by Tom Slemen
The Vampire Stalkers
On 9 March 1967 a rather unusual message appeared in the Personal Column of The Times newspaper which read: “A witch of full powers is urgently sought to lift a 73-year-old curse and help restore the family fortunes of an afflicted nobleman. Employment genuinely offered.”
The afflicted nobleman was the Duke of Leinster, a seventy-four-year-old bankrupt man who had experienced a dreadfully long run of bad luck in both his personal life and financial career. The ageing aristocrat believed his continual misfortune was the product of an old curse that had run in his family for seventy-four years. A “witch of full powers” duly responded to the Duke’s printed plea for help and eventually ‘lifted’ the curse. The duke found himself solvent again, and was able to re-enter high society.
Stranger messages have appeared in the personal columns of newspapers, both national and local, and one such message no doubt caught the attention of thousands of readers in the late summer of 1971. The peculiar eye-catching invitation appeared in a Birmingham newspaper first, before being printed in the Daily Mirror a week afterwards, and it stated: “Do you have an open mind towards the supernatural? Do you have the courage to investigate ghosts and the uncanny? Good pay for the right people. Interested parties should send an SAE to Mr W. Naismith, Lansdowne House, Berkeley Square, London W1X 6AA.”
One of the first people to respond to this intriguing advertisement was a 21-year-old Birmingham man named Barry Cody. Unemployed and bored, he’d been trawling the Situations Vacant pages of his local newspaper, and had been considering a career as cadet in the Royal Navy, for which he would receive the then princely sum of £21 per week, but now his attention had been grabbed by the mysterious Mr Naismith’s invitation to chase ghosts and ghouls. Barry had become interested in the occult since the age of fifteen, and so he sent a self-addressed envelope to Naismith’s address in London, and received an A4-sized piece of paper outlining the work involved in Mr William Naismith’s Supernatural Investigations Bureau. The pay was £30 per week, but there were a few catches. The successful applicant would have to relocate to Berkeley Square in the very desirable district of London’s Mayfair, but the hours of the job were irregular by their very nature, as ghosts and other supernatural entities do not limit their paranormal activities to a 9 to 5 shift. All the same, Barry went for an interview at Berkeley Square and was questioned by 72-year-old Mr Naismith – who was wheelchair-bound – for almost an hour. Five days afterwards the young man received exciting news by post at his Birmingham home: he was to start work on Wednesday 29 September at 9am. Barry and two other successful applicants to the offbeat advertisement – 32-year-old Liz Brookes of Nottingham, and 45-year-old Charles Wickham of Bury St Edmunds, met at the anteroom of William Naismith’s impressive London residence. An elderly female secretary ushered the trio into a cosy study with carved oak-panelled walls, a grand marble fireplace, and a long stained-glass window featuring a Latin motto - “Scientia deleo Vereor” (“Knowledge erases fear”). The three trainee investigators were served coffee, and in this informal atmosphere Mr Naismith talked to them about the areas of his research: ghosts, sensory-deprivation, psychometry, doppelgangers, dimensions, and vampires. Every subject of the paranormal Naismith discussed perfunctorily seemed to have some element of credibility, but the topic of vampires seemed out of place and rather dated to the mind of Barry Cody, and he expressed his scepticism to his new employer. Naismith put on a pair of bifocals, retrieved a slim folder from a pile of papers on his desk, opened it, and read out a letter from a 38-year-old Hounslow woman named Mrs Miller, who believed she was being haunted by what she called a ‘biting poltergeist’. For three months, between 10 January and 12 March 1971, Mrs Miller had been awakened in the night with alarming sensations of being bitten on the neck, breasts and thighs. On two occasions, the unseen biter broke the skin of the woman’s neck and drew blood. In the end, Mrs Miller had left her flat in the middle of the night after seeing the vaporous outline of a man standing over her bed. William Naismith had investigated Mrs Miller’s flat, as well as the flat below hers, which had lain vacant for some time, apparently because it had a reputation for being haunted by a man in black. This ghost had been active in the flat since the 1920s, according to several old people living next door to the haunted property. Mr Naismith was a man of considerable wealth, and he rented both flats for three months, hoping to confront the vampiric entity that had terrified Mrs Miller. Almost a week into his vigil, Naismith