by Tom Slemen
Rumours of a Royal Vampire
The grim forbidding Glamis Castle stands in the great vale of Strathmore in Tayside, in the north-east of Scotland. For centuries the vast fortified castle with its pointed towers has had a sinister reputation for housing an unspeakable, terrible secret, but just what is this dreadful secret? It is said that only certain members of the British Royal Family know, but there have been whispers and bloodcurdling rumours circulating about the secret of Glamis Castle for hundreds of years, and these strange claims are the subject of the following accounts.
It is known that the Glamis Secret has nothing to do with a stubborn bloodstain that cannot be removed from the floorboards in one of the castle rooms. That stain is the blood of King Malcolm II, who was cut down by the Claymore swords of his rebellious subjects in the castle in the year 1084; nor is the secret anything to do with the fact that Lady Glamis was burnt at the stake outside the castle for practising witchcraft, although her ghost still walks the corridors of Glamis as the Grey Lady. No, the secret of Glamis Castle lies in solving the following grotesque jigsaw puzzle of weird events.
If you stand outside the castle and count the number of windows, and compare them with the number of windows inside the building, you will always be two windows short; in other words, there seems to be a walled-up secret room in Glamis, and what this room contains has been the subject of much debated for over 600 years. No one knows where this secret room is, but some say it is on the top story of the castle inside a tower. Then there is another clue; over the centuries, servants have claimed to have heard strange thuds on the walls of the building, and one of the Earls of Strathmore said he once overheard King James V mentioning the thing locked up in its room. Many servants at the time speculated that the 'thing' was a deformed overgrown child, the product of the continual inbreeding over the centuries within the aristocracy. Some researchers believe this might just be the case, for in an oil painting at the castle, there is a strange green-clad figure of a child with a strangely-deformed torso. The identity of the painting's subject has never been established.
In the year 1486, a particular nasty event occurred at Glamis Castle when a party of neighbouring aristocrats called the Ogilvies came to Glamis and begged for protection from their sworn enemies, the Lindsay family. The Ogilvies were escorted to a chamber under the castle and left there without food or water for over a month. When the chamber was opened, only one of the Ogilvies was barely alive. He had eaten the other members of his family through starvation. In the 17th century, it was said that an unfortunate black slave was stripped naked and hunted 'as fun game' by the Earls and their hunting dogs. The slave was repeatedly impaled with lances and the dogs literally ripped him apart while the ladies of the castle looked on in laughter. The murdered slave's ghost may be the strange figure known as Jack the Runner, who has been seen darting about the castle as he screams as if in agony.
Around the time the slave was hunted to death, a young maiden from the local village who was involved with one of the Earls was said to have stumbled on the secret chamber in Glamis, and whatever she saw must have been terrifying, because she ran screaming from the castle, and was later captured by two Royal henchmen. One of these henchmen took a pair of iron tongs, ripped out the young lady's tongue and threw it on the fire. This is known as the Ritual of Silencing, and had been performed on several servants over the years who had inadvertently stumbled upon the Glamis Secret. The shock of having the tongue wrenched out at the root usually killed the victim and they usually bled to death anyway, but the poor aforementioned young maiden ran out of the castle dungeon minus her tongue in a state of terror with blood spurting out of her mouth. The henchmen went after her and one of them grabbed her in a headlock, then twisted her head until her neck broke. The body was then meticulously sawed up and fed to the wild boars in the forest.
The unmentionable secret of Glamis was briefly touched upon in 1904 when the 13th Earl of Strathmore, Claude Bowes-Lyon, told an inquisitive friend, "If you could only know the nature of the terrible secret, you would go down on your knees and thank God it were not yours." The meaning of the Earl's cryptic remark only deepens the mystery, but the friend he spoke to later claimed that he had found the secret chamber, and he was quickly bundled off to the colonies; some say he was sent to Australia.
Early in the 20th century, when the daughter of the 14th Earl of Glamis asked what the secret was, her father told her, "You cannot be told; for no woman can ever know the secret of Glamis Castle."
It is claimed that certain members of the Royal Family know of the terrible secret, and they are all males. It is said that they are traditionally told on their 18th birthday, but none of the Royals has ever commented on or denied the secret of Glamis Castle.
