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.)

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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.

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.

The house’s name was the Villa Diodati and those sheltering in it were no ordinary young people. As well as Lord Byron – the most successful, charismatic and infamous poet of the age – there was the equally talented poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his soon-to-be-wife Mary and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. As thunder rumbled and lightning crackled outside, the atmosphere within the Villa Diodati was also somewhat charged. Shelley had recently abandoned his wife to elope with Mary, but – just to intensify the sexual and romantic complications – Claire may have been Shelley’s mistress. Claire was also Byron’s paramour and – though Byron had been reluctant to take on Claire as a lover – she was now pregnant with his child.

There was another figure at that gathering. I imagine him – a black-haired, moodily handsome man – sitting sulkily in a corner as the dark room flashed with lightning and flickered with feeble candlelight. That young man was John William Polidori. Though officially employed as the personal doctor of the hypochondriac Lord Byron, Polidori harboured literary ambitions of his own. Arrogant and oversensitive, tortured – even in that forward-thinking group – by the difference in class between himself and his aristocratic companions, Polidori smarted and fumed at every perceived slight or put-down.

Polidori – though his relationship was Byron was fraught and complex – did view his employer as a model of literary achievement he could emulate. Polidori’s literary yearnings would – in a strange way – be fulfilled, but hardly in the manner he would have hoped for. There was also – to add to the passionate tensions in the Villa Diodati – the fact that John William Polidori was probably bi- or homosexual and very likely in love with his famous, though much resented, boss.

John William Polidori, the author of the first vampire novel

Mixed into all this volatile alchemy were the heady effects of the pipes of opium being passed around, the vials of laudanum on the tables, and the carafes of red wine that glinted in the candlelight. Looking back, it seems inevitable that something of significance – something horrifying, even, something that would shake generations of readers – would come out of that combination of that claustrophobic cooping-up of genius, that narcotically-fuelled swirl of envy and sexual longing, and those dark symphonies of nature thundering outside.

The cold and storms of 1816 – known as ‘the year without a summer’ – were due to the eruption of an Indonesian volcano called Mount Tambora. The volcano had spewed masses of sulphurous fog into the atmosphere, fog which went on to encircle the earth, dimming sunlight, perverting weather patterns and causing frost and ice well into summer. These gloomy conditions inspired Lord Byron’s excellent poem Darkness:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless and pathless and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air …

The summer at the Villa Diodati also resulted in the birth of the two most important – and unsettling – modern gothic archetypes: Frankenstein’s Monster and the aristocratic literary vampire. This latter character would go on to inspire Dracula author Bram Stoker, among others.

Both Frankenstein’s Monster and the vampire manifested out of what would be innocent attempts to pass the time as black clouds shrouded the sun, as lightning sparked, and as John William Polidori struggled with jealousy, bitterness and rage.

Was Lord Byron the model for the literary vampire?

The Modern Vampire Arises out of a Ghost Story Contest at the Villa Diodati

To lessen the boredom of their confinement, the group took to reading out spooky stories in the evenings, such as those from the Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of translated German horror tales. Near midnight, on 18th June, Byron was reading from Christabel, a gothic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As Byron recited the poem in a hypnotic voice, Shelley leapt up and ran shrieking from the room. He’d later say he’d seen a terrifying vision of Mary – who’d been in the corner nursing their child – with staring eyes instead of nipples on her breasts.

Byron soon suggested that each person in the Villa Diodati should write a ghost story of their own. I imagine the little group, heads bent, faces frowning in concentration as rain pounded the roof, as wind moaned and thunder quaked around the Villa’s walls. It would not, however, be the two great poets who’d be responsible for unleashing the most enduring visions on the world. Shelley produced little while Lord Byron only managed to write what would later be called The Burial: A Fragment (or Fragment of a Novel), a few pages of an unfinished story about an English aristocrat getting sucked into vampiric goings-on in Turkey.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was also at the Villa Diodati, though he didn’t manage to write much of a ghost story.

Polidori’s initial effort provoked ridicule. He conjured up a tale about a peeping tom, who was horrified to realise the woman he was gawping at had a bare skull for a head. Mary Shelley later commented, ‘Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole, what to see I forget.’

Mary would soon jerk bolt upright in her bed, waking screaming from a nightmare – or vision – in which, she asserted, ‘I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together; I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out.’ The idea for Frankenstein had been sparked into life.

Polidori – though the proud doctor snarled and bristled against the laughter and mockery his story generated – would, when he calmed down, re-examine the Fragment Byron had penned.

Polidori would take Byron’s casually tossed-off, unfinished vampire tale and work it over. Unknown to Byron, Polidori began escaping the Villa Diodati’s brooding atmosphere by rowing across the lake to light-hearted social gatherings organised by one Countess Breuss. Here John met a Madame Brelaz, who was soon captivated by his charms. With their encouragement, he would create a literary archetype that has flourished right up to the present day. The story Polidori produced would become a novella entitled The Vampyre.

The Villa Diodati, where both Frankenstein and the aristocratic literary vampire were born

Lord Byron and John William Polidori between Them Invent the Aristocratic Literary Vampire

Our modern image of the vampire is usually of a being who – while indulging in brutal acts to sate his need for blood – is suave, educated, sexually compelling and from the aristocratic layer of society.

This darkly charismatic figure seems puzzling when you consider how vampires were originally depicted in the folklore of Central and Eastern European, the Balkans and Turkey. The vampires of peasant legend were hideous shuffling corpses more akin to zombies than to the charmingly evil, well-travelled and sophisticated bloodsuckers of later literature and film.

Claire Clairmont, lover of Lord Byron and guest at the Villa Diodati

The folkloric vampire could not rest, thanks to the fact it had died by suicide or been murdered or improperly buried. At night, these stinking cadavers would totter from their tombs, searching for relatives and ex-neighbours in order to suck their blood and so prolong their miserably undead existence. A simple and parochial figure, the vampire couldn’t travel far from its native soil and rarely harassed anyone outside its former village. When the vampire’s neighbours realised what was going on, they would end the nosferatu’s wanderings by hammering a stake through its heart – pinning the creature to the earth, thereby encouraging decomposition to proceed more naturally.

Byron had heard about such legends on his journeys through Turkey and South East Europe, both heartlands of the traditional vampire myth. A vampire of this type crops up in Byron’s poem The Giaour (1813), set in the Ottoman Empire:

But first, on earth as vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race;

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

Yet loathe the banquet which perforce,

Must feed thy living livid corse.