had encountered the materialisation of a man in late Victorian attire by candlelight in the downstairs flat at 11.50 pm. Suspecting the ghost was in fact a vampire, Naismith wore a rosary with silver crucifix, carried a phial of holy water, a leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, several cloves of garlic, and a long stake of hawthorne wood. In addition to these items, Naismith had at his disposal a special torch fitted with filaments that gave off ultraviolet light to simulate sunlight – something which was thought to vaporise the skin of a vampire. Naismith never had a chance to test out this novel flashlight when the suspected vampire materialised, then attacked him with lightning agility. It began to throttle the elderly investigator, but upon seeing the rosary beads and crucifix around his neck, it threw him down onto a sofa and ran towards the empty dark mouth of the fireplace and vanished, leaving a musky smell in its wake. Naismith, an angina sufferer, took his heart pill and gradually recovered from the incredible attack. He was, unfortunately, unable to continue the vigil after his health deteriorated and he ended up confined to a wheelchair. He returned to Berkeley Square and spent days trying to trace a good medium. He found one through the recommendation of a friend, and she was Mrs Ivy Jones of Camden Town. Ivy was taken to the haunted flats in Hounslow during the daytime, and she received distinct impressions of a paradoxical, contradictory nature. She saw an angelic-faced reverend of long ago delivering a sermon from his pulpit, and believed he had a surname which sounded like Layton, but this same man had indulged in bestiality and orgies, and had cannibalistic urges. He had ‘interfered’ with several bodies lying in some sort of chapel of rest, and on one occasion he had even resorted to exhuming the body of a woman so he could cut out her heart out and eat it roasted. The medium became so distressed as she tuned into this despicable Victorian clergyman, she almost fainted, and had to be taken outside by Naismith to gulp fresh air. Mrs Jones warned Naismith to ‘leave the flats well alone, because he’s evil, and now he has chosen to walk the darkness, because if he goes across he’ll go straight to Hell.’
The medium refused to offer any further help, but Naismith was determined to get to lay the vampire.
Barry Cody still rejected the idea that vampires existed, and so, Naismith laid down a challenge: ‘If you don’t believe in vampires, I dare you to stay in the haunted flats for a week. What do you say?’
Barry secretly feared he would meet something inhuman but did not want to seem a coward in front of his co-investigators, Liz Brookes and Charles Wickham, so he accepted the challenge. Naismith gave Barry a crash-course in vampire-slaughtering, and warned him that he should never, under any circumstance fall for the deceptions of a vampire. In a stern voice the old man said: ‘They often pretend they are human in reality, and will beg you to spare their lives. Some use hypnosis to gain the upper hand, so avoid eye contact. Kill and ask questions later.’
On the last day of September, Barry Cody arrived at the house that had been divided into two flats. From the moment the taxi left him at the front door of the Victorian dwelling, he had the feeling he was being watched. He settled down in the ground-floor flat and instead of burning candles as Mr Naismith had suggested, Barry switched on the lights in the kitchen, bedroom, hall and lounge. Every hour or so he’d go gingerly upstairs to the upstairs flat with the ultraviolet torch in one hand and a Bible in the other and make a cursory inspection of the rooms. The first night passed without incident, and around 2.40 am, Barry fell into an uneasy sleep as he listened to his transistor radio. On the following evening at 8.3
0pm, Barry heard a noise in the kitchen, and when he went to investigate, he saw a boy of about nine or ten years of age opening the window over the sink. The boy climbed into the kitchen and was startled to see Barry standing in the doorway leading to the hall. ‘What’s your game lad?’ Barry asked the junior intruder.
The boy continued to gaze in astonishment at the investigator of the unknown for a moment, then stammered out a reply. ‘I – I’m looking for my brother Jim,’ he said nervously.
‘Well he isn’t here, so beat it,’ Barry told him, waving him away with the unlit ultraviolet torch.
‘Why are you here?’ the boy stood in the stone sink, looking Barry up and down. He seemed less nervous now.
‘Never you mind, now get out of here before I go and call the police,’ said Barry, and all of a sudden a bizarre thought entered his head: Could this child be something inhuman in disguise?
The young trespasser seemed fixated with the adapted torch Barry held, and his eyes had a wisdom that seemed far in advance of his years.
