The Vampirologist

Farrant - The Facts

2011-11-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

This is my final mention of someone whom we should not even be discussing because his phoney "involvement" in the Highgate Cemetery Vampire case of four decades ago was bogus from start to finish. The only reason David Farrant gets a mention at all is because of the mountains of misdirection and false attribution which he alone is responsible for that has obviously contaminated the public perception of younger generations without easy access to the archives. Born in January 1946, Farrant came to prominence in February 1970 when he wrote a letter to his local newspaper claiming to have had three sightings of a ghostly apparition as he passed by the gates of London's Highgate Cemetery.

Yet, he told Andrew Gough (Arcadia, 12 December 2009); "For a start, my letter to the Ham and High in 1970 badly misquoted myself (not deliberately I concede). I did not say that I had seen the figure (ghost) ‘on three occassions’: I was describing a figure that I said ‘had been seen on at least three occasions’. This is true – it had. But on these occasions, the witnesses were other people whom I had witnessed by this time."

Is it really plausible that Farrant's letter was so monstrously altered by the editor of a highly respectable newspaper to mean something quite different to what he had actually written? Is it likely that Farrant would not have insisted on having such a tampered version corrected in the following week's issue if this had really happened? There is no record of him having asked for any such correction. There is no record of an amendment appearing even though his contact with that newspaper remained ongoing for the next few weeks. There are records of Farrant sticking with his personal "three sightings" account until October of that year when it suddenly reduced to "two sightings." All these years later it has become "one sighting."

This is what David Farrant actually wrote in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 6 February 1970:

"On three occasions I have seen what appeared to be a ghost-like figure inside the gates at the top of Swains Lane. The first occasion was on Christmas Eve. The second sighting, a week later, was also brief. Last week, the figure appeared, only a few yards inside the gate. This time it was there long enough for me to see it much more clearly."

The next month Farrant stated to Today interviewer Sandra Harris on British television: "The last time I actually saw its face." Does this not suggest there was a time previous to the one he is referring to in that interview? Then there is the BBC's 24 Hours interview transmitted on 15 October 1970. Laurence Picethly’s interview with him for BBC television was sandwiched between footage of the President of the British Occult Society that had been filmed at the society’s north London headquarters and on location at Highgate Cemetery. The man representing the British Occult Society was obviously not Farrant even though the latter would fraudulently adopt that title two years later. In fact, the British Occult Society had distanced itself from what Farrant was doing as far back as March 1970. The interview Farrant gave in late 1970 is important, however, because there are no editors for him to blame for allegedly "altering" what he had claimed. In the BBC programme the words are heard from his own mouth and there is no escaping them.

Laurence Picethly: “On August the seventeenth, Allan [known locally as ‘Allan’ - his correct name being ‘David’] Farrant decided to pay a midnight visit to the cemetery to combat the vampire once and for all. At the cemetery, Farrant was forced to enter by the back wall [footage shows Farrant entering via the rear of the cemetery], as he still does today. He armed himself with a cross and stake, and crouched between the tombstones, waiting. But that night police, on the prowl for vandals, discovered him. He was charged with being in an enclosed space for an unlawful purpose, but later the Clerkenwell magistrate acquitted him. Now, in spite of attempts by the cemetery owners to bar him, Farrant and his friends [no friends were discovered by the police or subsequently identified by Farrant] still maintain a regular vigil around the catacombs in hope of sighting either the vampire or a meeting of Satanists.”

David Farrant: “We have been keeping watch in the cemetery for … [pauses] … since my court case ended, and we still found signs of their ceremonies.”

Laurence Picethly: “Have you ever seen this vampire?”

David Farrant: “I have seen it, yes. I saw it last February, and saw it on two occasions.”

Laurence Picethly: “What was it like?”

David Farrant: “It took the form of a tall, grey figure, and it … [pauses] … seemed to glide off the path without making any noise.”

Farrant's interview ends at this point. It is reproduced above in its entirety. He was acquitted of the charge that had led to his arrest, it being that he was found in an enclosed area for an unlawful purpose. Highgate Cemetery is obviously not “an enclosed area” and that is all he was charged with in August 1970. The BBC report then returned to the President of the British Occult Society who had strongly advised against the behaviour which led to Farrant's arrest on an earlier television programme transmitted on 13 March 1970.
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Three things are of significance in that BBC television interview from October 1970. The reconstructed footage of what Farrant was doing on the night of 17 August 1970 clearly shows him hunting a vampire with a rosary around his neck, a large cross in one hand and a sharpened wooden stake in the other hand. There is no ambiguity about what led to his arrest in this report where he is featured reconstructing what he was doing at the time of his arrest at midnight in Highgate Cemetery. The image above is taken from the 24 Hours programme as Farrant reconstructed the actions which led to his arrest. The second thing of significance is that when Laurence Picethly asked whether Farrant had ever seen the vampire, Farrant dis not attempt to correct the person interviewing him by saying it was something other than a vampire. Nor did he make clear that he did not believe in vampires, or that what he witnessed was not a vampire. Indeed, this section of 24 Hours was titled Vampires. The third thing of significance is that when asked if he had seen the vampire Farrant responded: “I have seen it, yes. I saw it last February, and saw it on two occasions.” He can be heard saying that he had two sightings of the vampire in early 1970, but in the interview he gave Andrew Gough, Farrant states that he had only one sighting and this was in December 1969, not February 1970 as stated by him in his BBC television appearance some four decades prior.

Having seen his letter published in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, Seán Manchester agreed to meet Farrant at Highgate Cemetery so Farrant could point out the spot where he allegedly sighted the apparition mentioned in his correspondence. Seán Manchester was not impressed by Farrant, a scruffy individual who harped on about potential media coverage of the alleged "ghost" he claimed to have seen. Seán Manchester took the opportunity to warn against antics such as Farrant was considering when he was interviewed on Thames Television, 13 March 1970, saying that the investigation of the malefic phenomenon should be left to those who knew what they were doing. In his published letter of 6 February 1970, David Farrant had proclaimed: "I have no knowledge in this field and I would be interested if any other readers have seen anything of this nature."

Seán Manchester demonstrated on the television programme how such manifestations were traditionally despatched according to vampire lore and tradition. Five months later, ignoring the public warning issued by him that individuals should not take matters into their own hands in this way, Farrant was arrested at midnight in Highgate Cemetery by police who found in his possession a cross and wooden stake. Farrant was alone and claimed to be in pursuit of the legendary vampire said to haunt Highgate Cemetery. Although he originally pleaded guilty, he later changed his plea to one of not guilty after being held on remand at Brixton Prison for the remainder of that month. Charged with being in an enclosed area for an unlawful purspose, he was eventually acquitted and released as Highgate Cemetery does not qualify as being an "enclosed area." The Daily Express, 19 August 1970, reported that Farrant told the police (as read out in court from his statement): "My intention was to search out the supernatural being and destroy it by plunging the stake [found in his possession when arrested by police on the night in question] in its heart." Farrant later reconstructed what he was doing on the night of his arrest for BBC television's 24 Hours, 15 October 1970. While inside prison, Farrant had written to Seán Manchester to request support from the British Occult Society to which Farrant owed no connection. He was visited while on remand and told that the Society could not possibly countenance his behaviour. Soon afterwards, Farrant began to falsely associate himself with the BOS, which immediately led to rebuttals appearing in various newspapers. It was only a matter of time before David Farrant began to fraudulently describe himself as the "president of the British Occult Society."

Readers letters to the Hampstead & Highgate Express in early 1970 included reports of a ghost wearing a top hat that had been seen in Swains Lane and just inside the gates at Highgate Cemetery. With the benefit of hindsight we now know that some of these letters bore the names and addresses of acquaintances of DavidFarrant. Fraudulent letters were sent to the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 13 February 1970, using the names and addresses of Farrant's friends Audrey Connely and Kenneth Frewin. Farrant wrote those letters in order to give his hoax some credibility. He used the names and addresses of friends with their consent. He used his close friend Nava Grunberg's address in Hampstead Lane, but her name was changed to a pseudonym. He also used Nava Grunberg, now adopting the nom de plume "Nava Arieli," when she used an address in Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead, belonging to a friend. Others might have witnessed Farrant in his familiar black mackintosh pretending to be a ghost. It has since been confirmed that he wore an old grey topper and ghostly make-up to convince local people that the cemetery was haunted. Then Farrant heard tales of the legendary vampire in pubs he frequented and decided to board what he perceived to be a publicity bandwagon. The rest is history. The vampire sightings and experiences by others were genuine enough. Farrant was not. His part in the saga was utterly fraudulent. He pretended to be a "vampire hunter" for the next few months before turning his attention to malefic pseudo-occultism which guaranteed a far bigger return in the publicity stakes. This quickly led to criminal convictions which included indecency in Monken Hadley churchyard under the Ecclesiastic Courts Jurisdiction Act 1860. Victoria Jervis was also found guilty. Her revelations under oath when called as a witness during Farrant's Old Bailey trials two years later are damning, to say the least. This is what she said:

"I have tried to put most of what happened out of my mind. The false letters I wrote to a local paper were to stimulate publicity for the accused. I saw him almost every weekend in the second half of 1972 and I went to Spain with him for a fortnight at the end of June that same year. I was arrested with him in Monken Hadley Churchyard. That incident upset me very much. Afterwards, my doctor prescribed tranquilisers for me."

Facing David Farrant in court to address him, Victoria Jervis added:

"You have photographed me a number of times in your flat with no clothes on. One photograph was published in 1972 with a false caption claiming I was a member of your Society, which I never was."

On another occasion, she recalled, how she had written psuedonymously to a local newspaper at Farrant's request "to stimulate publicity for the accused."

Back in 1972 during the indecency case, "Mr P J Bucknell, prosecuting, said Mr Farrant had painted circles on the ground, lit with candles, and had told reporters and possibly the police of what he was doing. 'This appears to be a sordid attempt to obtain publicity,' he said." (Hampstead & Highgate Express, 24 November 1972).

Speaking at the April 1996 Fortean Times Convention, Maureen Speller commented: "The programme came up with ‘His investigations had far reaching and disturbing consequences’ which I said meant he’d been arrested a lot. Strangely enough, this is more or less what he said. God, I felt old being the only member of [my] group who could remember this nutter being arrested every few weeks.”

“The wife of self-styled occult priest David Farrant told yesterday of giggles in the graveyard when the pubs had closed. ‘We would go in, frighten ourselves to death and come out again,’ she told an Old Bailey jury. Attractive Mary Farrant — she is separated from her husband and lives in Southampton — said they had often gone to London’s Highgate Cemetery with friends ‘for a bit of a laugh.’ But they never caused any damage. ‘It was just a silly sort of thing that you do after the pubs shut,’ she said. Mrs Farrant added that her husband’s friends who joined in the late night jaunts were not involved in witchcraft or the occult. She had been called as a defence witness by her 28-year-old husband. They have not lived together for three years.” (The Sun, 21 June 1974).

“All he talked about was his witchcraft. He was very vain.” (Julia Batsford, an ex-girlfriend quoted in the Daily Mail, 26 June 1974).

"Au pair Martine de Sacy has exposed the fantasy world of David Farrant, self-styled high priest of British witchcraft, for whom she posed nude in front of a tomb. Farrant was convicted last week by a jury who heard stories of Satanic rites, vampires and death-worship with girls dancing in a cemetery. Afterwards, 23-year-old Martine said: 'He was a failure as a lover. In fact, I think his trouble was that he was seeking compensation for this. He was always after publicity and he felt that having all these girls around helped. I'm sure the night he took me to the cemetery had less to do with occultism than his craving to be the centre of something.' ... While Martine told her story in Paris, customers at Farrant's local — the Prince of Wales in Highgate, London — chuckled over the man they called 'Birdman.' One regular said: 'He used to come in with a parrot on his shoulder. One night he came in with photos of Martine in the nude. We pinched one, and when she next came in, we told her he was selling them at 5p a time. She went through the ceiling.' ... Farrant called his estranged wife Mary, in his defence. She said: 'We would go in the cemetery with my husband's friends when the pubs had closed. We would frighten ourselves to death and come out again. It was just a silly sort of thing that you do after the pubs close. Nobody was involved in witchcraft or the occult'." (News of the World, 30 June 1974).

“I cannot believe for one moment that he is a serious student of the occult. In fact I believe him to be evil and entirely to be deplored.” (Dennis Wheatley, Daily Express, 26 June 1974).

“I think he’s crazy.” (Canon John Pearce Higgins, Daily Express, 26 June 1974).

“But for the results of his actions, this scruffy little witch could be laughed at. But no one can laugh at a man who admits slitting the throat of a live cat before launching a blood-smeared orgy. Or at a man who has helped reduce at least two women to frightened misery.” (Sue Kentish, News of the World, 23 September 1973).

“The jury were shown folders of pictures of naked girls and corpses, and told about a black-clothed altar in Farrant's flat with a large drawing of a vampire's face. When questioned, Farrant said: 'A corpse was needed to talk to spirits of another world'.” (George Hunter & Richard Wright, Daily Express, 26 June 1974).

“The judge said any interference with a corpse during black magic rituals could properly be regarded as a ‘great scandal and a disgrace to religion, decency and morality’.” (The Sun, 26 June 1974).

“Judge Michael Argyle QC passed sentence after reading medical and mental reports. He said that Farrant — self-styled High Priest of the British Occult Society [sic] — had acted ‘quite regardless of the feelings of ordinary people,’ by messing about at Highgate Cemetery.” (Hornsey Journal, 19 July 1974).

In the summer of 1974, David Robert Donovan Farrant was convicted of malicious damage in Highgate Cemetery by inscribing black magic symbols on the floor of a mausoleum. Offering indignities to remains of the dead via black magic rites in Highgate Cemetery where photographs were taken of a naked female accomplice amidst tombs. Threatening police witnesses in a separate case where his black magic associate was subsequently found guilty of indecent sexual assault on a young boy. His associate, on his current website, describes himself as a “master of the black arts.” Farrant was also convicted of theft of items from Barnet Hospital where the offender worked briefly as a porter upon his release from Brixton Prison where he had been on remand in August 1970. He was further convicted of possession of a handgun and ammunition kept at his address, which also contained a black magic altar beneath a massive mural of a vampiric face of a horned devil that had featured in various newspapers, not least full front page coverage of the Hornsey Journal, 28 September 1973.

David Farrant received a prison sentence of four years and eight months. Two libel suits brought by him resulted in the News of the World (who had quoted his girlfriend's claims that his publicity-seeking antics were compensation for him being a failure as a lover) failing to produce their principal defence witness due to Farrant making sure she remained in her native France, and him losing against the Daily Express (who had accused him of being a black magician and also of being insane) where £20,000 court costs were awarded against him. He had also brought suits against Canon Pierce Higgins and Dennis Wheatley (who sadly died prior to the court case) that failed. In the News of the World action, which he won on a technicality, he was awarded the derisory sum of £50 and ordered to pay costs. The newspaper’s star witness who failed to appear for their defence was Martine de Sacy, his ex-girlfriend who had been identified as the naked female in the infamous “nude rituals trial” at the Old Bailey in June 1974. Farrant persuaded her not to appear, causing the News of the World to lose their star witness.

Farrant's blatant bandwagoneering was a perverse parody aimed at garnering maximum publicity. It fooled nobody, but, unfortunately, his concoted claims gave the press something sensational, ie "naked virgins," to write about. This is what an article in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 15 October 1971, recorded:

"Despite a warning from police that he could be prosecuted, occultist David Farrant said this week he might return to Highgate Cemetery to 'exorcise a vampire' and fight a black magic sect. In the early hours of last Friday Mr Farrant, who is founder of the British Occult Society [sic], performed an exorcism ceremony involving six other young men and two naked girls at a chapel in the cemetery. After the ceremony, one of the girls claimed she saw a shadowy figure which Mr Farrant said was the cemetery's vampire, 'the king of the undead.' ... Armed with a crucifix, a bible, herbs such as camomile, dill and garlic, and holy water taken from St Joseph's Church in Highgate Hill, and accompanied by six other society members, he had climbed over the cemetery wall just before midnight ... etc."

Later in the article one of the alleged naked females is identified as Farrant's girlfriend Martine de Sacy. The newspaper reported: "He denied the ceremony involved sexual practices." Then it quoted Farrant explaining: "That's black magic, which involves getting your rewards before you die — wealth, prosperity, sex. Christian belief is that you get your reward after death. The elaborate things involved in the exorcism were purely symbolic, the most important thing was to have people present who believed in God and the bible. The girls were naked as symbols of purity — they were virgins."

This, at least, is what he had told the Hampstead & Highgate Express in October 1971. Four years later, however, he told readers of New Witchcraft magazine, issue #4, something far removed from the supposed exorcism with naked girls which did not involve sexual practices, as had been fed by him to the Hampstead & Highgate Express. When describing the same ceremony is an unedited article penned at the behest of the magazine's editor from his prison cell, David Farrant now claimed:

"The intrinsic details regarding this part of the ceremony however, must remain secret; suffice it is to say here that the entity (in its now omniscient form) was to be magically induced by the ritual act of blood-letting, then brought to visible appearance through the use of the sex act. ... I disrobed the Priestess and myself and, with the consecrated blood, made the secret sigils of the Deity on her mouth, breast, and all the openings of her body. We then lay in the Pentagram and began love-making, all the time visualizing the Satanic Force so that it could — temporarily — take possession of our bodies."

