“You think I don’t watch your movies? You always come back.”

I was disappointed to see this ‘vampire killing kit’ surface again, not because it’s back on the market (previously sold by LiveAuctioneers.com on 9.6.2012), but because Christie’s Paris have either failed to do the proper research or are ignoring the work that I and others (see also Joe Nickell’s chapter in his ‘Man-Beasts’ book) have done in the last few years to expose these kits as modern novelties.

Google Translate makes this of Christie’s auction notes;

‘Witty (s), this singular set is an invitation to travel that immerses us in the Carpathians at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It reminds us in particular to the publication in 1897 by Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The whole of Europe is so passionate about the fantasy world of vampires. Very quickly, creating Stoker transcends and creates a real fascination. This is particularly important in the Carpathian Mountains, considered the territory of vampires.

Professor Ernst Bloomberg, with the support of Nicholas Plomdeur a gunsmith Liege, then creates a business of destroying vampires. A destination for travelers to Eastern Europe, they produce kits containing the necessary equipment to protect themselves from these evil creatures.

Examples of such boxes that have survived are rare, it is nevertheless one of Sotheby’s New York, 16 November 2011, lot 112.’

Blomberg (not Bloomberg guys) is fake, Plomdeur was nothing to do with kits, and they can’t seem to make up their minds whether the kits were produced for those genuinely afeared of vampires, or if they are ‘witty’ flights of fancy. Added to which, the kit appears in the Decorative Arts department! Which is it guys? Real? Vintage novelty? Modern art? Arguably the latter of those, but in reality there’s just no evidence for these things prior to 1986, and I generously push the possible date back to c1970 in my Fortean Times article and the above-linked blog entries.

Ah well, maybe I have more work ahead of me!

 

When the Lights Went Out – Revenge of the Black Monk

If a ghostly monk can bite a sandwich, what’s stopping you from giving it a damn good thrashing?

There’s a new ‘true life’ haunting movie coming out next month, and this one is British.

Interestingly in this case the director has a connection to the ‘real’ story (Wiki’s version here). Inexplicably, he’s advanced the period setting by nearly a decade, presumably to hook the story onto another real life event; the energy crisis of 1973/4 (hence the title). Ironically, this draws attention to one alternate explanation for the lights going out during the ‘real’ haunting – power cuts and electrical problems happened before said shortage, and they still happen today. Even this may be redundant when we consider another explanation; that somebody might simply have been turning switches off;

‘The lights would go out, and when they looked in the cupboard under the stairs the main switch would be turned off. On one occasion, Mrs. Pritchard carefully taped it in the “on” position with insulating tape; half an hour later, the lights were off  again, and tape had simply vanished.’
-’Poltergeist!’, 1981, p.130

Wooooooo! Ahem. Anyway, Holden is the son of a one of the contributing figures in the story, Mrs Rene Holden:

‘Another neighbour, Rene Holden (who was a bit psychic), was in the Pritchards’ sitting room when the lights went out. In the faint glow of the streetlamp that came through the curtains she saw the lower half of a figure dressed in a long black garment.’
-‘Beyond the Occult’, 1988 p.237

‘A bit psychic’? Isn’t that like being ‘a bit pregnant’? The other major incidents involving Holden’s mother were the apparently spiritual theft of a fur coat, and the mysterious throwing of a plate of sandwiches around a room before a ghostly yet physical bite was taken out of one of them. All of this being under cover of another bout of another selective power failure. The latter is a rare instance of potential physical evidence of the paranormal that could have been tested, bearing as it did the impressions of apparently ‘enormous teeth’. Instead however, Holden kept the sandwich herself and somehow allowed it to deteriorate into ‘crumbs’ after only a few days. So we are told by author Colin Wilson, who has produced the closest thing we have to a written primary source for all this; his book ‘Poltergeist!’ (along with his other books like ‘Beyond the Occult’, referenced above). Though the director of the movie has drawn from family oral history for his version of the story, Wilson’s book was written closer to the time when the events in question happened, so might better reflect personal testimony. Then again, maybe not. In any case, his book was still published a good decade on from the ‘hauntings’, in 1981. Wilson himself was not involved or even present at the time, so far as I can determine. This, along with Holden’s film, is by its nature actually a secondary source and of limited usefulness in getting to the bottom of events. As Wilson relates, ‘no trained investigator came on the scene while the disturbances were at their height.’ So we don’t have any evidence from parapsychologists or even the pseudoscientific investigations of the average ‘ghost club’ to go on. Nor even any newspaper reports (that I could find). Just anecdote; although in this case it isn’t just family tradition, as visitors are also claimed to have experienced supposedly supernatural shenanigans (which of course doesn’t mean that they were). The film director claims that the police witnessed the ‘ghost’, and local MP Geoff Lofthouse writes of his personal experiences in his autobiography:

