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Overview
With subjects ranging from the Croglin Vampire and the Renwick Cockatrice to witchcraft and the Cursing Stone of Carlisle, this collection of first-hand accounts contains all manner of weird and wonderful events from Cumbria's long and tumultuous history. With more than 50 photographs, both archive and modern, and sightings of everything from lake monsters and anomalous big cats to fairies, phantom airships and the Solway Spaceman, prepare to be astonished! Geoff Holder is the author of more than twenty titles exploring strange and unexplained events in the North of England and in Scotland, and this collection will fascinate and amaze both residents and visitors alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752481852 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Paranormal Cumbria
By Geoff Holder
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 Geoff HolderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8185-2
CHAPTER 1
THE CROGLIN VAMPIRE AND THE RENWICK COCKATRICE
THE VAMPIRE OF CROGLIN GRANGE
This story is one of the most enduring – and misrepresented – of all of Cumbria's legends. At its core is a darkly Gothic tale of a sister and two brothers who lease a house in the remote fellside country of northeast Cumbria. On two separate occasions, nine months apart, a vampire-like being enters the girl's bedroom and attacks her, breaking her skin with its teeth. During the second attack one of the brother wounds the 'vampire' in the leg. A search of a vault in the local churchyard reveals a corpse-like figure with a bullet lodged in one leg. The creature is burned to ashes and the attacks stop. The story has been repeated and embellished over the years, and by a process of Chinese whispers has become distorted and exaggerated. By going back over the various accounts I think I may have solved part of the mystery. But to get to that point, we need to revisit the tortuous history of the Croglin Vampire.
THE ORIGINAL STORY – 1874–1900
The vampire first appeared in print in Volume 4 of The Story of My Life, a diary and journal published by Augustus Hare in 1900. Hare (1834–1903) was a well-heeled socialite and author of numerous travel books on some of the more agreeable areas of Europe. His autobiography is full to the brim of anecdotes of where he met this princess or that baron, and which peer of the realm he happened to have dinner with last night. He was also an inveterate gossip, and loved to write down entertaining snippets told to him by his fashionable acquaintances. As an established raconteur in high society, Hare was skilled at reshaping the stories he had been told, often making them more dramatic than in the original. This same gift for oratory and storytelling meant that he was often notoriously light on reliable details. He had a particular fondness for ghost stories, especially those that had a sting in the tale, or conveyed the appropriate sense of spine-chilling frisson. The tale of the Vampire of Croglin was one such episode.
On 24 June 1874, Hare dined with Captain Edward Fisher-Rowe, who was Hare's neighbour in Surrey and was getting married to Hare's cousin, Lady Victoria Liddel in five days' time; they later went on to have six children, one of whom lived until 1958. Also present was Fisher-Rowe's soon-to-be father-inlaw, Henry Thomas Liddell, the 1st Earl of Ravensworth. Lord Ravensworth told a creepy story of a death omen he had heard from the Lowlands of Scotland, and Hare no doubt contributed one of his polished anecdotes. Captain Fisher (as Hare styled him) felt compelled to participate and so contributed two episodes – a standard ghost story of a phantom carriage and death banshee, which no one now remembers, and the vampire tale, which has achieved worldwide fame. In Fisher's tale, as recorded and possibly reworked by Hare, Fisher's family owned an old house in Cumberland named Croglin Grange, but when they moved south they let it to three siblings. The story then proceeded as given above.
This, then, is the origin story for the Croglin Vampire, the basis for everything that follows. At this point, a few matters should be mentioned: the story is not a first-hand account by a witness, but an after-dinner ghost story told by Captain Fisher and then written down by Hare some time later. It is therefore third-hand at the very least, with all that implies for the possibility of changes and exaggeration. Furthermore, Fisher (according to Hare) gave no dates, and did not mention the name of the family concerned. In this it conforms to a standard kind of ghost story, one told for entertainment where the narrative is more important than mere details. I also point out that between 1874 and 1900, many works on Cumbrian folklore and local history had been published, and none of them mention the story. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it is perhaps significant that the only original source of the Croglin Vampire in print is in Hare's journal of gossip.
THE LEAP INTO PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS: CHARLES HARPER, 1907
The vampire story first reached a wider audience when it was printed verbatim in Charles Harper's sceptically-minded book Haunted Houses, published in 1907. In the Fisher and Hare account, Croglin Grange overlooked the churchyard. Harper visited Croglin and discovered that (a) there is no place named Croglin Grange, only Croglin High Hall and Low Hall (he thought the latter was the building indicated in Fisher's narrative); (b) Croglin Low Hall was well over a mile from the church; and (c) the churchyard contained no tomb or mausoleum that resembled the vault where the vampire was supposed to have taken refuge, and where it met its doom. In other words, he found that the geography of the tale as set out by Fisher bore little resemblance to the actual situation at Croglin.