Barry switched on the ultraviolet torch and aimed its beam at the boy and he let out a scream as his face instantly turned dark red. He held out his small pale hands to shield his eyes from the scorching beam of synthetic sunlight, and they too turned dark with small black blisters. The ‘boy’ turned away from Barry, dived straight through the open window into the darkness of the yard and ran off squealing. Barry stood there in shock for a moment, then decided enough was enough. He abandoned his vigil, leaving some of the equipment behind, and headed back to the Supernatural Investigations Bureau in Berkeley Square. Mr Naismith was initially furious at Barry for his ‘dereliction of duty’ but later sympathised with the young man for the way he had reacted to something terrifying that was outside of most people’s everyday experience. The second vigil at the haunted flats took place three days later, and on this occasion, Liz Brookes joined Barry Cody. At 10.45pm on the first night of the ‘vampire watch’ Barry and Liz heard footsteps in the upstairs flat, and went to investigate in an understandably nervous state. They checked the lounge first, and found nothing amiss there, then proceeded to the bedroom, where a strange sweet smell, possibly lavender, was evident. An old wardrobe stood in the corner, and Liz glanced at this, then turned towards the bedroom door, pulling Barry by his elbow after her. ‘What’s wrong?’ Barry asked, instinctively knowing something had spooked his colleague. Not until she reached she had entered the downstairs flat did she reveal what had chilled her. When she had glanced at the wardrobe in the bedroom of the upstairs flat, Liz had noticed the wardrobe door had been slightly ajar, and two grey-looking fingers had been slightly protruding from the gap in the door – as if someone had been inside the wardrobe, keeping the door closed over with their first and second fingers. After Liz related this, she and Barry heard footsteps upstairs once again. The two investigators of the paranormal stood stock still. The footsteps were coming down the stairs – to the ground floor flat. A rattling sound was heard in the hallway. The thing upstairs was opening the fuse-box in the communal hallway. It removed the fuses and plunged the flats into darkness. In a confused daze, Barry rummaged through his holdall and by sense of touch he felt the 18-inch hawthorne stake and wooden mallet and grabbed them. Liz’s trembling hands seized the ultraviolet torch. She slid the switch but the torch wasn’t working. The filaments had burnt out or broken. She located a full size Gordon’s Gin bottle filled with holy water and a wooden cross.
The door burst open and in a heartbeat something knocked Liz to the ground. She tried to scream but felt cold lips and a tongue pressing into her open mouth. Strong icy hands grabbed her throat and chest, pinning her to the ground. Barry felt intense nausea as he stumbled towards the shadowy thing covering Liz Brookes. He stabbed the wooden hawthorne stake into its back and slammed the mallet down, but the wooden hammer glanced off the head of the stake and struck his thumb. Barry’s attempt to stake the vampiric being distracted it for a moment, and in that window of opportunity, Liz lashed out with the gin bottle filled with blessed water and smashed it on the supernatural attacker. The weird assailant let out a long agonised shriek, then was heard running out of the room and down the hallway towards the kitchen. Barry picked up Liz and the two of them hurried out into the street via the front door. This was in the day when mobile phones were unheard of, and so the two amateur vampire hunters went to a public telephone box to call William Naismith. He told them to return to the flats to put the fuses back into the box, but Liz and Barry would not enter that house until the following morning when the light of dawn evaporated the fears of the night before. After that eventful night, there were no further strange goings-on at the flats, as if the vampire (and the possible vampiric child) had had enough. Research has shown that a Reverend Layton lived at the house in Hounslow in the 1890s, so perhaps the medium Ivy Jones was right. How then, did the warped, depraved reverend become a vampire after death? Occult lore states that suicides, some witches, evil murderers, men of the cloth who have been excommunicated because they have turned to the Devil, and those bitten by a vampire might become vampires themselves forty days after death. It is not hard to imagine the post-death fate of the soul of such a man as the reverend who molested dead bodies entrusted into his spiritual care, who ate a dead woman’s heart, and entered into sexual intercourse with animals. Even by vampire standards, the Reverend was evidently a rotten specimen.
