Vampires of Great Britain

by Tom Slemen

  No one in the street could remember who the occupier of that flat was, and he or she never returned, but even the hard-boiled streetwise policemen said they experienced an icy chill in that flat. Understandably, the young mum left the bedsit that very night and went to stay with her auntie on the Wirral. The 50-year-old self-styled ‘vampire-hunter’ Victor Mordelly committed the crime of trespass to investigate this peculiar incident. He examined the flat with the black walls and ceiling. He looked into a wardrobe in the room of the flat and discovered a hole in its floor. This hole led down into the cellar, and from the cellar, a tunnel ran into the darkness. Mordelly explored this tunnel, armed with his vampire-hunting kit – which contained a mallet, hawthorn stakes, holy water, cloves of garlic, and a crucifix.

  He bravely negotiated the winding tunnel for a mile or two, until he came upon a large vault coated with fungus, lichens, stalagmites and stalactites. Set into the limestone-encrusted floor of this vault was a block of sandstone, upon which someone had placed two rusted candlesticks streaked with black wax. Mordelly had seen such subterranean ‘altars’ before in tunnels leading from Beeston Castle in Cheshire, and also in the caverns beneath places as far apart as Billinge and Kirkby Lonsdale. Mordelly could see tell-tale dark stains of mammal blood on the altar, but no sign of the Sanguinarians (Mordelly’s term for vampires) responsible for the sacrifices. The courageous stalker of vampires raked the darkness ahead with the beam of his torch as he trudged through a tunnel that became increasingly more waterlogged with each step. After almost an hour he came upon a glimmer of light in the roof of the tunnel. Pale wintry daylight bled in through a crescent opening in the roof, and Mordelly could see the grim grey tenements known as Fontenoy Gardens through the aperture. He consulted his A to Z map book and deduced that the secret passage had led him into a disused railway tunnel. The only exit from this tunnel was blocked by a landslide of discarded rubbish, so Mordelly was forced to go back the way he had come. When he passed the altar, he heard a sound reverberate through the tunnel, and at first it sounded like the dripping of water that had percolated through the sandstone stratum. Clouds of his exhaled breath bloomed in mid-air in the glare of the torch as he became anxious – then he saw Manilu. Mordelly claims in his unpublished books on vampirology that some of these underground bloodsuckers living in perpetual darkness were devoid of eyes, but the vampire standing inert before him had large expressive red watery eyes. Mordelly slowly reached into a satchel to retrieve a revolver loaded with hollow-point bullets tainted with hawthorn berry powder. With an extraordinary swiftness the vampire flew at him, knocking Mordelly on his back with a bony fist. The thing held him down by the throat and bared its long fangs.

