Written in Blood E-Book

Paul Adams

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 518

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The British Isles has a remarkable association with vampires – chilling supernatural creatures of the night. From the nineteenth-century writings of John Polidori, James Rymer, Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, to the modern literary horrors of Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley and Kim Newman, the vampire casts a strange and compelling shadow that spreads from the realms of fantasy into the world of the living. Here you will find vampire murderers and vampire hunters together with the real-life mysteries of Croglin Grange, Alnwick Castle, the Vampire of the Villas, the Yorkshire Vampire and the enduring phenomenon of London's famous Highgate Vampire. In this thought-provoking book, illustrated with never before seen photographs and drawing on extensive original research, writer and paranormal historian Paul Adams explores the fascinating history of British vampirism in both fact and fiction. With extensive chapters on the post-war revival of Gothic cinema horror and the influence of cult studio Hammer Films on the vampire in British television and music, here is a modern guide where every page is truly written in blood …

Leseprobe

For Alan Frank,the man who taught me about horror.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Introduction and Acknowledgements

1 Gothic Beginnings and Victorian Vampires (1816–1873)

2 The Beast of Croglin Grange and Other Strange Happenings (1100s–Present)

3 Bram Stoker: A Benchmark in Blood (1847–1912)

4 The Undead in Britain: Vampire Fiction Before and After the First World War (1890s–1940)

5 The Vampire Murderers (1920s–2012)

6 The Mysterious World of Montague Summers (1880–1948)

7 A Silver Scream: The Road to British Vampire Cinema (1921–1955)

8 Lord of Misrule: The Rise and Fall of Hammer’s Dracula (1956–1974)

9 Sex and Blood: Hammer’s Legions and Beyond (1970–1988)

10 The Strange Story of the Highgate Vampire (1965–Present)

11 Undead Television: Vampires in British Broadcasting (1968–2010)

12 The Music of the Night (1960–2000)

13 In the Shadow of Stoker: Modern Vampire Literature (1975–2013)

About the Author

Bibliography and Further Reading

Plates

Copyright

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Vampires. Blood-drinking spectres that inhabit a world of shadows in a hidden realm somewhere between life and death: seemingly impossible but tantalisingly real; dark but alluring, sensual and dangerous. Today the vampire is a cultural icon whose origins in a distant age of ignorance and superstition continue to make themselves felt. In July 2013, during the time that I was researching and writing this book, archaeologists working on a roadway construction site near Gliwice in southern Poland unearthed what was reported to be an ancient Slavic ‘vampire’ burial: the skeletal remains of several human bodies, decapitated with the skulls placed between the legs in the hope that the dead would stay dead and not rise from their graves to attack and infect the living. In Bulgaria the previous year, two medieval skeletons were similarly excavated in the Black Sea town of Sozopol. Both bodies had been nailed into the ground with iron rods. Similarly, the day before submission of the final manuscript, the audience at London’s Royal Court Theatre were apparently shocked out of their seats at the gory goings-on in the National Theatre of Scotland’s full-blooded stage production of Jack Thorne’s Let the Right One In, an adaptation of the original Swedish vampire story by John Ajvide Lindqvist.

Looking back, it would seem that any writer of a work on a subject that rational thought and modern scientific study demands to be wholly nonsensical undertakes the task in the shadows of strange revelations that begin in some way to cloud the water. If I had been drafting this introduction in the mid-1990s, the then recent discovery (in 1994) of another skeleton, that of a middle-aged man in a Turkish cemetery on the Greek island of Lesbos, nailed through his neck, ankles and pelvis into his coffin with eight-inch metal stakes, would no doubt be playing on my mind. Similarly, for writers in the early 1970s, the frenzied media coverage of mass vampire hunts and exorcisms in a large Victorian cemetery in north London, just over 25 miles from where I am now writing, would be impossible not to mention and give support to those individuals who still believe and give a positive response to the familiar phrase, ‘Can such things be?’

Like many people, my introduction to the world of the vampire came through film and television. At half past ten on Friday, 15 March 1974, wearing no doubt a British Home Stores dressing gown, I sat down aged 7 with my father and watched Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, then a relatively recent offering from Hammer Films and one which we will encounter in more detail in the pages that follow. ‘Here comes the blood!’ my father announced as the living room filled with the first strains of James Bernard’s stirring orchestral introduction, and the television screen became a mass of Technicolor gore. Five months later, now in a caravan in Bognor Regis on a tiny black and white portable, Hammer and the Count returned for Dracula: Prince of Darkness, by which time my vampire education had moved up several gears with a copy of Alan Frank’s recently published and lavishly illustrated, The Movie Treasury: Horror Movies. Despite much exposure to a vast array of cinematic and literary horrors over the years, the vampire remains a personal favourite, one that seems to step out of both the silver screen and books, and become something more than simple words and flickering shadows, walking effortlessly down through the pages of recorded history into the present day.

In this book I have attempted to give a concise account of the ‘British vampire’, a strange and compelling amalgam of literature, music, criminology, film, television and the paranormal. Vampiric activity has seemingly been recorded in the British Isles since the days of the twelfth century, when medieval chroniclers set down for posterity accounts of strange happenings and unquiet graves. To these historical reminiscences are added a selection of later happenings, some well known, others obscure, and many of which are still within living memory, such as the Gorbals Vampire, the Blackburn Vampire, London’s infamous Highgate Vampire, and Stoke-on-Trent’s Vampire of the Villas. The contribution of creative fiction to the world of the undead cannot be underestimated and many British writers have laid down classic works that comprise a formidable and powerful body of literature. As well as the classic writers of the nineteenth century, such as Le Fanu, Rymer and Polidori, I have devoted space to some of the modern masters of terror, including Ramsey Campbell, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Brian Lumley, Guy N. Smith and Simon Clark, who have all developed, expanded and redefined the vampire novel from its beginnings in the opening years of the 1800s. One writer above all others, now over a century ago, single-handedly created the vampire as a twentieth- and twenty-first-century icon, and it is difficult not to write a work such as this without an examination of the writings of the Irishman, Bram Stoker. He is included here, despite his Dublin origins, due to the fact that his benchmark novel Dracula was both set and published in London, that Stoker himself worked for many years at the Lyceum Theatre off the Strand, and that Ireland did not become totally free from British rule until 1949, by which time his novel had changed the world of the undead forever. Similarly, Montague Summers, whose books remain a constant reference point for students and aficionados of the undead, is another character who would be noticeable by his absence.

