Vampires of Great Britain

by Tom Slemen

  Another case of a psychic vampire attack allegedly took place at Swindon in the 1980s. In the summer of 1981, a 25-year-old woman named Sarah went to live in Deacon Street, Swindon, to look after her 75-year-old auntie Esther, who was recovering from a mild stroke. One night at around 11.45pm, Sarah retired to bed, and had difficulty sleeping because of the humid summer night. She opened the window and saw a full moon hanging over the horizon, then returned to her bed and settled down to try and sleep on top of the duvet. A few minutes later, Sarah had the eerie feeling she was being watched, and she opened her eyes and glanced at the open window. A dark shape flitted away from the window, and Sarah knew it wasn’t an optical illusion because it momentarily blocked the moonlight pouring into the room and cast a shadow that flitted across the bed.

  Sarah got up off the bed, closed the window, and lay back on the bed, wondering what had passed the window. To allay any thoughts of the thing being something supernatural, she decided (rather unrealistically) that a moth had fluttered past her eyes. However, at ten minutes past midnight Sarah turned in the bed and looked towards the bedroom door – and saw something which was to haunt her for the rest of her life.

  Sarah noticed a dark shape sliding silently under her door. As she squinted in the moonlit room, she could discern the surreal sight of what looked like a flat two-dimensional cut-out of a man’s silhouette, sliding steadily through the centimetre-high gap under the door. Sarah raised herself from the pillow and sat on the edge of the bed, gazing at the bizarre spectacle in absolute terror. She had an urge to run out of the bedroom but that would mean walking over the crawling shadow. That shadow suddenly rose up from the carpet and instantly materialised into the three-dimensional solid form of a man in a long black robe of some sort. Sarah felt weak with fear, and she threw her arms up defensively as she fell back onto the bed. She passed out, and when she regained consciousness, Sarah saw the time was now almost four in the morning. She felt so drained of energy she could hardly draw breath, and her head slumped back onto the pillow until the light of dawn seeped into the room. Sarah eventually rose from her bed at 10am and found her cousin Lisa downstairs looking after Aunt Esther. Lisa had tried to wake Sarah several times without success, and when she saw her stagger downstairs, she asked her what the matter was. Sarah said she felt weak and dizzy then collapsed. An ambulance took her to hospital were she was subsequently diagnosed with a type of chronic-fatigue syndrome that was said to have been caused by the exhaustion Sarah had experienced from constantly caring for her sick aunt. Sarah disputed the diagnosis, as she felt as if something had somehow literally siphoned off the energy in her body, and she felt it had something to do with the ‘ghost’ that had entered her bedroom from under the door. On another occasion, this time at Sarah’s home on Crombey Street, about half a mile from her aunt’s house, the sinister apparition manifested again. This time, Sarah did not pass out when the entity materialised, and on this occasion the incident was also witnessed by Sarah’s 17-year-old brother Russell. At 9.45pm on Wednesday 12 August, 1981, Russell came into his sister’s bedroom asking for money to go to the local fish and chips shop. Sarah was sitting at a dresser as she put on her make up, and was complaining about the way Russell entered her bedroom without knocking first, when brother and sister suddenly saw the instantaneous appearance of a tall man in a long black cloak who seemed to walk from the side of the wardrobe. Sarah let out a scream and threw a hairdryer at the alarming phantom before rushing out the bedroom with Russell in close pursuit. The parents of Sarah and Russell barged into the bedroom when they heard the garbled account of their siblings’ description of the cloaked man, but found no one there. Sarah dreaded sleeping in her bedroom after that encounter, but thankfully the menacing figure never bothered her again. The apparition was never identified, and seems to have been some type of vampiric being that had been siphoning off Sarah’s vitality. One wonders if the entity is still at large.

  These vampires that draw off the very life-force of their victims are reminiscent of the incubus and succubus of Judaeo-Christian belief. An incubus is a male demonic being that lies on top of female sleepers at night and sexually abuses them. It also drains the victim of energy so she is unable to even call out for help. The incubus often takes on the form of an attractive young human male, whereas its female counterpart - the succubus – often resembles a voluptuous, attractive woman, but, it seems there are other nocturnal entities haunting our bedrooms, and the most widely-reported of these is known as the ‘Old Hag’.

