by Tom Slemen
The two vampires remained at large in that area of Dorset, and some think they are still around today with many others of their kind who have been turned into vampires over the centuries.
Vampires of the North
As astonishing as it sounds, Liverpool has quite a history of vampires. At the junction of the city’s Rupert Lane, Breck Road, Heyworth Street and Everton Road, there lies the skeleton of a man who bit his wife, drank her blood, and, until he had a wooden stake driven through him and was re-interred face down, allegedly rose regularly from his crossroads grave after dark to terrorise the women of old Everton. That was in 1680, and being a Lancashire man born and bred, I have in my files, dozens of such reported incidents, right up to the present day. In the summer of 1866, a gory, shocking murder took place in Liverpool at 14 Wood Grove, which now exists only as a weed-carpeted cul-de-sac off Edge Lane, beside a derelict garage. Here, in May 1866, one John Thomas Moss, an outspoken 27-year-old hater of the Christian religion, stayed with his beautiful 25-year-old cousin, Mrs “Nan” Train, a woman who felt abandoned by her husband Thomas Train, a ship’s purser. Moss was rumoured to be a vampire, and people had said they had seen his eyes ‘light up’ like burning coals at the mere mention of Jesus Christ. Women found themselves attracted to him and some even offered to walk out of stable marriages just to wait on him. For many years he lived in Sydney as a cigar manufacturer, when something happened to him, for the John Moss who returned to Liverpool in the early 1860s was not the same happy young man who had gone to seek a fortune and a new life in Australia. There were very strange stories about a suicide attempt at the Albert Dock, and how his lifeless body, dredged from the salty mud at night by watchmen, was apparently revived by moonlight – one of the uncanny biological capabilities of a vampire. Mrs Train had had Moss as a lodger for a few years before he was to horrifically murder her. In the Spring of 1866 she and her cousin moved from Elm Vale in Bootle to Wood Grove, in Liverpool’s Old Swan district, and even Mrs Train’s husband did not seem to mind Moss’s constant presence. It appears that when the cousins were children, they vowed never to separate and, pricking palms and mixing their blood, they ritually sealed their promise. The only witness to the ghastly murder was 20-year-old Margaret Golding, the maidservant of Mrs Train. She bravely stayed with her mistress as Moss followed his cousin around the Old Swan residence with a hatchet. Mr Train, as usual, was away at sea, and Mrs Train was slaughtered because she would not give a ring to Moss, and, more importantly, she would not desert her husband and marry him. He ranted on about Hell and the Almighty, rejecting both, and the maid Golding trembled as his eyes began to glow ‘as if on fire’. Moss brought the hatchet down on his cousin’s head repeatedly, taking off her nose as the blade embedded itself deeply in her head. During one of the hatchet blows, Mrs Train’s eyeball flew out its socket. The maid was so terrified she was unable to scream, and she found herself running down the stairs, almost in slow motion, as nerves got the better of her legs. Behind her, she heard what she would later describe as the sound like that of a butcher’s hatchet hitting bones. When the neighbours and police stormed the house, they found Moss in an immense pool of blood on the kitchen floor. He had cut his own throat, and according to the coroner, Moss had known exactly which arteries to cut in his neck to affect an instantaneous death.
