by Aaron Mahnke
One of the results of this obsession is that we often ignore or forget the other major players in the Dracula story. For example, Mina Murray is the powerful, heroic woman who spends the bulk of the story fighting to destroy Dracula, rather than wallowing in self-pity. Quincey Morris sacrifices himself to defeat the monster. And Jonathan Harker, Mina’s eventual husband, strikes one of the killing blows. The novel is full of characters, but all seem to fade into the shadow cast by the vampire lord himself.
All except for Abraham Van Helsing, that is. Over the decades, his character has received a good amount of attention from fans of the book, and honestly, how can you blame them? He was intelligent, brave, and skilled in his craft. And in a lot of ways, Van Helsing represented something we all aspired to be.
It’s a side effect of growing up with stories of creatures who want to hurt us. If there really is something living under the bed, or in the closet, or in that dark, damp corner of the basement, then shouldn’t someone care enough to protect us? If these creatures are the antagonists of our nightmares, then surely there are also protagonists. The heroes. The champions. Those brave souls who are tasked with fighting back.
Van Helsing was a fictional construct, of course, but his character echoes an ancient, widespread belief that can be found, in some form or another, within many folktales. No matter what the monsters might be, there are always those who fight them.
Amazingly, those hunters still walk among us.
BORN TO HUNT
Some of the earliest folktales involving hunters of the supernatural can be found in Bulgaria and nearby countries. After five centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Empire, the Bulgarians finally pushed out the Turks in the 1890s. During those first few years of freedom, the country’s rich folklore and traditions were gathered up and recorded for the first time, and right at the center of these records were stories of the vampire.
These tales have such power that people today still believe them and follow their prescriptions, such as the ritual exhumation of suspected vampires. It’s a belief that runs deep, mostly because of intense fear and superstition. To many, though, vampires were real, and they needed to be hunted down.
As a result, there were people in these Bulgarian villages called sâbotnik, who could detect vampires. They were called upon when a community suspected a vampire was hunting and harming them. Once the grave of a suspect was dug up and the body exposed, the sâbotnik would determine whether or not the corpse was really a vampire. If it was, the sâbotnik was also responsible for destroying it.
This was a power each sâbotnik acquired at birth, according to the stories. You just had to be lucky enough to be born either on one of the days between Christmas and January 6—a time known to ancient Catholics as the Unclean Days—or on a Saturday, which sounds pretty random to me, but hey, whatever.
Another group of vampire hunters was known as the vampirdžia. These were more akin to the modern movie version of Van Helsing that we know today. Destined to hunt vampires from birth, they traveled the land armed with weapons and tools, looking for battle. And they did all of this while following prescribed methods, like hunting vampires on Saturdays and leading the vampires into graveyards, where they were somehow weaker.
And these vampirdžia were heroes, often earning a good living from the gifts and donations of fearful villagers. There are even records of a provincial capital, Veliko Târnovo, actually employing a number of them and sending them out to investigate and hunt when reports of vampires popped up. Honestly, you could film this stuff and pass it off as an Underworld sequel. But it really happened, and to me, that’s what makes it so much more compelling.
The idea of hunting individuals who threatened society wasn’t isolated to Bulgaria, though, or even limited to the concept of the vampire. Contemporary to these vampirdžia tales were stories that highlighted another dangerous creature, one that walked right among us: the witch. And yes, we all already know that there was hysteria and persecution. Yes, there were hangings and burnings and other superstition-fueled acts of violence. But at the center of much of it, there were hunters.
In 1486, a German Dominican friar named Heinrich Kramer wrote a book that he called the Malleus Maleficarum, “the hammer of the witches.” Kramer was more than a friar, though; he’d served for years as an inquisitor with orders from Pope Innocent VIII. After his retirement, he wrote what he believed to be the gold standard for understanding and identifying witches.
The Catholic Church condemned the book just three years after it was published, but it was too late. The Malleus Maleficarum acted like an accelerant, thanks in part to Gutenberg’s printing press, and spread across Europe, where it fueled the flames of religious hysteria and social unrest. The book was used for centuries to teach others about witches—where they came from, how to detect them, and what to do when you found one.
And this was the world that Matthew Hopkins was born into in England in 1620. The son of a Puritan minister, he was raised to fear the Devil and lash out at what he saw as heresy. By the age of just twenty-four, Hopkins had set up shop in Sussex under the title of Witchfinder General, and began a short but devastating career in the discovery and conviction of witches.
In the 350 years that spanned the early 1400s to the late 1700s, it’s estimated that less than five hundred people in total were executed for witchcraft in all of England. That’s less than two executions per year, right? During their short two-year operation, though, Hopkins and his team were responsible for three hundred of those deaths.