  ‘Old Hag Syndrome’ has been recognised by psychologists for many years, but no one is sure whether the cause is supernatural or simply the product of a half-awake mind. Victims wake up in bed to find that they cannot move, even though they can see, hear, feel and smell. They often experience the feeling of a great weight on their chest and sense that there is a sinister or evil presence in the room. This presence sometimes manifests itself as an old hag with evil-looking eyes, hence the name of this syndrome. In 2003, a 27-year-old man named Tony woke at his home in the Kensington district of Liverpool, Merseyside, at three in the morning and found himself unable to move a muscle. He panicked, as he struggled to breathe, then he opened his eyes - and saw an old woman with a black shawl leaning over him. She started to cackle, and she started to stroke Tony's face with what felt like bony fingers. The face of the night visitor looked very sinister, and the woman muttered something unintelligible. She leaned forward and began to kiss Tony, and a terrible stench filled his nostrils. He tried desperately to regain the power of movement, and he suddenly screamed out and pushed away the eerie figure. The old hag was nowhere to be seen.

  Six days after that report, there was a second Old Hag report about two miles from the first incident. A 45-year-old Liverpool man named George retired to his bedroom at 10 pm. His wife remained downstairs ironing clothes. She said she'd be coming up to bed in about an hour. However, at around 11 o'clock that night, George was awakened by someone climbing into the bed. He turned to cuddle his wife and found no one there. George thought perhaps he'd been dreaming, and he laid back to relax. As he was about to drop off asleep, George felt something heavy pushing down on his chest. He opened his eyes - and found himself paralysed from head to toe. A dark shape was on top of him. George later stated that he felt as if the presence was stealing the life out of him, and that if he didn't fight it he'd die. An unsightly face leaned over his face. It was the face of a very old woman with evil staring eyes. George could see a flickering golden light in those eyes. The woman put her mouth to George's mouth and her breath smelt rancid. The putrid breath seemed to fill his head. George had classed himself as an atheist, but that night he called upon God to save him from the evil hag. The wrinkled face grimaced as if in great pain, and then the eyes turned completely white.

  The weight was lifted from George, and the hag vanished into thin air. George felt movement return to his big toe, then the whole of his leg and the rest of his body in turn. He raised himself up and leaned against the bed's headboard, gasping for breath. His heart pounded. He looked about, and saw the room was empty. George then ran down the stairs to tell his wife about the ghastly experience. She immediately noticed a strong putrescent odour, and sniffed his mouth. George then realised the hag had been no dream. He gargled with a mouthwash and brushed his teeth repeatedly until the horrid vestiges of the hag's kiss had gone.

  There were two further incidents of this kind, reported days later in other areas of Merseyside, and both victims of these eerie assaults gave a carbon copy description of the old hag who had terrorised the two men in the earlier cases. The victims also mentioned smelling an unpleasant odour during the assaults. Weeks after these four cases, there came a cluster of reports of the Old Hag in the neighbouring county of Cheshire, and herein lies a peculiarity of this phenomenon; the hag syndrome is rarely reported as a widespread occurrence, but instead, there are a number of highly localised incidents reported, sometimes in the same street, and this is difficult to
explain in terms of traditional psychology. Suggestion and hysteria could undoubtedly be cited as the cause if two or more people knew about the hag being reported several doors away, but in most cases, people have not reported it to neighbours, but to a doctor, and he or she has treated the report in the strictest confidence. Is the hag just the modern interpretation for a type of vampire that has been at large for centuries? What purpose would the hag serve if she was not vampiric? Why does she drain people of energy and the power of movement? Could she be a parasitic entity rather than the demonic being most Occultist believe her to be?