The rumours of vampirism, the stigma of suicide (deemed unholy in those times), and the brutal murder, led to Moss’s body being buried in unconsecrated ground between St Anne’s Church, Stanley, and the cattle market. The body of John Thomas Moss was staked, they say, with wood cut from the oldest tree – the Allerton Oak, in Calderstones, which still stands today, aged over a thousand years old, but, as you may have guessed, that was not the end of Moss. His caped form was seen over many evenings in June 1866, lurking in St Mary’s Cemetery, Kirkdale, the resting place of his beloved murder victim Mrs Train. A teenaged courting couple, kissing beneath a willow tree in the cemetery, were attacked by the cloaked fiend, but they both ran off and raised the alarm at a nearby inn. A small posse turned out to hunt the ghoul, who was seen jumping straight over a five-foot wall at the cemetery, his cloak billowing behind him. He also stalked the young maid Margaret Golding in December of that year. The maid had been having terrible vivid blood-spattered nightmares in which she relived the horrors of seeing her mistress being hacked to death, and one night she awoke in her bedroom at a friend’s house in Liverpool’s Aigburth district, when she felt a strange urge to go to her window. Through a glacial fog, she saw a pale-faced man in a black, wearing an opera cloak, but no hat on such an inclement night, standing on the pavement, gazing up at her window. Margaret’s heart almost stopped when she realised it was John Thomas Moss, because his eyes started to glow with a reddish orange tint. As the girl turned and ran out of her room, she heard the window rattling violently behind her, as if someone was trying to open it from outside, but she was too afraid to look around, and she awakened the entire household with her screams. Understandably, Margaret’s friend believed the poor girl had suffered nothing more than a lucid nightmare, caused no doubt by the traumatic memories of the horrific murder of her employer, but over the next three fog-bound nights, the evil-looking shade of John Thomas Moss was seen by other members of the household, looking through a basement window of the house, and, according to a neighbour, the cloaked stalker had even been seen on the roof of the Georgian dwelling, apparently trying to break open the skylight window. In the end, a local Catholic priest blessed the house, sprinkled Holy water over the threshold, and gave Margaret a Bible and a Rosary to keep on her bedside table. That seemed to do the trick, and Moss gave up his sinister pursuit of the former maid.
The Reverend Thomas Gardner, incumbent of St Anne’s Church, Stanley, which overlooked the site where Moss had been buried, staked and face down in an unmarked grave on wasteland, warned his congregation in a chilling sermon, about the dangers of succumbing to the dark powers of evil as Moss had. He talked of lost souls wandering the darkness after death, of demonic persecution and possession, and a nerve-jangling topic that was doing the round in his parish – vampirism. People living within a mile of the site where Moss lay in his unchristian grave slept with crosses and hung garlic from their bedposts, and for many months, the churches of the district became packed as parishioners sought divine protection from the self-resurrected Moss. Eventually the vampire mania subsided, but even today, there are occasional sightings of a solid, carnate ghost in a cloak who has been seen in the area of Liverpool’s Edge Lane, close to the street where Moss butchered his cousin and took his own life.
The Mysterious 'Vampire Grave'
One of the greatest and enduring mysteries in Liverpool’s history started to unfold in the autumn of 1973, when a gang of workmen set about clearing land to build a two-storey Roman Catholic primary school between St Oswald’s Street and Montague Road, in the district of Old Swan. The £450,000 St Oswald’s Primary School would be built on scrubland near to the church, and Father Patrick James McCartney did warn the workmen that they were likely to come across a few graves during their excavations, but no one at that point knew about the sinister, macabre secret which would soon be brought to light. An unmarked coffin was unearthed, then another one, but the foreman, Thomas Breen, told his men to carry on, and the coffins were solemnly put aside with the utmost respect. However, the workmen soon discovered that in an area 40 yards square, there were coffins piled sixteen high. Building work was immediately suspended, and the Clerk of Works had a look at the unusual find. It was a mass grave, and the total number of coffins discovered totalled 3,561. The mystery then deepened, because there were no records of any mass burial in the registers of St Oswald’s Church. This seemed to indicate that the 3,561 bodies had been stacked in the ground prior to 1840 – the year when registration of burials became compulsory.
Local and national historians were naturally intrigued by the Old Swan mass grave, and some theorised that the dead were plague and cholera victim
s, but people who had died of such diseases were usually put in quicklime without coffins. Furthermore, the dates of the plagues and cholera outbreaks in Liverpool and the numbers of the victims, as well as the time window within which they were buried, simply did not tally with the facts regarding the mass burial at Old Swan. Some historians even thought the answer to the baffling mass burial had something to do with the Benedictine Fathers who built a church near to the huge grave in the 18th century.
Before the historians could examine the mysterious coffins, the Home Office ordered Liverpool City Council to cordon off the mass grave with a 10-foot-high security fence. Officials in Whitehall subsequently gave instructions to cremate the unknown dead and to deposit the remains at Anfield Cemetery. The workmen then had to wait 18 months before the building of the school could commence, and in the meantime, the media was warned off when reporters tried to discover what had been found off St Oswald’s Street. The news leaked out that investigators had deduced that the 3,561 bodies had all been buried at the same time, which meant it certainly hadn’t been a plague pit or a pauper’s grave. Furthermore, there were inexplicable holes in most of the breastplates of the dead, almost as if they had been - staked. What then, is the truth behind the mystery of the Old Swan mass grave?