On his 1975 article, Farrant later recalled (to his friend and collaborator Kevin Demant): "When I had time to spare I wrote a few articles. I sent one to New Witchcraft which was used, and I mean, every single word was used. It was written on old scraps of paper, anything I could get together because obviously, they wouldn't have given me official writing paper to do that, apart from which, it would have been stopped anyway. That was smuggled out and used. I also wrote one for Penthouse, because ... they'd played up the sex angle in court and all the papers were implying ... I thought, well, it's a magazine, they could be half-serious. I mean, bloody hell, it was sold in W H Smiths!"

At this point, Farrant had contrived an infamous persona where necromantic diabolism overshadowed his earlier attempts to mimic Seán Manchester. He adopted a phoney form of witchcraft where he manufactured quasi-satanic stunts for the benefit of the press. These cost him his liberty and he ended up being sentenced to four years and eight months imprisonment in 1974. Though similar publicity stunts ensued upon his release, he would never again catch the attention of the media in the same way as he did prior to and during his notorious trials at the Old Bailey, and slowly returned to the bandwagon he originally boarded in 1970. Once again, David Farrant began to impersonate Bishop Seán Manchester, having publicly eschewed the trappings of manufactured devilry. In May 2011 he published pictures of himself dressed as a Christian priest carrying a bible. Such impersonation, of course, is illegal in the UK.

David Farrant was arrested in December 2002 and charged with the harassment of Seán Manchester, Sarah Manchester, Diana Brewester and Keith Maclean. But the Crown Prosecution Service did not proceed with their case due to Farrant taking great care to stagger the frequency of incidents so that they fell just outside the remit for the minimum number of offences required per month for a case to be successfully prosecuted via the precise charge brought under the section of the Protection from Harassment Act invoked. This much was confirmed by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Had the police merely charged him with sending malicious mail, Farrant would have undoubtedly been found guilty but his punsihment could be no more than a fine. Whereas the actual charges for harassment brought by the police were more serious, and if the CPS had allowed the case to be taken to trial it would have almost certainly resulted in a custodial sentence. Since that time, however, Seán Manchester has chosen to ignore David Farrant.

Diana Brewester sadly died of cancer in December 2003, having been harassed and libelled by Farrant in her latter years. Farrant always sends his malicious pamphlets to his victims. One such item contained Diana Brewester's private address which he published and circulated via the pamphlet. He also published false and disgusting claims about her private sexual life, none of which were true. David Farrant has absolutely no regard for the way he maligns people, steals, lies and causes grief to whomsoever he pleases. Throughout his life he has never shown any remorse for his behaviour and crimes. Indeed, he has always sought to capitalise on them; bragging to the press and regurgitating them in self-published pamphlets crammed with libel and copyright infringement. His entire life has been predicated on the execution of grievances, vendettas and sick pranks. Apart from a couple of weeks as a porter in late 1970, he has lived off state benefits all his life.
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The Highgate Vampire

2011-10-15T22:22:00.002-07:00

The Highgate Vampire: The Infernal World of the Undead Unearthed at London's Highgate Cemetery and Environs

[Hardback]

Seán Manchester (Author)

Publisher: Gothic Press (1991)

This is the definitive account of the UK’s best documented contemporary vampire case written by the man who led the only investigation into the spectral hauntings, nightly visitations, demonic disturbances and blood-lettings at Highgate Cemetery and environs. Spectres rising from tombs, ghostly manifestations in moonlit lanes, nocturnal attacks on people and animals, corpses drained of blood — almost everyone has heard tales of the Highgate Vampire. Only this book offers the full and unexpurgated account written by the man who was at the epicentre of the official investigation into these mysterious and terrifying happenings. Illustrated with case file photographs from the author's own archive plus line drawings inspired by the recorded history, this revised and handsomely updated edition in hardback has already become a collectors' item. Copies are signed by the author. This enlarged edition stands as the last word on the case by the man who investigated it from start to finish.

“Ever since I became aware that Highgate Cemetery was the reputed haunt of a vampire, the investigations and activities of Seán Manchester commanded my attention. I became convinced that, more than anyone else, he knew the full story of the Highgate Vampire.” — Peter Underwood, ghost hunter & author, The Ghost Club Society, London, England

“I am very impressed by the body of scholarship you have created. Seán Manchester is undoubtedly the father of modern vampirological research.” — John Godl, paranormal researcher and writer, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

“Seán Manchester is to be congratulated on this fine piece of research work which I confess to enjoying to the extreme.” — Professor Devendra P Varma, vampirologist & author, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

“Seán Manchester is the most celebrated vampirologist of the twentieth century.” — Shaun Marin, reviewer and sub-editor, Encounters magazine, England

“A most interesting and useful addition to the literature of the subject.” — Reverend Basil Youdell, Literary Editor of Orthodox News, Christ the Saviour, Woolwich, England

“This book will certainly be read in a hundred years time, two hundred years time, three hundred years time — in short, for as long as mankind is interested in the supernatural. It has the most genuine power to grip. Once you have started to read it, it is virtually impossible to put it down.” — Lyndall Mack, Udolpho magazine, Chislehurst, England

Elizabeth and Barbara, two sixteen-year-old students of La Sainte Union Convent, were walking home late at night after visiting friends in Highgate Village in early 1967. Their journey took them down Swains Lane which intersects Highgate Cemetery, a Victorian graveyard in two halves on a steep hill. These intelligent students could not believe their eyes as they passed the cemetery's north gate at the beginning of their downward path between the two graveyards. For there before them, amongst the jutting tombstones and stone vaults, the dead seemed to be emerging from their graves. The two schoolgirls walked in eerie silence until they reached the bottom of the lane. Here they spoke for the first time, having finally found their voice, and confirmed they had both experienced the same terrifying scene. So frightening was their experience that Barbara would not talk about it again. Elizabeth, however, gave the author her account some months later. It was tape-recorded and can be heard in a television film documentary about the Highgate Vampire case. Elizabeth recounted: "We both saw this scene of graves directly in front of us. And the graves were opening up; and the people were rising. We were not conscious of walking down the lane. We were only conscious of this graveyard scene." Demonry later took hold on Elizabeth where her elocuted and very attractive feminine voice would suddenly erupt into a distorted masculine sound, deep and harsh, that issued threats. Her boyfriend, Keith, recalled this phenomenon in an interview he gave for a documentary (True Horror: Vampires distributed by Discovery Channel) which DVD also includes archive recordings of Elizabeth speaking about her vision and the punctures on her neck.

The revised and updated edition was preceded by the first edition in 1985, which was published in paperback by the British Occult Society. Rare new copies can be obtained from Amazon. Its front and rear covers appear below:
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The Vampire Hunter's Handbook

2011-10-15T22:22:00.000-07:00

The Vampire Hunter's Handbook: A Concise Vampirological Guide

[Paperback]

Seán Manchester (Author)

Publisher: Gothic Press (1997)

"This book is not about fictional vampires of the Bram Stoker’s Dracula genre, but real life blood sucking monsters. It should also be pointed out that there is a long tradition of people who hunt down and kill vampires. This book is not for the faint-hearted, or those people who live alone in rambling houses located on deserted moors." — Shaun Marin (Encounters magazine)

"Seán Manchester is, unsurprisingly, very well read in both classical and more recent sources on vampires and vampirism, and cites them with great authority while taking the reader through a brief tour of vampire lore and mythology. This is a book I’d recommend to anybody with an interest in the author or vampires. The parts which deal with vampires are obviously based on years of substantial research and personal experience." — Joe McNally (Fortean Times magazine)

The vampire has been defined down the ages as an accursed body which cannot rest in the kindly earth, but nightly leaves its grave to prey on sleeping men and women through whom they are believed to maintain a semblance of life by sucking thence the warm blood of such victims while they sleep. Sir James Frazer in the second volume of his work The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religions (1934) is in no doubt that vampires are “malicious ghosts who issue from their graves to suck the blood of the living, and stringent measures are deemed necessary to hinder or arrest this horrible proceeding.”

They are, of course, demonic. In certain circumstances (though these are few and far between) those who expire from the parasitic undead's visitations and quaffing of their life-blood will themselves be at risk of becoming undead in their turn. This does not occur where the person is in a state of grace; where any mortal sin that stains their soul has been absolved. And by no means are the great majority of victims destined to return as undead. It would seem that those who become undead in this way are fewer than might be imagined. This nevertheless remains an enigma where probable candidates are those who have led a life of more than ordinary immorality and unbridled wickedness; where the individual has possessed a surfeit of selfish passions, evil ambitions and cruelty. Such undead, however, are thought to be those who have delighted in blood and devoted themselves during their life to the practice of diabolism and the black arts. Thus an undead is more likely to result from exceedingly base and cruel actions; especially where devil worship and devotion to the black arts has occurred.

The supernatural agency is demonic and, whilst human beings cannot actually transform into demons themselves, they may be possessed by them, and thus appear transformed. In the case of contamination followed by expiry of a candidate there exists the possibility that their malevolence sets in action forces which might prove powerful for terror and destruction even beyond the grave. It is hardly to be supposed that such persons would rest undisturbed while it is less difficult to contemplate the existence of this hideous life in death where the demonic is extant and seemingly manifests itself as a corporeal form. The smallest drop of blood can be employed by a demonic entity, enabling the wraith to form in a tangible manner. Such revenants are attracted to blood which allows them to effect their purpose. The ancient Israelites would not eat the blood of any flesh at all, because the life of the flesh is in the blood. The Hebrew word that translates as “life” in Deuteronomy 12: 23 (“Only be sure not to eat the blood, for the blood is the life”) also signifies “soul.”

The undead partakes of the dark nature and mysterious qualities of both revenant and demon. The exorcist must always be mindful of these alarming characteristics - not least the undead's terrible blood lust — and must never go unprotected when putting himself at risk during operative field work. Manifestation via the blood is the undead’s means of metamorphosis into a form often indistiguishable from a corpse. Since the undead do not exist in time — they dwell in what is described as "anti-time" - they will cast no shadow, nor will their reflection be seen in a mirror or water’s surface. The crucifix symbol itself is utterly abhorred by them, and indeed all forms of evil. The object and what it is made of does not possess any power, yet it is so strongly symbolic of the triumph of good over evil that it alone repels evil and whatever is an emissary of evil. However, when employed by a person the intent and faith of the person employing it is paramount. This might seem like a paradox. Christian items and holy places utterly repel evil people who oftentimes delight in their sacrilege. Likewise supernatural evil shuns these holy items.

It is indubitably unwise for these sacred symbols to be adopted as mere fashion accesories. Similarly, of course, it is unwise in the extreme for diabolical symbols to be adopted and worn. So the power of the crucifix exists, but will be magnified one thousandfold when supported by faith. Exorcism does not "kill" the demonic agent. It rids our sphere or dimension of the supernatural predatory wraith. The corporeal host once exorcised obviously returns to its true state and is no longer plagued by the apparent supernatural ability to manifest as though it were living.

“Whether we are justified in supposing that cases of vampirism are less frequent today than in past centuries, I am far from certain. But one thing is plain — not that they do not occur, but that they are carefully hushed up and stifled.” — Montague Summers (The Vampire in Europe, 1929).

BBC "24 Hours" Expurgated Footage

2011-10-15T21:55:00.001-07:00

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01WBBwNa4CA

Seán Manchester - Cimitero di Highgate (Storia di un Vampiro)

www.youtube.com

An alarmingly abridged version of BBC television's 24 Hours programme has been uploaded onto YouTube by David Farrant. It reveals the bandwagoneer contradicting virtually everything he nowadays claims about his arrest at Highgate Cemetery while he was prowling amongst the tombs on the night of 17 August 1970 and exposes him as a revisionist at best and a liar at worst, but such is his addiction to publicity that anything which includes him is apparently suitable for dissemination. The bulk of the original programme focussed, of course, on Seán Manchester's investigation into the mysterious case of the Highgate Vampire at its inception. Farrant obviously does not want anyone seeing this material and has therefore deleted all the footage where Seán Manchester features and indeed all reference to the British Occult Society, an organisation to which Farrant owed absolutely no connection whatsoever despite his false claim to the contrary in the years which followed. Some of the material showing Seán Manchester deleted by Farrant appears above in the Italian language version of a Discovery Channel programme's inclusion of the original 1970 television footage. David Farrant's highly selective version of the programme appears below.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VcUq-ohXVY
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David Farrant - BBC "24 Hours" Oct 1970 (expurgated)

www.youtube.com
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The Last Highgate Vampire Interview

2011-02-27T06:33:00.000-08:00

Seán Manchester has given his final interview on the Highgate Vampire case. He spoke for over two hours as three cameras recorded the historic occasion for posterity on the forty-first anniversary of the time he first brought to public attention the existence of a contagion at Highgate Cemetery. The Hampstead & Highgate Express, 27 February 1970, filled its front page with his startling revelations, albeit misquoting him and misrepresenting another exorcist, Reverend Christopher Neil-Smith, in their article written by editor Gerald Isaaman. Since then Seán Manchester has contributed to literally hundreds of interviews and television documentaries about his mysterious investigations spanning a period of no less than thirteen years. Now he feels that everything there is to say about the case has been said. He finds himself answering the same questions he was being asked four decades ago, and while Seán Manchester fully understands the enduring fascination the case holds (he wrote his book about his experiences to satisfy this need) the time has now come to draw a line under the topic. He believes enough is enough and wants no longer to talk about it.

In an opening chapter of The Highgate Vampire back in the previous century he wrote:

“The reality I once experienced exists no longer and although its memories are the most potent that I possess, they now seem so far away ─ possibly because next to the hunger to experience a thing, there is no stronger hunger than to forget.”

Vampire enthusiast Kev Demant jumped the gun by two decades with his "Last Highgate Vampire Interview" in Udolpho magazine in 1992. He conducted his interview with Seán Manchester, who was gradually persuaded and hesitatingly consented, in writing. Seán Manchester's schedule prevented a face to face interview, which obliged Demant to ask questions on the magazine editor’s behalf via correspondence and the bishop answering them through the same medium.

“This is certainly a strange way of conducting an interview,” Demant wrote on 20 February 1992. “Jennie sets the questions, you do all the hard work and I get my name to the results! … I hope I can do you justice.” A week later, having received Bishop Seán Manchester's answers, he replied: “You have not balked at the more ‘difficult’ questions.”

When he saw Jennie Gray’s expurgated outcome in print, however, Kev Demant was somewhat less enthusiastic when he wrote on 27 February 1992:

“To be honest, I don’t know what to feel about the article, a somewhat sanitised version of the material submitted. Many of your responses have been truncated while my own contribution has been edited, certain sentences have been rewritten (badly in my opinion and without my consent) and ultimately censored. … I wonder what all these aesthetes, decadents, intellectuals and yuppies who constitute the readership are going to make of it all!”

It did not take long to discover what they made of it all. Within a month all six hundred copies sold out. Publishing editor Jennie Gray ordered an unprecedented extra hundred copies. Her now defunct specialist magazine had reached its peak at this point. On December 14th, Kev Demant wrote to Seán Manchester:

“Somehow I think it is your prestigious interview which had much to do with the favourable response.”

The final interview would actually take place many years later in the following century. Seán Manchester is introduced in the television documentary as "Britain's top exorcist." It can be viewed at 8.00pm Pacific time / 11.00pm Eastern Time on The Conspiracy Show (Vision TV, Canada) on 1 April 20011. Also included in the programme are Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Joe Nickell and Neil Arnold.
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He will still continue to make broadcast contributions where it is in the public interest or where an opportunity to address an injustice arises. He will not, however, be willing to contribute any further media interviews about the Highgate Vampire case he investigated and resolved many years ago.

Mass Hunt for the Highgate Vampire

2009-03-13T02:36:00.000-07:00

The night of Friday 13 March 1970 witnessed in England the largest vampire hunt of the twentieth century by members of the public. It bordered on hysteria and led to local police having their leave cancelled to contain it. Just how many were involved would be difficult to estimate, but certainly hundreds of people. In the preceding weeks, the Hampstead & Highgate Express (a local newspaper) told of unearthly goings-on at Highgate Cemetery. Its February 27th issue ran the headline "Does A Wampyr Walk in Highgate?" The front-page headline of the following fateful week's edition told of the matter being discussed on television that very evening by Seán Manchester who recounts the event in his bestselling book The Highgate Vampire:

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"... attempts to shoot the interview by the north gate were abandoned and the actual filming took place outside the main gate further down Swains Lane. Some independent witnessed, including several children who had seen a ghostly manifestation, were also interviewed for the programme. One person said: ' Yes, I did feel it was evil because the last time I actually saw its face and it looked like it had been dead for a long time.' Another witness commented: 'It seemed to float along the ground.' One of those interviewed who claimed to have seen the vampire was a certain David Farrant, a pathetic figure whose infatuation with the Highgate haunting was to earn him an undeserved notoriety and send him on a helter-skelter into the abyss of the dark occult. The programme was transmitted at 6.00pm on Friday 13 March 1970: the eve of the proposed vampire hunt. Eamonn Andrews introduced the viewing audience to a report on the Highgate Vampire. Within two hours Highgate was the scene of utter pandemonium as crowds of onlookers flocked to Swains Lane. The number multiplied as the evening progressed. Police on foot and in cars were unable to control the swarming mass of those who had arrived to witness the discovery of a modern-day vampire infestation in their midst. And its eradication! ... While chaos and frenzy continued to erupt in Swains Lane, a group of hand-picked researchers led by myself, constituting the official vampire hunt, made their way to the catacombs in the inky darkness of the cemetery ..." ― Seán Manchester (The Highgate Vampire, pages 76-77).
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Seán Manchester

2009-01-17T02:32:00.000-08:00

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Seán Manchester was born near Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, England, toward the end of a nightmare that reduced much of Europe to a wasteland. An only child, he played in the avenues of sombre forest trees in Lord Byron’s gloomy abode, Newstead Abbey Park, where the fading twilight coupled with the moan in leafy woods to herald the last tangible breath of the Romantic Movement. The influence of his parents is touched upon in his memoir: "My father introduced me to Edgar Allan Poe, and my mother introduced me to St Teresa of Avila and, later on, to St Thérèse of Lisieux."