‘I suppose it would be about 1965, and I was in a Council meeting with Violet Pritchard, when I started ribbing her about the stories that were going around that her son’s house up on East Drive was haunted. Violet had great charm, but also great directness. She looked me in the eyes and said: “Well Geoff, if that’s what you think, you had better come up with me.” So after the Council meeting I picked up Sarah, and we went up to Joe Pritchard’s. Just as we entered, Violet said: “This will wipe the smile off your face.” The stories of the poltergeist had been going the rounds for a few months then. Sarah had heard them, but neither of us took them very seriously; after all, Chequerfield estate was not some haunted house in the South of London or a ruined tower up in the Yorkshire Dales, it was newly built council housing on what had been agricultural land. In we went and sat down. We had been there about twenty minutes when suddenly there was a banging on the wall, at this sound the dog, who was sitting right in front of me, stood up stock still and the hairs on his body rose up in the air. It only stood a second before darting through the door. Joe Pritchard said “It’s here again,” and to prove that it was, two candlesticks rose up and were thrown through the air. One second they were standing on a sideboard, or it may have been a shelf, and the next they had gone up into the air and broken the chandelier. This was enough for Sarah. Without any ado she dashed out of the house. I was just following her when politeness caused me to stop at the bottom of the stairs to say: “Excuse me but I have to go.” And I did, I went rapidly at the point when a number of blankets were thrown down at us.

In most things I am a bit sceptical, but when it comes to the stories of the Pontefract poltergeist I am a true believer. Taps were turning themselves on, and a whole range of activity was taking place, and this in a family of everyday Pontefract people. I decided that Violet Pritchard should be my Deputy Mayor because of all the people I have met in my life as a politician, I regard few politicians with such warmness as Violet Pritchard. When I say that she was a kind and simple soul, I do not mean to be disrespectful in any way.’
-’A Very Miner MP’, 1986, p.69

Very disconcerting at the time, no doubt, but so can fiction be. There are any number of explanations for what Lofthouse relates that don’t require the existence of ghosts – something that should require some pretty extraordinary evidence to accept. This lack of empirical evidence is a perennial problem with hauntings and similar experiences, in that all available evidence is anecdotal, mediated through a third party, and not recorded until years after the fact.

Wilson, too, is not a parapsychologist. is well-known in paranormalist and Fortean circles, having written a string of ‘factual’ books and bought into a wide range of ‘phenomena’ from illusionist Uri Geller (‘The Geller Phenomenon’) to the lost city of Atlantis. He’s also an author of true crime books and fiction.

Sightings like Holden’s led to the ghost being identified as that of a local historical figure, the ‘Black Monk’. Amusingly, this turned out to be a load of nonsense, and so Wilson, having himself debunked this hypothesis (p.146-7 of ‘Poltergeist!’), rationalised the whole thing away as the ghost choosing to look like the monk based upon overheard family conversations. Alternatively, the sightings were hallucinations, delusions, confabulation, or something else entirely. But it seems that it’s easier to just make the facts fit the story on the presupposition that what the family experienced was something paranormal.