As well as fictional horrors, the reality of the vampire in the mind of the murderer has resulted in several violent and tragic deaths which are touched on in a chapter looking specifically at the vampire murderer in Britain. Finally, with the medium of film and latterly television at the forefront of the vampire’s public persona, both here in the UK and worldwide, I have devoted a not inconsiderable amount of space to the development of the vampire in British cinema, in particular the importance of Hammer Films in the re-establishment of Gothic horror in mid-twentieth century film-making.

Before we begin, though, I would like to take a moment to thank a number of people who have helped considerably in various ways with the task in hand: Peter Underwood, for his interest in the project and for supplying illustrations; Colonel John Blashford-Snell, for recounting his experiences of vampire bats in Darren Province; Tine Appelman, who assisted with reviews for Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Darren W. Ritson, who provided the photograph of Croglin Low Hall; David and Della Farrant and Bishop Sean Manchester, for patiently revisiting their involvement in the Highgate Vampire case; Hammer Films historian Wayne Kinsey, who kindly supplied illustrations; Allan Downend and the E.F. Benson Society, who also assisted with illustrations, as did Rosemary Pardoe, Simon Ball, Stephen Jones and Paul Groundwell. I would also like to thank my old friend, Eddie Brazil, for his support and encouragement; Matilda Richards and Naomi Reynolds at The History Press, who have seen this book through to production with their usual efficiency; and finally my children, Aban, Idris, Isa and Sakina, who as usual have had to put up with it all.

Finally, it only leaves me to say that I hope you enjoy exploring the world of the British vampire in fact and fiction. Now, if you’re ready, here comes the blood …

Paul Adams, 2014

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders of photographs and illustrations used in this book. The publishers will be pleased to correct any mistakes or omissions in future editions. All photographs are presented here for educative purposes only and should not be reproduced.

1

Gothic Beginnings and Victorian Vampires

(1816–1873)

The British vampire was born appropriately enough under the wet grey skies of the ‘year without a summer’, a world of rain-lashed cemeteries, waterlogged graves and dark fearful imaginings over 450 miles from home. Across Europe this, to coin a phrase from American writer Richard Matheson, ‘Brontean weather’ caused crops to fail, which resulted in food riots and looting across England and France, marking 1816 as the time of the worst famine of the nineteenth century. A cumulative series of volcanic eruptions during the preceding four years, the most powerful of which took place at Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in April 1815, was the turbulent background to one of the most important and seminal events in the history of supernatural horror fiction, and which simultaneously established two of its greatest and most enduring franchises into European literature and beyond: the vampire myth and the world of the artificially created living dead. The fictional vampire was not new in 1816, but its various disparate strands found a focus and permanence at this time. In his book The Monster with a Thousand Faces (1989), Brian Frost suggests that the honour of the first example of an undead creature in a work of ‘pure imagination’ dates to the eleventh century and a piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry entitled ‘A Vampyre of the Fens’. He then subsequently traces a chronological lineage of fictional blood-drinking and vampire activity that encompasses Sir Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur, Heinrich Ossenfelder’s 1748 poem ‘Der Vampir’; then from Gottfried Bürger’s Lenore (1773) and late eighteenth-century de Sade – Juliette (1791) and Justine (1796) – through Goethe’s 1797 The Bride of Corinth and on to early nineteenth-century works including Johann Tieck’s Wake Not the Dead (republished in 1973 as The Bride of the Grave), Robert Southey’s 1801 Thalaba the Destroyer, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel (1816), at which point our present survey begins its bloody and patriotic course.

In the early part of 1816, two Englishmen – the noted Romantic poet George Gordon, the 6th Baron Byron, together with John William Polidori, a physician and writer employed at the time as Byron’s travelling companion and secretary – took up residence in a large rented house, the Villa Diodati, in Cologny on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. Polidori, aged 20, and eight years his employer’s junior, had been paid by the London publisher John Murray (who would later burn the manuscripts of Byron’s memoirs in his office fireplace for fear that their scandalous contents would damage the poet’s posthumous reputation) to keep a diary of their travels. Murray had successfully published the second volume of Byron’s narrative poem ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ in 1812, but the two men did not get on. Before the year was out the young doctor had been dismissed from his lordship’s service and after a brief and unhappy sojourn in Italy had returned to England.

Byron’s high-profile affair with English socialite Lady Caroline Lamb (then married to Lord Melbourne, MP for Leominster, who subsequently held the office of Prime Minister in 1834 and from 1835–41) had been the talk of the country four years before. Its bitter conclusion resulted in her former lover’s immortalisation by Lady Caroline’s own hand, as the dastardly Clarence de Ruthven (pronounced ‘Ruvven’), the titular anti-hero of the novel Glenarvon, published in May 1816 only days after Byron and Polidori had left the country for Switzerland.

Byron’s presence in Geneva caused something of a stir amongst fellow English tourists, who took to spying on the occupants of the Villa Diodati through telescopes from across the lake. Their gossip mongering soon reached feverishly new levels with the arrival of Byron’s former lover Clara ‘Claire’ Clairmont at another rented house nearby called Montalègre. Claire, then in the early stages of pregnancy with the poet’s daughter Allegra, arrived with her stepsister, the 18-year-old Mary Godwin, and another poet, Mary’s lover and soon-to-be husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Claire, Mary and Shelley took to making regular visits to be in Byron’s company, and it was amongst the neurosis of the Villa Diodati’s candle-lit decadence during that ‘wet, ungenial summer’, as Mary later famously described it, that legends were born.

In his book Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1991), Christopher Frayling has demonstrated that Mary Shelley’s posthumous recollections of the events of that time (included in an introduction to a third edition of Frankenstein in 1831, by which time Byron, Polidori and Shelley were dead) are not as accurate as its famous author would make out, but still it remains a monumental landmark in the history of supernatural horror fiction.