His beloved mother was born at the end of the Great War and it is via this side of the family that the Byron connection is inherited. The sanctuary of Newstead was forsaken by his parents for Canada when he was still an infant, but they soon returned to the familiar landscape and trees through which could be glimpsed a mist-laden semi-ruin of a rich and rare mixed Gothic.

His memoir recounts:

"My mother had much older memories [than Newstead]. When she was very young and her parents had moved from Derbyshire to an idyllic setting at Wollaton, a brook ran along the bottom of the country lane where their house was situated. She often spoke about her first home. Newstead, in many ways, would magnify its joys and aspects ― adding acres of woodland and more besides. After the Newstead property and its acreage were sold in the early 1960s, my grandparents lived out their remaining days in a house built for them on land purchased at Wollatan Park. The haunting of their home by a cold presence that apparently manifested as a spectre, allegedly causing my grandmother to fall down the rockery one evening, precipitated this final move. She lay undiscovered for some hours before her husband returned. Presentiments of doom and disaster seemed to intrude her everyday existence thereafter and she never properly recovered. Newstead was to become for me a symbol of all that belonged to the old world that was already irrevocably, moment by moment, slipping away. More than anything my mother wanted me to find the fulfilment that she had been denied. This is reflected in the lines I would write in a novel published some eight years after her death. 'The world we once inhabited has gone. … This is your time and your world.' So tells Mina Harker to her son, Quincey, in Carmel, my sequel to Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece. Yet it could have been my own mother speaking. Her world was fast disappearing as two catastrophic wars heralded the quick demise of a cultural identity and spiritual destiny that had lasted two millennia."

Already we begin to discover what set him on a road apart from others and how his interest in the supernatural was sparked. The incident at Newstead with its "presentiments of doom" involved a spectre about which he writes in Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (1992) and The Highgate Vampire (1991).

London also beckoned and here he would arrive to conclude his studies and live for much of his life. Author, lecturer and researcher, Seán Manchester also inherited his parents’ love of music and from early on in his life performed on reed and keyboard instruments. Later he turned to composing. He would bemoan the passing of the places, people and values of yesterday and indicate partly why he was attracted to the priesthood:

"All those wonderful qualities that made Great Britain attractive to the rest of the world would now seem to have been sacrificed to meet what is invariably the lowest common denominator. This constant lowering of standards to appease liberal modernists leaves a radical traditionalist like myself in the wilderness on most matters. Though I am not a voice entirely unheard. Not yet. ... My calling to the priesthood and episcopacy alienated a small number of so-called 'admirers' who reacted with hostility, even malice; but for me it was unavoidable in the morally bankrupt times I found myself. Degenerate behaviour and its attendant drug dependency, still in its infancy in the 1960s, has now become endemic throughout all strata of society. Absent is any political or even mainstream church leadership with the courage to address this continuing slide by returning to traditional spiritual values."

It was in 1973 that he entered the minor order of exorcist, having been tonsured, and already holding the orders of porter and reader. Later in 1973, he entered the highest of the minor orders, that of the acolyte. This was also the year when he inaugurated the founding of Ordo Sancti Graal on Good Friday 13th April:

"On Good Friday 1973, along with eleven others, I founded Ordo Sancti Graal on the summit of Parliament Hill, at London’s Hampstead Heath. After three months of spontaneous organisation, we developed into a dispersed Order of disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. By this point I was in minor orders with Ecclesia Vetusta Catholica, an autocephalous branch of the Body of Christ that seceded from the Roman Catholic Church on 15 October 1724 with the consecration of Cornelius Steehoven as the Archbishop of Utrecht. The succession reached these shores on 8 April 1908 with the consecration of Arnold Harris Mathew as the Regionary Old Catholic Bishop for Great Britain and Ireland. Seventeen years [after the founding of Ordo Sancti Graal], I would take holy orders within Ecclesia Vetusta Catholica. In the interim ― notwithstanding pilgrimages, processions, preaching, healing and exorcisms ― I embarked on a number of quests."

On taking holy orders he inherited ecumenical lines of apostolic succession in the Old Catholic, Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, plus other mainstream denominations. The following year he was elevated to the episcopate on the feast of St Francis of Assisi, 4 October 1991, whereupon he assumed primacy of the autocephalous jurisdiction Ecclesia Apostolica Jesu Christi. On the feast of the Precious Blood, 1 July 1993, he was enthroned as the Bishop of Glastonbury, and on the same feast day nine years later he founded the Sacerdotal Society of the Precious Blood, having been elected presiding bishop for the British Old Catholic Church, an umbrella movement for traditional Old Catholic groups based in the United Kingdom.

He would remark:

"When the precious mitre was placed upon my head on the feast of St Francis of Assisi in 1991, I already understood that a crown of thorns was contained within."

His personal view of the supernatural would be recounted as follows:

"Sightings of people who are mistaken for stray ghosts are probably few and far between because the circumstances that make such apparent hauntings possible seem to require precision not easily comprehensible to us. This does not rule out the genuinely supernatural manifestation of either angelic or demonic origin, as my late colleague Professor Devendra Prasad Varma would have been quick to point out ― and as I would have been equally quick to agree."

Seán Manchester's television debut was on 13 March 1970 on a programme about vampires in connection with Highgate Cemetery. This remains the topic he is most widely associated with by successive generations depite his obvious weariness in repeating old cases. He subsequently made hundreds of radio and television transmissions, having contributed to innumerable documentaries (some of which are available on DVD). He is consulted on matters of demonolatry and exorcism by clergy and scholars, as well as by the broadcast media. In recent times he has appeared repeatedly on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel and various UK television channels. Stock footage of him regularly crops up in film documentaries about demons and vampires. He is regarded by many as the foremost authority.

His predecessor, connected to him via his close colleague Peter Underwood (author and president of the Ghost Club Society, who met and knew Montague Summers personally) would have been proud.

Seán Manchester's published works include:

From Satan To Christ: Secrets of Witchcraft and Satanism Revealed in a Story of Salvation (1988); The Highgate Vampire: The Infernal World of the Undead Unearthed at London’s Highgate Cemetery (1985, 1991); Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Life of Lady Caroline Lamb (1992); The Grail Church: Its Ancient Tradition and Renewed Flowering (1995); The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook: A Concise Vampirological Guide (1997); Carmel: A Vampire Tale (2000); Stray Ghosts: A Memoir of Shades (2003); Confronting the Devil: At the Periphery and Beyond the Highgate Vampire (2007).

Source:

Stray Ghosts (2003)

International Authors' & Writers' Who's Who (2002)

Montague Summers

2009-01-16T01:11:00.000-08:00

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Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 - 10 August 1948) was a fascinating character (the youngest of the seven children of Augustus William Summers, an affluent banker and justice of the peace in Clifton, Bristol) without whom vampire research would be very much the poorer.

Throughout his life he was described by acquaintances as kind, courteous, generous and outrageously witty; but those who knew him well sensed an underlying discomfort and mystery. In appearance he was plump, round cheeked and generally smiling. His dress resembled that of an eighteenth century cleric, with a few added flourishes such as a silver-topped cane depicting Leda being ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan. He wore sweeping black capes crowned by a curious hairstyle of his own devising which led many to assume he wore a wig. His voice was high pitched, comical and often in complete contrast to the macabre tales he was in the habit of recounting. Throughout his life he astonished people with his knowledge of esoteric and unsettling occult lore. Many people later described him as the most extraordinary person they had ever known. His successor in the annals of professional vampirology, and founder of the Vampire Research Society, was barely an infant when Summers died.

Curiously, Seán Manchester's (whose initials are the same as Montague Summers’ initials reversed) is an outspoken opponent of the sexual preference attributed to Summers. Like Summers, however, he began in the Church of England and converted to Roman Catholicism before entering holy orders in the Old Catholic Church - as, of course, did Summers. Both were ordained within the context of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and, as Old Catholic Bishops, led autocephalous jurisdictions that held authority in Great Britain. Summers entered the Old Catholic priesthood in 1913 and, towards the end of his life, was elevated to the episcopate by Hugh George de Willmott Newman, Archbishop of Glastonbury - an office and See currently held by Seán Manchester. Summers was episcopally consecrated for the Order of Corporate Reunion. Summers worked for several years as an English and Latin teacher at various schools including Brockley County School in S E London, before adopting writing as his full-time employment. He was interested in the theater of the seventeenth century, particularly that of the English Restoration, and edited the plays of Aphra Behn, John Dryden, William Congreve, among others. He was one of the founder members of The Phoenix, a society that performed those neglected works, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.

Summers joined the growing ranks of English men of letters interested in medievalism, Catholicism, and the occult. In 1909 he converted to Roman Catholicism and shortly thereafter began to style himself "Reverend" which his biographer Father Brocard Sewell asserts, as an ordained deacon within the Church of England in 1908, was correct and proper for him to use.

Summers worked for several years as an English and Latin teacher at various schools including Brockley County School in S E London, before adopting writing as his full-time employment. He was interested in the theatre of the seventeenth century, particularly that of the English Restoration, and edited the plays of Aphra Behn, John Dryden, William Congreve, among others. He was one of the founder members of The Phoenix, a society that performed those neglected works, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916.

Despite his cherubic demeanour and affability some people found Montague Summers sinister, a view he delighted in encouraging. Although in everyday life he was kind and considerate, when engaged in academic debate Summers was furiously intolerant. There were also rumours that in his youth Summers had dabbled in the occult. Oddly enough, the same rumours persist about Seán Manchester. If true in either case, the only effect seems to have been to turn both completely against such meddling. He may have been fascinated, even obsessed by witches, vampires and the like but the tone of Summers’ writings is consistently hostile towards them. Ditto goes for Manchester who is believed to have infiltrated occult groups in order to later expose their depraved goings-on. Summers was a contemporary of the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley with whom he was acquainted. Likewise, Seán Manchester was a contemporary of a number of infamous Crowley devotees of a later generation whom he met and interviewed.

Montague Summers grew up in a wealthy family living in Clifton, near Bristol. Religion always played a large part in his life. He was raised as an evangelical Anglican, but his love of ceremonial and sacraments drew him to Anglo-Catholicism. After graduating in Theology at Oxford he took the first steps towards holy orders at Lichfield Theological College and entered his apprenticeship as a curate in the diocese of Bitton near Bristol. A year or so later he converted to Roman Catholicism. He had been made a deacon within the Church of England in 1908, and was diaconated again within the Roman Catholic Church, but it was not until he embraced the Old Catholic Church that he was ordained into the priesthood. He celebrated Mass publicly when travelling abroad, but at home in England he only performed this sacrament in private. This was probably due to the fact that he was ordained into the priesthood outside the regular procedures of the Church. Old Catholic holy orders, albeit valid, are irregular in the eyes of Rome and Canterbury.

None of his close friends doubted the sincerity of his religious faith. Dame Sybil Thorndike wrote of him: “I think that because of his profound belief in the tenets of orthodox Catholic Christianity he was able to be in a way almost frivolous in his approach to certain macabre heterodoxies. His humour, his ‘wicked humour’ as some people called it, was most refreshing, so different from the tiresome sentimentalism of so many convinced believers.”

For a living, Summers was able to draw on a modest legacy from his father, supplemented by spells of teaching at various schools, including Hertford Grammar, the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Holborn, and Brockley School in south London where he was senior English and Classics Master. He described teaching as: “One of the most difficult and depressing of trades, and so in some measure it must have been even well-nigh three hundred years ago when boys were not nearly so stupid as they are today.” In practice though, he was both entertaining and effective as a teacher once he had overcome initial problems with discipline, and was popular with both pupils and colleagues despite making it plain his real interests lay elsewhere.

From 1926, when he was in his mid-forties, Summers' writings and editing earned him the freedom to pursue full time his many enthusiasms and love of travel, particularly in Italy. The bulk of his activity then was related to English Restoration drama of the seventeenth century. Beginning in 1914 with the Shakespeare Head Press, Summers had edited a large number of Restoration plays for various publishers, accompanied by lengthy critical introductions that were highly praised in their own right, and did much to rescue that period of literature from oblivion.

Not content with editing and introducing these plays, Summers helped in 1919 to found the Phoenix Society whose aim was to present them on stage in London. The venture was an immediate success and Summers threw himself wholeheartedly and popularly into all aspects of the productions, which were staged at various theatres. This brought him a measure of fame in London society and invitations to the most select salons, which he dazzled with his wit and erudition. By 1926 he was recognized as the greatest living authority on Restoration drama. Some ten years later he crystallized his knowledge in The Restoration Theatre and The Playhouse of Pepys which examined almost every possible aspect of the London stage between 1660 and 1710.

Summers' involvement with the theatre presents a curious parallel with his near contemporary Bram Stoker, who for most of his working life was business manager to Sir Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London. There is even a suggestion of some jealousy in the grudging praise Summers gives Bram Stoker's Dracula, leading to his conclusion that the novel's success owed more to Stoker’s choice of subject than any authorial skill. One cannot fail to suspect that Summers felt he might have written the definitive vampire novel himself, only better. Notwithstanding this conjecture, Stoker’s Gothic masterpiece remains a work of sheer genius. It was left, almost inevitably, for Seán Manchester to tie up the lose ends left flapping about at Dracula’s conclusion in a sequel titled Carmel. The thought must have surely occurred to Summers, but it was to be Summers’ own successor who executed the deed.

Summers’ fame as an expert on the occult began the publication of his History of Witchcraft and Demonology followed by other studies of witches, vampires and werewolves. Summers wrote hagiography (on Saint Catherine of Siena) and lives of writers such as Jane Austen before turning to the occult, for which he will always be best remembered. In 1928 he published the first English translation of Heinrich Kramer's and James Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum, a fifteenth century Latin text on the hunting of witches. This work followed his History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and The Geography of Witchcraft (1928). He then turned to vampires, producing The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929), and later to werewolves with The Werewolf (1933). Summers's work on the occult is known for his old-fashioned writing style, his display of erudition, and his apparent belief in the reality of the subjects he treats. Of lasting value were his seminal works on Gothic literature: The Gothic Quest: a History of the Gothic Novel (1938), A Gothic Bibliography (1940) and his collection of Gothic Horror stories in The Supernatural Omnibus (1931) and Victorian Ghost Stories (1936). Summers also edited an incomplete edition of two of the seven obscure Gothic novels, known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, mentioned by Jane Austen in her Gothic parody Northanger Abbey. Summers was instrumental in rediscovering these lost books, which some had supposed were an invention of Jane Austen herself.

Summers cultivated his reputation for eccentricity. The Times of London wrote he was "in every way a 'character' and in some sort a throwback to the Middle Ages." His biographer, Brocard Sewell, paints the following portrait of Summers:

"During the year 1927, the striking and somber figure of the Reverend Montague Sommers in black soutane and cloak, with buckled shoes - a la Louis Quatorze - and shovel hat could often have been seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British Museum, carrying a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label, showing in blood-red capitals, the legend 'VAMPIRES'."

While his contemporary Aleister Crowley adopted the persona of a modern-day witch, Summers played the part of the learned Catholic witch-hunter. His introduction to the Malleus Maleficarum declares it an admirable and correct account of witchcraft and of the methods necessary to combat it. In the introduction to his book on The History of Witchcraft and Demonology he writes:

"In the following pages I have endeavored to show the witch as she really was – an evil liver: a social pest and parasite: the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed: an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes: a member of a powerful secret organization inimical to Church and State: a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition: a charlatan and a quack sometimes: a bawd: an abortionist: the dark counselor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants: a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age".

Much of Summers’ life remains in obscurity, many of his personal papers have been lost; yet he left an autobiography, The Galanty Show, which was published posthumously in 1980.

In his introduction to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto Summers articulated the appeal of Gothic novels, and perhaps also the appeal of all the dark mysteries that fascinated him:

“There is in the Romantic revival a certain disquietude and a certain aspiration. It is this disquietude with earth and aspiration for heaven which inform the greatest Romance of all, Mysticism, the Romance of the Saints. The Classical writer set down fixed rules and precisely determined his boundaries. The Romantic spirit reaches out beyond these with an indefinite but very real longing to new and dimly guessed spheres of beauty. The Romantic writer fell in love with the Middle Ages, the vague years of long ago, the days of chivalry and strange adventure. He imagined and elaborated a mediaevalism for himself, he created a fresh world, a world which never was and never could have been, a domain which fancy built and fancy ruled. And in this land there will be mystery, because where there is mystery beauty may always lie hid. There will be wonder, because wonder always lurks where there is the unknown. And it is this longing for beauty intermingling with wonder and mystery that will express itself, perhaps exquisitely and passionately in the twilight moods of the romantic poets, perhaps a little crudely and even a little vulgarly in tales of horror and blood.”

