Historical records show that St Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, was called upon to deal with the terrifying revenant and learned to his astonishment, after contacting other theologians, that similar attacks had happened elsewhere in England. John Henry Fuseli (1781) Nightmare in Buckinghamshireīut there is one case that has no connection to fiction, the little-known Buckinghamshire Vampire, recorded by William of Newburgh in the 12th century. There, shrivelled and mummified – but quite intact – lies the Croglin Vampire. One coffin only remains intact, but the lid has been loosened.

The vault is later discovered to be full of coffins that have been broken open and their contents, horribly mangled and distorted, are scattered over the floor. According to this legend, the vampire scratches at the window before disappearing into an ancient vault.

Its story is retold by Dr Augustus Hare, a clergyman, in his Memorials of a Quiet Life in 1871. The Croglin Vampire reputedly first appeared in Cumberland to a Miss Fisher in the 1750s. It is nearly 200 years since this Romantic/Byronic archetype for a vampire emerged – but what do we know about English belief in vampires outside of fiction? New research at the University of Hertfordshire has uncovered and reappraised a number of vampire myths – and they are not all confined to the realms of fiction. So the first fictional vampire was actually a satanic English Lord. Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, is inspired by a thinly disguised portrait of the predatory English poet, Lord Byron, in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816). The vampire first made its way into English literature in John Polidori’s 1819 short story “ The Vampyre”. But most of the action takes place in England, from the moment the Transylvanian vampire arrives on a shipwrecked vessel in Whitby, North Yorkshire, with plans to make his lair in the spookily named Carfax estate, west of the river in London.īut Dracula wasn’t the first vampire in English literature, let alone the first to stalk England. The story of Count Dracula as many of us know it was created by Bram Stoker, an Irishman, in 1897.

Vampyres lord byron to count dracula