This vampire is still the creature of rural legend – an animated carcass that stumbles around its former environs, desperate to feed on its relatives’ blood. In the Fragment of a Novel, however, Byron introduced a radically different vampiric archetype – a character that would be further elaborated in Polidori’s The Vampyre.

Mary Shelley in 1840. Her experiences in the Villa Diodati helped inspire Frankenstein.

Lord Byron’s The Burial: A Fragment

The vampire in A Fragment is one Augustus Darvell. Educated in aristocratic British schools, Darvell is well-travelled and ‘a man of considerable fortune and ancient family’. Though moody and enigmatic, he appears human and socialises with London’s elite. Nothing about him suggests the stench or decay of a corpse.

The narrator is an ex-schoolmate of Darvell’s, who – fascinated by his strange manner – succeeds in befriending him. The two visit Turkey, where – with a local guide – they make an excursion to the ruins of Ephesus. But, on the way, Darvell – who for some time has been growing ‘daily more enfeebled’ – suddenly becomes much weaker. To allow him to rest, the group pause in a Turkish graveyard.

Reclining against a tombstone in the shadow of a cypress tree, Darvell tells his friend he is dying and makes an odd request. He asks his friend to take an elaborate ring from his finger and hurl it into some salt springs ‘on the ninth day of the month at noon precisely’. On the following day, Darvell says, his friend should go to a ruined Temple of Sirius and wait one hour, though he doesn’t reveal what for. Darvell also makes his friend and the guide swear an oath that for one year they will ‘conceal my death from every human being’.

In the cemetery, the narrator notices a stork ‘with a serpent writhing in its beak’ that it – mysteriously – makes no attempt to devour. Darvell tells his companions to dig his grave exactly where the stork is standing. As the bird flies away, Darvell slumps against his friend and dies. The friend watches in horror as Darvell’s ‘countenance in a few minutes became nearly black’. Darvell’s body then starts to decompose at an unnatural speed and the narrator and guide bury him.

Though his companions in the Villa Diodati urged him to go on with his tale, Byron refused. He seemed to have a distaste for writing about vampires, stating in a letter of 1819, ‘I have a personal dislike to “vampires”, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets.’

Lord Byron in 1813 – was much of our modern archetype of the vampire based on him?

Byron did, however, let slip to Polidori how his story would have continued. Darvell would have risen from the dead – and sustained himself by feeding on the blood of the upper classes. Darvell would have also tried to seduce the narrator’s sister.

And Then John William Polidori Was Inspired to Write The Vampyre

Intrigued by Lord Byron’s story – and by the plot arc the poet had planned – Polidori got to work. He’d later claim he wrote his novella The Vampyre in just ‘two or three idle mornings’.

In The Vampyre, Aubrey – a naïve young gentleman – befriends Lord Ruthven, a mysterious and charismatic aristocrat who has entered London society. The two set off on a grand tour of Europe, but Aubrey – though originally enthralled by Ruthven – becomes disgusted by his behaviour, especially his habit of seducing then discarding women. Aubrey leaves Ruthven in Rome and travels alone to Greece, where he falls for Ianthe, an innkeeper’s daughter. Ianthe shows Aubrey around and schools him in the local vampire lore, but his ‘fair conductress’ is soon discovered murdered:

‘Upon her neck and breast were blood and upon her throat were marks of teeth having opened the vein:- to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously, struck with horror, “A Vampyre! A Vampyre!”’

This ‘vampyre’ turns out to be Ruthven. Aubrey, however, unaware of this fact, re-joins Ruthven and they travel through Greece. The pair are attacked by robbers and Ruthven is mortally wounded. He makes Aubrey swear not to tell anyone of his death for a year and a day. Ruthven also demands that his body be carried to ‘the pinnacle of a neighbouring mount’ where ‘it should be exposed to the first cold ray of the moon that rose after his death.’

Arriving back in London, Aubrey is amazed to meet Lord Ruthven, apparently alive and in good health. Ruthven insists that Aubrey keeps his oath and Aubrey – traumatised by his experiences abroad and startled by Ruthven’s reappearance – has a nervous breakdown.

Ruthven seduces Aubrey’s sister and it is announced they will marry soon. Aubrey – who has now realised Ruthven’s true nature – tries to alert his family, but his warnings are dismissed as the rantings of a madman. On her wedding night, Aubrey’s sister is found dead, having – according to the book’s last line – ‘glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!’ Aubrey also dies – of a broken blood vessel brought on by all the anguish.

Byron and Polidori’s tales have obvious similarities – the fascinating aristocratic vampire, the Continental travel, the naïve friend who tags along, the seduced sister, the strange death that is not a death and the weird rituals the vampire insists should be followed (presumably to ensure his ‘resurrection’).

But an examination of the lives of Byron and Polidori suggests that both their stories have more than a ring of reality about them. The genesis of the aristocratic vampire can be found in the bizarre histories of these two men and in the tormented relationship they shared.

The Strange and Tragic Life of John William Polidori

John William Polidori was born in London in 1795. His father, Gaetano, was an Italian political refugee, his mother an English governess. Polidori’s sister Frances would marry the exiled Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, making John the uncle of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his poet sister Christina.

John attended the Catholic school Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, then a remote, draughty, ramshackle establishment very different to the posh boarding school it would later become. From there, Polidori went on to study medicine in Edinburgh. Much of what he learnt – appropriately for one who would write about vampires – focused on purging the body, especially by using leeches to drain the blood. Polidori – also rather vampirically (think Lucy Westerna in Dracula) – wrote his thesis on sleepwalking. He became the youngest ever person to obtain a medical degree, graduating in 1815 at just 19 years of age.

Polidori, however, disliked studying medicine. A moody loner, he described his classmates as ‘automatons’. His passion was, instead, for literature. Like many young men, he longed to follow Byron’s example, perhaps imagining a literary career that would gift him riches, fame and sexual success. In The Vampyre, Polidori reflects with bitterness on his youthful yearnings, describing Aubrey as having ‘cultivated more his imagination than his judgement … he thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life.’

