by Tom Slemen
A sniggering sound was heard behind the couple, and the schoolteacher turned to see the shocking sight of an abnormally tall thin man in black with an unnaturally pale face and a head devoid of any hair. His eyes were dark slits and the strangers hands were large, with long fingers that tapered into pointed nails. The teacher and his fiancée got to their feet and the tall freak lunged at them. He clawed the face of the teacher and tore the arm of his shirt off as the woman ran off screaming. When the woman returned to the scene of the attack with a farmer and his son, they saw the teacher kneeling in the grass with blood streaming from his empty eye sockets. In the teacher’s hand he held one of his own eyeballs that had been clawed out by the sinister attacker. The teacher’s other hand searched the grass for the other eyeball, and upon seeing this, his sweetheart fainted. The teacher remained in shock for a while then also lost consciousness due to lack of blood and the severity of the pain. When the teacher was examined by a doctor, odd puncture marks, not made by normal human teeth, were found on the left forearm. The police searched for the wicked, violent culprit but he was never found, and the locals talked in hushed tones about the Hamstoke Vampire in the inns around Warleggan and St Neot. They say Garlic was sold in great quantities that year, and hawthorn crosses were hung on many a door to repel the feared vampire. Was the attacker merely a jealous rival of the teacher, or was he the (apparently ageless) Hamstoke Vampire? There is a curious epilogue to these tales of the Hamstoke bloodsucker. In 1931, a very unpopular and eccentric man of the cloth – the Reverend Densham – took on one of the most difficult incumbencies on record at St Bartholomew’s Church in Warleggan – at the age of sixty-one. Densham alienated his congregation to such an extent with his idiosyncrasies he ended up topping the fence of his rectory with barbed-wire and allowed Alsatians to roam the grounds. The doors of St Bartholomew were opened only to a select few that Densham saw eye to eye with, and if these few parishioners were just a minute late for the service they would find the church doors bolted against them. A majority of the people forming the small congregation were farmers, yet Densham frowned on their carnivorous eating habits and declared vegetarianism as the civilized way to eat. In the end the congregation dwindled until just two people attended Densham’s Mass, and then he even insulted those final loyal churchgoers. A close friend pleaded with the harsh Rector to be less strict but he remained unrepentant of his Draconian methods, and remarked of the villagers of Warleggan: ‘They all come to me in the end as I conduct all the funerals. They won't come to church on their feet but they have to come in their black carriages.’
Incredibly, the deranged Reverend preached to his non-existent congregation and eventually resorted to placing life-size cardboard cut-outs of people in the pews! What’s more, after each pointless service he would write in the register book: ‘No fog, no wind, no rain, no congregation.’ The Reverend Densham refused to visit his flock in Warleggan, and in the 1950s, when rumours circulated about the local vampiric fiend being active again, several people wrote to Densham to tell him about the strange sightings of a ghoul. A shopkeeper in the village who delivered milk and food to the balmy Rector learned that the apparition had recently visited St Bartholomew’s Church during Densham’s sermon to his cardboard congregation, and the visitation had given the odd Reverend a nasty turn. Not long afterwards, the Reverend Densham was found dead on the stairs at the Rectory with a look of intense terror on his twisted face, and some conjectured that the “thing” had scared Densham to death. Despite Densham’s wishes to be buried within a specially created Garden of Remembrance in the Rectory, his body was instead cremated and the ashes sprinkled at a public park of remembrance at Plymouth.
