are predestined to defeat the gods in a terrifying conflict at the end of time, arriving for battle in a ship made from dead men’s nails.

It was, however, biblical giants that Victorian Americans were most concerned about. In Genesis, the Nephilim are the product of the ‘sons of god’ (sometimes said to be fallen angels) and the ‘daughters of men’. The children that sprang from these strange couplings are described as ‘the mighty men that were of old, warriors of renown.’ Later in the Bible, the Book of Numbers states of the Land of Canaan: ‘And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak … and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers and so were in their sight.’

The problem was that – in a world reeling from the spread of new scientific ideas – the Bible’s authority was under attack. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species – published ten years before the Cardiff Giant was found – had shaken the faith and worldview of many.

But, for the more traditionally minded, there was hope. For some time, newspapers had been carrying reports of petrified humans – giants among them – that had supposedly been dug up across North America.

The Cardiff Giant is exhumed

Such articles – with their ‘rock-solid’ evidence of biblical Nephilim – could soothe Christian minds unsettled by new theories. Thanks to the Victorians’ mania for natural history, fossils were already a subject of fascination. If snails and fish and plants could be preserved in rock, many speculated, why not men and even giants?

And the American landscape did seem to oblige, by supplying occasional instances of ‘human petrification’. In 1858, the newspaper Alta California published a letter claiming a prospector had been petrified after drinking liquid found in a geode, a type of roundish hollow rock. In 1881, the New York Times reported that a Colorado man had dug up stones resembling human body parts, which – put together – formed the shape of a man 13 feet (3.96 metres) in length. In 1884, a petrified man – measuring seven feet four (2.25 metres) – was supposedly found on an Ontario farm. In Victoria, British Columbia, two farmers sinking a well were said to have uncovered a 12-foot (3.65-metre) giant, whose body was hard as flint and whose veins and ribs were visible.

Reports such as these cropped up in the papers from time to time, but with the Cardiff Giant there was no doubt that a body had been found, a body that would soon be on display for anyone who wished to view it. These remains seemed to offer the strongest proof yet that giants had once prowled the planet. As news of the Cardiff Giant spread and the public’s amazement grew, theologians and preachers rushed to proclaim the figure as undeniable evidence of the truth of Genesis.

The Cardiff Giant Sparks Wild Enthusiasm

It didn’t take long for the people of Cardiff – and those of nearby towns – to hear about the giant. The Syracuse Journal stated, ‘Men left their work, women caught up their children and babies, all hurried to the scene.’ It’s estimated that over 2,500 people saw the Cardiff Giant in the first week after his discovery. Railway companies put on extra trains to cope with the numbers flocking to the spectacle.

William Newell, the man upon whose land the Cardiff Giant had been found, soon put up a tent over the figure, charging 25 cents to see it. Wagonloads of eager visitors kept arriving so Newell upped the entry fee to 50 cents two days later. As excitement built, local newspapers proclaimed the Cardiff Giant ‘a singular discovery’ and ‘a new wonder’.

The Cardiff Giant becomes a popular attraction

The Cardiff area was already famous for its fossils – several important fish fossils had been found in a nearby lake – so it wasn’t difficult for many to believe the giant was an ancient human who’d been petrified in the local swamps.

Interestingly, Cardiff was also a centre of fiery religious revivals. The town is near the ‘burnt-over district’, where preachers thundered about hellfire and redemption during the Second Great Awakening (~1790-1850). Several religious leaders claimed God had appeared to them in the area, including Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. This strange combination of scientific intrigue and religious fervour made Cardiff a fitting place for a relic of ancient humanity to have been unearthed.

The writer Ralph Waldo Emerson called the giant ‘astonishing’ and ‘undoubtedly ancient’. Others, while not believing the Cardiff Giant was a petrified man, put forward the idea he was an ancient statue. Well-known academics – such as New York geologist James Hall, the fossil expert Dr John F. Boynton and Rochester University professor Henry Ward – gave support to the statue theory, with Ward declaring the Cardiff Giant ‘the most remarkable object yet brought to light in our country.’

Was the Cardiff Giant Genuine?

The Cardiff Giant

In 1867, George Hull – a tobacconist and atheist – got into an argument with a Methodist preacher while on a business trip to Iowa. Hull was exasperated by the preacher’s literalist interpretation of Genesis, especially his insistence that giants had once lived on the earth. Hull lay in bed later that evening mulling over the preacher’s notions and an idea began to form.