  Mordelly lay on his back with the strong iron-grip hands of the bloodsucking fiend Manilu around his neck. The vampire knelt with his legs on either side of Mordelly as he opened his mouth, ready to pierce the carotid artery. Mordelly felt the ground in desperation, seconds from a choking death, hoping to find the revolver loaded with hawthorn-tipped bullets, but it wasn’t there. Instead, Mordelly’s hand located a sharpened hawthorn stake, and in one swift movement he pushed its pointed end into the vampire’s gaping mouth until it was impaled in the palate. The creature screamed as blood dripped and sprayed from its mouth and it released its deathly grip then rose up trying desperately trying to pull out the stake. Mordelly pushed the soles of his boots into Manilu’s chest and sent him flying backwards into the darkness. Mordelly saw the revolver by the light of the torch lying in a puddle, and he seized it and began to fire at the tall wiry bloodsucker. After the third shot the unearthly figure flitted into the shadows with the agility of a startled spider. Mordelly turned and ran back down the tunnel until he reached the cellar of the house off Lodge Lane. He rented a flat on Picton Road in Wavertree, and wrote an account of his encounter with vampires in Liverpool and elsewhere. He went to a local paranormal investigation group and asked them to assist him in his vampire hunt, but they mocked him and decided he was crazy. Mordelly claimed that the network of tunnels excavated by the "Edge Hill Mole" Joseph Williamson under Liverpool in the early 1800s were now being used by light-fearing vampires, and even controversially suggested that Williamson himself may have been a dhampir (having a vampire father and human mother). John Burns, a member of the ghost-hunting group, initially believed Mordelly was a crank until late one night in 1983 when he pulled into a filling station in Wavertree. Burns saw Mordelly running from a lane, pursued by two strange-looking men in black - each about 6ft 5 in height. Burns watched as one of these tall skinny men picked up Mordelly and threw him onto a rubbish skip as if he was a rag doll. Burns went to Mordelly’s aid and saw from closer quarters that the eccentric man’s attackers were pale-faced with joined-up eyebrows and long pointed fangs. One of the sinister figures lunged towards Burns, but was struck by a car. Despite appalling injuries, the figure got to its feet and gave chase with its weird-looking comrade. Mordelly ran with Burns to his car and managed to escape. According to Mordelly, the two figures were centuries-old vampire confederates of Manilu. Burns decided that Mordelly was not a crank at all, and decided to join him in his quest to fight the Sanguinarians. I could fill a book with the tales of Mordelly and Burns, and who knows? Perhaps I will one day, although I doubt many would believe my accounts of their nocturnal adventures. Believe it or not, vampires are still being reported today. In January 2005, vampire mania swept Birmingham after the newspapers reported a Dracula-like attacker on the loose. The “Birmingham vampire” was even reported in the high-brow pages of The Guardian. The vampire reports are also available to see online. According to Mordelly, Manilu is still at large across the north-west after dark. I remember an incident many years ago, in the 1990s, in which a Tuebrook man was going to a filling station at three in the morning to buy cigarettes, and whilst on his way, a black limousine pulled up, and two tall men in black suits seized him by each elbow and pushed him into the back of the vehicle. The man resisted but felt an electrical jolt through his chest; perhaps from a stunner. He became groggy and the limo was driven to somewhere in the Toxteth area, because the captive remembered passing Lodge Lane Library. The abducted man was taken into a house and down into a spacious cellar, where a man sat on what could only be described as a throne. It was a high-backed seat of marble, featuring strange gargoyles and carvings of serpents. The man seated on it was bald, and although he was sitting down it was clear, from the unusually elongated proportions of his torso and limbs, that he was very tall. His face was so pale it looked as if he was wearing make up, and his eyes protruded from their dark-lined sockets. On one of his fingers he wore a large ruby ring, and his suit looked as if it was made of black velvet. His shirt was dark blue and satin. For a few tense moments he surveyed the captured man trembling between the two heavies before him, then announced, ‘That is not Cavaleri [or what sounded like that name].’

  The man on the throne waved the frightened Tuebrook man away and the two tall muscular henchmen dragged the abductee up a flight of stone steps and back to the limousine. The man was dropped off on Binns Road without a word of explanation or apology. The gargoyles on the throne and the serpents indicate an occult element. Was the man seated on that throne the legendary Manilu?