This is the man who invented the “swimming” test for witchcraft, which most people have heard about. The accused would be tied to a chair and tossed into a pond or lake, and then Hopkins would wait to see if the person floated. If so, that person was a witch and would be killed. If the accused sank…well…they still died, but with a clear name. It doesn’t make sense to us, I know, but in the 1640s, Hopkins could do no wrong. Everyone trusted him. His book, The Discovery of Witches, went on to fuel witch trials in the American colonies in the late 1600s, and some of his interrogation methods were even used in the Salem, Massachusetts, trials. Don’t get me wrong, the man was a monster. But he clearly left his mark as a witch hunter.
One last thing: according to the Bulgarian folklore surrounding vampire hunters, there was one big risk for those in the profession. Anyone who served as a sâbotnik or vampirdžia was most at risk of becoming a vampire themselves. Even in England, Hopkins didn’t die a hero. Instead, he was viewed as a monster and bogeyman. Rather than going down in history as some sort of heroic hunter, he acquired a reputation of having been evil himself.
Because sometimes, whether the creature is a thing of our own invention or simply the focus of a personal obsession, the hunter is always at risk of becoming the very thing they pursue.
JUMPING AT SHADOWS
In 1968, Paramount released Rosemary’s Baby, based on the hit novel from a year before. And 1973 saw the release of the original Exorcist, followed by The Omen three years later. There was a satanic craze sweeping through America—a mixture of fear and fascination—and Hollywood wanted to capitalize on it. But it’s often overlooked that this craze was preceded by an earlier wave of fear across the Atlantic, in England, that began when Londoners began to notice graffiti and vandalism inside the historic Highgate Cemetery.
Highgate is an old cemetery, established in 1839. While it was initially one of the city’s most fashionable burial places, with elaborate funerary architecture, over the years it became less popular. In World War II, German bombs damaged some of the vaults, and during the following decades it fell into disrepair, with trees and brush beginning to overtake the property. Youth and vandals began to spend more time inside the cemetery, and reports circulated of occult symbols, open graves, and bodies that had been moved for unknown reasons.
In 1969, a group calling itself the British Occult Society sought to investigate the unusual phenomena taking place in the cemetery, and they also listened to th
ose in the neighborhood who had stories of their own to share. Which is where they first encountered the rumors of something—maybe a person, or maybe something else—that prowled the graveyard at night. The stories described it as a tall, dark figure that could paralyze those who encountered it.
A man named David Farrant was intrigued, and so on December 21, 1969, he camped out in the cemetery overnight. It was the winter solstice and he was a paranormal investigator, so it all sort of lined up, at least in his mind. And according to him, the night was a huge success. The way he described it, at some point during the hours between dusk and dawn, Farrant encountered a creature that stood over seven feet tall, with eyes that glowed brightly. But when Farrant looked away for a moment, it vanished. He wrote to the local paper and asked if others had seen the same figure. Amazingly, for about two months, letters flooded in from others who described similar experiences.
About the same time, though, another man who was interested in the same goings-on in the cemetery, Seán Manchester, made further discoveries—bloody ones. Manchester believed the stories of the mysterious, dark figure, but he also found numerous animals in the cemetery that had been drained of blood. Upon inspection, he reported that each of them had small holes in its neck. When the local papers asked him if he had a theory, he told them he did. The figure, according to Manchester, was clearly a vampire.
And not just any vampire. This was what he called a “King Vampire,” brought over from Wallachia in the 1700s by a curious noble, and then buried on the estate that eventually became Highgate Cemetery. All of the satanic activity, according to him, was the work of local occultists trying to resurrect this creature.
So Manchester offered to hunt it down and exorcise it. He acknowledged that the law made it a bit…ah…difficult to go around plunging wooden stakes into corpses, but he’d already done it twice before. According to him, he was willing to put his life on the line to track down and destroy the King Vampire.
Few people bought it. They did believe that something was going on inside the cemetery, though, so the police began to patrol the area, watching for anything out of the ordinary. Over the next few months they chased a number of vandals out of the graveyard, but none of them turned out to be anything more than teenagers pretending to be vampire hunters, just out looking for a thrill.
And then, on August 1, 1970, something happened that changed all of that. That night police were called to Highgate Cemetery and directed to one particular crypt that was deep inside the property. When they arrived, they found the tomb door standing wide open, and inside, stretched out on the cold stone floor, was a body. Not particularly odd, given the location, but it was the condition of the body that alarmed them.
It had been charred beyond recognition, and then decapitated.
DARK FORCES COLLIDE
The police went public with the discovery and admitted that this, of all the things they’d found in Highgate so far, could actually be the work of occultists. And that was all the public needed. The papers were filled with headlines. People couldn’t help but jump to conclusions. And both Seán Manchester and David Farrant were right there in the middle of it, examining the clues and trying to make sense of it all.
They weren’t on the same side—each man had his own methods of investigation, some of which were a bit unorthodox. Two weeks after the burned body was discovered, Farrant was discovered by police to be wandering the cemetery at night. When they arrested him for trespassing, he was found to be carrying a large crucifix and a sharp wooden stake.
His group didn’t stop, though. They began to camp overnight in the graveyard on a regular basis, finding more peculiar clues, all of which pointed—to them, at least—to the work of a group bent on resurrecting the King Vampire.