Hull hired men in Fort Dodge, Iowa, to quarry out a block of gypsum, 10-feet-and-4.5 inches (3.18 metres) long, with a weight of five tons. Hull told the men it would be used for a statue of Abraham Lincoln in New York. Next, Hull transported the block to Chicago, where he paid a German stonemason, Edward Burghardt, to carve it into the shape of a man. Burghardt was sworn to secrecy.

Hull and Burghardt poured acid on the giant to make him look suitably worn and weather-stained. They pricked his skin with needles to give the impression of pores, and sculpted nails, nostrils, an Adam’s apple and ribs. Lines unexpectedly appeared in the gypsum that resembled human veins. The giant was originally given hair and a beard, but Hull removed these when he learnt hair doesn’t petrify. In contrast to the fearsome reputation of biblical and mythological giants, Hull’s creation sported a mysterious half-smile, which would soon be charming the public.

In November 1868, Hull shipped the 2,990-pound (1356-kilo) giant by railway to the farm of his cousin, William Newell. By then, Hull had spent around $2,600 on his hoax, equivalent in modern terms to $48,000. The giant was buried on Newell’s farm and – 11 months later – Newell hired two labourers to dig a well, knowing all about the ‘incredible discovery’ they were set to unearth.

Capitalism and Ancient Myth Collide: The Cardiff Giant Becomes a Cash Cow

Newell was soon making good money as people kept streaming to Cardiff to pay their 50 cents to view the giant.

But despite the public’s enthusiasm, the Cardiff Giant attracted scepticism almost immediately. Geologists pointed out there had been no good reason for Newell to dig a well where the giant was discovered. A mining engineer viewing the figure caused a hubbub by announcing that gypsum would have soon decayed in the soggy soil of Newell’s farm. The Yale palaeontologist Othniel C Marsh only needed a glimpse of the Cardiff Giant to declare it ‘of very recent origin and a most decided humbug.’ Some churchmen, however, went on insisting the giant was a genuine Old Testament colossus.

Two women visiting the Cardiff Giant

The controversy around the Cardiff Giant boosted its value. Hull sold his share in the giant for $23,000 ($445,000 in today’s money) to a syndicate headed by one David Hannum. The syndicate exhibited the giant in Syracuse, New York State. Here it drew such enormous crowds – with the railways again having to alter their schedules – that the showman and entrepreneur P.T. Barnum offered to buy the colossus for a cool $150,000.

And Then the Cardiff Giant Became Two

When his offer was refused, Barnum responded by making his own giant. He hired a man who somehow managed to cover the Cardiff Giant in wax, making a cast that was used to create a plaster replica. Barnum then exhibited his giant in his American Museum in New York City while proclaiming the other giant up in Syracuse was a fake.

Hannum sued Barnum for declaring his giant a hoax, but his case began to look less hopeful when the judge told Hannum a favourable verdict would depend on getting his giant to stand up in court and solemnly swear his authenticity.

The original giant, meanwhile, began to tour the country and soon arrived in New York, where it was exhibited just a few blocks away from Barnum’s replica. Even this fact, and increasing scepticism about both giants, did little to dim the public’s delight, with many New Yorkers still keen to go and see ‘Old Hoaxey’.

A poster advertising the Cardiff Giant

Barnum – whose museum exhibited real scientific artefacts alongside fakes such as ‘mermaids’ – played on this, issuing a leaflet stating, ‘What is it? Is it a statue? Is it a petrification? Is it a stupendous fraud? Is it the remains of a former race?’

In December 1869, Hull confessed everything to the press and in February the following year, the court declared that both giants were fake and that Barnum could therefore not be sued for claiming the first giant was a hoax. Public interest in the Cardiff Giant dwindled and the numbers visiting both giants plummeted.

The Strange Afterlife of the Cardiff Giant and Yet More Imitators

The Cardiff Giant was displayed at the 1901 Pan American Exhibition, where it was something of a flop. The giant was later bought by the Iowa publisher Gardner Cowles Jr, and used as a coffee table and talking point in his basement ‘rumpus room’. In 1947, Cowles sold the Cardiff Giant to the Farmers’ Museum, in Cooperstown, New York, a museum that seems to have become his final resting place.