In 1995, several Lancashire historians contacted Whitehall, hoping to discover why the Home Office had given orders to cremate the unknown dead of Old Swan, and a spokesman said he couldn’t trace any records of the incident. The files relating to the mysterious mass grave had apparently been destroyed. The puzzle then, of how 3,561 bodies came to be buried off St Oswald’s Street, remains unsolved. Victims of plague and cholera were dumped in pits often filled with quicklime, but the thousands of bodies found at Old Swan were not only placed in coffins, they had been buried in groups according to their age, which suggests all of the internments took place simultaneously. This means there are two possibilities, both of them controversial. Were over 3000 people massacred at Old Swan at some time in the 1840s or perhaps a decade before? If we suppose there had been some uprising, and that the authorities had dealt with the revolt by massacring the dissenters, would they have afterwards buried the victims in coffins? Thousands of poor people were disembowelled and hanged by the authorities in England during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1382, but news of the massacre could not be contained, and soon spread across the country. Although Old Swan was a peaceful rural suburb when the bodies were buried there en masse, news of any rebellion and subsequent carnage would surely have been impossible to contain.
The way the coffins were neatly laid out at Old Swan smacks of military involvement. All of the bodies with teeth – meaning they were young when they died – were placed in one particular section, and the coffins were perfectly aligned. The coffins at Old Swan had been buried simultaneously, in perfect alignment, and this would have required some manpower and organisation to achieve. To an army of trained military men with spades, the task would have been completed within days. The foreman who oversaw the removal of the bodies in the mass grave vividly recalls that there were no infants among the dead, which does pose a problem to the theory about the bodies of Old Swan being transplanted from an existing churchyard. Surely there would be infants among the dead? The foreman also remarked that the coffin wood was almost impossible to burn and a lot of it was buried on the site of the school. Perhaps if some of this wood could be recovered today, there may be some traces of DNA material to be had, however slight. John McDonald, one of the workers who excavated the graves told me how, at one point during the gruesome excavation, a perfectly preserved young woman with reddish hair, dressed in a white garment, slid out of a damaged coffin and landed in the rain-soaked mud with a sickening thud. Within minutes her pretty face and youthful body started to disintegrate as the atmosphere set in. When the rain worsened at one point, a young gravedigger found himself sinking into a quagmire with the bodies sliding out of their decaying coffins. The excavation pit became waterlogged and the whole scene was reminiscent of a scene from the film Poltergeist, with buoyant coffins opening and rotting corpses floating in the water.
The Home Office has suspiciously ‘lost’ the files referring to the Old Swan mass graves burial site, so it may be some time before we learn the truth about this enduring mystery.
Manilu - the Lodge Lane Vampire
I remember taking calls at BBC Radio Merseyside after a programme I’d broadcast on vampires, and I talked to about a dozen callers who claimed they had been bitten in the neck during the night, and had woken up with bloodstained pillows and bedclothes. A majority of these people lived close to one another off Liverpool’s Earle Road, and I visited a few of these ‘victims’ and found them all apparently sane enough. These night-bites continued for about six months and then ceased as mysteriously as they had started. Around that time, there was a strange rumour about a vampire named “Manilu” being on the prowl in the area around Lodge Lane. People claimed to have actually seen him, and described him as a bald-headed man with a pale, foreign-looking face, dressed in black. A 67-year-old woman told me how she had been walking along Hartington Road with her Jack Russell dog Simon one summer evening at 10pm when a weird-looking man picked up the dog with both hands and sunk his teeth into it. The dog yelped and almost died from blood loss. That same week in 1997, the same man, who matched the aforementioned description of Manilu, was seen prowling nearby Toxteth Park Cemetery on Smithdown Road. A heroin-user who often injected in the cemetery during twilight, saw a tall bald “ghoul” creeping among the gravestones, muttering to himself in a foreign language. A gang of children were roaming the cemetery several nights later when the tall peculiar stranger chased them, and allegedly grabbed one young lad by his ankle and threw him perilously high into the air as if he was a doll. On another occasion the heroin addict was spotted by the graveyard prowler, but he did nothing, as if he realised the drug user was not a threat, and simply walked off into the darkness. The reports of Manilu date back at least to the 1940s, and may simply be urban legends, but I feel there is much more to him than that.