Confined by constant heavy rain to the rooms of the Villa Diodati for several days in mid-June, the assembled company amused themselves by reading aloud from a French edition of the Fantasmagoriana or Tales of the Dead, a collection of German ghost stories that had been published anonymously by Jean Eyriès in 1812 (a similarly nameless English edition appeared the following year). Inspired by the first story in the book, known as ‘The Family Portraits’, the group began an exercise to see who could write their own successful ghost story, the competition eventually taking several days to complete. Stultified with laudanum and on the verge of a nervous collapse, Shelley was unable to write a line and no details of Claire’s contribution (if it ever existed) have survived. However, the teenage Mary Godwin famously delivered what amounted to the bones of a fully-formed Frankenstein that on publication two years later went on to become, in the words of H.P. Lovecraft, the twentieth-century American master of the weird tale, ‘One of the horror-classics of all time’, containing, as Lovecraft noted, ‘the true touch of cosmic fear’.

Polidori was able to set down an account of incest and spirit-rising that was later published in 1819 as Ernestus Berchtold, while Byron took the opportunity to create a supernatural parody of his present situation, describing a tale of sinister happenings in a Turkish cemetery involving two travelling Englishmen on a sightseeing tour of the East. Having told the story aloud, Byron felt enough of the work to write out the opening pages but soon tired of the project and quickly cast it aside. At some point during his remaining time at the Villa Diodati, John Polidori was challenged to complete Byron’s ‘fragment’, which he duly did: over the course of three days he reworked the basic plot, grafting on an ending that followed closely the conclusion that he himself had heard Byron relate to that strange company of ‘sexual and literary outlaws’ only a short time before. By the time he left Cologny under a cloud at the end of the year, the handwritten pages of what Christopher Frayling has considered to be ‘probably the most influential horror story of all time’ lay behind, forgotten and discarded in a drawer.

Polidori’s The Vampyre found its way to England two years later and was eventually published in the London New Monthly Magazine on 1 April 1819. The anonymous manuscript, bundled with a gossipy letter about the rainy shenanigans at the Villa Diodati, seemed to imply that the entire story was from Byron’s own hand and in this fashion it was enthusiastically embraced by the flagging New Monthly’s editor Henry Colburn, who threw caution to the wind and in what proved to be a successful coup, presented ‘A Tale by Lord Byron’ to the public at large, a bold decision that not only boosted the sales and literary reputation of the magazine (particularly as a suitable outlet for macabre and sinister stories) but also imprinted both the scourge of the undead myth and the singular character of the ‘Byronic Vampire’ firmly and indelibly into the unsuspecting human psyche.

Taking the character of Augustus Darvell, the mysterious traveller from Byron’s own story, Polidori overlaid Caroline Lamb’s Lord Glenarvon (and therefore Byron himself) to create the vampire Lord Ruthven, ‘a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank’ who, appearing unexpectedly in the midst of fashionable London society, a strange figure with dead grey eyes and a similar unnatural pallor, quickly becomes the object of much speculation and attention: ‘His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention.’

The licentious Ruthven, however, like the noble poet on whom he was based, is bankrupt and, in order to escape both his creditors and the soon-to-be revealed string of torrid affairs amongst a clutch of high-society women, plans to leave the country. Before he sails he is joined by Aubrey, a rich young gentleman who is tired with the London scene and desires to escape England.

As they journey to Italy on their tour across Europe, Aubrey witnesses the strange ill fortune that befalls all those that come into contact with the mysterious Ruthven: the young gamblers who are bankrupted by him at the casino, and the curse that seems to afflict any of those on whom Ruthven bestows his charity – ‘… for they all were either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery’.

In Rome, Aubrey watches as his companion attempts to seduce an Italian countess, but when a letter arrives from his guardians in England exposing the ruin of all the society women that have fallen under Ruthven’s spell, Aubrey successfully prevents a union between the couple and, abandoning Ruthven, leaves for Greece alone. In Athens he falls in love with Ianthe, a young innkeeper’s daughter who tells tales of vampires that haunt the countryside surrounding the inn. Aubrey dismisses such stories, but promises to return from an outing to an ancient temple before nightfall, as his trip involves passing through an olive grove ‘where no Greek would ever remain after the day had closed, upon any consideration’. However, Aubrey lingers in the ruins and it is dark before he attempts to make the return journey. Caught in a storm, the Englishman shelters in a mud hut deep in the woods where he is attacked by an unidentified assailant. Aubrey survives and is rescued by a party of torch-wielding villagers but amongst the trees the men find the body of Ianthe, the first vampire victim in the history of English literary horror:

He shut his eyes, hoping that it was but a vision arising from his disturbed imagination; but he again saw the same form, when he unclosed them, stretched by his side. There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there:- upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein:- to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, ‘a Vampyre, a Vampyre!’

Stricken with fever, Aubrey is confined to a bed at the inn where he is discovered by Lord Ruthven, who has followed him to Athens. The two men continue on together but in the mountains are attacked by brigands and Ruthven falls, mortally wounded. On his deathbed, he challenges Aubrey to withhold any information about the happenings on his return to England: ‘“Swear!” cried the dying man, raising himself with exultant violence, “Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see.”’ Aubrey eventually complies, at which point Ruthven slumps dead. In the morning, the dead man’s body has disappeared and Aubrey, now ‘[w]eary of a country in which he had met with such terrible misfortunes’ sets out to make the return journey home alone.

Back in England, Aubrey is busily preparing to present his 18-year-old sister at a reception for her formal entry into the London society scene. Among the many guests in a crowded salon, he is horrified to again see the apparition of the sinister Lord Ruthven, who takes his former companion by the arm and gives a chilling reminder of his ‘year and a day’ oath. The young man collapses and is taken away in a carriage. In the days that follow, Aubrey is haunted by visions of the sinister vampire and his health fails; the horror is almost complete when, after his sister announces her engagement to the Earl of Marsden, the tormented hero sees in a locket about her neck ‘the features of the monster who has so long influenced his life’. Powerless to act, as the wedding is scheduled to take place on the very day the oath expires, Aubrey sinks further into insanity and is confined to bed by a physician. In an attempt to delay the union, he writes a letter to his sister warning her of the danger but it remains undelivered and the marriage goes ahead, after which the couple leave on their honeymoon. On the stroke of midnight, Aubrey, now on his own deathbed, relates the entire series of events to his sister’s horrified guardians and expires immediately afterwards. The revelation, however, as Polidori notes with grim finality in his closing lines, has ultimately come too late: ‘The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!’