Montague Summers died of a heart attack in 1948 and his mantle awaited the arrival in London of Seán Manchester who would there establish himself as the most celebrated vampirologist of the latter-half of the twentieth century; just as Summers had established himself as the most celebrated vampirologist of the first half of that century. When Sandy Roberston launched The Summers Project in 1986 to raise money for a tombstone to be laid on Summers’ unmarked grave in Richmond Cemetery, known only as plot 10818, it was naturally to Seán Manchester that he turned for support. The simple stone, bearing the legend “Tell me strange things,” was erected on 26 November 1988. Summers invariably opened his conversation with those words when people visited him. He yearned to hear strange things.

In 1991 an updated and enlarged hardcover edition of Seán Manchester’s best selling The Highgate Vampire was specially dedicated to the memory of Montague Summers. This fitting tribute to that former vampirologist still remains in print. Two years after his death, Summers’ longstanding friend, Hector Stuart-Forbes, joined him in the then unmarked plot at Richmond.

Source:

Vampire Research Society

The Vampire: His Kith & Kin

2009-01-15T01:47:00.000-08:00

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With the following words, Montague Summers' introduced his celebrated book The Vampire: His Kith & Kin (1928). It was quickly followed by his equally informative The Vampire in Europe (1929). No self-respecting vampirologist can be without either of these fascinating works.

In all the darkest pages of the malign supernatural there is no more terrible tradition than that of the Vampire, a pariah even among demons. Foul are his ravages; gruesome and seemingly barbaric are the ancient and approved methods by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pest. Even to-day in certain quarters of the world, in remoter districts of Europe itself, Transylvania, Slavonia, the isles and mountains of Greece, the peasant will take the law into his own bands and utterly destroy the carrion who--as it is yet firmly believed--at night will issue from his unhallowed grave to spread the infection of vampirism throughout the countryside. Assyria knew the vampire long ago, and he lurked amid the primaeval forests of Mexico before Cortes came. He is feared by the Chinese, by the Indian, and the Malay alike; whilst Arabian story tells us again and again of the ghouls who haunt ill-omened sepulchres and lonely cross-ways to attack and devour the unhappy traveller.

The tradition is world wide and of dateless antiquity. Travellers and various writers upon several countries have dealt with these dark and perplexing problems, sometimes cursorily, less frequently with scholarship and perception, but in every case the discussion of the vampire has occupied a few paragraphs, a page or two, or at most a chapter of an extensive and divaricating study, where other circumstances and other legends claimed at least an equal if not a more important and considerable place in the narrative. It maybe argued, indeed, that the writers upon Greece have paid especial attention to this tradition, and that the vampire figures prominently in their works. This is true, but on the other band the treatise of Leone Allacci, De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus, 1645, is of considerable rarity, nor are even such volumes as Father François Richard's Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable a Sant-Erini, 1657, the Voyage au Levant (1705) of Paul Lucas, and Tournefort's Relation d'un Voyage du Levant (1717), although perhaps not altogether uncommon and certainly fairly well known by repute, generally to be met with in every library. The study of the Modern Greek Vampire in Mr. J. G. Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion has, of course, taken its place as a classic, but save incidentally and in passing Mr. Lawson does not touch upon the tradition in other countries and at other times, for this lies outside his purview.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, and even more particularly during the first half of the eighteenth century when in Hungary, Moravia, and Galicia, there seemed to be a veritable epidemic of vampirism. the report of which was bruited far and wide engaging the attention of curia and university, ecclesiastic and philosopher, scholar and man of letters, journalist and virtuoso in all lands, there appeared a large number of academic theses and tractates, the majority of which had been prelected at Leipzig, and these formally discussed and debated the question in well-nigh all its aspects, dividing, sub-dividing, inquiring, ratiocinating upon the most approved scholastic lines. Thus we have the monographs of such professors as Philip Rohr, whose Dissertatio Historico-Philosophica De Masticatione Mortuorum was delivered at Leipzig on 16 August, 1679, and issued the same year from the press of Michael Vogt; the Dissertatio de Uampyris Seruiensibus of Zopfius and van Dalen, printed at Duisburg in 1733; and the De absolutione mortuorum excommunicatorum of Heineccius, published at Helmstad in 1709. Of especial value are Michael Ranft's De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis Liber, Leipzig, 1728, and the Dissertatio de Cadaueribus Sanguisugis, Jena, 1732, of John Christian Stock. These dissertations, however, are extremely scarce and hardly to be found, whilst even so encyclopaedic a bibliography as Caillet does not include either Philip Rohr, Michael Ranft, or Stock, all of whom should therein assuredly have found a place. In this connexion must not be omitted the De Miraculis Mortuorum, Leipzig, Kirchner, 1670, and second edition, Weidmann, 1687, a treatise by Christian Frederic Garmann, a noted physician, who was born at Mersebourg about 1640 and who practised with great repute at Chemnitz. Garmann discusses many curious details and continued to amass so vast a collection of notes that after his death there was published in 1709 at Dresden by Zimmerman a very much enlarged edition of his work, "exornatum, diu desideratum et expetitum, beato autoris obitu interueniente."

During the eighteenth century the tradition of the Vampire was dealt with by two famous authors, of whom both concentrated upon this as their main theme, that is to say by Dom Augustin Calmet, O.S.B., in his Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges, des Démons et des Esprits et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie, e de Silésie, Paris, 1740, and by Gioseppe Davanzati, Archbishop of Trani and Patriarch of Alexandria, in his Dissertazione sopra I Vampire, Naples, 1774. As I have very fully considered both these important works they require no more than a bare mention here.

Of a later date we find in French a few books such as the Histoire des Vampires (1820) of the enormously prolific Collin de Plancy, the Spectriana (1817) and Les ombres sanglantes (1820) of J. P. R. Cuisin, and Gabrielle de Paban's Histoire des Fantômes et des Demons (1819) and Démoniana (1820), but these with many more of that class and epoch, although they are sometimes written not without elegance and industry and one may here and there meet with a curious anecdote or local legend, will not, I think, long engage the consideration and regard of the more serious student.

In English there is a little book entitled Vampires and Vampirism by Mr. Dudley Wright, which was first published in 1914; second edition (with additional matter), 1924. It may, of course, be said that this is not intended to be more than a popular and trifling collection and that one must not look for accuracy and research from the author of Roman Catholicism and Freemasonry.

It may, I think, not unfairly be claimed that the present work is the first serious study in English of the Vampire, and kindred traditions from a general, as well as from a theological and philosophical point of view. I have already pointed out that it were impossible to better such a chapter as Mr. J. C. Lawson has given us in his Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, a book to which as also to Bernhard Schmidt's Das Volksleben der Neugriechen und das Hellenische Alterthum, I am greatly indebted. But any wider survey of the vampire tradition will soon be found on demand an examination of legend, customs, and history which extend far beyond Greece, although in such an inquiry the beliefs and practice of modern Greece must necessarily assume a prominent and most material significance.

In the present work I have endeavoured to set forth what might be termed "the philosophy of vampirism," and however ghastly and macabre they may appear I have felt that here one must not tamely shrink from a careful and detailed consideration of the many cognate passions and congruous circumstances which - there can be no reasonable doubt - have throughout the ages played no impertinent and no trivial but a very vital and very memorable part in consolidating the vampire legend, and in perpetuating the vampire tradition among the darker and more secret mysteries of belief that prevail in the heart of man.

In many countries there is thought to be a close connexion between the vampire and the werewolf, and I would remark that I have touched upon this but lightly as I am devoting a separate study to the werewolf and lycanthropy.

The Vampire, his Kith and Kin will be shortly followed by The Vampire in Europe, in which work I have collected and treat of numerous instances of vampirism old and new, concretely illustrating the prevalence and phases of the tradition in England and Ireland, in ancient Greece and Rome as well as in modern Greece, in Hungary and Bohemia, in Jugo-Slavia, Russia, and many other lands. In this volume will be found related in detail such famous cases as that of Arnold Paul, Stanoska Sovitzo, Millo the Hungarian, the vampires of Temeswar, Kisilova, Buckingham, Berwick, Melrose Abbey, Croglin Grange, and many more.

Source:

Montague Summers

The Vampire: His Kith & Kin (1928)

The case of Petre Toma

2009-01-14T01:59:00.000-08:00

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The authorities in Craiova, south-west Romania, opened an investigation against six people alleged to have impaled the body of a villager who, according to them "had transformed himself into vampire" and "sucked blood from them during the night."

The body of Petre Toma had been unearthed six weeks later by his brother-in-law in the presence of several other members of the family, including his widow and her grand-daughter. According to several testimonies, they made an incision in the chest of Toma to extract his heart before burning it. One report states that, in accordance with a local custom to protect against vampires, they dissolved the ashes in water and drank it.

An autopsy carried out by the authorities in Craiova confirmed that "the heart was indeed taken."

The six people explained that after the death of Toma they had felt "weakened," as if they did not have "any more blood."

"One night I saw it in my room, and in the morning I could not arise; so much was I weakened", said the grand-daughter of Toma, Mirela Marinescu. According to her, as soon as the exorcism ritual was performed the dead body "did not come any more to haunt" its family.

The Sunday Times reported that several villagers affirmed that this exorcism ritual was known and practiced for a long time in the area, and that it each time had appeared "effective against vampires."

“For centuries we have had to protect ourselves against these creatures by finding the graves of the undead and risking our lives by ripping out their hearts,” said sixty-eight-year-old Tita Musca, a local farmer.

The village of the vampire slayers has become the focus of a police investigation that has highlighted not only local fears of the undead but a startling willingness to act on them.

The saga began when Petre Toma, seventy-six, was buried at new year. His nephew’s family fell ill with an unexplained sickness and a few days later a witness claimed to have seen Toma leaving their house before sunrise as a flock of crows flew portentously overhead.

“He sucked the life from us so that he could live,” said Mirela Marinescu. “We were all dying, my husband and my child, and we all saw him come to us in the same dream.”

Armed with hammers and chisels and fortified with home-made schnapps, four men led by Gheorghe Marinescu, the supposed vampire’s brother-in-law, set out for the cemetery.

“When we lifted the coffin lid his arms were not on his chest as we had left them but at his sides,” said Marinescu. “His head was turned to the side and his lips were stained with dried blood.”

After the corpse’s chest had been opened with a wooden stake the heart was removed. “It was full of fresh blood,” said Marinescu. “His body relaxed and we heard him sigh.”

The heart was burnt over the embers of a fire and the ashes stirred into a bottle of water from the village well to make a potion. The vampire’s “victims” recovered after drinking it but Toma’s daughter called the police.

Investigators soon discovered evidence of up to twenty vampire slayings in the past few years. At the regional police station the commissioner, Gheorghe Sandu, said: “I’d like to be able to say this village is unique, but unfortunately I can’t because I know just how strong belief in vampires is here.”

The Daily Telegraph reported that six men were jailed for ripping out the heart of a corpse they believed was undead. As Monica Petrescu in Bucharest writes, to many Romanians, vampires are not legend but terrifying reality.

It was just before midnight as Gheorghe Marinescu and five of his relatives crept into the graveyard in the small Romanian village of Marotinul de Sus. They knew which plot they were looking for – a simple earth grave with a wooden cross bearing the name Petre Toma – and quickly, but quietly, set about digging.

When they had dragged the body out, they waited. Then, at the stroke of midnight, Marinescu began the ritual that they had been planning for weeks, one that had passed from generation to generation in their family. They drove a pitchfork through Petre Toma's chest, opened it, drew out his heart and then put stakes through the rest of his body. They sprinkled garlic over the mutilated corpse and then, carefully, laid it back in its grave.

They left the cemetery with the heart impaled on the end of the pitchfork and went to a crossroads where Marinescu's wife, son and daughter-in-law were waiting. There the group burnt it, dissolved the ashes and then drank the solution.

The scene last July would fit readily into any number of films about vampires and the Dracula legend but Gheorghe Marinescu is real. He and his five relatives – Mitrica Mircea, Popa Stelica, Constantin Florea, Ionescu Ion and Pascu Oprea – were sentenced to six months in jail for the unlawful exhumation of the body of Toma, a former teacher and a man they believed had risen from the dead to drink their blood while they slept.

News of what the Marinescu family did made headlines in Romania, but in a country where a large minority of the population admit to openly believing in the undead, football bosses employ witches to cast spells on foreign teams and a couple recently named their newborn son Dracula after premonitions of impending danger to him, many were unsurprised by what they read.

Mihai Fifor, an ethnologist at the Centre for Studies in Traditional Cultures and Societies in Craiova, said, "This particular ritual is quite unique but there have been many cases of people claiming that they are being hunted by the dead and vampires. There are a number of other rituals that exist for this type of situation where people believe they need to kill vampires."

Romania has been associated with vampires in the minds of many Westerners ever since Bram Stoker wrote his classic horror story, Dracula, in 1897. But in Romania the belief in vampires and the threat of the undead stretches as far back as the fifteenth century leader of Wallachia – modern-day Transylvania and other parts of Romania – Vlad Tepes (Dracula), who was the inspiration for Stoker's novel. Stoker merged the Middle Ages belief in vampires, which had become entrenched in Romania and many other parts of central and eastern Europe at the time, with the historically documented bloodthirstiness of Tepes's rule. In doing so, he created the story of Count Dracula who rose from the dead to haunt the deep, dark forests and castles of Transylvania, preying on young victims and drinking their blood.

But while Dracula and vampires are just a fascinating legend to most people outside the country, to many Romanians, mostly in rural areas, they are a terrifying reality. After his arrest, Marinescu said: "If we hadn't done anything, my wife, my son and my daughter-in-law would have died. That is when I decided to "unbury" him. I've seen these kinds of things before.

"When we took him out of the grave, he had blood around his mouth. We took his heart and he sighed when we stabbed him. We burned it, dissolved the ash into water and the people who had fallen sick drank it. They got better immediately. It was like someone took away all their pain and sickness.

"We performed a ritual that is hundreds of years old. We had no idea we were committing a crime. On the contrary, we believed that we were doing a good thing because the spirit of Petre was haunting us all and was very close to killing some of us. He came back from the dead and was after us."

Marinescu explained to police when he was arrested that Toma, who he said had been a respected and well-liked teacher in the village for years, had been buried on Christmas Day in 2003. But soon afterwards he had begun to appear to members of Marinescu's family in dreams as a vampire. Although he did not see the man himself, he saw his family become sick and they told him that Toma was not just a dream but a vampire whose spirit had come back from the dead.

He, like the rest of his family, had been told how to recognise vampires and how to deal with them by his parents who had been taught that knowledge from their own parents and they from theirs. He said he had had to act quickly to save his family.

Paula Diaconu, who has lived in Marotinul de Sus for decades, praised the ritual carried out by Marinescu and his relatives. "It was all a good thing to take his heart out because people were in danger. Villagers in Romania know about rituals for driving away the evil spirits of the dead," he said.

Another man from the village, Dumitru Moineasa, once drank a solution containing the ashes of his uncle's heart. "An uncle of mine died in 1992 and a few days after we buried him I started to feel very sick," he said. "The doctor had no idea what was wrong with me. One day, an aunt brought me a glass of water. I drank it all. I got well almost immediately. I only found out later that it was my dead uncle's ashes."

His friend, Domnica Brancusi, said that hearts had been taken out of dead men's chests many times before. "There have been dozens of dead men who turned into vampires and were haunting us," he said. "But usually the family of the dead man who was haunting people made a pact with those people and agreed not to say anything about the rituals. Until this case, no fuss was ever made about it."

Local police laid charges against the six men after Toma's daughter, Floarea Cotoran, who has since left Marotinul de Sus, complained about what happened to her father's body. They admitted that they were aware of similar rituals having been performed in the region. A policeman in nearby Celaru, which has jurisdiction over Marotinul de Sus, and who asked not to be named, said: "We've known about it for years. There's never been anything we could do about it as no one ever complained."

Marotinul de Sus, in the south-west, is far from the only village in Romania to take the threat of vampires seriously. In many rural communities like it across the country, belief in vampires is pervasive and superstition often governs people's lives. "Fear and great challenges in life are sometimes met by people with rituals and superstitions, a set of rules built over generations which has been verified over time," said Sabina Ispas, an ethnologist at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore in Bucharest. "Rural Romania has conserved excellently this system of rituals and beliefs."

Deep superstition and belief in the paranormal permeates all levels of society in urban Romania as well. Maria Tedescu, a twenty-one-year-old law student in Bucharest, said: "We all have our little superstitions, like taking three steps back if a black cat crosses your path to stop something bad happening. But vampires are different. It's not something to be taken lightly. I know it may sound silly and I can't totally explain it, but I think they exist. I always wear a crucifix … just in case."

Source:

Sunday Times (11 April 2004)

Daily Telegraph (6 February 2005)

Is It Real?: Vampires (National Geographic, 2006)

Discerning the Vampire

2009-01-13T01:26:00.000-08:00

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French vampirological and biblical scholar, Dom Augustin Calmet, who entered the Benedictine Order in 1688, becoming ordained into the priesthood in 1696, is remembered for his 1746 work on vampires: Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges des Démons et des Espits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hongrie, de Boheme, et de Silésie. Calmet’s attempt to establish the veracity of such predatory demonic entities lacked first-hand evidence and he seemed to concentrate on the collecting of vampire reports, which he certainly did not dismiss out of hand, and then offered his personal reflections on them.

Calmet defined the phenomena as corpses that returned from their graves to disturb the living by sucking their blood and even causing death. The only remedy was to exhume the afflicted body, sever its head, and drive a stake through the heart. Cremation was another effective alternative. Using that definition, he gathered all the accounts he could find, and it is these reports of collected data that take up the majority of space in his volume.