So what really went on here? We’ll probably never know, but other cases from the Fox sisters to the Enfield poltergeist suggest that these ‘ghosts’ are linked to a very real phenomenon; that of growing up. The paranormalists express this in terms of supernatural manifestations fuelled by the available ‘energy’ of puberty, but a more realistic interpretation would be that they are the result of childish attention-seeking, acting out, and/or teenage angst. The title of the new film becomes highly relevant here. All of the major physical manifestations (sandwich hurling included) took place ‘When the Lights Went Out’, giving a great deal of room for real, live, human beings to get involved, just as in physical mediumship. Whatever the case, the film looks likely to provide an interesting dramatisation of a real life experience of a ‘haunting’ – but through no fault of the makers, it isn’t evidence of the paranormal. Doubtless the true life marketing will convince many that it is.

Aaaaagh! Vampire log!

Or is a saintly log? Surprisingly good preservation is often cited in folklore and history as evidence for a) vampires and revenants or conversely b) the very pious, depending largely upon one’s social status. If you’re a peasant with retarded decomp, you’re a tool of the devil, whilst if you’re a dead abbot or similar, you might even get canonised.

The deceased tree member in question seems to have attracted the interest of the superstitious because the locals expect wood to rot underground or in water. Well, sometimes it does. Other times, not so much. It depends entirely on the conditions involved, included the levels of oxygen in the water. The fact that they equate the decay rate of wood with that of metal shows a misunderstanding of how things decompose. I’m no expert myself, but I would certainly consult one before leaping to the conclusion that I had a magical garden fence.

Of Bulgarian Vampires

This post by Nils at Magia Posthuma raised my eyebrow. It seems the so-called Bulgarian vampire story was even more wildly popular than I’d realised. As I haven’t yet covered it, aside from a couple of comments on Nils’ blog, I thought it worth a post. He has subtly hinted that all may not be as it seems, but as the internet is not known for its subtlety, I think there needs to be an overtly critical voice out there. As you might imagine, I am that voice.

I’m afraid the evidence for these interments being ‘vampires’, imagined revenants of another sort, or even necessarily deviant burials at all, is pretty thin on the ground. Or, for that matter, IN it.

As usual, we have little to go on, and it’s perfectly possible that a forthcoming academic article might reveal all. But as we’ve seen in the past (check out the onward links there too), sometimes the eventual publication doesn’t live up to the media hype that we’ve all been suckered in by previously.

Here’s one of two ‘vampires’ from the Bulgarian dig in question (higher res available at the source, Fox News);

As you can see, there is disruption to the ribs area, but nothing that couldn’t be the result of burial under several feet of earth. It certainly appears to be unrelated to the iron lump that is claimed to be the ‘rod’ (by implication, stake) used to dispatch the undead creature/innocently decomposing corpse. The lump itself is just that – an unidentified angular ferrous object. If it’s the head of an iron shaft, that shaft must be huge. Far too huge, in fact. Why manhandle a valuable piece of metal into position when by far the most common folkloric weapon against vampires and revenants was a wooden stake? Perhaps that’s why they missed the heart or even chest/abdomen (it was not always necessary to penetrate the heart in folklore) completely. It looks for all the world as though the ‘vampire’ play-acted along, taking the ‘stale’ between body and arm like one of the henchmen in countless Hollywood swashbucklers. It’s not that iron wasn’t used as a weapon and a preventative measure against vampires; it certainly was in various Slavic countries.

After the story had circulated a while longer, it acquired a further embellishment, thanks to National Geographic, who claimed that the corpse’s teeth had been ‘pulled’. This seems to be based on the fact that the skull is missing many of its teeth, indeed much of its alveolar process – but only, I noticed, in the post-excavation images of the skeleton as it was being pimped to the media.

(Higher res available at the source, Fox News);

I’m as sure as I can be [edit - I was wrong on this - see the comments below] that this is indeed the same skeleton, that associated with the larger of the two iron lumps. If it isn’t, it’s a third skeleton, and only two have been claimed as ‘staked’. Photos show that the other skeleton and ‘rod’ are clearly different. Note that, like the other one, this too retains its teeth as discovered (image from Heritage Daily);

This being the case, why is it in substantially worse condition? Far from the loss of teeth being a counter-vampire measure, it appears that it is wear and tear, presumably sustained in the rush to get the thing on TV. Deliberate damage doesn’t bear contemplation. It usually takes weeks of post-ex work to clean, draw, document and analyse human remains. Yet here the poor bugger was hoiked out of the ground like a fossil in a plaster jacket, and wheeled in front of the cameras. This can’t be a good thing.