  The Tarbock Fiend

  The Brick Wall Inn is a pub that stands on Netherley Road, Tarbock, on the outskirts of Liverpool. It was built in 1940 on the site of the original Brick Wall Inn, which was built in the late 17th century, and although the inn today has its own innocuous ghosts (as most pubs do) the area in which it is set was once the backdrop if a terrifying supernatural mystery. The creature was known as the ‘Tarbock Fiend’, the ‘Cronton Vampire’ and many other names, but to this day no one knows just exactly what instilled so much fear into the hearts of people who lived in the countryside surrounding the Brick Wall Inn. Around 1838, a group of farmers formed the Farmers Rest Lodge, a friendly society that acted as both a co-operative group and a charity for worthy causes. The lodge met at
the Brick Wall Inn, and one blazing July day in 1839, as the farmers converged on the meeting place, two of them came across a girl of about fourteen, crying as she staggered along a cinder track that is now Greensbridge Lane. The girl was clutching her blood-soaked neck, and further down the road her frightened horse was seized. The animal also bore the marks of what seemed like a knife-attack. The girl gave a garbled description of her attacker. He was much taller than her, muscular, and had a mass of black hair and a beard. His nose was large and wide, and his mouth had a row of ‘rotten fangs’. His bulging eyes were full of madness and he looked more like an animal than a man. He wore a long flowing black cape and a pair of gauntlets, and his gloved hands had tried to throttle the girl as he attacked her after jumping out from behind trees as she rode along. The brute dragged the girl off the horse and bit her neck. He ran off when the girl screamed and vanished into nearby woods. The girl was taken to the Brick Wall Inn and bandaged by a doctor. The ‘fiend’ was seen mostly at night after that, and despite the attempts of a posse of armed farmers to track the beastly assailant down, he was never caught. There were reported sightings and attacks of the Tarbock Fiend across several manors, and he was seen in places ranging from the land where Netherley now stands, right up to Cronton, where he was regarded as a vampire who had been active over seventy years before in that area. The fiend seemed to go into hibernation for many years but returned with a vengeance in the 1840s. Around this time, the cloaked figure of the Victorian bogeyman Spring-Heeled Jack was seen in various parts of England, and some confused sightings of the caped fiend with Jack and vice versa. Eventually the fiend of Tarbock vanished into obscurity, but then in 1898 – 59 years after his first attack – a rumour spread throughout an area bounded by Halewood, Tarbock and Knowsley which stated that the fiend had returned. One stormy night in 1898, a local vagrant barged into the Brick Wall Inn, out of breath and in a state of terror. He told the pub landlord Jim Ambrose that the Devil had chased him across fields. The tale the tramp told was so frightening, the superstitious landlord locked the inn door and loaded a shotgun. Moments later, something pounded heavily at this door, and a grotesque face was seen gazing through a window. People refused to go home from the pub until almost four in the morning when the light of dawn crept over the manor. Was it all the work of a prankster? Was it all in the mind? If it was a real vampire, could the Tarbock Fiend still be around today?

  The Case of theGreek Vampire

  In the late 1860s, Nathaniel Cain, a wealthy Lancashire merchant who dealt in iron ore, bought a mansion at 40 Upper Parliament Street, Liverpool, and hired a cortege of servants to wait upon him. Cain was a lover of wine, and decided to extend his cellar to stock the various bottles of expensive claret and chardonnay. Workmen were brought in to remodel the existing cellar, and during their excavations, they came upon what seemed to be a tomb of polished granite. Upon a wall of this tomb was a Christian cross, and a plaque inscribed with obscure glyphs which resembled Greek letters. Georgio Eustratiadi, an Italian merchant, and close friend of Nathaniel Cain, was invited into the cellar to look at the ‘tomb’ and he advised his associate not to enter the cubic vault, which measured about nine feet in height. The Italian made the sign of the cross and told his bemused friend that he felt as if something evil lay within that burial vault. Mr Cain told the Italian he was being superstitious, and that he’d report the vault to the authorities, so that if it did contain mortal remains, they could be re-interred in a churchyard. The authorities were not informed, however, and privately-hired workmen excavated around the strange vault. One of the men said it would be better to leave the stone structure intact, as it would support the roof of the extended wine cellar. Cain however, had a burning, morbid curiosity to know just who lay within that vault, and he wondered what course of action to take. It would desecration to look into the tomb, but his intense inquisitiveness overrode any moral considerations.

  Weeks after the discovery of the enigmatic tomb, the servants at Cain’s house claimed to hear strange sounds coming from the wine cellar, and three days after the workmen had remodelled the cellar, Nathaniel Cain himself heard the eerie sound of a man singing all hours in the morning. On one occasion, as a fierce wind from the Mersey howled along Upper Parliament Street, Master Cain arose from his bed at four in the morning, with a pistol in one hand and a lit candle in the other. He descended the stairs, and heard not only the sounds of someone singing in a foreign language, but the eerie sounds of the singer’s manic, shrieking laughter. With a shudder, Cain realised that the origin of the uncanny nocturnal racket was the cellar, and he decided to turn around and leave the hallway to go back to his bedroom.

