SPIRITS & SPECTERS
Dracula Was Late: England Kept Its Own Vampires Long Before the Count Landed at Whitby
A University of Hertfordshire researcher says English belief in the undead stretches from medieval Yorkshire pits to a Buckinghamshire bishop's absolution.
HERTFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND — Count Dracula, though widely supposed to have introduced the vampire to English soil, arrived rather late, according to an article by Sam George, Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Hertfordshire, republished by The Daily Grail from The Conversation. Bram Stoker's novel appeared in 1897, and the author notes that the first vampire in English literature was John Polidori's Lord Ruthven, in 1819, modelled on a portrait of Lord Byron.
Beyond fiction, the author describes a number of local legends. The Croglin Vampire, said to have appeared in Cumberland in the 1750s, was retold by the clergyman Augustus Hare in 1871. In that tale, a creature scratches at a window and vanishes into a vault, where broken coffins are found, and one intact coffin holds a mummified figure. The author states the story has never been verified. In Renwick, Cumbria, villagers were once nicknamed "bats" after a creature said to have flown from a rebuilt church's foundations in 1733.
The article's firmest ground is older still. The twelfth-century chronicler William of Newburgh recorded a Buckinghamshire revenant, which St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, was asked to deal with. Told that the corpse must be dug up and burned, the churchmen chose instead to lay an absolution on its chest. According to the account, the body had not decomposed, and the wanderer was not seen again.
Most striking are the remains at Wharram Percy, a deserted Yorkshire village. The bones of more than 100 individuals, excavated over half a century ago, were first thought to reflect famine cannibalism or a massacre. A reexamination in 2017, the author writes, linked the burned and broken skeletons to deliberate mutilation meant to stop the dead from harming the living. The author adds that a child's skull with a stone in its mouth, found at a Roman site in Italy, has been dubbed the "Vampire of Lugano".
Despite such evidence, the author observes, popular opinion still places vampire belief in Eastern Europe. Her team's research into British vampire burials continues.