Neither Byron or Polidori would live to see the later manifestations of the literary phenomenon that between them they had unleashed. Henry Colburn’s sudden and incorrectly assigned publication of The Vampyre took both men by surprise and was the cause of much annoyance, although its immediate success was something that could only be marvelled at. The tale was published in book form soon after it appeared in the New Monthly – still credited to Lord Byron – and it was only in later printings that the correct author’s name was amended on the title page.

The following year, French writer Cyprien Bérard wrote the first vampire novel, Lord Ruthven ou les Vampires, an expansive two-volume work using material extracted directly from Polidori’s narrative. A little over thirteen months following its release, the first stage adaptation of Polidori’s The Vampyre had taken place when Charles Nodier’s Le Vampire was presented at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris on 13 June 1820 to much acclaim.

Byron had sent John Murray the incomplete manuscript of his own Villa Diodati tale shortly after The Vampyre had first appeared in print and it was published the same year – without the author’s permission and much to his chagrin – as Fragment of a Story (and subsequently using the name of the titular character Augustus Darvell) tacked onto the end of his narrative poem ‘Mazeppa’. Less than five years later Byron was dead at the age of 36, slain by a fever while fighting on the side of the revolutionaries in the Greek War of Independence. ‘Poor Polidori’, as Mary Shelley subsequently described him in her introduction to Frankenstein, had already preceded his former employer to the grave. Suffering from depression and saddled with gambling debts he committed suicide with prussic acid at his residence in Great Pulteney Street in London on 24 August 1821 – he was 25 years old.

European commentators on vampires pre-Polidori described their undead foes as loathsome creatures of the fields and the farmyard: rancid, swollen, peasant corpses gorged on the blood of both animals and humans alike; educated, urban vampires from the middle or upper classes were conspicuous by their absence. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick, in their introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of The Vampyre, published in 1997, reiterate what modern researchers such as Anthony Masters, Basil Copper, Christopher Frayling, Tina Rath and Kim Newman have described both before and since. ‘The historical and mythological importance of Polidori’s The Vampyre,’ they note, ‘lies in its … elevation of the nosferatu (undead) to the dignity of high social rank. By removing the bloodsucker from the village cowshed to the salons of high society and the resorts of international tourism, he [Polidori] set in motion the glorious career of the aristocratic [original emphasis] vampire’. In this respect, future British and non-British vampires such as Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Stoker’s Dracula, as well as Anne Rice’s Lestat (Interview with the Vampire, 1976) and Stephen King’s Mr Barlow from the 1975 novel Salem’s Lot, share a macabre lineage that begins with the seemingly effortless appearance of Lord Ruthven on the rain-soaked shores of Lake Geneva so many years before.

In 1995, the late English journalist and writer Peter Haining (1940–2007), a prolific editor and compiler of horror, fantasy and crime anthologies, published The Vampire Omnibus, a wide-ranging collection of tales involving a gregarious presentation of the vampire myth spanning nearly 100 years, beginning with an excised passage from Dracula, through inter-war tales by Gustav Meyrink (The Land of the Time-Leeches) and Henry Kuttner (The Vampire) and on to later twentieth-century contributions from writers such as Clive Sinclair, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon and Richard Laymon. In his anthology, Haining rescues from obscurity a little-known story ‘The Skeleton Count’, written by the early Victorian author Mrs Elizabeth Caroline Grey. It appears to now hold the title of the first extended vampire series in English, a trophy wrestled from the hands of a contemporary writer James Rymer.

Published in the appropriately named penny dreadful paper The Casket in the autumn of 1828, Mrs Grey’s narrative concerns the adventures of the Ruthven-like Count Rodolph of Ravensburg, a German nobleman whose diabolical pact with the Devil in order to gain the power of eternal life results in him being doomed to spend the hours between sunset and sunrise transformed into a living skeleton. Sub-titled The Vampire Mistress, this early instalment sees the Count employing necromancy in order to bring the dead body of a local teenage beauty, Bertha Kurtel, back to life. Unfortunately for Rodolph, although successful, the ritual transforms the restored Bertha into a vampire who proceeds to menace the inhabitants of a nearby village. A young child and one of the village maidens are attacked, an outrage which raises a mob of torch-wielding menfolk led by the local blacksmith, who storm Ravensburg Castle at dusk and succeed in dragging the unfortunate creature back to its grave:

Then a sharp pointed stake was produced, which had been prepared by the way, and the smith plunged it with all the force of his sinewy arms into the abdomen of the doomed vampire. A piercing shriek burst from her pale lips as the horrible thrust aroused her to consciousness, and as her clothes became dabbed with the crimson stream of life, and the smith lifted his heavy hammer and drove the stake through her quivering body, the transfixed wretch writhed convulsively, and the contortions of her countenance were fearful to behold. Thus impaled in her coffin, and while her limbs yet quivered with the last throes of dissolution, the earth was replaced and rammed down by the tread of many feet.

Given the summary execution denied to Lord Ruthven by John Polidori, Mrs Grey’s Bertha Kurtel appears to hold the honour of being the first traditional vampire slaying in the pages of English literature and as such provides the template for countless writers and film-makers through the years. As for the ‘Skeleton Count’ himself, Haining notes that he suffers a similar fate when, after a raft of supernatural adventures with such titles as ‘The Vampires of London’ and ‘Der Vampyr!’, Rodolph is finally tracked down to the ruins of Ravensburg Castle where another mob of villagers succeed in imprisoning him in a coffin and a final stake is driven through his heart. Elizabeth Grey, a former teacher, was the author of several mystery novels and melodramas whose route to popular writing came via the London publisher Edward Lloyd (1815–90) for whom she initially worked as secretary and later as editor-in-chief of his penny dreadful series of magazines, to which she also contributed several stories. She died in 1869, aged 71.