He justifiably condemned the hysteria which accompanied several of the reported vampire incidents, and also considered all the natural explanations that were offered for the phenomenon. His findings were inconclusive. However, Calmet did not state that the reports could be explained away by natural causes, but he shrank from proposing an alternative answer. In other words, he left the entire matter unresolved. He nevertheless seemed to favour the existence of vampires by noting “that it seems impossible not to subscribe to the belief which prevails in these countries that these apparitions do actually come forth from the graves and that they are able to produce terrible effects which are so widely and so positively attributed to them.”

Calmet had posed five possibilities for all the accounts he had considered. Three of these he dismissed. The remaining two consisted of the possibility that vampires are the result of the Devil’s interference, or just superstition. No firm conclusion was apparent until the third and last edition, published in 1751, where in his bestselling work he makes clear that he could conclude naught save that such creatures as vampires really did return from the grave.

In the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) the Church gives official recognition to the existence of the undead. Pope Innocent III sanctioned the publication of a treatise on the discovery and elimination of vampires. Protestant Reformers likewise made belief in the existence of vampires official. John Calvin explained the phenomenon of vampirism as being a consequence of sorcery. King James I, in his treatise Demonologie (1597), claimed that vampiric spectres were not the souls of the dead, but rather demons masquerading as the deceased. Even Martin Luther entertained vampires when they were related to him by a priest called George Rohrer. Written in 1679 by the theologian Philip Rohr (not to be confused with George Rohrer), De Masticatione Mortuorum translates as "On the Chewing Dead." Rohr was based in the Holy Roman Empire, and his text discussed the common folklore that some corpses returned to life, eating both their funeral shrouds and nearby bodies - a process known as manduction. The chewing dead were part of a larger body of vampire mythology, which Rohr's text contributed to significantly.

De Masticatione Mortuorum (or to use its full title Dissertatio Historico-Philosophica de Masticatione Mortuorum) is referred to on page 14 of The Vampire Hunter's Handbook (1997). Rohr, like many others before and since, attributed the vampire phenomenon to demonic possession.

The Eastern Orthdox Churches tend not to doubt the existence of vampires. It is not a top priority for them, but it is an aspect of the realm of demonaltry which all Christians, according to the New Testament (Mark 16: 17), are obliged to oppose and indeed exorcise.

We will now proceed to inquire into those physical traits by which a vampire may be discerned.

A vampire is generally described as being exceedingly gaunt and lean with a hideous countenance and eyes wherein are glinting the red fire of perdition. When, however, he has satiated his lust for warm human blood his body becomes horribly puffed and bloated, as though he were some great leech gorged and replete to bursting. Cold as ice, or it may be fevered and burning as a hot coal, the skin is deathly pale, but the lips are very full and rich, blub and red; the teeth white and gleaming, and the canine teeth wherewith he bites deep into the neck of his prey to suck thence the vital streams which re-animate his body and invigorate all his forces appear notably sharp and pointed. Often his mouth curls back in a vulpine snarl which bares these fangs, "a gaping mouth and gleaming teeth," says Leone Allacci, and so in many districts the hare-lipped are avoided as being certainly vampires. In Bulgaria, it is thought that the vampire who returns from the tomb has only one nostril; and in certain districts of Poland he is supposed to have a sharp point at the end of his tongue, like the sting of a bee. It is said that the palms of a vampire's hands are downy with hair, and the nails are always curved and crooked, often well-nigh the length of a great bird's claw, the quicks dirty and foul with clots and gouts of black blood. His breath is unbearably fetid and rank with corruption, the stench of the charnel. Dr Henry More in his An Antidote against Atheism, III, ix, tells us that when Johannes Cuntius, an alderman of Pentsch in Silesia and a witch returned as a vampire he much tormented the Parson of the Parish. One evening, "when this Theologer was sitting with his wife and Children about him, exercising himself in Musick, according to his usual manner, a most grievous stink arose suddenly, which by degrees spread itself to every corner of the room. Here upon he commends himself and his family to God by Prayer. The smell nevertheless encreased, and became above all measure pestilently noisom, insomuch that he was forced to go up to his chamber. He and his Wife had not been in bed a quarter of an hour, but they find the same stink in the bedchamber; of which, while they are complaining one to another out steps the Spectre from the Wall, and creeping to his bedside, breathes upon him an exceeding cold breath, of so intolerable stinking and malignant a scent, as is beyond all imagination and expression. Here upon the Theologer, good soul, grew very ill, and was fain to keep his bed, his face, belly, and guts swelling as if he had been poysoned; whence he was also troubled with a difficulty of breathing, and with a putrid inflamation of his eyes, so that he could not well use them of a long time after."

In the Malleus Maleficarum, Part II, Qn. 1., Ch. 11, the following is related: "In the territory of the Black Forest, a witch was being lifted by a gaoler on to the pile of wood prepared for her burning and said: 'I will pay you,' and blew into his face. And he was at once afflicted with a horrible leprosy all over his body and did not survive many days."

Boguet, Discours des Sorciers, gives as his rubric to Chapter XXV, Si les Sorciers tuent de leur souffle & haleine. He tells us: "Les Sorciers tuent & endommagent de lour souffle & haleine: en quoy Clauda Gaillard dicte la Fribolette nous seruita de tesmoignage; car ayant soufflé contre Clauda Perrier, qu'elle r'encontra en l'Eglise d'Ebouchoux, tout aussi test ceste femme tomba malade, & fut rendue impotente, & en fin mourut apres auoir trainé par l'espace d'vn an en toute pauurieté, & langueur: de mesme aussi comme Marie Perrier luy eut vne fois refusé l'aumosne, elle luy souffla fort rudement contre, de façon quo Marie tomba par terre, & s'estant releuée ause peine elle demeura malade par quelques iours, & iusques à tant que Pierre Perrier son neueu out menacé la Sorciere."

Sinistrari in his Demoniality says that if we ask how it is possible that the demon, who has no body, yet can perform actual coitus with man or woman, most authorities answer that the demon assumes or animates the corpse of another human being, male or female, as the case may be, and Delrio (Disquisitiones Magicae, Liber II, Q. xxviii, sec. 1). comments: "Denique multae falsae resurrectiones gentilium huc sunt referendae; & constat cum sagis ut plurimum induto cadauere diabolum sine incubum, sine succubum, rem habere; unde & in hoc genere hominum, cadauerosus quidam faetor graueolentiae, cernitur."

Some remoter country districts, indeed, are apt to regard any poor wretch who is sadly deformed as a vampire, especially if the distortion be altogether unsightly, prominent, or grotesque. It has even been known that a peasant whose face was deeply marked with wine-coloured pigment, owing it was thought to some accident which befell his mother during her late pregnancy, was shunned and suspected of being a malignant vrykolakas. Chorea, they say, is a certain sign of vampirism, and it may be remarked that in Shoa this disorder is regarded as the result of demoniacal possession, or due to the magic spell of an enemy's shadow having fallen upon the sufferer. An epileptic there is also often considered as being in the power of some devil, and unless proper precautions are taken he will assuredly not rest in his grave. The vampire is endowed with strength and agility more than human, and he can run with excessive speed, outstripping the wind.

The vampire is one who has led a life of more than ordinary immorality and unbridled wickedness; a man of foul, gross and selfish passions, of evil ambitions, delighting in cruelty and blood. Arthur Machen has very shrewdly pointed out that "Sorcery and sanctity are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life." The spiritual world cannot be confined to the supremely good, "but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The ordinary man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner sense of things, and, consequently our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate unimportant . . . the saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall . . . it is not the mere liar who is excluded by those words[1]; it is, above all, the "sorcerers" who use the material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you this; our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it.)"

It has been said that a saint is a person who always chooses the better of the two courses open to him at every step. And so the man who is truly wicked is he who deliberately always chooses the worse of the two courses. Even when he does things which would be considered right he always does them for some bad reason. To identify oneself in this way with any given course requires intense concentration and an iron strength of will, and it is such persons who become vampires.

The vampire is believed to be one who has devoted himself during his life to the practice of Black Magic, and it is hardly to be supposed that such persons would rest undisturbed, while it is easy to believe that their malevolence had set in action forces which might prove powerful for terror and destruction even when they were in their graves. It was sometimes said, but the belief is rare, that the vampire was the offspring of a witch and the Devil.

Source:

Seán Manchester

Stray Ghosts (2003)

The Vampire Hunter's Handbook (1997)

Montague Summers

The Vampire: His Kith & Kin (1928)

Concomitants of Vampirism

2009-01-12T01:47:00.000-08:00

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Dom Augustin Calmet writes:

"How can a corpse which is covered with four or five feet of earth, which has no room even to move or to stretch a limb, which is wrapped in linen cerements, enclosed in a coffin of wood, how can it, I say, seek the upper air and return to the world walking upon the earth so as to cause those extraordinary effects which are attributed to it? And after all that how can it go back again into the grave, when it will be found fresh, incorrupt, full of blood exactly like a living body? Can it be maintained that these corpses pass through the earth without disturbing it, just as water and the damps which penetrate the soil or which exhale therefrom without perceptibly dividing or cleaving the ground? It were indeed to be wished that in the histories of the Return of Vampires which have been related, a certain amount of attention had been given to this point, and that the difficulty had been something elucidated.

"Let us suppose that these corpses do not actually stir from their tombs, that only the ghosts or spirits appear to the living, wherefor do these Phantoms present themselves and what is it that energizes them? Is it actually the soul of the dead man which has not yet departed to its final destination, or is it a demon who causes them to be seen in an assumed and phantastical body? And if there bodies are spectral, how do they suck the blood of the living? We are enmeshed in a sad dilemma when we ask if these apparitions are natural or miraculous. ... Supposing, indeed, there were any truth in the accounts of these appearances of Vampires, are they to be attributed to the power of God, to the Angels, to the souls of those who return in this way, or to the Devil? If we adopt the last hypothesis it follows that the Devil can endue these corpses with subtilty and bestow upon them the power of passing through the earth without any disturbances of the ground, of gliding through the cracks and joints of a door, of slipping through a keyhole, of increasing, of diminishing, of becoming rarified as air or water to penetrate the earth; in fine of enjoying the same properties as we believe will be possessed by the Blessed after the Resurrection, and which distinguished the human Body of our Lord after the first Easter Day, inasmuch as He appeared to those to whom He would show Himself for 'Jesus cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said: Peace be to you,' Jesus uenit ianuis clausis, St John, xx, 26.

"Yet even if it be allowed that the Devil can re-energize dead bodies and give them movement for a certain time can he also bestow these powers of increasing, diminishing, becoming rarified, and so subtle that they can penetrate the earth, doors, windows? We are not told that God allows him the exercise of any such power, and it is hard to believe that a material body, gross and substantial can be endowed with this subtility and spirituality without some destruction or alteration of the general structure and without damage to the configuration of the body. But this would not be in accord with the intention of the Devil, for such a change would prevent this body from appearing, from manifesting itself, from motion and speech, ay, indeed from being eventually cut to pieces and burned as so often happens in the case of Vampires in Moravia, Poland, and Silesia."

These difficulties which Dom Calmet with little perception has raised can be very briefly answered, and they are not only superficial, but also smack of heterodoxy. In the first place, his example [a story related by Calmet] can hardly brush aside the vast vampire tradition because one instance proves to be overdrawn. In any case, what is certainly significant is that the Vampire was decapitated and that then the hauntings ceased.

Dom Calmet asks are the appearances of Vampires to be attributed to God, or to the souls of those who return or to the Devil? I answer that for the hauntings of a Vampire, three things are necessary: the Vampire, the Devil, and the Permission of Almighty God. Just as we know, for we learn this from the Malleus Maleficarum, that there are three necessary concomitants of witchcraft, and these are the Devil, a Witch, and the Permission of Almighty God (Part 1). So are these three necessary concomitants of Vampirism. Whether it be the Demon who is energizing the corpse or whether it be the dead man himself who by some dispensation of Divine Providence has returned is a particular which must be decided severally for each case. So much then for Dom Calmet's question, to whom are the appearances of Vampires to be attributed.

Can the Devil endow a body with these qualities of subtilty, rarification, increase, and diminishing, so that it may pass through doors and windows? I answer that there is no doubt the Demon can do this, and to deny the proposition is hardly orthodox. For St Thomas says of the Devil that "just as he can from the air compose a body of any form and shape, and assume it so as to appear in it visibly, so, in the same way, he can clothe any corporeal thing with any corporeal form, so as to appear therein." Moreover almost any séance will be sufficient reply to Dom Calmet's question. In his Modern Spiritism (1904), Mr T Godfrey Raupert says: "Photographs, or small drawing-room ornaments have thus been seen to change their places, and articles kept in a room other than that occupied by the sensitive, have been brought through closed doors and deposited at a spot previously indicated -in some instances placed into the hands of the person requesting the apport of the article. Many such remarkable instances of apport and of matter passing through matter have been observed under the strictest possible test conditions, and will be found recorded in the late Leipzig Professor Zoellner's deeply interesting work Transcendental Physics. The writer has himself observed one instance of this kind in a private house, and in circumstances entirely precluding the possibility of deception. There is, perhaps, no phenomenon which so distinctly exhibits the action of extraneous and independent intelligence as this one." (pp. 35-36.) Matter, then, can pass through matter, and the séance answers Dom Calmet. We may, if we will, adopt the ectoplasmic theory to explain the mode whereby the Vampire issues from his grave, but although this is very probably true (in some instances at all events) it is not necessarily the only solution of the problem. According to Catholic theologians evil spirits, if permitted to materialize their invisible presence, to build up a tangible and active body, do not absolutely require the ectoplasm of some medium.

Not very dissimilar to the dilemma of Dom Calmet are the views hold by an eminent authority, Dr Herbert Mayo, who was sometime Senior Surgeon of Middlesex Hospital, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in King's College, Professor of Comparative Anatomy in the Royal College of Surgeons, London. In his well-known work, On the Truths contained in Popular Superstitions, he devotes his second Letter, or rather Chapter, to "Vampyrism," concerning which he says "The proper place of this subject falls in the midst of a philosophical disquisition," but he adds for the benefit of the inquirer that it is "a point on which, in my time, school-boys much your juniors entertained decided opinions." He continues to inform us that during the middle of the eighteenth century: "Vampyrism spread like a pestilence through Servia and Wallachia, causing numerous deaths, and disturbing all the land with fear of the mysterious visitation, against which no one felt himself secure. Here is something like a good solid practical popular delusion. Do I believe it? To be sure I do. The facts are matter of history: the people died like rotten sheep; and the cause and method of their dying was, in their belief, what has just been stated. You suppose, then, they died frightened out of their lives, as men have died whose pardon has been proclaimed when their necks were already on the block, of the belief that they were going to die? Well, if that were all, the subject would still be worth examining. But there is more in it than that."

He then gives an account in very full detail of a Vampire at Belgrade in the year 1732, he describes the circumstances in which the body was disinterred, It leaned to one side, the skin was fresh and ruddy, the nails grown long and evilly crooked, the mouth slobbered with blood from its last night's repast. Accordingly a stake was driven through the chest of the Vampire who uttered a terrible screech whilst blood poured in quantities from the wound. Then it was burned to ashes. Moreover, a number of other persons throughout the district had been infected with vampirism. Of the facts there can be no question whatsoever. The documents are above suspicion, and in particular the most important of these which was signed by three regimental surgeons, and formally counter-signed by a lieutenant-colonel and sub-lieutenant. Even Dr Mayo is obliged to allow: "No doubt can be entertained of its authenticity, or of its general fidelity; the less that it does not stand alone, but is supported by a mass of evidence to the same effect. It appears to establish beyond question, that where the fear of Vampyrism prevails, and there occur several deaths, in the popular belief connected with it, the bodies, when disinterred weeks after burial, present the appearance of corpses from which life has only recently departed." It is very instructive to note how the writer proceeds with the greatest subtility and no little cleverness to extract himself from logical consequences it might have seemed impossible to avoid, and how he explains an exceptional circumstance by circumstances which are far more amazing and difficult to believe. With the utmost suavity and breadth of mind he continues: "What inference shall we draw from this fact? - that Vampyrism is true in the popular sense? - and that these fresh-looking and well-conditioned corpses had some mysterious source of preternatural nourishment? That would be to adopt, not to solve the superstition. Let us content ourselves with a notion not so monstrous, but still startling enough: that the bodies, which were found in the so-called Vampyr state, instead of being in a new or mystical condition, were simply alive in the common way or had been so for some time subsequently to their interment that, in short, they were the bodies of persons who had been buried alive, and whose life, where it yet lingered, was finally extinguished through the ignorance and barbarity of those who disinterred them. . . . We have thus succeeded in interpreting one of the unknown terms in the Vampyr-theorem. The suspicious character, who had some dark way of nourishing himself in the grave, turns out to be an unfortunate gentleman (or lady) whom his friends had buried under a mistake while he was still alive, and who, if they afterwards mercifully let him alone, died sooner or later either naturally or of the premature interment--in either case, it is to be hoped, with no interval of restored consciousness."

I submit that Dr Mayo has not succeeded in solving any difficulty at all connected with vampirism. No doubt, as we have already considered in some detail, cases of premature burial, which were far more common than was generally supposed, would have helped to swell the tradition, but that they can have originated it is impossible, and it is absurd to put forward the terrible accident of premature burial as an explanation to cover all the facts. It is quite impossible that a person who had been interred when in a coma or trance should have survived in the grave.