I would note here that the pointy teeth are a creation of fiction, starting with ‘Varney the Vampire’ in the 1850s. Iron teeth are sometimes referred to in folklore, but not their removal as a preventative measure. The usual threat cited is the use of the corpse’s teeth to chew on their burial shroud or on their own limbs, in the manner of the German Nachzehrer (though this belief was more widespread than just the Germanic world).

In the footage linked, note also the claim by the museum director that;

‘Iron rods were used for the richer vampires’.

This is the first time I have ever heard such a claim, and I’m pretty familiar with the literature by this point. It appears to me to be a way of heading off another obvious criticism of the ID for these finds – that historical vampires were not high status individuals. They were working class people, relatives and friends of those who were compelled to ‘slay’ their troublesome dead bodies. The vampire lord is another creation of fiction, as this media piece correctly points out.

This is all a bit of a shame. These are clearly deviant burials of potentially historically significant individuals, worthy of further study for both reasons. As much as I love vampirey news, and I’m sure all this is a wonderful boon to the Bulgarian tourist industry, I think forcing this evidence to fit Western preconceptions about vampires – derived from fiction –  is wrong. I can tell you that I’m not the only historian or archaeologist who is of this opinion, either.

I recommend reading Nil’s discussion of the background and characters surrounding this discovery, which also details the reburial of another skeleton. I’m not wild about this either, as it further prevents serious scholarly study of the remains and condemns them forever as ‘vampires’. I just hope all possible analysis was completed before the skeleton went back into the ground.

A Yorkshire Vampire Killing Kit

Another vampire kit has surfaced, this time in the UK. Being a Daily Mail article, no effort has been made to research the subject, and the auction house appear not to know much about them either. To their credit though, they aren’t claiming it as definitively 19th century in date.

As ever, it’s not quite like any other before it, but to me appears to have been fashioned out of a ‘vanity box‘ or possibly a writing case, instead of the pistol case typical of the ‘Blomberg’ kits. It’s a nice one – how nice we shall soon see. On past performance the £2000 estimate in on the low side…

Veni, vidi, vampire?

An English ‘vampire’, from ‘Medieval Towns’ by Schofield and Vince, 2003 edition

The always-fascinating Magia Posthuma blog has posted a really nice update on that ‘vampire of Venice’ story from 2009. It puts the original claims in perspective and provides much-needed insight into the academic side of the ensuing controversy that most of us haven’t been privy to.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my biggest gripe with the idea that this ID6 skeleton was an Italian ‘Nachzehrer’ (or ‘shroudeater’) remains valid – because there ARE no Italian Nachzehrer! It’s a Germanic phenomenon. The fact that there’s no Italian analogue means that, at the least, the (now contested) conclusions found in ‘Forensic Approach to an Archaeological Casework of “Vampire” Skeletal Remains in Venice’ (paywalled) and in the media versions that most people read should have been presented in a more tentative manner.

However, it did get me thinking about analogues to the practice of placing a stone or brick in the deceased’s mouth however, as this is more widespread than the shroud/self-devouring version of the ‘vampire’ (and strictly, I should use the more general word ‘revenant’ there).

The stone/brick-in-mouth (or under chin) apotropaic does appear outside the bounds of (modern) Germany. Folklorist Jan Perkowski refers to the practice amongst the Kashubs of Poland (who did actually cary the Nachzehrer belief with them also), and Paul Barber cites Stora’s ‘Burial Customs of the Skolt Lapps’ as describing a similar practice amongst the Laplanders.

Then there’re the skeletons of Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic, one of which was found with a stone inserted between the jaws of its disembodied head. The skull was also placed between the feet, which is something that Perkowksi and Barber also refer to in the Germanic and Slavic worlds.