More familiar than Count Rodolph of Ravensburg is another British penny dreadful bloodsucker, Varney the Vampyre, who first appeared in August 1845 and whose chronicling, again at the hands of Edward Lloyd (who provided the famous alternate title The Feast of Blood), ran for an astonishing 109 weekly episodes before being subsequently published in its entirety in book form in September 1847. Today credited as the work of the prolific London-born hack writer James Malcolm Rymer, the author of over 100 full-length books – all written between 1842 and 1866 – whose works include many sensational serials including Ada the Betrayed, Newgate, The Lady in Black, and The String of Pearls (the latter remembered for its introduction of the character of Sweeney Todd, ‘The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’), the eponymous vampire of the title is Sir Francis Varney, the scourge of Bannerworth Hall. Varney is an undead aristocrat who may have had his real-life inspiration in the career of Sir Edmund Verney, a Royalist politician killed at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642, although the villainous Richard Varney from Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821) is also an interesting literary possibility. What is clear, as Christopher Frayling has noted in Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, is that the republication of Polidori’s The Vampyre in an illustrated penny edition in 1838 most likely provided Rymer with the stimulus for his long-running undead saga. However, the authorship of Varney was for many years attributed to the pen of another of Lloyd’s popular weekly authors, Thomas Preskett Prest (c.1810–59): several twentieth-century commentators, including Montague Summers, Basil Copper, Peter Underwood and Anthony Masters, all credit the character to him and it was not until the early 1960s and the discovery of Rymer’s personal scrapbooks containing reviews of his work that the error was discovered. Internal evidence within the writing of this and another serial, The String of Pearls, corresponding to financial problems in the early months of 1847, also point to Rymer being the true creator of one of the genre’s most important and influential literary characters.

Making his entrance in suitably dramatic fashion during the height of a violent hail storm, Varney begins his gruesome career of bloodletting, the object of his fiendish desires being the long-suffering Bannerworth family and several other interested parties that make up a rich soap-opera cast of mid-nineteenth-century characters. As well as the Bannerworths themselves – the widowed Mrs Bannerworth, her sons Henry and George and their attractive sister, Flora – they include the local physician, Dr Chillingworth; an old family retainer, Mr Marchdale; the doomed heroine Clara Crofton; Charles Holland; Flora’s fiancé as well as a cheeky sailor, Able Seaman Jack Pringle (loosely based, according to historian Dick Collins, on British seaman Sam Weller); Holland’s uncle, Admiral Bell; and in a much later episode, Count Pollidori and his daughter, the Signora Isabella. Much of the action in the early part of the serial takes place in and around the Hampshire mansion of Bannerworth Hall, a fictional building which may have had its inspiration in the real-life haunted manor house at Hinton Ampner (nine miles east of Winchester on the western edge of the South Downs), an account of which first appeared in Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft published in 1830.

As the popularity of Varney’s bloodcurdling and barnstorming adventures increased, Rymer was obliged to pile on the wordage until eventually in its complete form the saga reached Tolkien-like proportions (the modern Wordsworth Editions reprint runs to a total of 1,166 pages) and was littered with such lurid and sensational sounding chapter headings as ‘The Stake and the Dismembered Body’, ‘The Vampire in the Moonlight’, ‘The Bone-house of the Churchyard of Anderbury’ and ‘The Horrors in the Night’. As well as traditional elements of vampire lore, such as bodily stakings in coffins and the decapitation of undead victims, Rymer introduces original and interesting elements into his writing, such as Varney’s ability to be restored to life by the rays of the full moon, and in the story’s closing pages (‘Varney gives some personal account of himself’, reproduced in an edited form in Haining’s The Vampire Omnibus as ‘The Vampyre’s Story’) the incident of a first-person narrative enters a vampire tale for the first time, with great dramatic effect:

I sprung upon her. There was a shriek, but not before I had secured a draught of life blood from her neck. It was enough. I felt it dart through my veins like fire, and I was restored. From that moment I found out what was to be my sustenance; it was blood – the blood of the young and the beautiful.

In these vampiric confessions, Rymer dates Sir Francis Varney’s origins to the time of Oliver Cromwell and reveals how the curse of vampirism was bestowed upon him as revenge for the accidental murder in a fit of rage of his own son: ‘Be to yourself a desolation and a blight, shunned by all that is good and virtuous, armed against all men, and all men armed against thee, Varney the Vampyre.’ Although the speed and pressure of writing created a somewhat chaotic chronology of chapters and characters in some parts of the story, it would appear that given his contemporary setting in the mid-1840s, Rymer’s undead anti-hero was something in the region of 200 years old at the time of his first resurrection.

James Rymer’s shilling shocker writing career continued post-Varney for several years although his output dropped around 1853 following the death of his first wife Caroline and again in 1865 after another tragedy, in this case the death of his 5-year-old son Gerald by his second wife, Sarah Carpenter. In 1870, he abandoned the literary world completely and became a hotelier in the south-coast resort of Worthing in West Sussex. Rymer died in London on 11 August 1884 aged 70, and was buried in the grave of his son in Kensal Green Cemetery. His legacy was to fire the public imagination for the first time as to the violent and sexual possibilities of the vampire figure. Unlike John Polidori, Rymer lived to see how the crude sexuality of the Varney saga would, in less than a quarter of a century, be refined by another British writer into one of the finest and most far-reaching of undead tales that, over 140 years after its first appearance, still retains its atmospheric and sensual power.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a contemporary of Rymer, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and who was also the great-nephew of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was born in Dublin on 28 August 1814. The son of a Protestant clergyman, Le Fanu read classics and law at Trinity College but despite being called to the Irish Bar in 1839, he quickly abandoned a legal career and gravitated into newspaper publishing, becoming the owner of two Protestant editions, The Warder and the Protestant Guardian, as well as owning shares in three other titles including the Dublin Evening Mail. Le Fanu’s own talent for writing, and particularly the supernatural tales for which he is highly revered today, had become apparent while he was still a student and many of these stories first saw publication in the Dublin University Magazine, an independent cultural journal that had first appeared in 1833. They include ‘The Ghost and the Bone-Setter’ (1838), the sinister masterpiece ‘Schalken the Painter’, first published in 1839 and much later given a memorable television adaptation as part of the BBC’s ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ season in 1979, ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’ (1853), and the mystery novels The House by the Churchyard (1863) and an early serialised version of Uncle Silas (1864); he eventually bought the title of the Dublin in 1861 and acted as its editor for several years. Like Rymer, Le Fanu also suffered the debilitating tragedy of losing a wife (in April 1858), his spouse of fourteen years, Susanna Bennett who, between 1845 and 1854, gave birth to their four children, and it was not until after the death of his own mother three years later that he felt able to write fiction again.

