Vampires of Great Britain

by Tom Slemen

  On the third Sunday of that July, eleven horses tethered to posts outside the Buxhoewden chapel became hysterical during evening Mass. Half of the unfortunate creatures fell down and resisted all attempts by their owners to make them stand. Three of the horses died where they fell, while others became so frenzied they snapped their reins and galloped off in blind panic. Throughout all this commotion, the chapel-goers felt strange throbbing vibrations pounding the ground beneath them. The localised tremors were evidently coming from the exact spot where the Buxhoewden family vault was located.

  The mystery of the restless dead beneath the chapel could no longer be kept secret, and the people who had lost their horses together with a mob of the town's superstitious inhabitants joined forces and sent a petition to the Consistory - the supreme governing church body which periodically held official hearings regarding religious visions and supernatural incidents. While the tardy white-haired elders of the Consistory considered what actions to take over the rumbling vaults, one of the Buxhoewdens died. After the funeral, several members of the wealthy family melted the seals of the now infamous vault and unlocked its heavy six-inch reinforced doors. Once more, they found the coffins in a stack in the centre of the vault, and this time there were strange marks on one of the larger coffins, as if it had been battered and chipped by something. The Buxhoewdens and several brave volunteers positioned the coffins back onto their iron wall racks and quickly retreated from the vault. The locks were changed this time and fresh lead was poured onto the seals around them. Word got out of this second bizarre incident, adding more fuel to the creepy rumours of the jumping coffins in the Buxhoewden vault. Now the people of Oesel feared something evil was at large on their island and they made further demands to the sluggish Consistory to take immediate action. The church court decided to act under this growing pressure, and they opted for a thorough investigation of the haunted vault. The President of the Consistory, Baron De Guldenstubbe, went along to the vault with two members of the Buxhoewden family. He noted that the doors were locked and their lead seals had not been broken or tampered with in any way. Another witness was summoned and he observed the Baron and the two Buxhoewdens break the seals, unlock the door, then enter the vault with lanterns. This witness was given permission to enter the vault, and when he did, he came upon a most distressing scene. This time, the coffins were scattered everywhere in disarray, and some of them had been smashed open, partially revealing the decomposed corpses they contained. There was no way grave-robbers could have tunnelled into that vault, which was lined with thick slabs of granite. The slabs were intact, and there was no evidence of any secret openings to the vault. Furthermore, had grave-robbers been responsible for the gross acts of desecration, they would certainly have taken the diamond rings and other items of jewellery from the bodies.

  New coffins were brought into the vault and the bodies were put into them. Someone suggested sprinkling fine wood ashes on the floor of the crypt so that the ghouls responsible for the grim deeds would leave their footprints behind. This ingenious suggestion was taken up, and a fine layer of ash was duly sprinkled on the vault floor. The Buxhoewden vault was then locked and sealed once again, but the Baron De Guldenstubbe still suspected foul play by persons unknown who were perhaps tunnelling into the chamber, so he employed workmen to dig a six-foot deep trench around the vault and posted armed guards at the crypt's entrance. After seventy-two hours, the Baron turned up unannounced with two of the Buxhoewdens and stormed the troubled vault. Inside, they found all the coffins off their wall racks, each of them standing on end against the wall. On the floor, there were no footprints in the layer of ash. This left the Baron and the Buxhoewdens completely baffled - and somewhat afraid of the dark forces which were apparently at work in the crypt.

  Baron De Guldenstubbe filed his report to the Consistory, and the only suggestion they had regarding the unexplained disturbances was to bury the Buxhoewden coffins elsewhere. This was subsequently done, and the old family vault was sealed up for good.