THE PENNY DREADFUL CONNECTION? – 1929
In 1929, Montague Summers, a prolific and popular if somewhat credulous chronicler of the supernatural, again printed the original story word-for-word in his book The Vampire in Europe. He countered some of Harper's criticisms, suggesting that the vault had been deliberately destroyed to erase all trace of the vampire episode. Summers also reprinted a chapter from Varney the Vampire, a low-brow and sensational 'penny dreadful' novel written by James Malcolm Rymer in 1847. Summers did not comment on the several similarities – in action, characterisation and description – between the Croglin Vampire and the manner in which Varney enters a room and attacks a female victim.
THE PERIOD OF INVENTION – 1950s
During the middle decades of the twentieth century the vampire story was repeated in a number of popular publications, and in so doing gained a number of entirely invented elements (a typical example was Unsolved Mysteries, written by Valentine Dyall, 'The Man in Black', in 1954). The two brothers and sister were said to be Australian, and the female victim's first name was given as Amelia. And the events were meant to have taken place in 1875, or at least the late nineteenth century. None of these details are mentioned in the original account, and – despite the fact that they are now all established aspects of the legend, endlessly repeated in websites and pop-horror books – they are all entirely false.
HARE AND FISHER JUSTIFIED? – F. CLIVEROSS' INVESTIGATION, 1962
In November 1962 F. Clive-Ross, a writer interested in matters mystical and mysterious, journeyed to Croglin to undertake what was probably the first on-the-spot research for many decades. Through contact with several local people, including Mrs Mary Watson, the tenant of Croglin Low Hall, and Mrs Parkin, the widow of Inglewood Parkin, the former owner of the estate on which Low Hall stood, Clive-Ross uncovered a number of illuminating elements:
1. The tradition was well-known locally, so much so that the former Chief Constable of Cumberland and Westmorland enjoyed 'reconstructing the crime' when he was a member of shooting parties taking lunch at Croglin Low Hall. Mrs Watson showed Clive-Ross the very window that the vampire was said to have climbed through.
2. The tenants who had suffered the vampire attacks were described as coming from outside the local area, and having the surname Cranswell.
3. A local member of the Fisher family who had been born in the 1860s remembered hearing the tale from his grandparents, so if the events were in any way real they dated from at least the early 1800s, if not much earlier. Another Fisher family member in Surrey recalled that her aunt would retell the story every Christmas. Clearly the vampire was a long-standing Fisher family tradition.
4. According to the deeds of Croglin Low Hall, the farm was sometimes referred to as Croglin Grange before 1720. Up to the same date the now two-storey building had just one storey, which matched the description given by Captain Fisher.
5. The main village of Croglin, where the present church stands, was once known as Croglin Multa. The church of Croglin Parva had once stood next to Croglin Low Hall, but it was destroyed during the Civil War in the seventeenth century. In 1933, this church field was still littered with good-quality stones that were later re-used in local buildings. (Later research shows that Croglin Parva church appears on both John Speed's 1610 map of Cumberland and Blaeu's map of 1667.) Tradition spoke of graves in the field, including the Fisher vault. If all this was true, then this long-vanished churchyard was the one featured in the Fisher/Hare narrative. The current church over a mile away in Croglin village has nothing to do with the vampire story.
Based on the above, and the opinions of Mrs Parkin and others, Clive-Ross concluded that the vampire legend had not been invented as a dinner-party anecdote, but whatever had kickstarted it – an event whose details were sadly lost to history – it must have taken place sometime around the 1680s to the 1690s, some two centuries before what had by now falsely become the 'established' date for the vampire attack. His article also revealed that in the 1950s an ancient human skeleton was accidentally discovered at Low Hall, hidden behind the dining room fireplace. Its provenance was a mystery, although it seemed that it had previously been noticed (and left undisturbed) in 1928. Even more intriguing from the point of view of research into the vampire, he found a tradition linking Croglin High Hall to the story. The tenant there had found what he thought were rat bites on the throat of his three-year-old daughter. She became frightened, sickly and pale, and only when the attacks took place on their neighbour were the bitemarks reassessed. The tenant, who was not named, was one of those who took part in the destruction of the loathsome visitant. F. Clive-Ross published his findings in the relatively obscure magazine Tomorrow in Spring 1963, and his article became the benchmark for years to come. When Lionel Fanthorpe investigated the case in the 1970s (published in The World's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries) he largely substantiated Clive-Ross' findings although he did not pick up on the expansion of the story into High Hall.
THE PLOT THICKENS – MARC ALEXANDER, 1970
In 1970 journalist and author Marc Alexander made the journey to Croglin. He appeared to be unaware of Clive-Ross' article, but he too spoke to Mrs Watson and in the course of showing him around Croglin Low Hall she told him basically the same information she had given his predecessor eight years' previously. When he came to write up the visit in Haunted Churches & Abbeys of Britain (1978), however, Alexander had a veritable bombshell: he had an entirely different vampire tradition, a new date and location for the events – and even an identity for the vampire.