Beneath Ingleborough Hill in the Yorkshire Dales National Park there exists a network of underground caves, discovered in 1923 by two amateur geologists named Long and Churchill. The ‘White Scar Caves’ as this network is called, have one of the largest cave chambers in Britain, and are now open to the public as a popular tourist attraction. Throughout the 1930s, an enormous dark-blue bat-like bird was seen to fly to and from the White Scar Caves mostly during the evenings, and this unidentified creature was thought by some of the locals to be a vampire bat. The bird’s wingspan was estimated to be some six feet or more, and the head of the strange and ominous ‘cryptid’ (as cryptozoologist’s term these unknown species) had pointed ears. In 1933, a man named John Bray kept a vigil in the caves for this sinister night-bird, and his long watches throughout one particular cold winter’s night paid off when the giant bat put in an appearance. Mr Bray saw that the bat looked like a human figure with huge wings, but only saw the creature in silhouette against a moonlit sky of snow-clouds. Bray startled the apparently human-bird hybrid and it emitted a bloodcurdling shriek, raised its wings, then flew out of the cave at an incredible speed. John Bray held successive vigils, hoping for the bizarre creature to return, but it never did. Other people saw this ‘birdman’, including a policeman at Chapel-le-Dale Village. A similar giant bird with human features was reported between September 1968 and June 1970, mostly at sites located along the Bridgewater Canal at Preston Brook, and parts of Runcorn. At around 11pm one night in September 1968 two men on a barge on the Bridgewater Canal at Preston Brook saw an enormous dark bird with a wingspan of at least twelve feet descend from a clear starry sky and land with a thud on a barge moored about sixty feet away in a marina. The men were so afraid of the huge bird they hid in their canal boat and wouldn’t come up until they heard the creature’s wings flapping as it flew off into the night. The same oversized bird was seen during the following month over east Runcorn and Murdishaw, and several witnesses described the flying monstrosity as resembling a giant bat. These unidentified overgrown birds have been seen across the globe, and many theories have been expounded in an attempt to explain their existence. Some think they are pterosaurs, a type of prehistoric bird that did not die out millions of years ago when the other dinosaurs met their mysterious worldwide death. Others think that the creatures are merely unidentified species of bird, but that seems rather unlikely, and most ornithologists would scoff at this possibility. The coelacanth is a species of prehistoric fish that had supposedly been extinct since the Cretaceous Period (145 to 65 million years ago) until one was caught off the east coast of South Africa in 1938. Could a bird, believed to have been extinct for millions of years, be flying around today? It’s highly unlikely, so what are we to make of these giant bat sightings? Are they from some parallel universe perhaps, or does the answer lie in the supernatural sphere? Are these monstrous creatures of the wing vampiric beings who have undergone some sinister metamorphosis to become bat-like humanoid entities? In the spring of 1922, an enormous black bat with a wingspan of six feet was seen circling the spire of West Drayton Church during the night of a full moon. Several terrified witnesses watched the creature dive into the churchyard, where it roamed among the gravestones. When it was chased by two policemen, the creature let out a loud bloodcurdling screech, flapped its wings, and soared skywards. An old man who claimed he had seen the giant bat twenty-five years previously, maintained that it was the spirit of a vampire who had murdered a woman to drink her blood in Harmondsworth in the 1890s. In Thornton Heath, Surrey, in 1938, a woman reported being attacked in the night on three occasions by a large winged creature with fangs. Each time it flew into her bedroom and drew blood from her neck, leaving her weak with fear. One night in November 1963, four teenagers were walking along a country road near Hythe in Kent when they saw something very strange; a tall figure of a man in black, minus a head, with ‘bat wings’ sprouting from his back, approached them on foot. The teenagers ran off in fright. This entity is remarkably similar to the so-called “Mothman” who haunted West Virginia in the United States in 1966. Like the Kent entity, Mothman did not seem to have a head, but two luminous red eyes set into its chest, and it also had wings that were described as looking like those of a bat. The creature was seen by many people and to this day, Mothman remains a mystery. The
“Cornish Owlman” – a humanoid entity with wings and large red owl-like eyes – was seen in Cornwall between 1976 and 1978, and although encounters with the creature were reported in the press, the authorities didn’t even bother to investigate.