  In 1992 there was a classic case of a psychic vampire reported at Cardiff. A 34-year-old secretary named Jane Williams had recurring nightmares of a man in black floating in through her bedroom window each night, and in the dreams the man would put his mouth to Jane’s lips and suck the breath from her lungs until she would wake up, gasping for air. After a week of such nightmares, Jane woke up one night trembling in her Wharton Street home to see the shadowy outline of a man hovering over her bed. She let out a scream and the weird apparition dissolved before her eyes. The man in the nightmares had a distinctive face with unusually dark menacing eyes and a white-streaked quiff. One afternoon in October 1992, Jane was returning from work when she encountered this man on Queen Street. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the man of her nightmares, and before she turned to run off, she heard him utter something unintelligible. Jane suffered two further nightmares at the house on Wharton Street, and on both occasions, awoke gasping for breath and feeling completely exhausted. Jane went to stay at her sister’s home in Caerphilly, and after two nights of peaceful sleep, the nightmares returned with a vengeance. Jane awoke screaming in the spare bedroom and her sister Claudia ran to her help. Upon entering the bedroom, Claudia saw a dark amorphous shape, almost like a cloud of black smoke, roll along the ceiling and vanish into the drawn curtains. A Methodist lay-preacher was finally enlisted to tackle the sinister supernatural nocturnal assailant, and it was found that as long as Jane had a crucifix at her bedside, she was not troubled by the nightmares and accompanying assaults by the man in black. The lay preacher believed the invader of Jane’s bedroom was a demon, but Jane described the familiar symptoms of the kind reported in the aftermath of an attack by a psychic vampire; shortness of breath, complete exhaustion, and a sensation of dread. An almost identical case of a vaporous vampiric being was reported on a housing estate in Exeter in 2005, only on this occasion, the apparition was said to be wearing a tuxedo! The victim was once again female, and the attack took place around 11pm in an attic. Sandra, 39-year-old mother of two teenaged children, Becky, aged 13, and Zara, aged 15, had converted the attic of her home into a study, with bookshelves and a computer. Sandra’s daughters used the den to surf the net most evenings, but one Sunday night, when Becky and Zara were sound asleep in bed, Sandra decided to go upstairs and send an email to a friend from the attic computer. As she sat typing out the email, she suddenly felt as if something was in the attic with her. A floorboard creaked, and Sandra felt goosebumps rise involuntarily on her arms. She distinctly heard someone sigh quite close, and suddenly, out the corner of her eye, she saw a man in a black dinner jacket and matching trousers standing there. He wore a bow tie, and his hair was dark and slicked back. Sandra was instantly paralysed, and she could hear her heart pounding with fear as she sat at the computer, unable to move. The stranger’s face was pallid, and his eyes were abnormally large and black as coal. He walked silently to the terror-stricken mum, then began to kiss her neck and face, and Sandra literally felt as if the sinister man was drawing her very life from her. She became so weak she felt sick, and after blacking out, she woke up about twenty-five minutes later and found herself on the floor of the attic. Sandra told her best friend, Julie, who worked as a tutor at the local university, and Julie in turn told an amateur investigator of the paranormal named Allan Moore. Allan claimed that the unearthly life-draining ghost in the dinner jacket was a type of psychic vampire who had been preying on people in the Topsham Road area – and that was the very neighbourhood where Sandra lived. Sandra’s daughters were not told about the man in the tuxedo for obvious reasons, so Sandra shuddered when both girls reported seeing the silhouette of a man against the blinds of their bedroom all hours in the morning. Allan Moore resorted to the traditional remedies for protecting victims against vampires; he left garlic bulbs, crucifixes and bottles of holy water in the attic and bedrooms of Sandra’s home, and these measures seem to have done the trick, for the man in the tuxedo with the chalk-white face was seen no more by Sandra and her daughters.