Ghost stories were an integral part of the Irishman’s output throughout his entire literary life, but it was in this period of maudlin creativity that Le Fanu penned many of his most important and impressive contributions to the genre, of which the compendium of tales entitled In a Glass Darkly is perhaps the finest. First published individually in The Dark Blue magazine in the winter of 1871 and then as a complete book the following year, this collection of stories with its title a variation on the famous Biblical passage from the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, purports to be a set of case notes of the German physician Dr Martin Hesselius, an imaginative ‘portmanteau’ plot device that was used with great effect by the British film company Amicus Productions in a number of their multi-episode horror flicks from the mid-1960s onwards. Hesselius has been seen as the forerunner of several psychic sleuths of twentieth-century supernatural literature including Dr John Silence (Algernon Blackwood), Carnacki the Ghost Finder (William Hope Hodgson), Titus Crowe (Brian Lumley), Mark Sabat (Guy N. Smith) and most famously Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing. Though it is the vampire-hunting Baron Vordenburg, ‘one of the strangest-looking men I ever beheld … tall, narrow-chested, stooping, with high shoulders, and dressed in black’ from the volume’s famous final ‘case’ ‘Carmilla’, who in this instance fulfils the character role that would be first elevated to international fame by Count Dracula a quarter of a century later. As well as the subject of vampirism, Le Fanu also presents a fine study in psychological horror involving a clergyman haunted by the apparition of a spectral monkey (‘Green Tea’), as well as accounts of premature burial (‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’), a Cock Lane-style haunting (‘Mr Justic Harbottle’, a revised version of the ‘Aungier Street’ tale from 1853), and ‘The Familiar’, another revision of a previous story (‘The Watcher’, 1851) about a sea captain terrorised by the appearance of a mysterious dwarf. But it is the final story, the novella ‘Carmilla’ that remains one of the troubled Irishman’s most well-known supernatural tales and which most importantly provides the bridge between the Victorian penny blood shockers of Varney the Vampyre and the dark erotic world of Stoker’s Dracula and his twentieth-century legions.

Written as a first-person account ten years after the event, Le Fanu sets down the chronicle of a young Austrian woman, Laura, the daughter of a retired English diplomat, and her encounter with a sensual vampire woman, Countess Mircalla Karnstein, known for much of story by the eponymous title of ‘Carmilla’. The family, comprising Laura and her unnamed father (a widower), a Swiss governess, Madame Perrodon, and a finishing teacher, Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, live in an isolated castle in a remote forested area of Styria in south-eastern Austria. It is a ‘lonely and primitive place’ close to the empty and abandoned village of Karnstein, with a ruinous and roofless church ‘in the aisle of which are the mouldering tombs of the proud family of Karnstein, now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate château which, in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town’. In reality the sinister Karnsteins are not as deceased as local history would suppose and soon a carriage accident that occurs close to the entrance of the castle introduces the enigmatic and deadly vampire into the innocent and unsuspecting household.

Offering assistance to two travelling women – a mother and her young daughter – who are stunned when their post-chaise overturns within sight of the castle drawbridge, Laura and her father invite the mysterious Carmilla into their home for a period of three months while her mother continues her urgent journey alone, unaware that their near neighbour, General Spielsdorf’s much loved ward Bertha has already fallen victim to the undead aristocrat’s bloodlust. Laura recognises Carmilla as a ghostly apparition which had appeared to her at her bedside, seemingly in a dream, as a child, and as what appears to be a plague-like fever brings about the sudden deaths of the local swineherd’s wife and a woodman’s daughter, Laura herself gradually falls under the vampire’s deadly influence: a vision of a strange cat-like familiar visits her at night and her own health begins to fail. Not until the arrival of the tormented General Spielsdorf and the revelation that the blood-drinking Karnsteins have returned from beyond the grave is Carmilla’s true identity finally revealed, although the young woman’s likeness to a portrait of the late Countess Karnstein dated 1698, recently restored to the castle, hints at the ultimate horror to come. Eventually Spielsdorf, accompanied by Baron Vordenburg, a modern descendant of a local dynasty who drove the Karnsteins to their graves decades before, finally run to earth the grave of the undead Carmilla and bring about her final and ultimate destruction:

The next day the formal proceedings took place in the chapel of Karnstein. The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the general and my father recognised each his perfidious and beautiful guest in the face now disclosed to view. The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life…The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which, to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed. Here, then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head were next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.

Sheridan Le Fanu survived his most famous creation by only a year, dying in Dublin on 7 February 1873 at the age of 58. For posterity he left behind an acknowledged masterpiece of the genre whose success derives from its operation on a number of carefully contrived levels. The bloody violence of Carmilla’s inescapable fate provides a suitable shocking finale, but the Irishman weaves a haunting atmosphere into his tale far more effective than simple gratuitous bloodletting, sustaining it with great skill during the course of the novella’s gradual unfoldment, and providing several macabre and masterly moments that remain disturbingly in the reader’s memory: the mysterious vision of a ‘hideous black woman’ gazing out from the carriage window ‘with gleaming eyes and large white eye-balls’ and ‘teeth set as if in fury’; the deceptive and sensuous languor of her undead lover together with the eerie possibility of her potential return to life. Added to this is Laura’s final recollections of her hellish experience and the fancy of hearing ‘the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door’ again. However, by eschewing the Byronic male lead and reversing the sexual polarity through Carmilla’s romantic advances towards the ambiguous Laura – whose simultaneous fascination and repulsion comes close to a basic understanding of the workings of the vampire myth in both literature and reality – Le Fanu refines the core of morbid sexuality inherent in the undead theme and, as we will see, provided the all-important stepping stone for greater horrors to come.