  The mysterious movements of the coffins in the Buxhoewden vault are paralleled in similar accounts of mobile burial caskets that have been reported in various countries. According to church records at Stanton, in Suffolk, a vault belonging to a French family became the source of loud thudding sounds one evening in the mid-18th century. When the vault was opened for an additional internment in 1755, the large lead-covered burial caskets were found scattered about the place. One of the coffins was resting on the fourth step on the stairway leading out of the crypt, and was so heavy, it took eight men to reposition it on its wooden bier. Grave-robbers were initially blamed, but the locks on the vault hadn't been tampered with, nor had the seals.

  A similar mystery was investigated on island of Barbados in the 19th century. This was the so-called mystery of the 'creeping coffins'. The chilling story dates back to 1724, when the Walronds, a rich family of planters, constructed a magnificent blue Devon marble tomb at Christ Church, Barbados. The locals thought the ostentatious tomb was more of a fortress than a resting place of the dead. The floor space measured 12 feet in length, almost 7 feet in width, and was sunk into the ground. For some inexplicable reason, none of the Walronds were interred in their tomb. The first body that was interred there was that of Mrs Thomasina Goddard on July 31, 1807. In the following year, the vault came into the possession of the wealthy slave-owning family of Thomas Chase, who purchased it to entomb two daughters in 1808 and 1812. When the Chase tomb was reopened in July 1812 to lay Dorcas Chase to rest, the coffins containing the Chase daughters were seen to be standing on their heads. Thomas Chase, the head of the family never recovered from the shock of seeing the inverted coffins and he became so mentally disturbed he committed suicide a month later. On August 9 his heavy lead-lined coffin was also placed in the vault by eight pallbearers. On September 25 1816, the Chase vault was reopened to receive the coffin of Samuel Brewster Ames, a little boy who was distantly related to the Chase family. Once again the coffins in the vault were found disarranged. Only the burial casket of Mrs Goddard was still in its original place. The other coffins looked as if something had scattered them across the vault. There was little the enraged mourners could do but return the coffins to their rightful places. Later that year, on November 17, the vault was opened once more for the internment of Samuel Brewster, whose coffin was being transferred from its original grave in a St Philip churchyard. The sinister reputation of the vault was now so well-known, crowds of curious people gathered around it in eager anticipation of further developments. They were not disappointed, because once more it was discovered that the coffins of the chase tomb had been thrown about again. The coffin containing Mrs Goddard had been battered open and her remains had been exposed. The desecration was linked with an abortive slave rising that had been severely subdued by the authorities with much bloodshed earlier that year, but that connection was later ruled out, as there was no way anybody could have entered the stronghold of the Chase tomb.

  On July 17, 1819, the vault was opened and the coffin of Thomasina Clarke was taken inside. Outside the crypt, the Viscount Combermere, the Governor of Barbados, and two of his officials waited with bated breath, along with hundreds of hushed spectators. Yet again, the coffins were lying about the tomb in different directions. Viscount Combermere was allowed in and was baffled by the scene that met his eyes. He had watched the masons cutting free the marble slab door of the tomb, and had seen the exertion on the faces of the slave gang who had dragged that slab aside. He wondered what force or entity could have invaded such an impenetrable crypt to throw the coffins about. After the coffins were lugged back to their original positions, fine-grained sand was sprinkled over the entire floor. This would surely reveal the traces of the mysterious desecrator, the Viscount reasoned. This time when the vault slab was closed, the Viscount left the impression of his seal in the cement.

  By April of the following year, burning curiosity had gotten the better of everybody on the island, and they begged
the Viscount Combermere to reopen the Chase tomb to see if anything had happened. After a protracted debate on the requests of the islanders, the Governor of Barbados bent to public pressure, and he authorised the reopening of the notorious vault. The seals on the cement were intact, yet when the interior of the crypt was inspected, the coffins were again found strewn across the vault. Whatever had moved the coffins had done it with such violence, there were large dents in the walls of the chamber made by the impact of the lead coffins, and yet there were no marks in the sand on the floor of the vault. Viscount Combermere - a fearless man who had been one of the Duke of Wellington's finest cavalry commanders - later admitted that his blood had ran cold when he saw the state of the vault and the positions of the coffins that day. In the end, the Viscount had the coffins removed from the accursed tomb and had them buried elsewhere. The Chase tomb was put on the market, but because of it eerie reputation it was never purchased and still lies empty. Even today, people on the island will not venture near the black mouth of the open tomb's entrance after dusk.