Before we deal with the signs by which it is reputed a vampire may be recognized; the method in which a vampire presumably leaves his grave; and the way by which a vampire may be released or destroyed, we will briefly inquire into Dr Mayo's explanation of the actual visit of the vampire to a victim and the subsequent consequences, the terrible anæmia and hæmoplegia which may result in death followed by the vampire infection. And here we find that Dr Mayo quite honestly and frankly confesses that he is completely at a loss to give any solution of the difficulty. It is most instructive to read those inconclusive pleas which he is driven to put forward but which his own good sense cannot accept. He writes: "The second element which we have yet to explain is the Vampyr visit and its consequences, - the lapse of the party visited into death-trance. There are two ways of dealing with this knot; one is to cut it, the other to untie it. It may be cut, by denying the supposed connexion between the Vampyr visit and the supervention of death-trance in the second party. Nor is the explanation thus obtained devoid of plausibility. There is no reason why death-trance should not, in certain persons and places, be epidemic. Then the persons most liable to it would be those of weak and irritable nervous systems. Again, a first effect of the epidemic might be further to shake the nerves of weaker subjects. These are exactly the persons who are likely to be infected with imaginary terrors, and to dream, or even to fancy, they have seen Mr or Mrs such a one, the last victim of the epidemic. The dream or impression upon the senses might again recur, and the sickening patient have already talked of it to his neighbours, before he himself was seized with death-trance. On this supposition the Vampyr visit would sink into the subordinate rank of a mere premonitory symptom. To myself, I must confess, this explanation, the best I am yet in a position to offer, appears barren and jejune; and not at all to do justice to the force and frequency, or, as tradition represents the matter, the universality of the Vampyr visit as a precursor of the victim's fate. Imagine how strong must have been the conviction of the reality of the apparition, how common a feature it must have been, to have led to the laying down of the unnatural and repulsive process customarily followed at the Vampyr's grave, as the regular and proper preventive of ulterior consequences."

Dr Mayo proposes therefore "to try and untie this knot" a result which he singularly fails to achieve. He quite erroneously states "in popular language, it was the ghost of the Vampyr that haunted its future victim." This is exactly what the Vampire is not. As we have seen there is some divergence of view whether the Vampire is the actual person. energized with some horrible mystical life in death who visits his victims, and there can be no doubt at all that this is the true and proper Vampire, or whether it is a demon who animates and informs the body. But in no circumstances whatsoever is the Vampire a phantom or ghost, save by a quite inadmissible extension of the term, which then may practically be regarded (as indeed it is often most mistakenly and reprehensibly regarded) as covering almost any malignant supernatural phenomenon. So an explanation which confuses a Vampire with a ghost is entirely impertinent.

Source:

Montague Summers

The Vampire: His Kith & Kin (1928)

The haunting of Elizabeth Wojdyla

2009-01-11T01:27:00.000-08:00

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Elizabeth Wojdyla and Barbara Moriarty, two sixteen-year-old students of La Sainte Union Convent (near Highgate, London), were walking home late at night after visiting friends in Highgate Village. Their journey took them down Swains Lane which intersects Highgate Cemetery, a Victorian graveyard in two halves on a steep hill. These intelligent students could not believe their eyes as they passed the cemetery's north gate at the beginning of their downward path between the two graveyards. For there before them, amongst the jutting tombstones and stone vaults, the dead seemed to be emerging from their graves.

The two schoolgirls walked in eerie silence until they reached the bottom of the lane. Here they spoke for the first time, having finally found their voice, and confirmed they had both experienced the same terrifying scene. So frightening was it that Barbara Moriarty would not talk about it again.

Elizabeth Wojdyla, however, gave Seán Manchester an account of her experience some months later. It was tape-recorded by him and was heard during a televised film documentary about the Highgate Vampire case (True Horror: Vampires).

Elizabeth recounted: "We both saw this scene of graves directly in front of us. And the graves were opening up; and the people were rising. We were not conscious of walking down the lane. We were only conscious of this graveyard scene."

A series of nightmares then began to plague Elizabeth; all with one thing in common: something was trying to enter her bedroom window at night. A deathly-pale face identical to the corpses leaving their graves appeared behind the glass pane on some occasions.

During the summer of 1969, Seán Manchester had a chance meeting with Elizabeth Wojdyla who now appeared anaemic and listless. She was nevertheless anxious to get something off her chest. Now resident in an area not too far from the cemetery, she told Seán Manchester that her nightmares had returned with a vengeance. This time she was able to give a better description of the unwelcome spectre that haunted her nights, and, once again, Seán Manchester tape-recorded her words:

"[It has] the face of a wild animal with glaring eyes and sharp teeth, but it is a man with the expression of an animal. The face is gaunt and grey."

Two weeks later, Elizabeth's boyfriend, Keith, contacted Seán Manchester and reported on further deterioration:

"[Her] condition has grown worse. ... She is withering away at such a rate that she is only just barely alive. ... She is being overcome by something."

This time Seán Manchester noted the discovery on Elizabeth's neck marks which Keith had already mentioned in his preamble:

"I noticed for the first time the marks on the side of her neck. ... They were two inflamed mounds on the skin, the centre of each bearing a tiny hole."

On another occasion it was found that specks of blood had appeared on Elizabeth's pillow. Seán Manchester at this point began to apply traditional vampire antidotes and repellents; especially when it was confirmed that she was more and more attracted to Highgate Cemetery and that her anaemic condition was worsening. The small cross she had always worn as a schoolgirl had been absent for some time. Seán Manchester provided a larger crucifix made of silver and sprinkled her environment liberally with holy water. He repeated the Creed in a loud voice, applied salt, garlic and more crosses; during which procedure prayers were recited to shield Elizabeth from the innumerable crafts of Satan and all pestilence.

Elizabeth attempted to remove the impediments and further demonic assaults occurred as nightmare incidents multiplied before this feverish struggle against the predatory vampire ceased altogether.

Her appetite restored and the unhealthy, anaemic condition vanished. The punctures on her neck, bathed with holy water throughout the conflict, eventually faded. By Christmas all was well and the hideous manifestation of the Highgate Cemetery vampire did not return to haunt Elizabeth again. Soon afterwards she relocated elsewhere.

Source:

Seán Manchester

The Vampire's Bedside Companion (1975, 1976)

The Highgate Vampire (1985, 1991)

True Horror: Vampires (Discovery Channel, 2004)

Emma S------ and Eleonore Zügun

2009-01-10T02:08:00.000-08:00

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Andrew Lang in his Dreams and Ghosts (1897), relates the story of "The Ghost that Bit," which might seem to have been a vampire, but which actually cannot be so classed since vampires have a body and their craving for blood is to obtain sustenance for their body.

[Seán Manchester argues that vampires possess the power of metamorphosis, ie shapeshifting; therefore no dichotomy exists in their apparent ability to manifest from corporeal to non-corporeal and back again.]

The narrative is originally to be found in Notes and Queries, 3rd September 1864, and the correspondent asserts that he took it "almost verbatim from the lips of the lady" concerned, a person of tried veracity. Emma S------ was asleep one morning in her room at a large house near Cannock Chase. It was a fine August day in 1840, but although she had bidden her maid call her at an early hour she was surprised to hear a sharp knocking upon her door about 3.30. In spite of her answer the taps continued, and suddenly the curtains of her bed were slightly drawn, when to her amazement she saw the face of an aunt by marriage looking through upon her. Half unconsciously she threw out her hand, and immediately one of her thumbs was sensibly pressed by the teeth of the apparition. Forthwith she arose, dressed, and went downstairs, where not a creature was stirring. Her father upon coming down rallied her a little upon being about at cockcrow and inquired the cause. When she informed him he determined that later in the day he would pay a visit to his sister-in-law who dwelt at no great distance. This he did, only to discover that she had unexpectedly died at about 3.30 that morning. She had not been in any way ailing, and the shook was fearfully sudden. On one of the thumbs of the corpse was found a mark as if it had been bitten in the last agony.

In The Proceedings of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, Vol. I., 1927, will be found an account of the phenomena connected with Eleonore Zügun, a young Rumanian peasant girl, who in the autumn of 1926, when only thirteen years old was brought to London by the Countess Wassilko-Serecki, in order that the manifestations might be investigated at "The National Laboratory of Psychical Research," Queensberry Place, South Kensington. The child was said to be persecuted by some invisible force or agent, which she knew as Dracu, Anglice the Devil. There were many extraordinary happenings and she was continually being scratched and bitten by this unseen intelligence. It must suffice to give but two or three instances of the very many "biting phenomena." On the afternoon of Monday, 4 October 1926, Captain Neil Gow an investigator in his report, notes:

"3.20. Eleonore cried out. Showed marks on back of left hand like teeth-marks which afterwards developed into deep weals. . . . 4.12. Eleonore was just raising a cup of tea to her lips, but suddenly gave a cry and put the cup down hastily: there was a mark on her right hand similar to that caused by a bite. Both rows of teeth were indicated."

Of the same incident, Mr. Clapham Palmer, an investigator who was also present writes:

"Eleonore was in the act of raising the cup to her lips when she suddenly gave a little cry of pain, put down her cup and rolled up her sleeve. On her forearm I then saw what appeared to be the marks of teeth indented deeply in the flesh, as if she or someone had fiercely bitten her arm. The marks turned from red to white and finally took the form of white raised weals. They gradually faded but were still noticeable after an hour or so."

Such bitings not infrequent occurred, and photographs have been taken of the marks.

It was an interesting question to discuss the cause of these indentations and no doubt it is sufficiently remarkable, but however that may be such inquiry were impertinent here, for it is clearly not vampirism, nor indeed cognate thereto. The object of the vampire is to suck blood, and in these cases if blood was ever drawn it was more in the nature of a scratch or slight dental puncture, there was no effusion. Again the agent who inflicted these bites was not sufficiently material to be visible, at any rate he was able to remain unseen. The true vampire is corporeal.

The vampire has a body, and it is his own body. He is neither dead nor alive; but living in death. He is an abnormality; the androgyne in the phantom world; a pariah among the fiends.

Source:

Montague Summers

The Vampire: His Kith & Kin (1928)

The case of Mercy Brown

2009-01-09T01:20:00.000-08:00

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The Mercy Brown vampire case, which occurred in 1892, is one of the best documented cases of the exhumation of a corpse in order to perform rituals to banish an undead manifestation.

In Exeter, Rhode Island, the family of George and Mary Brown suffered a sequence of tuberculosis infections in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Tuberculosis was called "consumption" at the time and was a devastating and much-feared disease.

The mother, Mary, was the first to die of the disease, followed in 1888 by their eldest daughter, Mary Olive. Two years later, in 1890, their son, Edwin, also became sick.

In 1891, another daughter, Mercy, contracted the disease and died in January 1892. She was buried in the cemetery of the Baptist Church in Exeter.

Friends and neighbours of the family were convinced that one of the dead family members was a vampire (although they did not use that term) and was causing Edwin's illness. This was in accordance with threads of contemporary folklore linking multiple deaths in one family to undead activity. Consumption was a poorly understood condition at the time.

George Brown was persuaded to exhume the bodies, which he did with the help of several villagers on 17 March 1892. While the bodies of both Mary and Mary Olive had undergone significant decomposition over the intervening years, the more recently buried body of Mercy was still relatively unchanged and had blood in the heart. This was taken as a sign that the teenager was undead and the agent of young Edwin's condition.

Mercy's heart was removed from her body, burnt, and the remnants mixed with water and given to the sick Edwin to drink.

Unfortunately, despite all his efforts, George was unsuccessful in protecting his son, who died two months later.

Dr Michael Bell is a folklorist and author of Food for the Dead (a book that explores the folklore and history behind Mercy Brown as well as several other cases of New England vampires). Dr Bell feels there is a direct connection between some vampire cases and consumption. He said: "The way you look personally is the way vampires have always been portrayed in folklore ~ like walking corpses, which is what you are, at least in the later stages of consumption. Skin and bones, fingernails are long and curved, you look like the vampire from Nosferatu."

Consumption took its first victim within the Brown family in December of 1883 when Mercy's mother, Mary Brown, died of the disease. Seven months later, the Browns' eldest daughter, Mary Olive, also died of consumption. The Browns' only son, Edwin, came down with consumption a few years after Mary Olive's death and was sent to live in the arid climate of Colorado to try and stop the disease. Late in 1891, Edwin returned home to Exeter because the disease was progressing ~ he essentially came home to die. Mercy's battle with consumption was considerably shorter than her brother's. Mercy had the "galloping" variety of consumption ~ her battle with the disease lasted only a few months. Mercy was laid to rest in Chestnut Hill Cemetery behind the Baptist church on Victory Highway.

After Mercy's funeral, her brother Edwin's condition worsened rapidly, and their father, George Brown, grew more frantic. Mr Brown had lost his wife and two of his daughters, and now he was about to lose his only son. Science and medicine had no answers for George Brown, but folklore did. For centuries prior to Mercy Brown there have been vampires. The practice of exorcising these undead began in Europe. Various ways people dealt with vampires was to exhume the body of the suspect, drive a stake through the heart, rearrange the skeletal remains, remove vital organs, or cremate the entire corpse.

So much death had plagued the Brown family that George Brown probably felt he was cursed in some way. It did not take a massive leap of faith for someone to come up with a radical idea to halt the death. Maybe the Brown family was under vampire attacks from beyond the grave? Was Mercy Brown the vampire, or was it Mercy's mother or sister? George Brown was willing to dig up the body of his recently deceased daughter, remove her heart, burn it, and feed the ashes to his son because he felt he had no other choice.

In Dr Bell's book Food for the Dead he recounts an extensive interview he conducted with Everett Peck, a descendent of Mercy Brown and life-long resident of Exeter, Rhode Island.

"Everett heard the story from people who had been there [at the exhumation of Mercy Brown] ~ who were alive at the time," Dr Bell said. "The newspaper [Providence Journal] says they exhumed all three bodies, that is, Mercy's mother, her sister who had died before her, and Mercy. Everett said they only dug up Mercy. He implied that there was some sign that Mercy was the one ~ that's the supernatural creeping into his story. Everett said that after they had dug her up, [they saw that] she had turned over in the grave ~ but there's no mention of that in the newspaper or the eyewitness accounts."

We do not know exactly what position Mercy Brown's body was in on that day in March when George Brown, and some of his friends and family, came to examine Mercy's body. We do know that she looked "too well preserved."

"There's a suggestion in the newspaper that she wasn't actually interred in the ground," Dr Bell said. "She was actually put in an above-ground crypt, because bodies were stored in the wintertime when the ground was frozen and they couldn't really dig. When the thaw came, they would bury them. So it's possible that she wasn't even really interred."

Her visual condition prompted the group to cut open her chest cavity and examine her innards. Dr Bell said: "They examined her organs. The newspaper said her heart and liver had blood in it. It was liquid blood, which they interpreted as fresh blood."

The liquid blood was taken as evidence that Mercy was indeed a vampire and the one draining the life from Edwin and possibly other consumption victims in the community.

Dr Bell said: "They cut her heart out, and as Everett said, they burned it on a nearby rock. Then according to the newspaper, they fed them [the ashes of the heart] to Edwin."

Folklore claims that destroying the heart of a vampire would kill it, and by consuming the remains of the vampire's heart ~ the spell would be broken and the victim would get well.

The community's vampire slaying had failed to save Edwin ~ he died two months later, but maybe it helped others in the community?

Mercy Lena Brown is arguably North America's most famous vampire because she is also the most recent. The event caused such a stir in 1892 because newspapers like the Providence Journal editorialised that the idea of exhuming a body to burn the heart is completely barbaric in those modern times.

Dr Bell commented: "Folklore always has an answer ~ it may not be the scientifically valid answer, but sometimes it's better to have any answer than none at all."

Source:

Bell, Michael E. (2001). Food for the Dead - On the Trail of New England's Vampires. New York: Carrol & Graf Publishers. p. 338 pages. ISBN 0-7867-089909.

Connecticut Public Television. Vampires in New England [TV Documentary].

The case of Peter Plogojowitz

2009-01-08T01:01:00.000-08:00

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Peter Plogojowitz (Serbian form: Petar Blagojević/Петар Благојевић) was a Serbian peasant believed to have become a vampire after his death and to have killed nine of his fellow villagers. The case was described in the report of Imperial Provisor Frombald, an official of the Austrian administration, who witnessed the exorcism via impalation by stake of Plogojowitz.

Peter Plogojowitz lived in a village named Kisilova (Kisiljevo) in the part of Serbia that temporarily passed from Ottoman into Austrian hands after the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718) and was ceded back to the Ottomans with the Treaty of Belgrade (1739).

Plogojowitz died in 1725. His death was followed by a spate of other sudden deaths (after very short maladies of about twenty-four hours each). Within eight days, nine persons perished. On their death-beds the victims allegedly claimed to have been throttled by Plogojowitz at night. Plogojowitz's wife stated that he had visited her and asked her for his opanci (shoes). She then proceeded to move to another village. In other accounts it is said that Plogojowitz came back to his house demanding food from his son, and when the son refused Plogojowitz brutally murdered his own son.

The villagers decided to disinter the body and examine it for signs of vampirism; such as growing hair, beard, and nails and absence of decomposition.

The inhabitants of Kisilova demanded that Kameralprovisor Frombald, along with the local priest, should be present at the procedure as a representative of the administration. Frombald tried to convince them that consent from the Austrian authorities in Belgrade should be sought first. The locals declined because they feared that by the time the permission arrived the whole community could be exterminated by the vampire, which they claimed had already happened "in Turkish times," ie when the village was still in the Ottoman-controlled part of Serbia. They demanded that Frombald himself should immediately permit the procedure or else they would abandon the village to save their lives. Frombald was obliged to consent.