2

The Beast of Croglin Grange and Other Strange Happenings

(1100s–Present)

Leaving the literary world of the Victorian vampire, we now cross the threshold into real time and space and spend some time examining several interesting examples of alleged vampirism recorded from in and around the British Isles that bookend a somewhat expansive frame of reference spanning from the twelfth century through to the present day. The geographical distribution of vampire stories across the world is an interesting study in itself, as all countries and cultures have their traditions of vampire-like demons and similar supernatural creatures stretching back into the beginnings of recorded history. Many of these particular vampires fall into the category of, or at least have their origins in, the ‘revenant’ – a generic term for an unquiet soul of a deceased person, often given physical form as a reanimated corpse or body that exhibits a form of post-mortem behaviour that we would now classify as being vampiric, most noticeably the emergence from the grave or tomb at night, accompanied by some type of blood-drinking activity. The ‘vampire’ that we recognise today, as London University graduate Dr Tina Rath has commented (‘Leaves of Blood’, BBC Television, 2009), is essentially a modern phenomenon that has its centre of gravity in the waves of vampire hysteria that swept across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In broad terms, this vampiric folklore demonstrates the age-old human fascination with both the mysteries of blood and the uncharted realms beyond the grave.

In Mexico, the ancient Mayans feared Camazotz, the bat-like god of the underworld who haunted caves and similar remote locations, and whose activities gave rise to the growth and harvest of agricultural crops; while amongst the many sinister deities present in the mythology of the Aztecs, the Cihuateteo, the corrupted souls of women who died in childbirth, effected an undead existence with several of the traits familiar in other cultures associated with vampiric activity, namely roaming abroad at night in search of unfortunate victims – in this instance unwary children – and a tendency to gather at crossroads, where food offerings would be placed in an attempt to lower the supernatural-affected child mortality rate. Vampire-like spirits and blood-drinking witches, particularly the Lamia, were a contemporary part of the legends of Ancient Greece even before the establishment of the Greek Orthodox Church brought about the idea that the excommunicated dead would become vrykolakas (a long-standing Greek term for a benign revenant-type being particularly associated with the brutal and dangerous modern concept of vampirism). The apparent incorruptibility of buried corpses, perhaps the most powerful catalyst for the development of the vampire myth, played a part in the establishment of the Greek vampire tradition. This was particularly evident on the island of Santorini where writer Anthony Masters (The Natural History of the Vampire, 1974) reports the existence of a ghoulish flesh-eating vampire variant, the vrykolatios. Australian aborigines told tales of a tree-dwelling blood-drinker, the dwarf-like Yara-ma-yha-who, which preyed on children and travellers sheltering from the sun; the Filipino Aswang was an attractive female witch that transformed into a blood-sucking bird at night; while in Tibet, Yama, the skull-festooned Nepalese god of death, carried a sword and a cup from which he drank the blood of sleeping people.

Evocatively described by the novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd as ‘a land engulfed by mist and twilight’, the British Isles are today most associated with accounts of ghosts and hauntings rather than tales of vampires and the undead. Where accounts of apparent vampirism do exist, they are, in the main, ghost stories that have some vampire-like similarity or exhibit phenomena that has been interpreted as having its origins in a vampiric ‘entity’ or some similar spectral creature. A number of buildings and churches have particular connections with vampire stories and legends, some stretching back over the course of many years, while others, such as Highgate Cemetery in North London, have garnered their associations within a relatively recent time span.

The earliest tales of vampires in Britain date to the twelfth century and the recording of two medieval writers, Walter Map and William of Newburgh. Map, later to become Archdeacon of Oxford, was born in 1140 of apparent Welsh descent. In his early twenties he studied at the University of Paris and subsequently became a courtier of Henry II. By the early 1180s, Map was drawing a stipend from the Diocese of Lincoln; he held offices at Lincoln Cathedral and later made two unsuccessful attempts for a bishopric, one at Hereford and another at St David’s in Wales. Map lived a remarkably long life for such difficult times, dying in his late fifties sometime between May 1208 and September 1210. His written legacy is a Latin text known as De Nugis Curialium or the ‘Trifles of Courtiers’, a miscellany of historical accounts and personal insights into his times divided up into five chapters, a number of which contain a selection of ghostly stories that have some form of vampire-like quality. The only surviving manuscript dates from at least 200 years after the work was compiled (between 1181 and 1193), and it has been subsequently edited and republished on two subsequent occasions, the first in 1850 by Thomas Wright of the Camden Society, and later in 1914 by the English ghost story master Montague (M.R.) James.

One of Walter Map’s vampire anecdotes reads like an embellished tale of premature burial and concerns an unnamed knight from Brittany, whose wife was laid to rest after having died in an undisclosed manner. Soon after, she is said to have returned to life, having been brought back from beyond the grave by a band of dancing fairies. Rescued from their clutches, the woman went on to bear a large number of children who became known as the ‘Sons of the dead’ or ‘Sons of the dead woman’. Between 1164 and 1179, Roger, son of Robert Fitzroy, 1st Earl of Gloucester, held the office of Bishop of Worcester. During this period, Map records an account of a revenant, dressed in a hair-shirt, seen haunting an orchard after dark. The figure was identified as being that of a local man who died an atheist and who appeared to several people on three separate nights, all of whom recognised the deceased person. Little if any actual blood drinking activity seems to have taken place and if anything paranormal was indeed involved, the incident is more likely to have been some form of apparition. However, word was sent to the Bishop of Worcester, who instructed that the unquiet soul should be laid to rest by erecting a large cross over its grave site. This was duly carried out but appears to have had the opposite effect: Donald Glut (True Vampires of History, 1971) describes the figure as leaping back in alarm at the sight of the cross and running away. ‘Then the people, acting on wise advice, removed the cross, and the demon rushed into the grave covering himself with earth, and immediately after the cross was raised upon it again so that he was lain there without causing any disturbance.’ Nothing, it seems, was heard of this particular vampire again.