Finally, there is a lesser-known British connection. A helpful source at the Museum of London referred me a while ago to two instances. First are 11th/12th century burials at St Nicholas Shambles church in the City of London, where small stones were found in the mouths of four inhumations. These were interpreted as a substitute for the ‘ferryman’s’ coin, aka ‘soul-scot’ in the Anglo-Saxon world. More were found at St Botolph’s church in Billingsgate, my MoL source reports that several 15th-17th century burials also had stones in their mouths, a few being ‘the size of cannon balls.’

Two more were found at Fillingham in Lincolnshire, and another at Raunds Furnells in Northamptonshire. Note however that stones, big and small, are a feature of medieval graves in England, and seem to have served more than one purpose. Unlike burials elsewhere, we lack any real historical or folkloric evidence to back up the idea that these placements were aimed at keeping the dead…dead, but given the stones found in the two eye-sockets of one of the two Fillingham bodies (and bearing in mind the analogue practice observed even today of coins over eyelids), deliberate placement at least seems highly likely (more discussion here, including the connection with heavy stones perhaps used to weigh down the dead).

This doesn’t really aid the ‘Vampire of Venice’ claim any, as we still lack even support in an Italian context for the stone-in-mouth burial practice. But together with the rebuttal by the authors, it does perhaps increase our confidence that this was a deliberate effort by somebody, and by analogy, may indeed have been to prevent the return of a revenant of some kind. If so however, the shroud-eating hypothesis remains dubious, and the relevance of the term ‘vampire’ is, I suppose, a matter of definition. It certainly attracts a lot more press than ‘revenant’.

An honest miss-stake.

Here’s a quick follow-up to the article on Vampire Killing Kits in the current issue of Fortean Times. Thanks to Darth Saber of the Replica Prop Forum for pointing out this intriguing new kit that’s somehow (so far) survived Ebay’s anti-weapons policy.

We’ve seen kits containing real antique firearms sold on Ebay before, but only where the pistol itself is listed on a different site. So whether this one stays the distance is anyone’s guess.

It’s interesting because it’s far superior to most ostensibly antique kits that we see on the ‘bay, but falls short of the mark in a few key ways. Firstly, there’s the deviation from the original Blomberg label style, typeface, and wording. You can’t beat the classic, so why even try?

Secondly, there’s the bizarrely-named bottle labelled ‘Daffy’s Eliyir’ [sic];

An oblique ‘Count Duckula’ reference? Who knows?!

Finally, and most obviously, there are the glaring spelling/typo and grammar mistakes (see how  many you can spot):

I realise Blomberg is meant to be a non-native English speaker, but really.

At least he’s consistent! (NB this odd spelling appears elsewhere…)

Now, I should point out that in common with recent auction house trends, there’s no direct claim of antiquity here. It’s simply presented as a ‘Vampire Killing Slayer Kit’, leaving the bidder to make up his own mind about its age and authenticity. Note however that it uses mostly antique components and those that aren’t have been deliberately aged. Is there intent to deceive? I leave that to the reader to decide.

Vampire Killing Kits article in Fortean Times

I hope readers won’t mind my drawing attention to this month’s issue (288) of Fortean Times, which I’m proud to say features as its cover article a synthesis of my research – and that of others – into those vampire killing kits that I’ve posted so much about. Whilst reiterating that we have no real evidence for their existence prior to the 1970s, it does try to make room for the kits as ‘invented artefacts’ of modern pop culture. Because, quite simply, many of them are lovely! It also features a detailed sidebar by the talented Darth Saber of the Replica Prop Forum, and a couple of other interesting vampire-related articles. Well worth a look, and always a stimulating read due to its policy of including different points of view, from what we might regard as somewhat uncritical, to the outright sceptical.

The Angle of Mons

I’ve so far refrained from commenting on the ‘Angel of Mons’ story, mostly because this Fortean Times article absolutely nails it, and though I’ve yet to read it, I’m sure the full book on the subject (also by Dr David Clarke) thoroughly pokes its dead husk with a stick.