Together with the Gradiška priest, he viewed the already exhumed body and was astonished to find that the characteristics associated with vampires were indeed present. The body was undecomposed, the hair and beard were grown, there were "new skin and nails" (while the old ones had peeled away), and blood could be seen in the mouth. After that, the people, who "grew more outraged than distressed," proceeded to stake the body through the heart, which caused a great amount of "completely fresh" blood to flow through the ears and mouth of the corpse. Finally, the body was burned.

Frombald concludes his report on the case with the request that, in case these actions were found to be wrong, he should not be blamed for them, as the villagers were "beside themselves with fear." The authorities apparently did not consider it necessary to take any measures regarding the incident.

The report on this event was among the earliest documented testimonies concerning vampirism in Eastern Europe. It was published by Wienerisches Diarium, a Viennese newspaper, today known as Die Wiener Zeitung. Along with the report of the very similar Arnold Paole case of 1726-1732, it was widely translated West and North, contributing to the vampire panic of the eighteenth century in Germany, France and England.

In De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1725), Michaël Ranft attempted to explain folk beliefs in vampires. He writes that, in the event of the death of every villager, some other person or people—most likely a person related to the first dead—who saw or touched the corpse, would eventually die either of some disease related to exposure to the corpse or of a frenetic delirium caused by the panic of merely seeing the corpse. These dying people would say that the dead man had appeared to them and tortured them in many ways. The other people in the village would exhume the corpse to see what it had been doing. He gives the following explanation when talking about the case of Peter Plogojowitz:

"This brave man perished by a sudden or violent death. This death, whatever it is, can provoke in the survivors the visions they had after his death. Sudden death gives rise to inquietude in the familiar circle. Inquietude has sorrow as a companion. Sorrow brings melancholy. Melancholy engenders restless nights and tormenting dreams. These dreams enfeeble body and spirit until illness overcomes and, eventually, death."

Recently, the story has sparked some interest in the village of Kisiljevo among some Serbian journalists. According to Belgrade newspaper Glas javnosti, which cites local official Bogičić, the villagers are unable to identify Plogojovitz's (Blagojević's) grave and don't know whether the local family that bears that surname is related to him. One local does recall stories of a certain female vampire by the name of Ruža Vlajna, who was believed to haunt the village in more recent times, in the lifetime of her grandfather. She would make her presence felt by hitting pots hanging from roofs and was seen walking on the surface of the Danube, but it is unknown whether she was ever staked.

Source:

Frombald (1725). Copia eines Schreibens aus dem Gradisker District in Ungarn. (the original report in German), Kayserliche Hof-Buchdruckerey (a private english translation of the report).

Ranft, Michael (1728). De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (aka De la mastication des morts dans leurs tombeaux or Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern), Leipzig: Teubners' Buchladen.

Summers, Montague (2003). The Vampire in Europe 1929. Kessinger Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-7661-3576-4.

Nowosadtko, Jutta (2004). Der Vampyrus Serviensis und sein Habitat: Impressionen von der österreichischen Militärgränze. In: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit. 8 (2004). Heft 2. Universitätsverlag Potsdam.

Pera svrgnuo Savu Savanovića. By Dušanka Novković Glas javnosti 26-04-2006.

The case of Arnold Paole

2009-01-07T00:38:00.000-08:00

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Arnold Paole died circa 1726. (Arnont Paule in the original documents; an early German rendition of a Serbian name or nickname, perhaps Арнаут Павле, Arnaut Pavle) was a Serbian hajduk who was believed to have become a vampire after his death, initiating an epidemic of supposed vampirism that killed at least sixteen persons in his native village of Medwegya (also rendered as Metwett; likely a German rendition of Serbian Medveđa, not to be confused with the modern Southern Serbian town of Medveđa), located at the Morava river near the town of Paraćin. His case, like the similar case of Peter Plogojowitz, became famous because of the direct involvement of the Austrian authorities and the documentation by Austrian physicians and officers, who confirmed the reality of vampires. Their report of the case was distributed in Western Europe and contributed to the spread of vampire belief among educated Europeans. Knowledge of the case is based mostly on the reports of two Austrian military doctors, Glaser and Flückinger, who were successively sent to investigate the case.

With the Treaty of Passarowitz (Požarevac, 1718), the Habsburg Monarchy annexed most of Serbia and the northern part of Bosnia, territories which had been part of the Ottoman Empire. These remained in Austrian control until the Treaty of Belgrade (1739), when the Austrians were forced to cede them back to the Turks. During this twenty-year period, these newly conquered boundary districts were subject to direct military rule from Vienna for strategical, as well as fiscal and other reasons. As a result of the devastation brought about by previous Austrian-Ottoman wars, these areas were in a poor condition, with scarce and partly nomadic population, little agriculture and an emphasis on cattle-breeding. The Austrian authorities sought to further economic development and attract German-speaking as well as Serbian and Bulgarian settlers to the new territories. Many of the Serbs, especially those who had immigrated from Ottoman-held areas, were recruited as militiamen (hajduks) for the protection of the boundaries in peace-time as well as regular military service at war in exchange for unalienable lots of land. It was in these communities that the earliest well-documented vampire attacks were attested.

This outbreak is only known from Flückinger's report about the second epidemic and its prehistory. According to the account of the Medveđa locals as retold there, Arnold Paole was a hajduk who had moved to the village from the Turkish-controlled part of Serbia. He reportedly mentioned often that he had been plagued by a vampire at a location named Gossowa (perhaps Kosovo) but that he had cured himself by eating soil from the vampire's grave and smearing himself with his blood. About 1725, he broke his neck in a fall from a haywagon. Within twenty or thirty days after Paole's death, four persons complained that they had been plagued by him. These people died shortly after. Still ten days later villagers, advised by their hadnack (a military/administrative title) who had witnessed such events before, opened his grave. They saw that the corpse was undecomposed "and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears; that the shirt, the covering, and the coffin were completely bloody; that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the skin, had fallen off, and that new ones had grown". Concluding that Paole was indeed a vampire, they drove a stake through his heart, to which he reacted by groaning and bleeding, and burned the body. They then disinterred Paole's four victims and performed the same procedure, to prevent them from becoming vampires.

About five years later, in the winter of 1731, a new epidemic occurred, with more than ten people dying within several weeks, some of them in just two or three days without any previous illness. The numbers and the age of the deceased vary somewhat between the two main sources.

Glaser's report on the case states that by the twelfth of December, thirteen people had died in the course of six weeks. Glaser names the following victims (here rearranged chronologically): Miliza (Serbian Milica, a fifty-year-old woman); Milloi (Serbian Miloje, a fourteen-year-old boy); Joachim (a fifteen-year-old boy); Petter (Serbian Petar, a fifteen-day-old boy); Stanno (Serbian Stana, a twenty-year-old woman) as well as her newborn child, which Glaser notes was buried "behind a fence, where the mother had lived" due to not having lived long enough to be baptized; Wutschiza (Serbian Vučica, a nine-year-old boy), Milosova (Serbian Milošova, actually "Miloš's /wife/", a thirty-year-old wife of a hajduk), Radi (Serbian Rade, a twenty-four-year-old man), and Ruschiza (Serbian Ružica, a forty-year-old woman). The sick had complained of stabs in the sides and pain in the chest, prolonged fever and jerks of the limbs. Glaser reports that the locals considered Milica and Stana to have started the vampirism epidemic. According to his retelling, Milica had come to the village from Ottoman-controlled territories six years ago. The locals' testimony indicated that she had always been a good neighbour and that to the best of their knowledge, she had never "believed or practiced something diabolic". However, she had once mentioned to them that, while still in Ottoman lands, she had eaten two sheep that had been killed by vampires. Stana, on the other hand, had admitted that when she was in Ottoman-controlled lands, she had smeared herself with vampire blood as a protection against vampires (as these had been very active there). According to local belief, both things would cause the women to become vampires after death.

According to Flückinger's report, by the seventh of January, seventeen people had died within a period of three months (the last two of these apparently after Glaser's visit). He names Miliza (Milica, a sixty-nine-year-old woman, died after a three-month illness); an unnamed eight-year-old child; Milloe (Miloje, a sixteen-year-old-boy, died after a three-day illness); Stana (a twenty-year-old woman, died at childbirth after a three-day illness, reportedly said herself that she had smeared herself with vampire blood) as well as her newborn child (dead right immediately after birth, and, as Flückinger observes, "half-eaten by the dogs due to a slovenly burial"); an unnamed ten-year-old girl; Joachim (a seventeen-year-old, died after a three-day illness); the hadnack 's unnamed wife; Ruscha (Ruža - variant of Ružica - a woman, died after a ten-day illness); Staniko (Stanjko, a sixty-year-old man); Miloe (Miloje, the second victim of that name; a twenty-five-year-old man); Ruža's child (eighteen days old); Rhade (Rade, a twenty-one-year-old servant of the local hajduk corporal, died after a three-month long illness); the local standard-bearer's (bajraktar's) unnamed wife, apparently identical to Milošova in the other report along with her child; the eight-week-old child of the hadnack; Stanoicka (Stanojka, a twenty-year-old woman, the wife of a hajduk, died after a three-day illness). According to her father-in-law Joviza (Jovica), Stanojka had gone to bed healthy fifteen days ago, but had woken up at midnight in terrible fear and cried that she had been throttled by the late Miloje. Flückinger states that the locals explain the new epidemic with the fact that Milica, the first to die, had eaten the meat of sheep that the "previous vampires" (ie Paole and his victims five years ago) killed. He also mentions, in passing, the claims that Stana had, before her death, admitted having smeared herself with blood to protect herself from vampires and would hence become a vampire herself, as would her child.

The villagers complained of the new deaths to oberstleutnant Schnezzer, the Austrian military commander in charge of the administration. The latter, fearing an epidemic of pestilence, sent for Imperial Contagions-Medicus (roughly, Infectious Disease Specialist) Glaser stationed in the nearby town of Paraćin. On the twelfth of December 1731, Glaser examined the villagers and their houses. He failed to find any signs of a contagious malady and blamed the deaths on the malnutrition common in the region as well as the unhealthy effects of the severe Eastern Orthodox fasting. However, the villagers insisted that the illnesses were caused by vampires. At the moment, two or three households were gathering together at night, with some asleep and other on the watch. They were convinced that the deaths wouldn't stop unless the vampires were executed by the authorities, and threatened to abandon the village in order to save their lives if that wasn't done. Failing to "get this out of their heads", Glaser consented to the exhumation of some of the deceased. To his surprise, he found that most of them were not decomposed and many were swollen and had blood in their mouths, while several others who had died more recently (namely Vučica, Milošova, and Rade) were rather decomposed. Glaser outlined his findings in a report to the Jagodina commandant's office, recommending that the authorities should pacify the population by fulfilling its request to "execute" the vampires. Schnezzer furthered Glaser's report to the Supreme Command in Belgrade (the city was then held by Austrian forces). The vice-commandant, Botta d'Adorno, sent a second commission to investigate the case.

The new commission included a military surgeon, Johann Flückinger, two officers, lieutenant colonel Büttner and J.H. von Lindenfels, along with two other military surgeons, Siegele and Johann Friedrich Baumgarten. On the seventh of January, together with the village elders and some local Gypsies, they opened the graves of the deceased. Their findings were similar to Glaser's, although their report contains much more anatomical detail. The commission established that, while five of the corpses (the hadnack's wife and child, Rade, and the standard-bearer's wife and child) were decomposed, the remaining twelve were "quite complete and undecayed" and exhibited the traits that were commonly associated with vampirism. Their chests and in some cases other organs were filled with fresh (rather than coagulated) blood; the viscera were estimated to be "in good condition"; various corpses looked plump and their skin had a "red and vivid" (rather than pale) colour; and in several cases, "the skin on ... hands and feet, along with the old nails, fell away on their own, but on the other hand completely new nails were evident, along with a fresh and vivid skin". In the case of Milica, the hajduks who witnessed the dissection were very surprised at her plumpness, stating that they had known her well, from her youth, and that she had always been very "lean and dried-up"; it was only in the grave she had attained this plumpness. The surgeons summarized all these phenomena by stating that the bodies were in "the vampiric condition" (das Vampyrenstand). After the examination had been completed, the Gypsies cut off the heads of the vampires and burned both their heads and their bodies, the ashes being thrown in the Morava river. The decomposed bodies were laid back into their graves. The report is dated 26 January 1732, Belgrade, and bears the signatures of the five officers involved.

On the thirteenth of February, Glaser's father, Viennese doctor Johann Friedrich Glaser, who was also a correspondent of the Nuremberg journal Commercium Litterarium, sent its editors a letter describing the entire case as his son had written to him about it already on the eighteenth of January. The story aroused great interest. After that, both reports (especially Flückinger's more detailed version) and the letter were reprinted in a number of articles and treatises.

Source:

Glaser's report in the original German.

Johann Friedrich Glaser's letter to the editors of Commercium Litterarium (also in German).

Flückinger's report in the original German.

An English translation of Flückinger's report.

Nowosadtko, Jutta. 2004. Der Vampyrus Serviensis und sein Habitat: Impressionen von der österreichischen Militärgränze. In: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit. 8 (2004). Heft 2. Universitätsverlag Potsdam.

Philosophy of Vampirism

2009-01-06T02:22:00.000-08:00

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John Heinrich Zopfius in his Dissertation on Serbian Vampires (1733) says: "Vampires issue forth from their graves in the night, attack people sleeping quietly in their beds, suck out all the blood from their bodies and destroy them. They beset men, women and children alike, sparing neither age nor sex. Those who are under the fatal malignity of their influence complain of suffocation and a total deficiency of spirits, after which they soon expire. Some who, when at the point of death, have been asked if they can tell what is causing their decease, reply that such and such persons, lately dead, have risen from the tomb to torment and torture them."

Scoffern in his Stray Leaves of Science and Folk Lore writes: "The best definition I can give of a vampire is a living, mischievous and murderous dead body. A living dead body! The words are idle, contradictory, incomprehensible, but so are vampires."

Horst defines a vampire as "a dead body which continues to live in the grave, which it leaves, however, by night for the purpose of sucking the blood of the living, whereby it is nourished and preserved in good condition, instead of becoming decomposed like other dead bodies."

A demon has no body, although for purposes of his own he may energize, assume, or seem to assume one, but it is not his real and proper body. So the vampire is not strictly a demon, although his foul lust and horrid propensities be truly demonic and of hell. Neither may the vampire be called a ghost or phantom, strictly speaking, for an apparition is intangible. The vampire has a body and his craving for blood is to obtain sustenance for that body. He is neither dead nor alive; but living in death. He is an abnormality; the androgyne of the phantom world; a pariah among the fiends. How fearful a destiny is that of the vampire who has no rest in the grave but whose doom it is to come forth and prey upon the living.

In the first place it may briefly be inquired how the belief in vampirism originated. The origins, although of course very shadowy, may probably be said to go back to the earliest times when primitive man observed the mysterious relations between soul and body. The division of an individual into these two parts must have been suggested by his observation, however crude and rough, of the phenomenon of unconsciousness as exhibited in sleep, and more particularly in death. He cannot but have speculated concerning that something, the loss of which withdraws man forever from the living and waking world. He was bound to ask himself if there was any continuance, in any circumstances at present veiled from him, of that life and personality which had obviously passed elsewhere. The question was an eternal one. It was, moreover, a personal one which concerned him most intimately since it related to an experience he could not hope to escape.

Source:

Montague Summers

The Vampire: His Kith & Kin (1928)

Vampire antidotes and exorcism

2009-01-05T02:26:00.001-08:00

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Upon discovery, a vampire can be destroyed by cremation, decapitation, exposure to sunlight or impalation with a stake through its heart. The vampire’s powers are many and varied. They can remain undead indefinitely unless exorcised in a specific manner. They can assume animal shapes and some have been thought to control the elements locally. Metamorphosis into mist is not unknown either. They can intrude upon sleeping persons’ dreams and mesmerise their prey. Their infectious bite may eventually result in the death of their victims, some of whom will likewise become undead upon expiry. Vampires, despite their manifold supernatural abilities, are nevertheless not invulnerable. They leave the confines of where the corporeal shell resides only between sunset and sunrise. They cannot cross running water save at the slack or the flood of the tide. They fear and shrink from the sign of the cross, the crucifix and, above all, from the Host, the Body of God. Holy water will burn them as some scorching acid and they flee from the fragrance of most incense, particularly frankincense. Certain trees and herbs are hateful to them, especially whitethorn, or buckthorn. They are also curiously allergic to garlic. The pungent herb Allium Sativum (wild variety: Allium Vineal) is deemed by many to be effective as a vampire repellent. In 450 BC, Herodotus, the Greek historian, in Euterpe: Concerning the History of Europe, remarks about an inscription inside the Cheops pyramid at Gisa, built circa 2900 BC, that attests to the value of garlic’s arcane properties. It was invariably employed to ward off evil spirits, and still is.

Exorcism does not "kill" the demonic agent. It rids the supernatural predatory wraith from our sphere or dimension. The corporeal host obviously returns to its true state and is no longer plagued by the apparent supernatural ability to manifest as though it were living. During the exorcism the material shell returns to earthly time as the demonic entity is expelled.

Evil tends to need to be invited when it enters a portal into our hemisphere. This does not necessarily require a full-blown evocation, or the raising of demons per se. It is relatively easy to release evil into the world for evil is not merely a lack of something, but an effective agent, a living spiritual being, perverted and perverting; a terrible reality: mysterious and frightening. The problem arises when attempting to cast such evil out of our world. This is significantly more difficult than inviting it in.