Curiously, a female vampire has allegedly been sighted in the grounds of the castle from time to time, and legend has it that she is visiting her child, a half-human half-vampire, or 'dhampir' as such hybrids are called. In 1885, an enthusiastic collector of literature on historical oddities named George Blizard wrote to a private investigator named John Meikeljohn at his office in York Buildings, Adelphi, London. Blizard said he was prepared to offer Meikeljohn a very substantial amount of money if he could uncover the so-called Glamis Secret. Meikeljohn declined, recognising the fact that the Royals were a powerful family who could destroy his career and perhaps imprison him if he delved into their secrets. Blizard therefore sat down in the study of his Bloomsbury home and wrote to another private detective named Collinson, of Savoy Street, but he also turned down the collector’s offer. Finally, when word of Blizard’s offer was mentioned at a gentleman’s club, two adventurers named Edward Rye and John Grimstone, took up the intriguing but dangerous and controversial challenge. They both applied for employment at Glamis Castle, but only one – Edward Rye – was accepted as a junior butler. John Grimstone found lodgings at a cottage several miles from the castle, and the two men communicated by sending Morse messages to one another. Grimstone sent his message by covering and uncovering a bull’s eye lantern, and his colleague imparted information by doing the same with a candle at one of the windows of Glamis Castle after dark. The two occasionally met during various days of the week when Mr Rye was sent to the local village to order groceries for the cooks of the castle. According to Rye, in the relatively short time he’d been employed at the castle, he had met two members of staff – a footman and a young female servant - who had enthusiastically talked at length about the Glamis Secret. Both their stories mentioned a vampire that inhabited a secret room in one of the turrets. This vampire was the result of some curse on the bloodline of the Earls of Strathmore, and the creature was allowed to walk on the roof of the castle most nights. The vampire could not be killed because it had Royal blood in its veins and was regarded as a member of the Earl’s family. Fresh human blood was allegedly taken up to the vampire every few days, and the origin of this ‘nourishment’ remained a mystery. The young maid told how, on one occasion when the Earl of Strathmore and his family were away, the staff hung towels from every window in Glamis Castle, then went outside to see that there were several windows where no towel was evident, because they were the windows of the secret chambers where the Royal vampire was allowed to roam.
John Grimstone corresponded with George Blizard about the extraordinary claims, and the latter sent more money to the two investigators to encourage them to look a little deeper into the strange goings-on at Glamis Castle. Weeks afterwards, Edward Rye was awakened at almost three in the morning by a female scream. Rye stumbled out of bed in his long-johns and went into the corridor outside his room with a candle. At the end of the corridor the senior butler barred his way and strongly advised Rye to return to his bed. Rye said that the scream seemed to have come from the upper floors, but in a stern voice, his senior told him to go back to his room immediately. After that night, the young maid who had told Edward Rye about the vampire was curiously absent. Edward Rye attempted to gain access to the secret chambers
in one of the turrets of the castle, but he was caught by a member of staff and sacked. Rye and Grimstone returned to London and refused to take any more money of Mr Blizard, feeling they had failed in their mission.
Could there be any truth in the story of a Royal vampire? Queen Mary, the consort of George V, was related to Vlad the Impaler, a barbaric Transylvanian ruler who once killed more than 100,000 Turkish soldiers by having them impaled on long spiked wooden poles as he dipped his bread in their blood at an open-air banquet overlooking the scene of mass carnage. The psychopathic Transylvanian was known as Dracula, Romanian for “son of the Devil”, and he is thought to have been a major inspiration for Bram Stoker’s famous vampire novel, Dracula. Prince Charles then, is a direct descendant of Vlad Dracula, and in November 1998, when His Royal Highness visited Transylvania during a tour of Eastern Europe, he told newspaper and television reporters covering his trip that he was aware of his infamous Transylvanian ancestor. The Freedom of Information Act of 2000 is an Act of Parliament that introduced a public ‘right to know’ – but only in relation to public bodies; it could not be applied to secrets of the British monarchy. The macabre secret of Glamis Castle will therefore remain a secret for many years to come.