The revelation came in a letter he included from the Revd Dr Matthew Roberts, the rector of Croglin from 1944 to 1948. Revd Roberts had heard the following tale from the Revd Reginald Green, rector from 1891 to 1907. According to the story, one of the beautiful daughters of the Revd Joseph Ireland, rector from 1804 to 1837, was asleep in her home in Croglin village when she was attacked by something that drew blood from her neck. The following night the same thing happened. On the third night the girl's brothers set a trap, with one lurking outside the door of his sister's room, and the other hiding in the stable yard. When the girl screamed the lad rushed in – to find a large black bat flapping around the bed. He drove it out of the window, where the other brother shot it. Wounded, the bat flew low into the churchyard and under the flat table-tomb of George Sanderson – the rector from 1671 to 1691. The story finished in the traditional manner, with the body of the minister being exhumed and a stake driven through its heart.
Although some of the elements in this variant conform to what we might term the 'mainstream' version of the legend, others are clearly anomalous. The location is shifted from Croglin Low Hall to Croglin village; the victim is different; the date is moved to the early 1800s; the transformation to a flying bat is mentioned for the first time (could there be some thematic or folkloric connection with the Renwick 'bat' described below?); and the vampire is identified as a former minister who lived in the 1680s, the very period when the originating events might have occurred.
I am, however, a tad sceptical. The entire scenario sounds as if it has been taken wholesale from either Bram Stoker's novel Dracula or one of the film adaptations such as Nosferatu (1922) or the 1931 Hollywood Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. The only original element is the identification of George Sanderson as the undead assailant. One of the intriguing aspects of the whole episode is that Mr Alexander's research has been virtually ignored, and most popular summaries of the Croglin case make no mention of his valuable work; I am pleased to do my small part in restoring his discoveries to public gaze.
ENTER THE TOWRYS – RICHARD WHITTINGTON-EGAN'S RESEARCH, 2005
In June 2005 the widely-published author Richard Whittington-Egan reviewed the case for the Contemporary Review. Going back through the records he established that Croglin Low Hall was sold by the Howard family to George Towry in 1688. The Towrys owned the property until 1727, when it was sold to a Mr Johnson. It was only in 1809 that the Fisher family took possession of Low Hall, and then not as owners – as Captain Fisher-Rowe had told Hare – but as tenants. So if the unknown events that instigated the vampire legend took place as surmised in the 1680s/90s, then it was the Towrys who were living at Low Hall at the time. This means that not only could there have been no 'Fisher vault' in the now-vanished Croglin Parma church, but also that the victims of the 'vampire' (or whatever it was) were not the Fishers but the Towrys. Whittington-Egan speculated that the Fishers had been told the story by the departing or soon-to-be deceased Towrys, and had then incorporated it into their own family mythology.
PRESENT DAY – A VAMPIRE FOR ALL SEASONS
The Croglin Vampire is now a permanent fixture in popular culture. There is the inevitable panoply of websites and newspaper articles. In 2008 best-selling children's author Terry Deary wrote a book on it. And in December 2007 the Lakeland Players put on a village pantomime entitled 'The Pirates of Watermillock and the Legend of the Croglin Vampire'. Written and directed by local drama student Owen Lightburn, it took the usual panto liberties with the story, so that two rival sets of pirates were seeking the monster, who turned out to be a world-class French hairdresser called Croglin Vam'Pierre. Well, it made me laugh.
CONCLUSION
Can anything firm be concluded about the entire vampire farrago? Augustus Hare, the original printed source, may not be entirely reliable in his details – and yet the legend clearly appears to be of longstanding in the Croglin area, dating back according to the Fishers themselves at least 200 years. If some kind of originating event did take place in the late seventeenth century, it may have been experienced by the Towrys, not their successors the Fishers, whose family folklore it then became. We have two (or even three) locations for the attacks, and three different female victims from two different eras. We have a human (or human-like) figure, and in one variant a transformation into a bat. We have elements that seem to be shared with popular works such as Varney the Vampire and Dracula. There is no original documentation and, to be frank, everything that anyone has written on the subject – including this very chapter – is based on little more than various degrees of hearsay and oral tradition. I suspect that if Augustus Hare had not jotted down his neighbour's after-dinner story in 1874 then very few people outside the fellside villages would have ever heard of the Croglin Vampire.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Paranormal Cumbria by Geoff Holder. Copyright © 2012 Geoff Holder. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Introduction,
Chapter One: The Croglin Vampire and the Renwick Cockatrice,
Chapter Two: Witchcraft, Magic and the Devil,
Chapter Three: The Cursing Stone of Carlisle,
Chapter Four: Powers of the Mind,
Chapter Five: Fairies, Nature Spirits and Other Beings,
Chapter Six: The Mysterious Menagerie – From Big Cats and Black Dogs to Lake Monsters and Werewolves,
Chapter Seven: From Scareships to the Solway Spaceman,
Bibliography,