When disinterred the abnormal condition of the corpse will be a sure mark of whether it is a vampire or not. Such bodies do not suffer decomposition after burial. They do not fall to dust. Generally described as being exceedingly gaunt and lean with a hideous countenance, the vampire, when he has satiated his lust for warm human blood, will appear horribly puffed and bloated, as though he were some filthy leech, gorged and replete to bursting. The lips are often markedly full and drawn back to reveal sharp teeth, gleaming white against a frame stained with slab gouts of blood. The foul offal from the previous night's feast. The gaping mouth, stained and foul with blood, might reveal glutinous trickles that have spilled on to the lawn shrouding and linen cerements. The form is therefore discovered gorged and stinking with the life-force blood of others. The eyes are sometimes closed; more frequently open, glazed, fixed, and glaring fiercely. The corpse will nevertheless seem composed as if in a profound sleep. The stench of the charnel where these undead repose is oftentimes so terrible and fetid that the sickening odour can effect the senses of an observer for possibly months afterwards. Epidemics of this unspeakable evil have resulted in entire graves being discovered soaked and saturated with squelching blood. Such an epidemic plagued south east Europe and reached England's shores in the early part of the 18th century. It is believed that the Highgate contamination had its origins in this particular plague.

Source:

Seán Manchester

The Highgate Vampire (1985, 1991)

The Vampire Hunter's Handbook (1997)

Why do people dismiss Vampires?

2009-01-04T02:33:00.000-08:00

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Today the majority of folk not only dismiss the existence of vampires, but also most anything else remotely belonging to the supernatural. Montague Summers and Seán Manchester, however, tend to subscribe to the view that cases of vampirism have been stifled and covered up by those in authority. So has much else, of course, and the recent inaccurate portrayals of the vampire and vampirism in films and literature only serve to assist this endeavour of disinformation. Furthermore, most people have built in “slides” that short circuit the mind’s critical examination process when it comes to certain sensitive topics. “Slides” is a CIA term for a condition type of response which dead ends a person’s thinking and terminates debate or examination of the topic at hand. Any mention of the word “vampire,” for example, often solicits a “slide” response with most people.

Owing to the incredible bombardment of information (and thereby also misinformation) via the media, television, radio and, not least, the new information technology, people are probably far less open-minded than they were hitherto. Hence they dismiss the existence of the vampire phenomenon without prior examination. This principle of prior contempt cannot fail to keep people in everlasting ignorance of the undead. Notwithstanding the natural predilection nowadays to dismiss any notion of vampires, when a BBC poll was conducted to coincide with an online discussion with Seán Manchester on the subject the result was interesting. The question put to those who visited the BBC website was: “Do you believe in vampires?” 47.4% said they did not believe, but an encouraging 52.6% said that they did believe in the existence of vampires.

The vampire is a predatory entity that feeds on the life-force, ie blood, of others. It is but one of many types of demon. However, in all the darkest pages of the malign supernatural there is no more terrible tradition than that of the vampire, a pariah even among demons. When the undead is exorcised using impalement the corporeal shell returns to earthly time with a bang as the demonic presence is expelled as the accompanying rite of exorcism is uttered and a prayer for the dead follows.

Source:

Seán Manchester

Definition of a Vampire

2009-01-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

The vampire has been defined down the ages as an accursed body which cannot rest in the kindly earth, but nightly leaves its grave to prey on sleeping men and women through whom they are believed to maintain a semblance of life by sucking thence the warm blood of such victims while they sleep. Webster’s International Dictionary confirms that the vampire is a “re-animated body of a dead person … believed to come from the grave and wander about by night sucking the blood of persons asleep causing death.” The Oxford Dictionary agrees with all the above, describing a vampire as “a ghost that leaves his grave at night and sucks the blood of sleeping persons.” Sir James Frazer in the second volume of his work The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religions (1934) is in no doubt that vampires are “malicious ghosts who issue from their graves to suck the blood of the living, and stringent measures are deemed necessary to hinder or arrest this horrible proceeding.”

They are, of course, demonic. In certain circumstances (though these are few and far between) those who expire from the parasitic undead's visitations and quaffing of their life-blood will themselves be at risk of becoming undead in their turn. This does not occur where the person is in a state of grace; where any mortal sin that stains their soul has been absolved. And by no means are the great majority of victims destined to return as undead. It would seem that those who become undead in this way are fewer than might be imagined. This nevertheless remains an enigma where probable candidates are those who have led a life of more than ordinary immorality and unbridled wickedness; where the individual has possessed a surfeit of selfish passions, evil ambitions and cruelty. Such undead, however, are thought to be those who have delighted in blood and devoted themselves during their life to the practice of diabolism and the black arts. Thus an undead is more likely to result from exceedingly base and cruel actions; especially where devil worship and devotion to the black arts has occurred.

The supernatural agency is demonic and, whilst human beings cannot actually transform into demons themselves, they may be possessed by them, and thus appear transformed. In the case of contamination followed by expiry of a candidate there exists the possibility that their malevolence sets in action forces which might prove powerful for terror and destruction even beyond the grave. It is hardly to be supposed that such persons would rest undisturbed while it is less difficult to contemplate the existence of this hideous life in death where the demonic is extant and seemingly manifests itself as a corporeal form. The smallest drop of blood can be employed by a demonic entity, enabling the wraith to form in a tangible manner. Revenants are attracted to blood which allows them to effect their purpose. The ancient Israelites would not eat the blood of any flesh at all, because the life of the flesh is in the blood. The Hebrew word that translates as “life” in Deuteronomy 12: 23 (“Only be sure not to eat the blood, for the blood is the life”) also signifies “soul.”

The undead partakes of the dark nature and mysterious qualities of both revenant and demon. The exorcist must always be mindful of these alarming characteristics - not least the undead's terrible blood lust - and must never go unprotected when putting himself at risk during operative field work. Manifestation via the blood is the undead’s means of metamorphosis into a form often indistiguishable from a corpse. Since the undead do not exist in time - they dwell in what is described as "anti-time" - they will cast no shadow, nor will their reflection be seen in a mirror or water’s surface. The crucifix symbol itself is utterly abhorred by them, and indeed all forms of evil. The object and what it is made of does not possess any power, yet it is so strongly symbolic of the triumph of good over evil that it alone repels evil and whatever is an emissary of evil. However, when employed by a person the intent and faith of the person employing it is paramount. This might seem like a paradox. Christian items and holy places utterly repel evil people who oftentimes delight in their sacrilege. Likewise supernatural evil shuns these holy things.

It is indubitably unwise for these sacred symbols to be adopted as mere fashion items. Similarly, of course, it is unwise in the extreme for diabolical symbols to be adopted and worn. So the power of the crucifix exists, but will be magnified one thousandfold when supported by faith. Exorcism does not "kill" the demonic agent. It rids our sphere or dimension of the supernatural predatory wraith. The corporeal host once exorcised obviously returns to its true state and is no longer plagued by the apparent supernatural ability to manifest as though it were living.

“Whether we are justified in supposing that cases of vampirism are less frequent today than in past centuries, I am far from certain. But one thing is plain ~ not that they do not occur, but that they are carefully hushed up and stifled.” - Montague Summers (The Vampire in Europe, 1929).

Source:

Seán Manchester

Montague Summers

Those who are not Vampires

2009-01-02T01:52:00.000-08:00

If people who incorrectly call themselves "vampires" would consult the definition provided in the English dictionary we would be able to communicate much better. Such individuals are what vampirologists like myself describe as vampiroids and psychologists sometimes refer to as people suffering from a form of personality disorder, but they are not "vampires." The only persons they are deluding are themselves and a handful of similarly reluctant dictionary users. If we do not agree on the definition and meaning of words what is the point in communicating at all? Words sometimes have quite specific meanings. "Vampire" is one such word. A small number of people choosing to hijack that word and alter its meaning to apply it, albeit absurdly, to themselves does not, in fact, change the meaning of the word. The vampire has been defined down the ages as an accursed body which cannot rest in the kindly earth, but nightly leaves its grave to prey on sleeping men and women through whom they are believed to maintain a semblance of life by sucking thence the warm blood of such victims while they sleep. Webster’s International Dictionary confirms that the vampire is a “re-animated body of a dead person … believed to come from the grave and wander about by night sucking the blood of persons asleep causing death.” The Oxford Dictionary agrees with all the above, describing the vampire as “a ghost that leaves his grave at night and sucks the blood of sleeping persons.”

Dictionaries have not accommodated the relatively recent appearance of vampiroids by expanding the word to mean "people who follow what they believe to be 'vampire' lifestyles and behaviour patterns." The word "vampire" still means what is has always meant in dictionairies. To qualify such people would have to be "undead" and they clearly do not qualify in that department. So call themselves what they will, they are not, nor ever have been, vampires; no matter how much they might wish to imagine otherwise. They are, at best, imitating what they construe vampires to be, albeit a million miles from the reality according to its accepted meaning in the English language. Once we lose the meaning of words, we might as well all act as if we are illiterate.

The interest in vampirism with an attendant growth of a vampiroid subculture over the last quarter of a century is largely due to the promotion of occultism and the malign supernatural throughout the media, particularly the cinematic and television media. The vampire archetype is the antithesis of the Christian archetype, but has more and more been portrayed in a kinder and more sympathetic light. This is at odds with reality and all we know about such predatory wraiths.The Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series and Anne Rice novels have been extremely popular, but they are light years removed from the real thing.

My disapproval is not of folk who wish to enjoy Gothic literature, art, and theatre - even when this involves their entering into the spirit of the occasion by donning what they construe to be authentic garb. My disapproval hinges on those who by their behaviour do harm to themselves and to others. Such as these I identify in my concise vampirological guide The Vampire Hunter's Handbook. Examples of ultra-vampiroids would be the cases of Manuel and Daniel Ruda in Germany, and Roderick Ferrell in the USA. Ultra-vampiroidism is no freak display of neo-Gothicism or decadent and dark Romanticism. In essence it is indubitably anti-Gothic and anti-Romantic. Such people who claim to be "vampires" are, of course, not vampires.

Those who appear to display a blood-drinking addiction, special need or habit, fetish or predilection describe themselves as "sanguinarians". Those who claim to have an ability or special need to absorb earth energies call themselves "psi-vampyres." The added trimmings of pseudo-gothic subculture and the occult are tenuous and remotely secondary. In fact, they are superficial. Vampiroidism is fiction and fantasy in relation to real vampirism. The practice of drinking human blood has nothing to do with the meaning of "Gothic," whether literature, art or achitecture. Anyone can absorb energies. There is pranic energy in mere water alone, but energy is nothing without direction and control. Vampiroidic "vampires" are a self-labelled fetishistic subculture of people, some of whom have a pathological fixation for drinking blood. Hybrid "psi-vampyres" are equally fraudulent compared to the real thing which is essentially demonic. The self-styled descriptive label "vampire" is in the case of such people a preposterous misnomer.

Source:

Seán Manchester

Genesis of the word "Vampire"

2009-01-01T01:19:00.000-08:00

The English word vampire was borrowed (perhaps via French vampire) from German Vampir, in turn borrowed in early 18th century from Serbian вампир/vampir or, according to some sources, from Hungarian vámpír. The Serbian and Hungarian forms have parallels in virtually all Slavic languages: Bulgarian вампир (vampir), вапир (vapir) or въпир (vəpir), Croatian vampir, Czech and Slovak upír, Polish wąpierz and (perhaps East Slavic-influenced) upiór, Russian упырь (upyr'), Belarussian упiр (upyr), Ukrainian упирь (upir' ), from Old Russian упирь (upir'). The etymology is uncertain. Among the proposed proto-Slavic forms are *ǫpyr' and *ǫpir'. The Slavic word might, like its possible Russian cognate netopyr' ("bat"), come from the Proto-Indo-European root for "to fly". Another theory has it that the Slavic word comes from a Turkic word denoting an evil supernatural entity (cf. Kazan Tatar ubyr "witch"). This theory has now become obsolete, but has recently been embraced by one Polish scholar. The word Upir as a term for vampire is found for the first time in written form in 1047 in a letter to a Novgorodian prince referring to him as 'Upir Lichyj' (Wicked Vampire).

Tales of the undead craving blood are ancient and found in nearly every culture around the world. Vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are mentioned in early Babylonian demonology, and the bloodsucking Akhkharu even earlier in the Sumerian mythology. These female demons were said to roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and killing newborn babies and pregnant women. One of these demons, named Lilitu, was later adapted into Jewish demonology as Lilith. Lilitu/Lilith is sometimes called the mother of all vampires.

In India, tales of the Vetalas, ghoul-like beings that inhabit corpses, are found in old Sanskrit folklore. A prominent story tells of King Vikramāditya and his nightly quests to capture an elusive Vetala. The stories of the Vetala have been compiled in the book Baital Pachisi.

The Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet in one myth became full of bloodlust after slaughtering humans and was only sated after drinking alcohol coloured as blood.

In Homer's Odyssey, the shades that Odysseus meets on his journey to the underworld are lured to the blood of freshly sacrificed rams, a fact that Odysseus uses to his advantage to summon the shade of Tiresias. Roman tales describe the strix, a nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood. The Roman strix is the source of the Romanian vampire, the Strigoi and the Albanian Shtriga, which also show Slavic influence.

In early Slavic folklore, a vampire drank blood, was afraid of (but could not be killed by) silver and could be destroyed by cutting off its head or by putting a wooden stake into its heart.

Medieval historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded the earliest English stories of vampires in the 12th century.

Many vampire legends also bear similarities to legends and religious beliefs regarding succubi or incubi.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the word vampire in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published in the Harleian Miscellany in 1745. Vampires had already been discussed in German literature. After Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires". These reports, prepared between 1725 and 1732, received widespread publicity.

The English term could have been derived (possibly via French vampyre) from the German Wampyr, in turn thought to be derived in the early eighteenth century from the Serbian вампир/vampir. The Serbian form has parallels in virtually all Slavic languages: Bulgarian вампир (vampir), Czech and Slovak upír, Polish wąpierz, and (perhaps East Slavic-influenced) upiór, Russian упырь (upyr'), Belarusian упыр (upyr), Ukrainian упирь (upir'), from Old Russian упирь (upir'). Many of these languages have also borrowed forms such as "vampir/wampyr" subsequently from the West; these are distinct from the original local words for the creature. The exact etymology is unclear. Among the proposed proto-Slavic forms are *ǫpyrь and *ǫpirь. Like its possible cognate that means "bat" (Czech netopýr, Slovak netopier, Polish nietoperz, Russian нетопырь / netopyr' - a species of bat), the Slavic word might contain a Proto-Indo-European root for "to fly". An older theory is that the Slavic languages have borrowed the word from a Turkic term for "witch" (eg Tatar ubyr).

The first recorded use of the Old Russian form Упирь (Upir') is commonly believed to be in a document dated 6555 (1047 AD). It is a colophon in a manuscript of the Book of Psalms written by a priest who transcribed the book from Glagolitic into Cyrillic for the Novgorodian Prince Vladimir Yaroslavovich. The priest writes that his name is "Upir' Likhyi " (Упирь Лихый), which means something like "Wicked Vampire" or "Foul Vampire". This apparently strange name has been cited as an example both of surviving paganism and of the use of nicknames as personal names.

Another early use of the Old Russian word is in the anti-pagan treatise Word of Saint Grigoriy, dated variously from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, where pagan worship of upyri is reported.

Source:

Johnson, Samuel (1745). "IV". Harleian Miscellany. London: T. Osborne. pp. 358.

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial and Death, page 5.

(German) "Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. 16 Bde. (in 32 Teilbänden). Leipzig: S. Hirzel 1854-1960".

(French) "Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé". http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/fast.exe?mot=vampire. Retrieved on 2006-06-13.

(French) Dauzat, Albert (1938). Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française. Paris: Librairie Larousse. OCLC 904687.

(Russian) Tokarev, Sergei Aleksandrovich (1982). Mify Narodov Mira. Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya: Moscow. OCLC 7576647. ("Myths of the Peoples of the World"). Upyr'

(Russian) "Russian Etymological Dictionary by Max Vasmer". http://vasmer.narod.ru/p752.htm. Retrieved on 2006-06-13.

(Bulgarian) Mladenov, Stefan (1941). Etimologičeski i pravopisen rečnik na bǎlgarskiya knižoven ezik.

(Russian) Sobolevskij, A. I.. "Slavjano-russkaja paleografija". http://www.textology.ru/drevnost/srp2.shtml. Retrieved on 2007-12-21. The original manuscript, Книги 16 Пророков толковыя

Lind, John H. (2004). "Varangians in Europe’s Eastern and Northern Periphery". Ennen ja Nyt (4).

Dolotova, I.A.; O.A. Rodionov & A.B. Van'kova (2002) (PDF). История России. 6-7 кл : Учебник для основной школы: В 2-х частях. Ч. 1: С древнейших времен до конца XVI века. ЦГО. ISBN 5-7662-0149-4. ("History of Russia. 6-7 kl.: Textbook for the basic school: In 2-X parts. Part 1: From the earliest times to the end of the XVI century.")

(Russian) "Рыбаков Б.А. Язычество древних славян / М.: Издательство 'Наука,' 1981 г.".

(Russian) Зубов, Н.И. (1998). "Загадка Периодизации Славянского Язычества В Древнерусских Списках “Слова Св. Григория … О Том, Како Первое Погани Суще Языци, Кланялися Идолом…”". Живая Старина 1 (17): 6–10.