One night Farrant took a reporter from the Evening News into Highgate with him, and together they discovered a crypt with an eerie scene. The body had been removed from the coffin inside the crypt and placed in the center of a large pentagram that had been drawn on the stone floor. Farrant and his group also claimed to find bodies with voodoo dolls placed next to them, bodies with missing heads, skulls placed in odd locations, and symbols that hinted at rituals from previous nights. All of it, they said, pointed to a dark evil that needed to be stopped. Their efforts, as risky as they seemed, were aimed at doing just that.
Months later, Farrant was arrested a second time, along with his girlfriend. The police apparently thought the couple was transporting marijuana, but it turned out to be a plastic bag of chamomile, of all things. They claimed it was an ingredient in one of their rituals. According to them, they had found a crypt that showed signs of a recent black magic ceremony, and so their group had gone there to cleanse it. Once they had all gathered inside the open tomb, they stood in a circle around the perimeter of the room, reading passages from the Bible along with spells they claimed had been lifted from ancient books of magic. Some of the women in the group even stripped to dance naked in the center of the room. They were symbols of purity, according to Farrant.
Manchester publicly disapproved. He preferred to conduct his exorcisms in broad daylight, which allowed him to be safer, and—as some critics pointed out—also made it more likely that there would be an audience around to watch him. But that didn’t mean his rituals were any less entertaining. At one point, Manchester claimed that he was led to a tomb by a young woman possessed by a demonic spirit named Lusia. Inside the tomb, he claimed, was an ancient coffin with no nameplate. He had opened the coffin and was about to plunge a wooden stake into the corpse when another member of his group stopped him. Instead, Manchester simply sprinkled the body with holy water and cloves of garlic. According to witnesses, as he did this, loud rhythmic booms could he heard, growing louder the deeper into the ritual they went.
Events in Highgate seemed to end shortly after January 1974. On the twelfth of that month, local police were called to inspect the car of a local resident, parked near the cemetery. Inside, they found an embalmed corpse seated at the wheel, its head removed and nowhere to be found.
Farrant was interviewed as a suspect, but in the end it turned out to be a prank put on by a group of local teenagers. One of them had actually taken the head home and kept it on his mantel—until it began to smell, that is.
Manchester found a way to make a career out of his adventures in Highgate, and over the past few decades has become known as a “vampire expert,” appearing in many television documentaries on the subject. He’s written two books: one about the Highgate Vampire, and a handbook for would-be hunters.
David Farrant experienced less success in the wake of the events. He was arrested in 1974 for vandalizing property within the cemetery. He denied any involvement, of course, but the police were hungry for a real suspect after nearly five years of activity. He was sentenced to four years in prison, but was paroled after just two years when it was determined that his rights had been violated. He went back to heading up the British Occult Society, where he still works today.
Newspapers at the time featured photos of Farrant with his vampire-hunting tools. He was referred to as the “Graveyard Ghoul” by one local paper, and another called him a “wicked witch.” In a book written in 1991, Manchester refers to him as “a wayward witch who dabbled in the black arts.”
In the eyes of some, at least, David Farrant seemed to suffer a fate similar to Matthew Hopkins’s. Rather than succeeding, it seems, the young man became the thing he hunted.
THE PURSUIT
Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year, and I bet you feel the same. It’s one of the few moments when we stop and acknowledge the shadows—the mystery and the unknown. Because life without mystery is stale and flat, and days like today help to add texture to our lives.
Each year, millions of children dress up and walk through their neighborhoods. They each have a favorite creature, something they want to become for the one night of the year when it’s expected and normal. And they’ll do all of this like hunters on a
mission.
Interestingly, the teens who live near Highgate still creep into the graveyard every year. Each Halloween, they find a way inside, gather together, and go on their own vampire hunts. And that’s no easy task these days. The cemetery has been cleaned up, its gates have been locked, and it’s opened to the public only for paid, guided tours. Still, the youth of the area manage to celebrate Halloween there each and every year.
Twenty years before the events in Highgate Cemetery, though, there was another gathering of youth farther north. Glasgow, the second-largest city in Scotland, straddles the river Clyde. South of the river, just north of the M74 motorway, is a neighborhood known as Gorbals. It’s an area of the city that has a rough history. The industrialization and overpopulation of the late 1800s led to the construction of tenement slums throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It’s gone through some attempted redevelopment, but in the 1950s it was probably at its lowest point.
One night in September 1954, a police constable named Alex Deeprose was called to investigate a disturbance at the Southern Necropolis, a burial ground as old as Highgate and just as creepy in its own way. When the officer got to the cemetery, he found that some of the neighborhood children had gathered there. Hundreds of children, in fact, ranging in ages from four to fourteen. And they were armed. Deeprose managed to gather them all together and lead them out of the graveyard, but the following night they were back. Each of the children carried something dangerous—knives, sticks, metal bars. Some even brought dogs along. And Deeprose wanted to know why.