In early 1816, however, Polidori must have felt the most incredible blessing had descended, a piece of luck that brought him closer to his treasured literary aspirations. He was offered the job of personal physician to Lord Byron. Polidori’s father – who’d once been the secretary of the flamboyant dramatist and author Vittorio Alfieri and understood the dangers of working for a vain and famous man – urged his son not to accept the post. But John was unable to resist the magnetic draw of Byron’s talent and charisma. And, anyway, because of his youth, Polidori was forbidden to work as a public doctor. (In London, one couldn’t practise medicine until the age of 26.) Those close to Polidori weren’t the only ones to sense foreboding over the appointment. Byron’s faithful friend John Cam Hobhouse warned the poet not to employ the arrogant, volatile young man.

Byron – due to his good looks, dangerous charms and undeniable literary gifts – had proved a popular figure on London’s social scene, an accomplishment emphasised in both Polidori’s and Byron’s work. In The Vampyre, Ruthven’s ‘peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house, all wished to see him and … were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention … many of the female hunters after notoriety attempted to win his attentions …’ In the Fragment, Darvell is an object ‘of attention, of interest and even of regard … a being of no common order, and one who, whatever pains he may take to avoid remark, would still be remarkable.’

But just before Polidori entered Byron’s employment, society’s attitude towards the poet changed from admiration to outraged disgust. Thanks to the dramatic collapse of Byron’s marriage to Annabella Milbanke, lurid rumours were swirling through London and the rest of the country: that Byron had been having an incestuous affair with his half-sister, that he’d sodomised his wife, that he’d been enmeshed in sordid liaisons with numerous actresses and prostitutes. He was even accused – Byron today would be thought of as bisexual – of corrupting his page boy.

To escape all this scandal, as well as the increasing debts his spendthrift nature had racked up, Byron fled London for the Continent on St George’s Day (23rd April) 1816, taking Polidori with him. The pair exited Byron’s home with difficulty. A hostile crowd had gathered around it – a mob Byron feared might lynch him.

At first, the two men got on, but Byron soon became irritated with Polidori’s strange mix of puppy-like idol worship, immaturity and over-sensitive arrogance. Byron gave him the effeminate nickname Pollydolly, an insult which – considering Polidori was likely in love with him – must have stung.

Even before they left England, Byron began to humiliate his physician. Some of the poet’s friends came to see him off at Dover. As they ate dinner, Byron – to howls of laughter – lampooned a play Polidori had written. John stormed off and furiously paced the town’s streets. Upon reaching Belgium, Polidori was still able to write to his sister claiming, ‘I am with him on the footing of an equal’. But – as they journeyed across Europe – Byron would grow more and more exasperated with Polidori’s travel sickness, tantrums, back answers and sulks.

‘Pray, what is there excepting writing that I cannot do better than you?’ Polidori asked Byron in an inn overlooking the Rhine.

‘There are three things,’ Byron replied. ‘First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point. And thirdly, I can give you a damn good thrashing.’

Polidori also felt Byron outshone him. John observed Byron’s charisma sucking people into the poet’s orbit while he remained ‘like a star in the halo of the moon, invisible.’ Polidori’s own sense of self was being overshadowed by Byron. He would increasingly keep his distance from the poet and in June he half-heartedly attempted suicide.

Others had complained of Byron draining the life from them, eclipsing their personalities with his almost supernatural magnetism. Amelia Opie, a woman Byron had charmed, accused him of having ‘such a voice as the Devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it.’ The critic Thomas Jones de Powis claimed Byron had ‘the facility of … bringing the minds of his readers into a state of vassalage or subjection.’

At the Villa Diodati, things deteriorated further. Polidori was thrown into jealous rages by Claire’s flirtations with his employer. He was also envious of the intense friendship Byron struck up with Shelley. After Polidori lost a boat race to Shelley, he challenged him to a duel. Shelley just laughed in the doctor’s face while Byron offered to fight the duel on his friend’s behalf.

The tensions in the Villa Diodati spelled the end of Byron and Polidori’s relationship and Polidori was soon sacked. As he began to write The Vampyre, Polidori is likely to have been brimming with rage, hatred, disillusionment and the pain of rejection. The temptation must have been great to satirise his famous employer and The Vampyre is – at least in part – a work of revenge. While it’s difficult to be sure how much Polidori knew about Byron, parts of the poet’s life and personality do appear to have influenced the reprehensible character of Lord Ruthven. By extension, these aspects of Byron’s history and temperament have formed much of our modern image of the vampire.

The Transgressive, Gothic and Vampiric Life of Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron was born in London in 1788. He emerged into the world shrouded by a caul. According to the folklore of many countries, those born in the caul – a phenomenon which affects less than one in 80,000 babies – are lucky and destined for greatness. The caul’s superstitious associations are, however, not always positive – in Romania those born in the caul become vampires after death.

Byron was also born with a club foot – a deformity that would make him walk with a slight limp, make physical activity difficult and perhaps give him an urge to prove himself.

For one upon whom much of the modern archetype of the vampire would be based, Byron had a suitably gothic childhood. When Byron’s great uncle – the ‘Wicked’ Lord Byron – died in 1798, Byron inherited his title along with the ancestral home of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire: a dark draughty mansion with a ruined gothic monastery incorporated into its structure. Byron’s nurse, May Gray, gave him savage beatings and locked him in the dark after delivering terrifying lectures on religion and hellfire. Gray also led Byron to believe Newstead was haunted and she may have sexually abused him.

Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron’s ancestral home

Byron’s education was sporadic and eclectic, but he was eventually sent to school at Harrow. Byron – frequently in trouble with the teachers and alienated from most pupils – at first hated the place. He’d sneak out and spend hours lying dreamily on a flat gravestone, known as the Peachey Tomb, in nearby St Mary’s Churchyard. Though Byron never really settled at Harrow, his time there wasn’t completely wasted as he’d occupy himself by reading books of history, biography, philosophy – and poetry. He’d often recite their contents for his friends. In addition, Byron had a more unusual way of entertaining his schoolmates. Having discovered a human skull in the depths of Newstead Abbey, he’d drink from it in front of friends who visited him at home before urging them to do the same. At Harrow, Byron also made early forays into composing verse.

After leaving school, Byron studied at Cambridge. Unimpressed, he wrote, ‘It is the Devil or at least his principle residence. They call it the University, but any other appellation would have suited it better.’

He also stated, ‘Since I have left Harrow, I have become idle and conceited, from scribbling rhyme to making love to women.’