In the Midst of Death They Are in Life
A vampire may exist as a dead body which continues to paradoxically ‘live’ in its grave until night-time, when it crawls forth out of it temporary resting place to go in search of blood and prana - the very life-force essence of a human – to sustain nourishment. Many years ago at a cemetery in Lancashire, a father died and could not be buried in the family plot because there were four coffins already in the grave. The sons were baffled, as there should have only been three coffins in the grave, and some assumed that the fourth coffin had been interred by mistake. One of the sons prised open the coffin lid and was amazed to see it was not even fastened down with screws. In the satin-lined coffin there rested a rosy-cheeked stranger in expensive-looking clothes of velvet and silk. On his fingers he wore a collection of dazzling rings, and the dead man’s face was described as having ‘a distinctly aristocratic profile’. The sons entered the cemetery after dark with spades to remove the stranger from the family grave to make room for their father’s coffin. When they opened the unidentified coffin, they were shocked to find it completely empty. There had been recent reports of the ‘vaporous’ ghost of a distinguished-looking man who haunted the cemetery, and a local priest believed the apparition was that of a vampire who had been seen floating over the gravestones late in the grey foggy November afternoons a fortnight before. Gravediggers had told the priest about strange tunnels in the same burial ground, of moved coffins, and disturbed corpses – all indications of a vampire lair under the cemetery. There have been many well-documented cases of ‘moving coffins’ and other baffling subterranean mysteries concerning graveyards printed in the newspapers of the world, and there is a strong possibility that many of these unquiet graves are the result of vampire activity. Here are just a few accounts of corpses that have been busy after death.
Situated in the icy expanses of the Baltic Sea, the bleak rocky island of Oesel is better known for the whiskey it exports to the world, but in the 19th century, the island became the talk of Europe for much less mundane reasons: the sinister 'unquiet graves' saga.
Upon the island of Oesel on June 22, 1844, Mrs Dalmann, the wife of a local tailor, rode a cart carrying her two children up the long lonely lane which ran parallel to the town cemetery. Mrs Dalmann was going to visit her mother's grave as she did every month. The cart trundled past the many chapels adjoining the cemetery which had been built by the island's wealthier families and finally came to a halt in front of the Buxhoewden family chapel, where Mrs Dalmann hitched the horse to a post. She then went into the cemetery with her two children, clutching a bouquet of flowers, ready to pay her quiet respects to her much missed mother at the graveside.
Quarter of an hour later, Mrs Dalmann and her children returned to the cart and found the horse acting hysterically. It was lathered in perspiration and had almost uprooted the post to which it had been tethered. Mrs Dalmann tried her utmost to calm the horse down, but the animal reared up on its hind legs and seemed terrorised by something. Mrs Dalmann called out a veterinarian to treat her animal, and he bled the horse - which was a common practice to remedy almost anything in those days. The horse finally settled down, and the vet suggested that the animal had perhaps been stung by a bee.
On the following Sunday the same phenomenon happened again, this time to three horses simultaneously. All the horses that had been tied to posts outside the Buxhoewden Chapel were found quivering and acting strangely when their owners came out to mount them. The same explanation was offered by the vet who had treated Mrs Dolman's horse: bee stings. However, on the very spot where the four horses had been terrified by something, a number of villagers heard heavy rumbling sounds emanating from the Buxhoewden family vault beneath the chapel. Over the next few days, the strange subterranean disturbances continued to be heard, and eerie rumours about the unquiet graves of Buxhoewden chapel began to circulate through the town. The strange gossip finally reached the ears of the Buxhoewden household via the servants, but the weird tale was dismissed as the slanderous invention of some enemy of the family. The tittle-tattle about the supernatural goings-on in the vault refused to die down, so the Buxhoewdens informed the authorities and arranged for them to witness the reopening of the vault in an effort to end the silly rumours. When the Buxhoewden family vault was opened, the investigators found a chilling surprise awaiting them. All of the coffins were piled on top of one another in the centre of the vault. Three members of the Buxhoewden family and the party of official investigators took half an hour carrying the heavy coffins back to their iron racks which were mounted around the walls of the vault. No one spoke so much as a word within the vault during this time because the air seemed charged with a terrible presence of dread. When all of the living had left the underground chamber of the dead, the vault was locked and molten lead was poured over the broken seals of the door as a precaution against any future tampering. The Buxhoewdens and the group who had accompanied them into the vault racked their brains trying to think of a natural explanation which could account for the stacked coffins, but no such explanation was forthcoming. It was therefore agreed that the incident should be kept secret from the people of Oesel.