The Cardiff Giant in his final resting place in the Farmers’ Museum (Photo: Martin Lewison)

Barnum’s replica has ended up in Marvin’s Marvellous Mechanical Museum, an arcade of slot machines and entertaining oddities in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

P.T. Barnum’s replica of the Cardiff Giant in Marvin’s Marvellous Mechanical Museum (Photo: John Kannenberg)

Yet another copy of the giant can be found in Fort Dodge, Iowa – where Hull’s gypsum block was quarried – displayed in The Fort Museum and Frontier Village.

The Cardiff Giant – probably due to its ability to slacken purse strings – inspired a number of imitators across America.

The Solid Muldoon – exhibited in Beulah, Colorado, for 50 cents a peek – was a giant made of clay, ground bones, meat, rock dust and plaster. Many suspected the Muldoon was another creation of George Hull, who’d now run through the fortune he’d made from the Cardiff Giant. Interestingly, Barnum was rumoured to have made an offer for the Muldoon, this time for $20,000.

In 1877, the owners of the Taughannock House hotel on Cayuga Lake, New York, created a fake petrified man that was conveniently dug up by workmen as the hotel was expanding. And in 1892, one Jefferson ‘Soapy’ Smith of Creede, Colorado, paid $3,000 for a ‘petrified man’, which he exhibited for 10 cents a ticket.

Perhaps most bizarrely, a ‘petrified man’ found in 1897 near Fort Benton, Montana, was proclaimed to be the corpse of Civil War general Thomas Francis Meagher, who’d drowned in the Missouri River 30 years previously. The ‘general’ was exhibited across Montana and displayed in Chicago and New York.

The Cardiff Giant has continued to haunt American popular culture. In Mark Twain’s A Ghost Story, the Cardiff Giant’s ghost appears in a Manhattan hotel room, pleading to be reburied. But, in a somewhat post-modern twist, the spirit is so confused that it haunts Barnum’s replica of itself. A computer named The Cardiff Giant featured in the TV series Halt and Catch Fire.

The giant even had a living human imitator, George Augur, a circus giant who worked for the Ringling Brothers. Billed as standing at eight feet (though he was more likely seven-and-a-half), George – who adopted the stage name The Cardiff Giant – performed in the big top with a family of Hungarian midgets, who formed a striking contrast to his towering stature.

What Does the Legend of the Cardiff Giant Tell Us?

The Cardiff Giant seems to me evidence of a collision of modern and ancient worlds: biblical literalism slamming up against science, developments in geology and evolution confronting legend, ancient myth hitting hard-faced capitalism, and the use of industrial techniques to fabricate a folkloric monster. With the Cardiff Giant episode, we can see the nightmares and obsessions of our ancestors entering modern culture through the portals of circuses, freakshows, short stories and 10-cent exhibitions.

The Cardiff Giant appeared at a time when the lines between myth, religion, science and entertainment were blurred. As Barbara Franco points out in her book The Cardiff Giant: A Hundred-Year-Old Hoax, people were interested in the emerging sciences, but few really understood them. There was less of a distinction between the serious and popular study of subjects. Victorian Americans attended carnivals, religious revival meetings, freakshows, and scientific exhibitions and lectures with much the same attitude – an attitude that demanded they be both educated and entertained.

With the growth of democracy and individualism, there was also the idea – like in our internet age – that autonomous individuals had the right to view the evidence and make up their own minds. Yet, paradoxically, one effect of the Cardiff Giant case – with the embarrassment the hoax caused to intellectuals and experts – was to encourage more rigorous expectations of science and a greater distinction between ‘armchair’ and professional approaches to research.

Monsters still haunt our modern dreams, even if they appear in more debased forms than those the ancient legends and holy scriptures clothed them in. The Cardiff Giant is not the only folkloric being to erupt into our modern world. Other examples include Glasgow’s Gorbals Vampire, the Manchester Mummy, the Highgate Vampire and London’s Spring-heeled Jack.

The American society of the late 1800s – hurtling into an age of industry and capitalism – couldn’t quite leave its old archetypes behind. On the brink of the 20^th century – despite the growth of factories and skyscrapers, despite the ever-expanding frontiers of science – dark and ancient fears still plagued people’s minds.

The post The Cardiff Giant – Was a Colossal Corpse Unearthed in Victorian New York? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.