Vampires are often seen as destroyers of boundaries and upsetters of the social order – transgressing the borders between life and death, callously smashing all rules of civilised behaviour and violating vows of marriage and betrothal (think of Dracula’s attentions towards Lucy Westerna and Mina Harker). The most ‘vampiric’ facet of Byron’s character was perhaps his tendency to blatantly disregard the conventions and restrictions of ordinary life and to even view them with contempt.

An amusing example of this attitude occurred during Byron’s time at Cambridge. When told he couldn’t keep a dog in his room, his response was to acquire a different pet – a bear. As the regulations made no mention of bears, the university had to accept Byron’s unusual roommate. Byron even threatened to apply for a college fellowship for the creature. Visiting Byron in Italy, Shelley remarked on his fondness for keeping an eccentric array of animals:

‘Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels … [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … I have just met on the staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens and an Egyptian crane.’

The Peachey Tomb, in St Mary’s Churchyard, Harrow, upon which Byron would lie as a schoolboy. Maybe the railings are to stop others following his example. (Photo courtesy of Marathon)

But it was for his defiance of sexual mores that Byron became most infamous. He almost certainly indulged in same-sex activity when at Harrow, something that appears to have been quite common despite the horror with which society at that time regarded such relations. Byron seems to have had an affair with a boy at Harrow called John Thomas Claridge and a liaison at Cambridge with one John Edleston, memories of whom would inspire several poems.

Byron went on to have numerous liaisons with married women, perhaps most notoriously with Lady Caroline Lamb. An Anglo-Irish aristocrat and wife of the future prime minister Viscount Melbourne, Lady Caroline claimed to have coined the famous description of Byron as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. When Byron ended their relationship, Caroline suffered a mental derangement, stalking Byron and once even sneaking into his home disguised as a page boy, a scandalous move that could have meant the social ruin of them both. Caroline lost so much weight during her distress that Byron complained he was ‘haunted by a skeleton’.

Lady Caroline got her revenge by satirising Byron in a ‘kiss and tell’ or – as the poet put it – ‘fuck and publish’ novel called Glenarvon. The novel’s brooding anti-hero – who roams ruined priories, howls at the moon and dresses as a monk – betrays every person close to him. Aided by his demonic charisma, on a grand tour of Europe he ruins every woman he meets, some of whom end up dead. He is eventually confronted on a ship by the ghosts of all the women he’s destroyed. Overcome with remorse, he leaps into the sea.

Byron had many other liaisons: with female admirers, as well as with an assortment of actresses, servant girls and prostitutes. Typical of Byron’s attitude was a note he wrote casually to his publisher: ‘Last night I had Angelina, the daughter of my physician and a married woman.’

In 1812, the first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published. This semi-autobiographical travelogue-poem – suffused with sex, danger and adventure and based on a two-year trip Byron had made around Europe – brought Byron unimaginable attention and fame. At just 24 – in a society with little experience of stardom – he became the first modern celebrity. Byron was invited to dazzling parties and elected to exclusive social clubs, becoming – as the Fragment puts it – ‘deeply initiated into what is called the world’. He frequented the most fashionable drawing rooms of Regency London and fans mobbed him in the streets.

Despite this success, Byron projected a sullen image, making him seem similar to Childe Harold, the world-weary and melancholic hero of his poem. This may have been partly due to Byron’s club foot making him reluctant to dance. But standing sulkily on the edge of the dancefloor only enhanced Byron’s appeal. He was inundated by hundreds of letters from women eager to meet him. At one point, it even became too much for Byron’s gargantuan sexual appetite and he pleaded with his publisher to protect him from women’s advances. In a preface to The Vampyre, Polidori mentions a woman fainting just because Lord Byron entered the room. (The Vampyre is, in part, a satire on the vampiric nature of the new phenomenon of fame.)

Byron struggled with the blurring of his ‘real self’, his public personality and his creation Childe Harold. Acquaintances recalled Byron laughing and joking before abruptly switching to his moody persona if there were people around who expected it. ‘Why don’t you just be more natural?’ they’d ask him. ‘This is natural,’ he’d reply. As well as Byron’s persona overwhelming others, it seems to have sometimes oppressed and confused him. This powerful archetype – the aloof, prickly, enigmatic, inwardly tortured ‘Byronic hero’ – would influence future literary characters such as Heathcliff, Mr Rochester and Count Dracula as well as perceptions of rock stars like Jim Morrison.

After a while, however, there was a sense that Byron was going too far in his outraging of public decorum. This was in part because the laid-back Regency world was starting its transition towards a stricter, Victorian-style morality, but it was also due to Byron’s determination to go well beyond the flirtations and aristocratic affairs common in his milieu.

In January 1815, Byron married Annabella Milbanke, a sober serious person who happened to be Lady Caroline’s cousin. The marriage appears to have been doomed from the start – waking with a horrendous hangover in a carriage after the wedding reception, Byron saw light flickering through the dark red curtains and thought he was in Hell. It seems Byron had proposed to Annabella in the hope her wealth could pay off the debts he’d accumulated through extravagant living though it later turned out she was less wealthy than he’d assumed.

Byron’s marriage was marked by black violent moods, heavy drinking and affairs. Though unhappy marriages and adulterous liaisons weren’t considered unusual or especially shocking at the time, it was the way Byron went about undermining his union that appalled society. Rumours were soon flying around that he was having an incestuous affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, an affair that may have been going on for a year before Byron’s marriage began. Byron does seem to have been obsessed with Augusta, writing of her: ‘I am much afraid that that perverse passion is my deepest.’ Byron might well have been the father of (the already married) Augusta’s third daughter Elizabeth Medora Leigh.

Gossip was also going round accusing Byron of sodomy, with both men and women. Sodomy was seen as an atrocious crime and those found guilty of it were hung on separate gallows so they wouldn’t ‘pollute’ the other convicts. As the rumours about Byron became more and more extreme, the press compared him to the decadent Roman emperors Nero and Caligula and alleged he’d seduced three boys while at Harrow. Byron felt he had no option but to flee England. He would never return alive.

The trauma of scandal didn’t encourage Byron to amend his behaviour. Upon reaching the Continent, he claimed he ‘fell like a thunderbolt upon a chambermaid’ in Ostend and he sent back to England for ‘more cundums’ while travelling along the Rhine. When news got round that Byron had hired out the Villa Diodati, the nearby Hotel Angleterre rented binoculars to English tourists so they could spy on the escapades of the notorious poet and his circle.