The Unknown Vampire Hunter
There are many superstitions surrounding the death of a person. At the moment of death, for example, tradition in many places across Britain dictates that doors and windows should be opened, and that mirrors should be covered in case the spirit of the deceased enters one of them by mistake. Wakes were held in many houses in the past, and they still continue in some parts of the UK. A corpse at such a wake must never be left alone or in the dark, lest it become the prey of demons, and from this custom we derive the ritual of the ‘wake’ – which is in essence a vigil to be kept on a body. There is a now-rare custom regarding the passage of the soul of the dead person to the world beyond called “Sin-Eating”. This involved sprinkling salt on the breast of the dead person and leaving it on the corpse for a while until a plate of six or seven newly-baked savoury-tasting cakes was placed on a specially prepared table draped with a black tablecloth (sometimes displaying a skull and crossbones). The salt was then picked from the chest of the corpse and sprinkled onto these cakes, which were subsequently consumed by mourners partaking in the sin-eating ritual. By consuming the cakes with the salt, the partakers believed they were eating the sins of the deceased. This ritual was carried out on an old Hampshire farmer named Jack Savage, who died sometime in the early 19th century, probably 1810. The story regarding the alleged resurrection of this farmer was related to a Hampshire folklorist in Victorian times by one Alfred Summers, the landlord of the White Swan inn, Winchester, in 1899. The tale was also backed by several other people, who had in turn heard the ‘yarn’ from their elders. After his death, from what seems to have been a stroke, Jack Savage was laid in a coffin on the kitchen table at his cottage near to the ancient forest of Bere, and the sin-eating cake ritual commenced. For some obscure reason never explained in the story, the body of Savage was not allowed to be buried in a Christian churchyard, and so it was interred at a secluded spot in the nearby forest of Bere. A fortnight after the burial, two soldiers hired by the local farmer to catch poachers were patrolling the periphery of the Forest of Bere around midnight, when they caught five gypsies carrying out a bizarre ritual at Savage’s unhallowed grave. The gypsies had dug up the coffin, bound it in three chains, and had attached a small crucifix to the coffin-lid. The oldest gypsy told the soldiers that the man in the coffin had been rising from his grave to attack people in the area, and had bitten his grand-daughter, a girl of 8 years of age. She was now delirious and being cared for back at the gypsy encampment by a man with an immense knowledge of vampires named Jonathan. The soldiers were very sceptical of the old Romany gypsy�
�s tale, and they ordered him and the other gypsies to remove the chains from the coffin and to rebury it immediately. With great reluctance the gypsies unbound the coffin, removed the crucifix from its lid and lowered the remains of Jack Savage back into the earth. They then headed back to their camp deep in Bere forest. Three days later, the two soldiers were again patrolling the farmstead near Bere Forest when they glimpsed a terrifying sight by the light of the moon. A tall thin bony man was darting about amongst a clump of trees with the speedy agility of a spider. The figure was so fast, the eyes of the soldiers were barely able to follow it, but at one point when the eerie man kept still for a few seconds, an opening in the low clouds allowed sufficient moonlight from the lunar orb to reveal that the swift prowler was none other than Jack Savage. As the military men squinted in the silvery moonshine in horrified disbelief, the ghastly-looking apparition of Farmer Savage flitted towards them. One of the men managed to rapidly draw his flintlock and fire, but missed the target wildly because the ghoul zig-zagged as he approached. The other soldier drew his pistol and calmly fired. There was a flash and accompanying bang, and the metal ball flew at the head of the weird-looking attacker from beyond the grave. The carnate, solid flesh-and-blood ghost of Jack Savage stopped and clutched his left eye with his hand, and blood streamed down his face. The projectile from the flintlock had destroyed the resurrected man’s left eye, and he angrily lunged at the soldier who had harmed him – a man named Ned – and proceeded to bite his neck with such ferocity, the flesh was torn open and arterial blood spurted high into the air. The second soldier deserted his comrade and ran to the farmhouse of his employee in fear. In one version of the story, the body of the soldier Ned is not found, but according to another narrative, he was found beneath a hedge, drained of blood, with his back snapped so the back of his head touched his buttocks. After this shocking discovery, a rumour spread that Jack Savage had risen from his unhallowed grave as a vampire, and a vicar from the nearby Market Town of Fareham told his congregation that there were no such creatures as vampires. A lay-preacher in the town knew better, and rejected the vicar’s claim, for he himself had had dealings with many people in England and France over the years who had been troubled by vampires. The vicar stated that it was impossible for a man to raise from his grave, and the lay-preacher responded by quoting the accounts documented in the Bible about various resurrections: Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones being restored as a living army of flesh and blood; the resurrections performed by Jesus, such as the raising from the dead of the daughter of Jairus, the reanimation of a man in the middle of his own funeral, the recalling of Lazarus from his tomb, and of course, the resurrection of Christ himself and the account of the dead saints who came out of their tombs to enter Jerusalem after Jesus had risen from his own tomb. After Jesus, the Bible also mentions a resurrection of a female named Tabitha by Peter.