  In the 1950s, a cemetery at Bebington, Wirral was said to be haunted by an entity that emerged out of holes in the ground. The opening of these outlets were as small as rabbit holes in some places, yet a six-foot-tall man in black was seen to emerge from them as a vapour which quickly solidified. The strange being was seen initially by an elderly woman who was going to place flowers on her daughter’s grave one dusky October afternoon in 1952. This pensioner saw a cone of ‘smoke’ issue from the ground, and as she looked on, the vapour slowly solidified into the figure of a tall man who stood looking at her with an expression of contempt. His arms were folded, and the pensioner turned around and walked quickly in the other direction. The same vaporous man in black was seen by many other people in the cemetery until 1959. Incidentally, there is a grave at this cemetery in Bebington that contains the body of a Birkenhead woman who passed away in the early 1960s. The woman – Mrs Emily Filer – died at the age of 69 from a cerebral haemorrhage, but her 33-year-old son was so distressed at losing his beloved mother, he attempted to bring her back to life by digging down to her coffin and ‘rescuing’ her from decay in the realm of worms. In the mind of this man, who was unhinged by utter grief, he believed that instead of waiting for the mass resurrection of Judgement Day, he could revive his mum. He decided he would first infuse chemical-based energy into the lifeless body by stuffing its mouth with glucose sweets. He then resorted to wiring his mother up to the mains electricity supply in an effort to resurrect her. Perhaps the muscles of the corpse twitched and spasms rippled through the decrepit limbs, but the spark of life could not be rekindled. Sometimes it’s hard to let a loved person leave our life, but when death takes them, there is little we can do except hope they are at peace, and if we have sufficient faith, we may look forward to joining them in the hereafter one day.

  The Frankenstein-like son was watched by curious neighbours entering and leaving a certain house that served as his ad hoc laboratory, and in the end the authorities swooped on this grim abode and came upon the exhumed corpse, laying on its unfurled burial shroud with sweets contained in its bulging cheeks and wires trailing from the decaying body to the mains outlets. The police were sympathetic towards the son, and no charges were brought against him. The old woman was solemnly re-interred in Bebington Cemetery, were she silently awaits that promised day when the dead shall rise from their graves.

  If a vampire can cheat death by rising from the grave, can they survive disasters that no human could live through? What would happen to a vampire if he or she was on a sinking ship at sea? The following strange story may give us an indication of the resilience of the vampire’s physical constitution.

  There are many sane and respected people around the world today who intend to have their bodies 'put on ice' when they expire. Their frozen corpses will be stored in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of minus 196 degrees centigrade until a future time when advances in medical technology will allow the deep-frozen dead to be resurrected. These attempts at cheating death through freezing are practical examples of the relatively young science of applied cryonics. The Cryonics Society of California is a pioneer in this field and started freezing newly-dead bodies in 1967, but there are now cryonic storage societies starting up in other parts of the world.

  Many scientists still regard the prospect of cryogenic immortality as a slim and laughable chance, because it is still difficult if not impossible to freeze human tissue fast enough to avoid vital-cell destruction. This problem will undoubtedly be resolved in the not-too-distant-future, and already rudimentary human embryos have been successfully frozen at sub-zero temperatures. Moral watchdogs are concerned at the pace of progress in cryonics, and recent legislation in Britain has limited the period scientists can hold the embryos in cold storage.