After leaving the Villa, Byron headed for Milan then moved on to Venice, where he is said to have seduced 200 women. Settling in that decadent decaying city, he had affairs with married aristocrats. Shelly visited him in Venice and what Shelley witnessed would prove too much even for that outspoken advocate of free love. Shelley stated that Byron ‘associated with wretches that seem to have almost lost the gait and physiognomy of man … he was familiar with the lowest sort of woman, the people his gondoliers pick up in the street. He allows fathers and mothers to barter with him for their daughters.’

So How Did The Vampyre Reflect Byron’s ‘Debauchery’, ‘Wickedness’ and ‘Baleful Influence’ upon Others?

Polidori’s character of Ruthven is, of course, based on Byron. Ruthven is aristocratic and seems wealthy, though Aubrey would gradually learn ‘that Lord Ruthven’s affairs were embarrassed’ and that, because of this, ‘he was about to travel’. Ruthven is charismatic and good-looking: ‘In spite of the deadly hue of his face, which never gained a warmer tint … it’s form and outline were beautiful.’ Ruthven, like Byron, is a part of society but also a stranger in it. He’s cold, aloof, sexually alluring, and often violent and remorseless in the quest to fulfil his desires.

Travelling with Ruthven, Aubrey soon notices he seeks out ‘the centres of all fashionable vice’. Aubrey receives letters from his guardians in England warning him that ‘there was an evil power resident in his companion … that his character was dreadfully vicious, for that the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society.’ The letters tell Aubrey of a Dracula-style contagion of evil: ‘all those females who he had sought, apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his departure, thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze.’

Lord Byron would influence the portrayal of vampires in literature and film.

Indeed, Byron’s aristocratic antics seem to have – at times – outraged the bourgeois morals of the middle-class Polidori. (In Dracula, Bram Stoker would favourably contrast the sober values of the middle-class characters with those of the flightier, more decadent – and, in the Count’s case, downright evil – aristocrats.) The Vampyre seems saturated by the bitterness that a famous aristocratic man can – at least for a while – get away with behaviour that his ‘social inferiors’ would have been unable to.

Polidori also underlined how dangerous Ruthven (or Byron) could be. While Ruthven would not give any charity to the virtuous who ‘were sent from the door with hardly suppressed sneers … when the profligate came to ask something, not to relieve his wants, but to allow him to wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity.’ But ‘all those upon whom it was bestowed, inevitably found there was a curse on it, for they were all either led to the scaffold or sunk to the lowest and most abject misery.’

Byron himself felt he was cursed, noting that many of his friends, lovers and acquaintances suffered misfortune or died tragic and early deaths. Lady Caroline Lamb, for instance, never recovered from her liaison with Byron. Following struggles with mental instability, health problems and addictions to laudanum and alcohol, she passed away at just 42. Caroline has her anti-hero in Glenarvon proclaim, ‘Weep! I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue. Henceforth, you shall weep no more … My love is death!’

Lord Byron’s ‘vampiric curse’ – it might seem – also worked its influence on those who’d been with him in the Villa Diodati. All of them would experience tragedy or in some way be afflicted by premature death. Byron’s ‘curse’ would – especially – overshadow what remained of the life of John William Polidori.

The Publication of The Vampyre and the Final Tragedy of John William Polidori

After his sacking by Byron, Polidori travelled around Italy before returning to London. It was there, while living in Soho, that he was shocked to learn The Vampyre had been published. The work appeared – without Polidori’s permission – on April Fools’ Day (1st April) 1819 in The New Monthly Magazine. A far worse insult was that it was entitled: The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron.

Polidori scrambled to assert his rights to the novella. Despite repeated denials by Byron and Polidori, the idea of Byron’s authorship prevailed for quite a while and – when Polidori succeeded in making enough noise to draw attention to himself – he was accused of plagiarism or piggybacking on Byron’s fame. Later the same year, The Vampyre came out in book form and was also attributed to Byron though later editions did exchange his name for Polidori’s. Byron’s Fragment got published too in an attempt to clear up the confusion, but The Vampyre continued to be viewed by many as the creation of Polidori’s ex-boss.

Polidori had left his manuscript at the home of his friend Countess Bruess, where it had lain around for three years before the Countess passed it to a Madame Gatelier. Madame Gatelier forwarded the novella to the disreputable journalist and publisher Henry Colburn, who had put out Glenarvon and would publish Frankenstein. Colburn had the story printed up in The New Monthly Magazine. In a typically offhand manner, Byron dissociated himself from Polidori’s work: ‘If the book is clever, it would be base to deprive the real writer, whoever he may be, of his honours; and if stupid, I desire the responsibility of nobody’s dullness but my own.’

The Vamprye, however, proved an immediate hit, partly because of the attribution to Lord Byron, partly because it fitted the public’s enthusiasm for gothic horror tales. The book went through numerous editions and translations. A play based upon it – Le Vampire, which premiered in Paris in June 1820 – was immensely popular and ignited a vampire craze across Europe. Operatic adaptations were made of Polidori’s story and Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas and Aleksey Tolstoy would all produce vampire tales. The modern archetype of the vampire had been born.

An early edition of The Vampyre, credited to Lord Byron rather than Polidori

Little of the praise or money The Vampyre generated found their way to Polidori. Though he wrote other novellas, plays, non-fiction books and poems – including a long theological poem called The Fall of the Angels – none of these works gained success and Polidori became more and more disgusted with the literary world. Searching around for a new purpose, Polidori even sought to return to Ampleforth College to train as a monk. Polidori’s request was refused, with the prior telling him this was due to ‘certain publications which I have seen and of which I must tell you as a friend I wish you had not been the author.’ Even though Polidori had abandoned his literary dreams, he couldn’t free himself from Byron’s spectre. Polidori enrolled to study law – using his mother’s maiden name – but could muster no enthusiasm for it. He fell into depression and gambling addiction, amassing large debts.

Polidori died in London on 24th August 1821, two weeks short of his 26th birthday. While he almost certainly committed suicide – by ingesting prussic acid – the coroner gave a verdict of death by natural causes, probably out of consideration for Polidori’s family.

‘Poor Polidori,’ Byron wrote upon hearing the news, ‘it seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act. He had entertained too sanguine hopes of literary fame.’