  The cases of vampires of the life-force documented so far within this chapter occurred in this century and the last one, but some of the most terrifying incidents of this kind first took place in 19th century London. Standing 68 feet high on London’s Thames Embankment is a 180-ton obelisk of red granite that dates back fourteen centuries to the reign of Thutmose III, the sixth Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. This tall, tapering four-sided monument, which ends in a pyramidal top, had nothing to do with Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt, yet the obelisk is known as Cleopatra’s Needle for some reason. In 1819, Mehemet Ali, the viceroy of Egypt, presented the ‘needle’ to Britain to commemorate the victorious battles of Nelson and Abercromby. However, the obelisk remained at Alexandria in Egypt until 1877, when the first attempt was made to ship it to England. The obelisk was dug out of the sands that had covered most of it for over a thousand years, and many Egyptian labourers involved in the excavation believed something evil was residing in the needle, for there were superstitions rife in that part of Egypt about Sekhmet – a fierce vampiress who was worshipped by a blood-drinking cult dating back thousands of years to the 12th Dynasty. Sekhmet was originally known as the Egyptian goddess of war, but even in times of peace she was feared because of her bloodlust. She was depicted as a female with a lion’s mane, a beautiful pale face with large black penetrating eyes, and a fanged mouth. She was always robed in scarlet, and was known by various titles, such as The Mistress of Dread and the Lady of Slaughter. In the ancient myths, Sekhmet was said to have almost destroyed all of mankind on one occasion because of her bloodlust. Ra, the sun-god of Upper Egypt was said to have tricked her into drinking a bloodlike liquid which was in fact pomegranate juice mixed with beer. The vampire goddess then fell into a long slumber and was finally transformed into the gentle deity Hathor. However, the truth behind this allegorical tale is much more sinister. Sekhmet was said to have been temporarily ‘tamed’ by Egyptian High Priests who used Sumerian exorcism rites. It was said that only the wraith, or psychic shell of Sekhmet survived the exorcism, and that the feeble but deadly vestige of this violent lover of blood had sought sanctuary in the fallen obelisk of Thutmose III.

  On 14 October 1877, the ship carrying the obelisk to England capsized during a fierce storm in the Bay of Biscay, and six lives were lost as a result. The obelisk was finally brought to England in January 1878, and it was subsequently erected on the Victoria Embankment in September of that year. Hidden within the pedestal of Cleopatra’s Needle there is a rather interesting time capsule from Victorian times containing a full set of British Empire coins, a rupee, a 3-inch model of the monument and plans of the obelisk on velum, plus a Bradshaw Railway Guide booklet, a shilling razor, a portrait of Queen Victoria, a box of cigars, a collection of children’s toys, and twelve photographs of the most beautiful women of the day.

  A naked man was seen jumping into the Thames close to the obelisk, weeks after its erection. The body of the suicide was later recovered from the river but never identified. Not long after this, rumours began to circulate about a strange power emanating from Cleopatra’s Needle which could cause people to jump into the Thames. Miss Davies, a 27-year-old woman from Pimlico left her home one night in 1880 and wandered the streets of London in a morose trance. Upon reaching the Victorian Embankment, she felt a ‘magnetic’ force draw her to the obelisk, where she heard the eerie sounds of female laughter.
Davies found herself walking towards the ancient monolith, and was unable to control her legs. She jumped into the river, but was rescued by a young vagrant. Miss Davies gradually recovered from her ordeal in hospital, but suffered terrible nightmares of an abnormally tall woman in dark red robes with a terrifying white face and black almond-shaped eyes. Each time this disturbing figure appeared in the dreams, Miss Davies would find herself paralysed with fear, and the entity would slowly open an enormous mouth to reveal an array of pointed teeth. The figure would then move steadily towards the dreamer and bite into her face, tearing off strips of her flesh. Fortunately, the nightmares ended after a fortnight, but Miss Davies believed the cannibalistic woman was not merely a figment of her dream, but something truly evil connected with the obelisk on the Embankment. Could the woman in the scarlet robes be the vampiric goddess Sekhmet? Many men and women from all classes and walks of life have since chosen to end their lives by jumping into the Thames close to Cleopatra’s Needle, and even the police have remarked on the ‘popularity’ of the suicide spot. Could an ancient vampire be causing people to drown themselves to somehow live off the very life-energy of the suicides?