Vampire State of Mind.

Just a few miles east of the M6, on the edge of the Pennines, in the county of Cumbria there lives one of Britain's few homegrown vampires. That is if vampires can be said to live. That is if vampires can be said to even exist.

Croglin's not a big place and its claim to fame, mostly made by outsiders it must be said, as Britain's vampire capital is, perhaps, the most noteworthy thing about it. Vampires don't tend to come from Britain. They're usually found in Central Europe and, particularly, in the countries from that region that once found themselves under the reign of the Ottoman Empire.

There are many competing theories as to why this is (and you can read about them in the blog I wrote in March 2019) but a lot of belief in vampires is driven by a misunderstanding of how bodies decompose, an attempt to understand and somehow rationalise epidemic (or, now, pandemic) death, and the practice of deviant burials.

People being buried face down, staked through the heart or abdomen, or even with their heads chopped off. I was at Skeptics in the Pub - Online (hosted, again, by Cleo Bellenis from the Winchester branch) for the always excellent Deborah Hyde's talk - The Vampire of Croglin Grange.

The first recorded instance of this particular vampire comes from 1874 and with the writer and raconteur Augustus Hare (1834-1903). On 24th June that year, Hare was dining (Hare's big thing, apparently, was going round people's houses to eat dinner) with Henry Thomas Liddell, the 1st Earl Ravensworth and his neighbour, and intended son-in-law, Captain Edward Fisher-Rowe.

By that time, the Fisher-Rowes had tired of rural life in Cumbria and moved south to the bright lights of, er, Guildford. But, over repast with Hare, Fisher-Rowe told a story about his earlier life in a one storey building in Croglin named Croglin Grange. Fisher-Rowe's sister had, one night, encountered a "ghastly something" and, on doing so, was seized by "the most uncontrollable terror".

A hideous brown faced creature had appeared at her window, broken into her bedroom, and bitten her violently in the throat. Textbook vampire behaviour. Eventually another brother chased the unwanted intruder away and the assumption was that a lunatic had escaped a local asylum.

After a brief holiday in Switzerland to convalesce from this traumatic episode, Fisher-Rowe's sister returned home and, after a period of inactivity, the visitor returned. This time family members shot at him. One bullet made contact with his leg but, seemingly, serious damage was avoided as he was able to run away as they chased him off. He ran to a nearby graveyard and disappeared into the large vault of a long dead family.

On returning the next morning, the family found the same figure, lying dead, in the vault. Mummified and with a pistol wound to the leg. Cognisant in standard vampire protocols, the family burnt the corpse. Hare's writings on the aristocracy and the histories of various cities had never attracted much attention but when he wrote about folklore, ghosts, and black dogs people became interested.

Never more so, it seems, than when he shared the story of the vampire of Croglin Grange. But the story was one that would prove mutable over time, one that would, like the most popular of folkloric tales, be able to adapt to different settings. In 1907, Charles Harper, in his book Haunted Houses, made the observation that there was no such building as Croglin Grange - and none that even remotely fitted the description given by Fisher-Rowe and Hare.

On top of that, the graveyard of the church in Croglin had no tomb similar to that described either. In his 1929 book The Vampire in Europe, Montague Summers (author, spiritualist, mystic, and, according to Deborah Hyde, "nutcase") made the claim that Fisher-Rowe had been "lavish" in his description of Croglin Grange.

Summers pointed to an 1840s book called Varney the Vampire in which a very similar story had been told to the one Fisher-Rowe had passed to Hare. Varney the Vampire was a BIG book. Bigger, and more lurid, than the Bible. By James Malcom Rymer and Thomas Pecket Prest, it was the book that first portrayed vampires as having sharpened teeth and it was very popular at the time. It would have been quite possible that Fisher-Rowe had seen a copy.

Despite this, Summers believed that Fisher-Rowe's story was probably still true. A case, I suspect, of wanting to believe something so badly that he found a way of doing so. Nearly thirty years later, in 1954, the character actor and writer Valentine Dyall got involved. Dyall went on to appear in Doctor Who, Blake's Seven, Blackadder, The Avengers, and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy on television but his role in moving forward the story was small.

Small but important. He claimed to have discovered that the family in question were not the Fisher-Rowes but were in fact called Cranswell. Amelia, the sister, and her two brothers Michael and Edward. The occult author Francis Clive-Ross, in 1963, visited Croglin to further his investigations. He found that, in the village, the story was well known.

He also discovered that there had once been another church there but that that had been destroyed during the English Civil War. As the English Civil War had taken place between 1642 and 1651, Clive-Ross moved the vampire tale back to the 17th century so that he could incorporate the now lost church.

This (rather too) convenient shifting of chronology enabled observers, some years later, to make links to some of the information given in Mark Alexander's 1978 book Haunted Churches and Abbeys of Britain. When Alexander wasn't writing about shooting black bats (you'd think they'd be difficult targets) he was writing about the Croglin tomb of one George Sanderson.

Sanderson, a vicar, had died in 1671, which fits Clive-Ross's timeline, and he had also not been a popular man in Croglin. He'd been forced upon the area as a Puritan vicar but he was not really a Puritan. He was more a mercenary, a chancer, a supposed man of God whose only real interest was in advancing his career.

Sanderson had been C of E until he deemed it disadvantageous to his prospects and he became C of E again as soon as the Restoration of the Monarchy made it a problem to be a Puritan. His attitude, his lack of either morality or piety, and, perhaps, his outsiderdom, made him easily unpopular enough to become the monster in any local story.

When, in 2005, Richard Whittington-Egan's Contemporary Reviews made claim to evidence that the Fisher-Rowe family had never owned property in Croglin but had only ever lived there as tenants (and, even then, certainly not in the 17th and 18th centuries), the finger of suspicion pointed ever more certainly towards the Sanderson era as the root of the vampire tale.

But there was to be one last, so far, twist in the tale. In 2012, Welsh author Geoff Holder released Paranormal Cumbria and he mentioned in it that in his studies of various books written about Cumbrian folklore between 1874 and 1900 (I was surprised also that there should be so many) there is not one single mention of the vampire of Croglin Grange.

Holder looked back to the fifties and the advent of television as a mass medium and a golden age of Hammer horror and decided that this period of invention, of inventive thinking, was probably when the story first became popular. Even that, though, doesn't fit with the fact that Augustus Hare had reported it roughly eighty years earlier.

The story of the vampire of Croglin Grange is, it seems, one that can shift over time. Even the cast does not remain static. What it tells us about vampires is, of course, precisely nothing (SPOILER ALERT:they don't really exist) but what it tells us about people is that we love stories. We make them up about people we don't like, we make them up about our own families, and we make them up to try and rationalise things that otherwise don't make sense to us.

That Deborah Hyde was able to relate this ever changing story to us (and I've not even mentioned the digressions into the beheading of Charles I, Joyce Grenfell, vaginal steaming, Harry Potter, An American Werewolf in London, the practice of eating human hearts, Santorino, and 'Old Stinker' the 8ft werewolf believed to live in an industrial estate in Hull) and keep us interested at all times is testament to both her ability as a speaker and to our own love for a good story. This one, it seems, is far from fully told.