Even in death ‘poor Polidori’ was unable to summon the respect he had craved. He was buried in Old St Pancras Churchyard, London, but his grave was one of 7000 interments dug up to make space for a railway in the 1860s. The architect put in charge of this gruesome job was the young Thomas Hardy. While Hardy had the human remains carted offsite and buried in a pit, he came up with a novel solution about what to do with the hundreds of redundant gravestones. He massed the tombstones together in a circle and planted an ash tree in the centre of that macabre ring. As the ash – known as The Hardy Tree – grew, it absorbed many of the gravestones: forming an interesting tableau demonstrating the complex intermixture of life and death. An appropriate memorial, perhaps, to one who added so much to the myth of the vampire.

The Hardy Tree, in St Pancras Old Churchyard. Is Polidori’s gravestone one of those massed around it? (Photo courtesy of David Edgar)

The ‘Curse’ of the Vampiric Lord Byron

Polidori wouldn’t be the only one from the Villa Diodati affected by Byron’s ‘curse’. In July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a boating accident off the Italian coast, less than a month before he turned 30. Shelley had named his boat – a ‘perfect plaything for the summer’ – the Don Juan as a tribute to one of Byron’s best-known poems. When Shelley washed up on a beach near Viareggio, his body – in keeping with quarantine regulations – had to be burnt there.

Byron, along with Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawny, carried out the grim task of building the pyre and setting the fire going. But, as the flames began to consume Shelley, Byron – bizarrely – stripped off and swam out to sea, thereby missing most of the cremation. He may not have been able to bear the scene for long as parts of Shelley’s corpse had been fleshless when the ocean gave him up. A book of Keats’ poems was found in Shelley’s pocket and Trelawny is said to have snatched his heart from the blaze. Years later, after Mary Shelley’s death, her son discovered the remnants of a charred heart in a drawer.

A 1889 painting of the funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley. This romanticised depiction, by Louis Edouard Fournier, contains a number of historical inaccuracies.

Mary Shelley died at 53. Though Frankenstein was well-received, she doesn’t seem to have garnered much money from it. During her financially precarious life, she would – however – write many more books and put a great deal of energy into editing her husband’s work and promoting his reputation as a great poet.

Claire Clairmont – mostly working as a governess – lived in several European countries, eventually dying in Italy at 80 years of age. Her daughter Allegra – who she’d been carrying at the Villa Diodati – was taken from her by Byron. Placed in an Italian convent against Claire’s wishes, Allegra died at five. Her body was brought back to England and buried in St Mary’s Churchyard, Harrow, close to the Peachey Tomb upon which Byron had dreamed away so many adolescent hours. Claire blamed Byron for Allegra’s death and hated him for the rest of her life. She’d say her relationship with the poet had given her just a few moments of pleasure but a lifetime of trouble.

Byron himself travelled to Greece, where he joined that country’s armed struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Now balding and white-haired, Byron fell in love with a Greek youth called Lukas Chalandritsanos. Byron’s legendary charms, however, were on the ebb – despite writing poems for Chalandritsanos and spending large sums upon him, the poet’s affections went unreciprocated.

Byron died from a fever on 19th April 1824, aged 36. Some say his heart was cut out and kept in Greece – where he was, and still is, a national hero – but his body was embalmed and returned to England. Byron was to have been buried in Westminster Abbey, but the clergy challenged this plan on the grounds of his ‘questionable morality’. Death had not, however, diminished Byron’s fame and huge crowds viewed his coffin as he lay in state for two days in London. Byron was interred in his family vault in St Mary Magdalen’s Church, Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.

Lord Byron on his Deathbed, painted in 1826. Note the sheet covering Byron’s club foot.

There is, though, an interesting postscript to Byron’s story, a postscript suggesting that even death and the passing of more than a century couldn’t extinguish his vampiric sexual charisma. In 1938, the vicar of Hucknall – because of persistent rumours that Byron’s coffin was empty – agreed to have his casket opened. Inside was Byron’s well-preserved – and naked – corpse. The vicar stated:

‘Reverently, very reverently, I raised the lid and before my eyes lay the embalmed body of Byron in as perfect condition as when it had been placed in the coffin … his features and hair easily recognisable from the portraits with which I was so familiar. The serene, almost happy expression on his face made a profound impression on me … I gently lowered the lid of his coffin – and as I did so, breathed a prayer for the peace of his soul.’

The coffins of Lord Byron and his only legitimate daughter Ada Lovelace. The crowns show their status as barons.

The vicar’s churchwarden, however, couldn’t help remarking that Byron’s ‘sexual organ showed quite abnormal development’. One of the workmen who’d helped them lever open the coffin was far blunter. He said Byron was:

‘Just like in the portraits … a good-looking man putting on a bit of weight, he’d gone quite bald. He was quite naked, you know … look, I’ve been in bathhouses, I’ve been in the army, I’ve seen men. But I never saw nothing like him. He was built like a pony.’

(The article’s main image shows an 1813 portrait of Lord Byron in traditional Albanian dress.)

The post Was Lord Byron England’s 1st Vampire? John Polidori & the Birth of the Literary Bloodsucker 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.

When PC Alex Deeprose arrived a few minutes later, he couldn’t believe the sight that confronted him.

Hundreds of children were swarming over the graveyard. Some clutched crosses and crucifixes; others brandished axes, staves and knives. The oldest kids were around 14; the youngest could barely even toddle.

PC Deeprose watched in amazement as the children searched among gravestones, peered behind trees and prowled around elaborate Victorian tombs. The scene was made even more apocalyptic by the steelworks at the end of the cemetery, which was throwing up flames, belching smoke and sending the scent of sulphur across the Necropolis.

Blasts of flame cast strange shadows; dark figures moved in and out of clouds of rolling fog. ‘There he is!’ the children would shout as they rushed off to confront some silhouette. ‘No, he’s there!’ a cry would go up as the fire illuminated another sinister outline.

PC Deeprose managed to conquer his astonishment and asked a group of children what they were doing. The kids replied they were hunting the ‘Gorbals Vampire’ – a seven-foot-tall monster with long metal fangs. They claimed the vampire had captured and eaten two boys and was living in the graveyard.

More police arrived, but they couldn’t persuade the children to give up their quest. Only when it started to rain – and a local headmaster told everyone to stop being ridiculous – did the children disperse.

The next night, however, the young vampire hunters were back, and the night after that, though in smaller numbers. But as the children’s interest in the monster waned, the Gorbals Vampire began to cause disquiet among adults.

Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis, home of the Gorbals Vampire? (Photo: Jim Smillie)

Parents earnestly asked the police if there was any truth in the legend. The story got into the national press, questions were asked in Parliament, and a major moral panic saw changes in the law.

But what was the Gorbals Vampire? Who was to blame for the monster’s appearance in the Southern Necropolis and what were the consequences of the creature’s ‘crimes’?

Let’s tramp through fog, sulphur and smoke and see if we can hunt down this elusive bloodsucker.

How Real Was the Gorbals Vampire?

The Gorbals Vampire certainly seemed real to the children who hunted him. On the first day of the panic, rumours of the monster spread from school to school.

Ronnie Sanderson, who was eight when he took part in the vampire hunt, said, ‘It all started in the playground.’

‘The word was there was a vampire and everyone was going to head out there after school. At three o’clock, the school emptied and everyone made a beeline for it. We sat there for ages on the wall, waiting and waiting. I wouldn’t go in because it was a bit scary for me.’

‘I think someone saw somebody wandering about and the cry went up: “There’s the vampire!”’

Another of the young vampire hunters, Tam Smith, said, ‘The red light and the smoke (from the steelworks) would flare up and make all the gravestones leap. You could see figures walking about at the back all lined in red light.’

The sighting of a bonfire near the cemetery even led to screams that the vampire was burning the remains of his victims.

Another boy there at the time, Kenny Hughes, said the children’s terror ‘built up and built up until it basically became mass hysteria.’

Despite the determination of the youngsters to hunt down their monster, there are no records of any missing or murdered children around the time of the Gorbals Vampire incident. So, if no vampire was skulking around Glasgow’s Victorian cemeteries, we might ask where such a strange myth came from.

Was the Gorbals Vampire a modern, industrial version of older legends? Were scary passages in the Bible to blame or was the culprit to be found in imported American popular culture? Were the fears of bloodsuckers just childish fantasies or was the vampire conjured from the dirt and fumes and poverty of the Gorbals itself?

Forerunners of the Gorbals Vampire – Monsters with Iron Teeth

Myths of iron-toothed monsters have haunted Glasgow for some time. According to Tam Smith, parents sometimes warned their badly behaved offspring that the ‘Iron Man’ – a local ogre – would get them.

Another Glasgow ghoul was ‘Jenny wi’ the Airn (iron) Teeth’, a hideous witch said to have prowled around Glasgow Green in the early 1800s. Jenny was infamous for devouring children who refused to sleep. A rhyme about her was told to kids who wouldn’t go to bed. Part of the poem ran:

Jenny wi’ the Airn Teeth

Come an tak’ the bairn (child)

Tak’ him to your den

Where the bowgie bides (bogie lives)

But first put baith (both) your big teeth

In his wee plump sides

An iron-toothed monster also appears in the Old Testament Book of Daniel, in which the prophet dreams of four beasts:

‘Behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly, and it had great iron teeth.’

As the Gorbals had significant Protestant, Catholic and Jewish populations, it’s possible that a child could have heard about this monster at church or synagogue and told their friends. Aided by vivid imaginations and rapidly spreading whispers, youngsters could have transformed this biblical beast into the Gorbals Vampire, perhaps augmenting it with bits of Scottish urban folklore.

What Was the Significance of the Gorbals Vampire’s Iron Teeth?

It strikes me that the Gorbals Vampire’s iron teeth were its most outstanding feature.

Kenny Hughes said, ‘We were told – or we picked up in school – that it was somebody called the Man with the Iron Teeth. We started to scream, “Who’s this man with the iron teeth?” And he apparently had big fangs that come down like a walrus or something.’

I can’t help thinking that the myths of this iron-toothed monster were related to the industrial poverty of the Gorbals and the steelworks looming over it. While providing employment for some, steelmaking posed dangers to the health of its workers and put them at risk of accidents. And that’s in addition to the air, noise and light pollution the steelworks caused.

Guy Holland, from the Gorbals’ Citizens’ Theatre, said, ‘The local area at that time was dominated by Dixons Blazes, the iron foundry that would go 24/7, belching out smoke with the night sky lit up orange.’

‘There was clanking noises of metal going on and the area was polluted and smelt pretty foul – and it was directly behind the Necropolis.’

‘I think that might have had as much to do with it as anything else – kids knocking about in the graveyard at night and all the smoke and colour going on, the noise. It is a potent mix.’

Working class poverty in the Gorbals, photo by Bert Hardy, 1948 (Courtesy of E.b Phelps from pinterest)

As well as being the home of heavy industry, the Gorbals was one of Glasgow’s most poverty-stricken districts. By the end of the 19^th century, the area was overcrowded and blighted by poor sanitation. Many people lived there because their firms provided worker housing and they couldn’t afford their own.

In the 20^th century, as some local industry declined and unemployment grew, the area gained a reputation for crime and drunkenness. But migrants still streamed into the Gorbals from the countryside, with many arriving from the Scottish Highlands. The area also received immigration from overseas, with Irish Catholic, Jewish and Italian communities growing up. By the 1930s, around 90,000 residents were crammed into the small district, which had a population density of 40,000 per square kilometre. Such conditions bred high infant mortality and it’s worth noting the vampire was accused of killing two children.

Could the Gorbals Vampire – and earlier myths like the Iron Man and Jenny w’ the Airn Teeth – have emerged from the poverty and pollution of the Gorbals? Could they have been personifications of the hazards faced by the urban industrial poor? In the fog-laden, sulphur-tinted air, with the billowing of smoke and clunking of iron all around, could malnutrition and overcrowding have conjured up these strangely modern monsters in the inhabitants’ minds?

It’s interesting that critics of industrial capitalism likened that system to a vampire sucking its workers’ blood. In 1867, Karl Marx wrote in Capital, ‘Capitalism is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ (Incidentally, industrial America also gave birth to a strange mythical being, a giant called Joe Magarac who stirred vats of molten steel with his bare hands.) 

The Gorbals Vampire episode would go on to shake the nation, and those outraged by the incident would soon find something easier to blame – and take action over – than complex issues like poverty and industrial pollution.

The Gorbals Vampire Terrifies the Nation and the Blame Is Pinned on … Comics

Glasgow’s vampire hunt soon made it into the local press and it wasn’t long before the story was picked up by the national papers. People started searching for the cause of the hysteria that had gripped one of Britain’s major cities.