The most gruesome of the accounts given in the De Nugis Curialium is that of a sinister shapeshifting vampire woman, masquerading as a children’s matron in the household of an unnamed knight, who was responsible for the slaughter of three infant babies. Unmasked by a visiting traveller who brands the creature’s forehead with the door key from a nearby church, the vampire is revealed to be the demonic double of a virtuous and clean-hearted woman, whose many good deeds and noble actions had aroused the wrath of Hell, whose devils then created a facsimile in her likeness so that her noble reputation would be blighted by its actions. After being exposed – the local woman was still living – the doppelganger makes its escape by climbing through a window and, howling into the night, was never seen again. As with the previous account, no blood drinking is recorded as taking place, the familiar limiting its murderous activity to cutting the throats of the sleeping infants on the mornings following their births.

Another of Map’s records concerns a Welsh vampire whose activities were brought to the attention of the Bishop of Hereford, who was at that time Gilbert Foliot (c. 1110–87), a Cluniac monk and former Abbot of Gloucester who would later become the Bishop of London. English soldier William Laudun described a wave of sickness and death brought about by the nightly appearance of the apparition of a recently deceased man whose banshee-like calls were causing several of his former lodgers to fall ill and die. The Bishop prescribed a ritual of exorcism that contained a number of elements familiar today through the medium of modern films and literature, namely the exhumation of the vampire’s corpse, the cleansing of both the grave and the body with holy water, and the severing of the head from the torso. Despite the ceremony being undertaken as directed, Map notes that the vampire continued to appear in the nights that followed: no explanation is given but it seems likely that some aspect of the ritual was not carried out completely to the letter. Events came to a head when, on three occasions after dark one night, Laudun himself heard his name being called – the signal that soon his life would be drawn away. Taking up his sword, the tormented soldier rushed out and pursued the creature back to its grave, where, with one blow, he struck its head from its body. The brave Laudun succeeded where the other slayers had failed, as the ‘demonical wanderer’ was heard to call out no more. ‘We know that this thing is true,’ Glut’s English translation of the Latin concludes, ‘but the cause of the haunting remains unexplained.’

A contemporary of Walter Map was William of Newburgh, born in Bridlington in the East Riding of Yorkshire around 1136. William, like his southerly counterpart, left a chaptered Latin text, in this instance known as the Historia rerum Anglicarum, or History of English Affairs. It is similar in manner to the Trifles of Courtiers, in that it contains a number of paranormal entries now ascribed as being early incidents of vampiric activity. Like Map’s vampires, William’s tales are notable for their absence of bloodletting or actual instances of the drinking of human blood, with the result that if non-supernatural causes can be discounted, spectres such as the Berwick Vampire are more likely to have been early accounts of crisis ghosts or possibly ‘stone tape’ apparitions (i.e. echoes or imprints of past events left ingrained into the psychic fabric of a building or atmosphere and subsequently replayed in the presence of a suitably endowed witness or group of people).

One particular haunting was related to William by the monks of Melrose Abbey, a Cistercian Order founded in 1136 in the Scottish borders thirty miles south-west of Edinburgh. Today the picturesque ruin is best known as the burial site of the heart of Robert the Bruce, which was interred there following its return from the crusades in Grenada in 1330. Many years before Robert’s death, the abbey became the resting place of a private chaplain who augmented his religious duties in the household of a local noblewoman (herself a patron of the abbey) by hunting with horse and hounds, to such an extent that he became known locally as the ‘Dog Priest’. Soon after his death, an apparition bearing his likeness was seen at night attempting to enter the abbey cloisters but was driven away by the power of the monks’ prayers. Not long afterwards it began appearing to its former employer, entering her bedchamber at night and uttering such ‘loud groans and horrible murmurs’ that the woman became distressed and went to the monks of Melrose for help. Soon a deposition from the abbey, comprising two friars and two local villagers, began holding a vigil at the grave of the renegade priest in an attempt to curtail its nightly wanderings. As an already cold night began to grow more bitter, three of the party retired to a nearby house to get warm, leaving one of the monks to keep watch at the graveside. Seizing the opportunity, the vampire attacked but was driven off by the young friar who struck the creature a heavy blow with an axe. The undead man sought refuge in his own grave which, at daybreak, was opened by the monk and the rest of the party, all of whom were presented with a gruesome spectacle: the body of the deceased priest lay uncorrupted in the ground but clearly bore the great wound inflicted the previous night. With shades of the vampire fiction of Le Fanu and the English author E.F. Benson, whose writings we will encounter in more detail in a later chapter, the unquiet grave itself was found to be filled with blood. Wasting no time, the party removed the body and took it to an unfrequented spot outside the walls of the abbey, where it was burnt and the ashes scattered to the wind. ‘I have related this story quite simply and in a straightforward manner,’ William concluded in his ‘History’, ‘just as it was told to me by the monks themselves.’

Another early British revenant that met its end by fire is one that can be loosely described as the Vampire of Alnwick Castle – a stronghold on the Northumberland coast, thirty miles north of Newcastle. Here, William of Newburgh reports the death and return from the grave of ‘[a] certain man of depraved and dishonest life’ who enjoyed the protection of the lord of the manor but who rejected the Sacrament and expired before making a full confession of his sins. His death was, according to the account given in the Historia rerum Anglicarum, the result of a Chaucer-like episode: he died from injuries sustained after falling through a bedroom ceiling while spying on his unfaithful wife who was making love with the son of a neighbouring farmer in the chamber below.

The dead man’s likeness was seen walking abroad at night accompanied by the howling of the village dogs, its rotting countenance bringing with it a pestilence that befell nearly every household. In time, Alnwick became a ghost town as the inhabitants either abandoned the area or themselves fell victim to the plague. On Palm Sunday a decision was made to eradicate the plague carrier and a deposition of surviving townsfolk, together with the local priest, made their way to the cemetery where the vampire’s grave was duly opened. There the assembled party saw the body that lay within, ‘gorged and swollen with a frightful corpulence’, its face ruddy and bloated, the clothes it was buried in ripped and soiled where it had been forcing its way up through the ground. When struck a powerful blow with a spade, the corpse spewed forth a welter of fresh blood that left the horrified company in no doubt as to the nature of the danger they were facing. As with the incident at Melrose Abbey, the Alnwick vampire was removed to a spot outside the town and burnt to ashes on a large pyre. Soon the air became clean again and life in Alnwick began to return to normal.