There is also an earlier and more extensive article by Clarke in Folklore journal, reproduced here, a Skeptoid podcast, and just to give some balance, one of the original sources for the claim of ghostly and/or angelic warriors helping British soldiers at the Battle of Mons is online at archive.org. This includes ‘eyewitness’ testimony all apparently based upon an original work of fiction by author Arthur Machen, and all investigated by Clarke and others over the years. The ‘Angel’ is about as open and shut case as it’s possible to get where eyewitness sources are concerned.

But I recently received a Google alert directing me to this blog, which scoffs at Clarke’s scepticism and asserts that;

“The issue in the 21st Century isn’t whether the event actually happened – It is whether such an event Could happen.”

Er, is it? I’m not sure how that follows, but even if angelic apparitions were documented and scientifically verified reality, there would still be reason to believe that this incident never happened. And contrary to another statement from the linked blog post, it isn’t because the ‘Angel’ was really;

“…collective hallucination arising from battle fatigue…”

…as the writer claims others claim. No-one today is seriously suggesting this, least of all Clarke, though he does detail this explanation as part of his research. The author of the blog piece clearly hasn’t properly read the article that he links to, as the consensus explanation for the ‘Angel’ is that it was a fictional story that grew legendary ‘legs’.

The invocation of ‘Ockham’s razor’ is also odd, given that even the most ardent believer must admit that the existence of angels is not scientifically evidenced, nor is it today a mainstream belief in the UK, where this commentator is based. But then, phrases like “paradox ridden fairytale” and ”meat grinding existentialism and…no hope materialism” being applied to science gives you an idea of the ‘angle’ the writer is taking here. It’s a licence not only to believe what one likes, which I certainly don’t challenge, but to claim it as falsifiable truth.

Well, sorry chum, but it doesn’t work that way. As for;

“why therefore go to all the trouble to dismiss and destroy the Mons story which is a manifestation of human spiritual hope amongst the dark meat grinder of holocausts such as a world war ?”

You said it yourself. Mythmaking under the pressures of one of the most horrific conflicts humanity has ever known is a fascinating and important area of study, whether or not you believe that the events described actually happened. But at the same time, a proper investigation into such stories will almost certainly have to tackle the question “did it really happen”? Some of us feel that it’s important to separate fact from fiction for the same reason that fictional literature, movies and video games are enjoyable and rewarding, but it wouldn’t be healthy to live our lives as though the events described in them were real – as appealing as that idea might sometimes be.

PS Yes, it’s a lame title. Deal with it.

Scientific American on the Fox Sisters

I’m afraid you haven’t got long to peruse it, but there’s all sorts of great stuff in the Scientific American archive, available from 1845 – 1909 for free until the end of the month. Here’s a snippet from 1848 (Vol.5, 8th Dec, transcribed below) on the infamous Fox Sisters (though not naming them). It’s more cynical than sceptical, but you have to love the Victorian turn of phrase, and they do have a point about the lack of falsifiable information that mediums produce:

‘There has been quite an excitement in Rochester, N.Y., about mysterious sounds heard by visitors in the presence of three bespirited young ladies. Committees of ladies and gentlemen  have been appointed to try and find out the cause,  but all  in vain.  The  ladies’committee divested the  be-spirited damsels of their clothing to find out whether that something or  other,  we suppose, was not concealed underneath,  but the  sounds were heard just  as well. They were placed on feather beds  and all  sorts  of  non-electric conductors, but the sounds were heard just the same – thus proving,  no doubt, that there is no relationship between spirits and magnetic current. The sounds reported to be heard, are certain raps on the floor or wall, and these raps have been formed into a kind of alphabet,  to repeat certain names, &c. (queer, this, very). We perceive by the names of some of the gentlemen on the committees, that they are men of high standing in Rochester, and some we know personally. It will all turn out to be a piece of nonsense,  because the raps and all that has been done, is stuff – nothing sensible or of utility. All ghost stories are made up of just such miserable fiddle-faddle – and we all know that the swallowing of pins, mounting the air on broomsticks, &c., constitute the amount of witch learning.’