I Was A Vampire And Werewolf Hunter!

I know the above title will come as a shock to those that know me, or to those that read my blog. But it is true: I was once a vampire and werewolf hunter. Admittedly, I was only ten years old at the time.

It all started when some friends and myself were introduced to the camp Goth horror that was ‘Hammer’ If you’re not familiar with the Hammer horror films, I do urge you to seek them out. They are wonderful, over-the-top camp Goth masterpieces, that scared the life out of a bunch of young lads from Huddersfield in the late sixties. What made this situation worse for us was the fact that one of our friends knew a lad whose dad was a headmaster, and he had a book that could prove there was such a thing as vampires.

The book turned out to be an incredibly old, and incredibly rare and expensive, copy of Vampyre by John Polidori. I had to look up the author, and was shocked to find out this novella was written in 1819!

We believed it to be true and took it in turns to read it; I have to confess that my heart started to race when I first picked up this ‘tome’ but quickly found that I couldn’t read or understand the archaic text, so, like my friends I presume, I lied and said that I had read it.

This led us all to form a club, to find the werewolves and vampires that walked among us, and report them to the local priest for exorcism. Little did we know that, as young boys, we were in far more danger from the local priest than from any vampire or werewolf! 

For years this obsession with the occult gripped my fertile young mind. I read many books on everything from life after death, ghosts, and vampires to the ridiculous Erich Von Daniken. If you have not read any of his books, don’t bother; they are a pile of bullshit. He claims to have proof of aliens living here on earth.

I later became interested in Colin Wilson’s books, as they purported to answer the questions (they didn’t).

Strangely it was one of these books, Windows of the Mind by, I think, E. G. Glaskin, that got me interested in psychology. The book was a pile of ‘tosh’, but I became very interested in why we believe such things, as the book told of so called psychological experiments such as the ‘Christos experiment’. I told you it was a pile of ‘tosh'!

Vampires are, of course, very ancient mythical beings  - some claim the idea goes back to the Stone Age. The Greeks called them ‘Vrykolakas’, but it was the eastern Europeans that really took the vampires to heart and their take on it is now what we base our ideas of vampires on.

It has to be said that the ultimate book about a vampire is Dracula by the Irish writer Bram Stoker. This is said to be based on Vlad the Impaler, but I can’t find any reference that Stoker claimed this. Vlad, by the way, was real and quite a guy.  He watched people being tortured and killed while eating his meals. He also had the turbans of some visiting dignitaries nailed to their heads for not removing them in his presence.  Not one to bring home to meet Mummy and Daddy, girls!

  

If you read any literature of the time you will find the British distrust of all things foreign. Such as Willkie Collins' The Woman in White, where the evil Count Fossco preys on the innocent  pure British woman, whose name escapes me now. So I think Dracula was just another of these British "Johnny Foreigner" stereotypes.

It is believed that the vampire legend came about because people who were thought to be dead suddenly returned to life with an unquenchable thirst; this was probably a hypoglycaemic coma or other medical condition at play.

Werewolves are also an ancient belief from the Greek,s but the middle ages saw the rise of the witchfinders and werewolves were linked to these and the myth resurfaced here and in America. It is believed that the myth started because of bodies being buried in shallow graves and wolves would find them and dig up the bodies and eat them. The locals would see the body the next day removed from the grave (albeit half-eaten) and see the paw prints, and believe they had come back to life as a wolf.

My sister had a morbid fear of werewolves when she was small, so one night, armed with a furry hat and gloves, I decided to enter her bedroom, to scare the life out of her. That was the night I found out that her fear was to her so real she slept with a Rounders (Baseball) bat, under her pillow. I lost a tooth in the resulting onslaught.

I’m telling you all this because Halloween is creeping up on us, and every year The Nemesis and myself like to go to Whitby, where the Dracula story starts, to watch the Goths who turn up in the hundreds, most of them believing that Dracula exists.

Last year I did a ‘Gezzy’ on some of them (see previous blogs) and told a few extreme eye-liner types in a pub that a body had been found at the back of the abbey, but, instead of taking it away to the morgue, the police had taken it into the church. This resulted in them forming a posse to find out why. I want to go back this year, and I need a spoof that will get hundreds of them all hot and bothered. I want to see if I can make the national news - any ideas?