We all undergo metamorphosis, or bodily change, day by day, as we age, but the concept of shape-shifting in vampires predates Bram Stoker’s fictional Dracula changing into a bat. Vampires were not only thought to be able to take the form of a bat, but the form of many animals, including dogs and wolves through a type of ‘transfiguration’. The most famous transfiguration is the one that takes place when the face of Jesus becomes as radiant as the sun and his robes become as white as snow upon Mount Thabor. This transformation, referred to as 'metemorphothe' by St Matthew and St Mark, has also allegedly been observed in several mediums throughout history. Queenie Nixon, a Northampton-born medium, gave many demonstrations of astonishing physical mediumship from the 1950s to the 1980s in which her face would change into that of a stranger. Sitters at Queenie’s demonstrations would become aware of a gaseous substance similar to cigarette smoke that would swirl around the medium’s face. This would be followed by the gradual materialisation of pale ‘masks’ on Queenie Nixon’s face, and within minutes the face of the medium would become the face of a girl, or an old man, sometimes sporting a moustache or beard. This phenomenon is usually explained by mediums in terms of ectoplasm and trance states, but scientists are sceptical of such claims. Could the vampire be capable of such metamorphosis, in which he or she turns into a bat-like creature? It’s certainly food for thought.
Most of Lancashire is undermined by coal-pits, and many of them are disused. It is said that in the Wigan area, many of the disused collieries are haunted. Considering the loss of life that was common down the coal mines in the 19th and 20th centuries, this is not surprising, but one particular ‘haunting’ is of interest because it involved the apparition of the archetypal Dracula type of vampire. The case was reported by a Preston journalist named William Topping around 1919, and was also investigated by a trio of amateur vampire hunters. These three brave real-life Van Helsings were a bookseller from Workington, Cumberland, named Jonathan Carmichael, a photographer named John Warwick of Carlisle, and a soldier named James Dunne, who hailed from Bolton. In 1897 at an unnamed colliery near to Wigan, miners, upon reaching the bottom of the mine, had to walk for almost half an hour to reach the coal face, and one evening there was a commotion at the colliery because a very strange-looking man had been seen prowling about at a considerable depth. The out-of-place stranger was said to be over six feet in height, to have black slicked-back hair, and an aristocratic face. He wore a long opera cloak, a suit of dark green velvet, and wore a dazzling collection of gold and silver rings encrusted with a variety of gemstones. He had an unnerving habit of literally appearing out of thin air, and on one occasion he ascended from the pit in a cage with two terrified miners. During the journey to the surface he spoke in a foreign language – possibly French – and when he walked out into the night air he immediately turned into a huge bat and flew off into the ink-black sky. The weird foreigner was seen five times in all, and on the last occasion the vampire ‘hunters’ Carmichael, Warwick and Dunne, who had heard about the strange shape-shifting nobleman from a relative of a miner at the pit, decided it was time for a showdown. They descended on the colliery and were given permission to track down the suspected bloodsucker. The cloaked stranger was spotted sneaking about in the darkness by a collier who raised the alarm, and the vampire hunters soon gave chase, but unfortunately the intrepid threesome were forced back when their quarry retreated down an old tunnel deemed unsafe because of a number of recent cave-ins. That tunnel ran for a quarter of a mile to yet another pit, and it was said that the mystifying oddly-dressed Frenchman haunted that pit for a while until there was a cave-in. A body was recovered from the falling-in of a roof but the corpse was not that of the suspected vampire, but that of a young miner.
What must rate as the most bizarre underground vampires were said to have been encountered on many occasions in the tunnels under Billinge, which lies about five miles south-west of Wigan. This area has a hill - known locally as the “Lump” – the crown of which looks down from 600 feet above sea level onto sixteen counties. One can also see Ireland, Scotland, the Welsh Hills, and other areas of Britain and beyond from this breathtaking vantage point, but there are lesser-known places of interest beneath the bedrock around Billinge, and a case in point is the unidentified church that sunk into the earth at some time in the past. In the late 18th century, four local children decided to go and explore the limestone caverns in the area and vanished. One of the children, a 9-year-old named Will, eventually resurfaced and revealed the terrifying and gruesome fate of his three friends. A group of old men in beards and black and green velvet clothes grabbed the children and one of the men started to bite the neck of the youngest, a boy of five. As his screams echoed throughout the cave, Will managed to run off. He was pursued by three of the bizarrely-dressed old men, but managed to outrun them. At one point, Will stumbled over human bones in a torch-lit chamber, and the discovery frightened him so much, he tried to desperately squeeze through a hole in the cave towards the daylight. As he was almost out of the cave, a hand grabbed his foot and began to pull him back. Will kicked back with this foot and hit the person apprehending him in the face. The boy’s foot was released and he ran off yelling for help.