  We don't have to look to cryogenics to see examples of deep-frozen mammals; nature has already beaten us to it. In the summer of 1977, a perfectly-preserved specimen of a six-month-old baby mammoth was disinterred by a bulldozer from permafrost in the Yakutsk Republic of the former USSR. This baby mammoth, nicknamed Dinah, is over ten thousand years old. In 1900, a larger Russian mammoth was found in Berezovka standing upright in the Arctic permafrost. The frozen beast was so perfectly preserved by the sub-zero temperatures that the ancient buttercups it had been eating when it died were still stuck to its tongue. No reason has ever been given to explain why the mammoth died so suddenly it never had a chance to swallow the flowers, but the beast seems to have been literally frozen in its tracks.

  Human bodies that have been frozen naturally in Arctic conditions have been reported from time to time. In August 1984, scientists chipped through five feet of gravel and permafrost on Beechley Island, which is situated at the entrance to Canada's Wellington Channel. What the excavating scientists came upon was breathtaking - three graves containing the bodies of sailors who had died in 1846. One of the corpses was perfectly preserved. The body was subsequently identified as that of seaman John Torrington of the ill-fated Franklin Arctic expedition. Sir John Franklin had left England in 1845 on a mission to find the Northwest Passage, a long-sought sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of Canada's arctic islands. The British Government and its Admiralty were confident that Franklin would find the Passage, and they gave him two ice-region ships named 'Erebus' and 'Terror' which had been completely overhauled and refitted for the expedition. Franklin and his men perished in the Arctic Circle before they could find the Northwest Passage, but the fate of the ships is unknown. However, in 1851, the captain and crew of a brig named 'Renovation' were astounded to see two full-sized ships perched on top of a huge iceberg in the North Atlantic. Two old seadogs on the 'Renovation' identified the ships through a telescope; they were the frozen wrecks of 'Erebus' and 'Terror'. The 19th century ice-bound wrecks were allegedly seen once more in the early 1950s still embedded in a berg.

  There have also been more sinister reports of people frozen in ice. The following story was buzzing across the Internet in the late 1980s and was even reported in a BBC radio bulletin in Britain.

  According to the story, in March 1988, towards the end of the Cold War, a Russian destroyer was on manoeuvres in the North Atlantic, about 800 miles south of Iceland, when a lookout on the ship with high-powered binoculars spotted an iceberg on the horizon. There was nothing unusual about an iceberg being in that area of the ocean in March, but what excited the lookout was the curious dark spot he could see on the iceberg. As the berg floated nearer to the destroyer, the lookout zoomed in on the dark spot, and sighed in disbelief; the dot was the figure of a woman lying on a ledge, covered in a thin layer of ice. She was dressed in a black jacket and a long black dress, and was lying on her back.

  The captain of the destroyer immediately dispatched a motorboat to take a closer look. Two divers left the boat and swam over to the ledge of the iceberg to take a closer look at what was obviously the frozen corpse from some sea disaster. Three more men, including a
physician, came off the ship and spent almost an hour freeing the body from the ice. The woman, who looked about twenty-five to thirty years old, was perfectly preserved, except for one ankle, which was blackened by the tissue-destroying ice crystals. However, the outdated clothes she wore indicated that she had been frozen for a long time, perhaps fifty years or more. The corpse was put into a body bag and taken on board the Russian destroyer, where it was put in refrigeration until the ship returned to the Soviet Union.

  The corpse was then transferred to a military hospital in Leningrad and slightly thawed to just under room temperature. The woman's face looked fresh and rosy, presenting the illusion that she was only sleeping. During the examination of the female, her eyelids flew open. It seemed to be just a reflex action, and not a sign of life. The blue eyes were slightly bloodshot, but looked animated. All of the scientists present recoiled in shock. The eyes then rolled upwards and the eyelids of the corpse flickered, and then closed. One report said that the scientists tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the corpse by firing a high voltage current through its chest with a special defibrillator, but the lungs were full of ice and the other internal organs were damaged beyond repair. However, there were later reports of the woman being successfully revived.