In 1894, a 60-year-old woman named Emma Furnival, who ran a bakery at 13 Lodge Lane, was visited by a sinister abnormally tall man in black with “foreign features” and peculiar dark eyes. The man entered her shop to buy a loaf, and he spoke in broken English with an East European inflection in his voice. At this time, there were queer rumours about a vampire being at large in the south of Liverpool after a child and a number of women living near Sefton Park had awakened in the morning to find strange puncture wounds on their necks. Bram Stoker had not yet written Dracula, his Gothic masterpiece, but the habits of vampires were well-known, and one of them was the drawing of blood from the neck. The vampire was also believed to originate from Eastern Europe, from places such as Transylvania and Hungary, and when the tall thin foreign man with staring eyes remarked upon the beauty of Mrs Furnival’s neck, she became so frightened she ran through a door to a back room on the premises and locked herself in. The man in the black homburg and frock-coat made himself scarce, but was later seen prowling nearby Toxteth Park Cemetery at twilight. Two policemen chased him but he somehow managed to evade them among the forest of gravestones. Weeks later, two spinster sisters, surnamed Bould, awoke at their home on Earle Road to find the tall silhouette of a man standing in their bedroom. One of the sisters screamed and fled from the room, but the other one remained in her bed, frozen with fear. The intruder assaulted her, bit her neck, and drew off blood, before fleeing through a window. The assailant was never captured, and his bloodsucking fuelled the vampire ‘mania’ prevalent in south Liverpool at that time. The reports of the vampiric man then subsided for decades, but in the late 1940s, dark rumours about a vampire who prowled the area bounded by Lodge Lane, Smithdown Road and Ullet Road began to circulate in postwar Liverpool. According to the rumours, the vampire was well over 6 feet in height, and was named Manilu. Some said his first name was Nathan. He was said to have lived at a crumbling Victorian hou
se off Lodge Lane for over forty years, and at this old abode he had accumulated a handful of disciples who had been initiated into his personal religion by participating in blood-drinking rites. Of course, the vampire stories may be nothing more than hearsay, urban myths and exaggeration, yet I believe there is more than a grain of truth in the stories of Manilu. In the 1980s, a wave of vampire reports rippled across several parts of Liverpool, originating in Lodge Lane. A highly-controversial self-styled vampire-hunter, Victor Mordelly, set out to confront the vampire and lay it to rest. Equipped with hawthorn stakes, holy water, crucifixes – and a profound knowledge of these creatures of the night – Mordelly allegedly traced “Manilu” to his lair. I will now relate the shocking outcome of this vampire hunt, according to Mordelly’s testimony.
In February 1983, a young single mum living in a bedsit off Lodge Lane with her eight-month-old baby had the feeling that she was being watched. She was not the superstitious or paranoid type, but from the day she moved into the bedsit, she had the horrible sensation of being observed by someone or something next door, especially at night. In the end, the edgy electric atmosphere in the bedsit became so intense that the woman went to Wavertree Road police station and told a bemused constable about the interminable feeling about being watched by something evil in the flat next door. The policeman said there was nothing he could do, but the girl began to sob, and she hysterically begged him to send an officer to the flat adjacent to her bedsit, for she felt as if something sinister was going on next door - but it was hard for her to put her fears into words. To calm her down the police officer promised he'd send someone around to look into the matter, and that night as the young woman was watching News at Ten to take her mind off the eerie predicament, she was startled to hear loud thumps coming from the flat next door. She looked out the window and saw a police car down below in the street. Then she realised that the police constables had responded to her plea, and were inspecting the next-door flat; they had been the source of the banging noises. The police later revealed to her what they had found in the flat next door, and the revelation resulted in the girl packing her bags. After they had broken into the flat, the two policemen saw that the previous occupier had painted all of the walls black. These walls were dotted with mysterious pentagrams and other occult symbols. In the middle of the floor there was a coffin which looked over a hundred years old. It had probably been stolen from a tomb in a local graveyard, but it was empty and there were no traces of the corpse it had contained. The nameplate was too rusted to be identifiable. Next to the coffin was a mysterious ancient mildewed handwritten book on occultism, and next to this tome was an empty milk bottle - which contained a small amount of human clotted blood.