A newspaper report inspired by the Gorbals Vampire case (from the Mitchell Library)

The culprit was swiftly discovered – the American horror comics that were just beginning to get popular with UK youngsters. It was argued that these comics – with lurid titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror – were inflaming imaginations with their graphic images of monsters, murder and mayhem. Young minds were being ‘polluted’ by these ‘terrifying and corrupt’ publications.

And the blame was truly pinned – or should that be staked? – on the comics when it turned out one had featured a monster similar to the Gorbals Vampire. A 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries had included a story called The Vampire with the Iron Teeth.

Did this infamous comic inspire the Gorbals Vampire hysteria? (Image courtesy of thehorrorsofitall)

A strange coalition formed to campaign against the comics, composed of teachers, Christians and – keen to limit the influence of American culture – communists. A debate took place in the House of Commons, in which the Gorbals’ Labour MP, Alice Cullen, played a prominent role. The upshot was the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act of 1955, which banned the sale of ‘repulsive or horrible’ reading matter to children. The Act is still law today.

Were American Comics Really to Blame for the Gorbals Vampire Hysteria?

It might seem obvious that comics portraying iron-fanged vampires could spark hysteria about such creatures. But a closer examination of the facts suggests this wasn’t the case in the Gorbals.

There’s no evidence that any of the Glasgow vampire hunters had ever glimpsed an American comic. And some seemed to have had only the vaguest notions about what vampires were.

Vampire hunter Bob Hamilton admitted he had ‘no idea’ what a vampire was, saying, ‘Nobody knew we needed stakes – we didn’t have Christopher Lee to explain you had to put a stake through the heart to kill him. We were just going to cut the head off, end of story. Don’t know what we’d have done if we’d met one, like.’

Ronnie Sanderson said, ‘I just remember scampering home to my mother: “What’s the matter with you?” “I’ve just seen a vampire.” And I got a clout round my ear for the trouble. I didn’t know what a vampire was.’

Neither Ronnie Sanderson nor Tam Smith had a TV in their homes or had ever seen a comic book. According to comic expert Barry Forshaw, a British child getting their hands on an American horror comic would have been like discovering the Holy Grail.

Mr Forshaw said, ‘It was a perfect fit. Here was a campaign looking to justify itself and then this event happens.’

‘It is ironic that the moral furore began in Scotland, where the comics (like The Dandy and The Beano, published in Dundee) couldn’t have been more safe.’

Could the Vampire Have Morphed out of the ‘Magical Realist’ World Children Inhabit?

Vivid stories are invented by kids across the world, stories which often feature the monstrous, terrifying and grotesque. And the children of the Gorbals had more fuel for their fantasies than most kids. Because their neighbourhood lacked open space, they used the Southern Necropolis as a playing field.

Kenny Hughes said, ‘We’d all head off up the gravy (graveyard) – if you were out playing, you went up there.’

Spending evenings and weekends in that sprawling cemetery, in which 250,000 Glaswegians were interred; running among the huge and gloomy Victorian monuments; seeing the flames darting from the steelworks – all this may have pushed the children’s imaginations towards the macabre.

Bob Hamilton said, ‘We used to sit (up there) and tell ghost stories, scary stories.’

Children playing in Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis (Photo by Bert Hardy, 1948)

Geoff Holder, of the podcast Fortean Freak Out, said, ‘Although as adults we can sometimes reconstruct the emotional realm of childhood … we often struggle to recall the intellectual or cognitive world of the child.’

‘Perhaps young children live in a world of magical realism, where strange and wondrous things can intrude into the ordinary everyday world without causing cognitive dissonance … bizarre events can be seen as normal as children have not yet learned the ‘common sense’ limits of normality.’

Geoff argues that during the vampire hunt ‘groups of children, swept up by an intoxicating and fluid wave of exciting rumours, gathered together and engaged in a communal activity to hunt down the monster. It was enjoyable … but they weren’t playing at monster hunting, they were monster hunting.’

Geoff points out that the Gorbals Vampire episode was just one of several ‘monster hunts’ involving Glasgow children. In the 1870s, kids hunted hobgoblins in the Cowcaddens neighbourhood. The 20^th century saw Glasgow youngsters hunting banshees, ghosts, maniacs and even Spring-heeled Jack, a Victorian fire-breathing phantom said to have haunted London. And such children’s hunts were not limited to Glasgow. In 1964, hundreds of Liverpool children took part in a search for leprechauns.

Geoff Holder said, ‘In some times and some places, children collectively invent threatening, uncanny or non-human figures and then engage in enjoyable collective adventures to hunt these figures down. In many cases, the hunt is ephemeral and is as quickly forgotten as any other playground sport.’

The Gorbals Vampire incident is just better remembered because it made it into the media. And the media does seem fond of chronicling the occasional yet scandalous eruptions of mythological creatures into modern life, with other famous cases including the Highgate Vampire, the Manchester Mummy, Cumbria’s Vampire of Croglin Grange, and the Cardiff Giant.

So Where Did the Gorbals Vampire Come from and What Is His Legacy?

The Gorbals Vampire seems to have arisen from a mix of ingredients – a spooky and much-frequented cemetery; the stresses caused by overcrowding, poverty and industrial pollution; and earlier legends of similar demons, which could easily be conjured back to life in such surroundings.

Add to this the tendencies of children to blur the borders of the fantastical and real, and we can see how the Gorbals Vampire emerged.

The children’s response could also be linked to a certain trait in the psyche of the Gorbals, a working-class grittiness.

Playwright Johnny McKnight, whose play The Gorbals Vampire was staged in the neighbourhood in 2016, said, ‘There is something just fascinating about the idea of primary school kids going to take on a vampire.’

‘I love that in the Gorbals, the reaction to that was: “Let’s get the bastard tonight!’”

In contrast to the moral panic of earlier years, the Gorbals now seems proud of its vampire. Residents of the district volunteered to act in McKnight’s play and – perhaps ironically – the staging of the play ran alongside a competition for local schoolchildren to create a horror comic and even design a mural in homage to the monster.

The mural of the Gorbals Vampire in Glasgow (Photo: Bradley Michael)

And that mural is proudly displayed in the Gorbals today. The neighbourhood is now much redeveloped and gentrified and has lost some of its working-class edge, but I suspect the spirit of its past will be laid to rest less easily than the legend of the Gorbals Vampire.

(The main image, a statue in Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis, is courtesy of Gray Mitchell.)

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