  A solicitor from nearby Montpellier Terrace named Thomas Paget had studied ancient Greek at university, and Mr Cain invited him into the wine cellar to hopefully decode the baffling inscription on the vault. After Paget had read the inscription by the light of a lantern, he unashamedly hurried from the cellar, followed closely by the iron merchant Cain, who was naturally curious as to what had unnerved his colleague. The inscription had been barely legible to read in some parts, but Paget got the gist of the writing, which warned that the soul of the person within the vault was too wicked to be allowed within the realm of the dead, and an unknown word - “vurculac” - was referred to twice in the engraved message. Paget consulted his father’s library and discovered to his horror that “vurculac” - according to ancient East European folklore - was a type of vampire.

  Nathaniel Cain and Thomas Paget researched the history of 40 Upper Parliament Street, and saw that no church ever stood there, so the vault could not belong to some forgotten graveyard of yore. According to Georgio Eustratiadi, his friend Nathaniel Cain paid a sect of monks a huge sum of money to dismantle the vault, and they told him that all it contained was a burial shroud, which soon disintegrated upon contact with the air. The monks blessed the wine cellar, and told Cain that a vampiric being that had lain in the tomb had probably gone to ground in a nearby cemetery.

  Strangely enough, a month later, an elderly servant at Cain’s mansion told her master that she had answered the door one evening to see a man dressed in a black cape on the doorstep, who said nothing, but stared at her with dark menacing eyes, ‘smiling like the Devil himself‘ said the young servant. The odd visitor uttered something unintelligible and lurched forward, but the maid slammed the door on the weird caller. Cain dismissed the servant’s claim as the product of ‘her Irish imagination,’ but the master of the household later heard of other reports of the eerie man in black from the most unlikeliest source. In January 1870, the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas was consecrated on Liverpool’s Berkley Street - just around the corner from Cain’s mansion. A religious friend of Cain named John Stanley had actually met the Most Reverend, Alexander Lycurgus, the Archbishop of Syra and Tenos, who had consecrated the newly-built Greek Church. After the consecration ceremony, an Anglican minister and a Greek Priest talked about a strange-looking man who had been prevented from stealing the chalice containing the Holy Eucharist from the Greek Church. Moreover, this man wore a black, wide-brimmed hat, a cape, and had a sinister, pallid face with a pair of intensely staring eyes. He dashed off from the church, leaving his would-be captor clutching the cape, and ran with amazing speed off into the evening gloom, in the direction of Catharine Street. The Archbishop Lycurgus and the Greek priest were of the opinion that the individual who had attempted to steal the Eucharist was a “Vyrolakos” - a type of vampire found in countries off the Adriatic and Agean coasts. Some of the Anglican ministers tried to defuse the spine-chilling talk of vampires by talking about mundane matters, but Mr Stanley asked the Greek priest what the so-called vampire would want with the Eucharist. ‘Perhaps to desecrate the most powerful and important part of the mass in a ritual of black magic,’ the Greek minister answered. Mr Stanley was horrified yet intrigued by the idea of a vampire, which, he had assumed, was merely a figment of folklore.

  The Greek holy man assured the staid
Lancashire man that vampires were a reality; that a vampire was the shell of a foul person who had led a life of gross immorality and unbridled wickedness; someone who had rejected God, spat upon the Bible, and delighted in child-murder and the practise of cannibalism. Upon death, that type of person was sometimes rejected from entering into the world of clean spirit, and became reanimated by demonic entities to wreak havoc. The Greek told Stanley dark tales of the Vyrolakos which chilled him to the bone, and warned him to be careful when passing graveyards - the lair of the Vyrolakos - at night.