Episode 46: Dark Conclusions

This is the story of the one.

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For almost as long as we've had motion pictures, we've also had vampire stories.

And rightly so, The Tale of Dracula is a story of fear and suspense, and it's been told over and over again during the last century.

Theater productions, early black and white films, and every successive film since the 1930s has proven that our love for the story of Dracula is as undying as the monster himself.

One of the results of this obsession with Dracula is that we often ignore or forget the other major players in that story.

Mina Murray is the powerful, heroic woman who spends the bulk of the story fighting to destroy Dracula rather than wallowing in self-pity.

Quincy Morris Morris sacrifices himself to defeat the monster, and Jonathan Harker, Mina's eventual husband, strikes one of the killing blows.

The novel is full of characters, but all seem to fade into the shadow cast by the vampire lord himself.

All.

Except for Abraham Van Helsing, that is.

Over the decades, his character has received a good amount of attention from fans of the book, and Honestly, how can you blame them?

He was intelligent, brave, and skilled in his craft.

And in a lot of ways, Van Helsing represented something we all aspired to be.

It's a side effect of growing up with stories of creatures who want to hurt us.

If there really is something living under the bed, or in the closet, or in that dark, damp corner of the basement.

And shouldn't someone care enough to protect us?

If these creatures are the antagonists of our nightmares, then surely there are also protagonists, the heroes, the champions, those brave souls who are tasked with fighting back.

Van Helsing was a fictional construct, of course, but his character echoes an ancient, widespread belief that can be found in some form or another within many folktales.

It seems that no matter what the monster might be, there are always those who fight them.

Amazingly, those hunters still walk among us.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Some of the earliest folktales involving hunters of the supernatural can be found in Bulgaria and nearby countries.

After five centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Empire, the Turks were finally pushed out of Bulgaria in the 1890s.

During those first few years of freedom, the country's rich folklore and traditions were gathered up and recorded for the first time.

And right at the center of those records were tales of the vampire.

Tales with such power that people today still believe them and follow their prescriptions, such as the ritual exhumation of suspected vampires.

It's a belief that runs deep, mostly because of intense fear and superstition.

To many though, vampires were real and they needed to be hunted down.

As a result, there were people in these ancient Bulgarian communities called sabotnik who could detect vampires.

They were called upon when a village suspected a vampire was hunting and harming them.

Once the grave of a suspect was dug up and the body was exposed, the sabotnik would determine whether or not the corpse was really a vampire.

If it was, they were also responsible for destroying it.

This was a power each subbotnik inherited at birth, according to the stories.

He just had to be lucky enough to be born either on one of the days between Christmas and January 6th, a time known to the ancient Catholics as the Unclean Days, or on a Saturday, which sounds pretty random to me, but hey, whatever.

Another group of vampire hunters was known as the Vampiredzia.

These were more akin to the modern movie version of Van Helsing that we know today.

Destined to hunt vampires vampires from birth, they traveled the land armed with weapons and tools, looking for battle.

And they did all of this while following prescribed methods, like hunting only on Saturdays and leading the vampires into graveyards where they were somehow weaker.

And these vampired Zia were heroes, often earning a good living from the gifts and donations of fearful villagers.

There are even records of the provincial capital of Tarnovo actually employing a number of them and sending them out to investigate and hunt when reports of vampires popped up.

Honestly, you could film this stuff and pass it off as an underworld sequel, but it happened, and to me, that's what makes it so much more compelling.

The idea of hunting wasn't isolated to Bulgaria, though, or even limited to the concept of the vampire.

Contemporary to these vampiredzia tales were stories that highlighted another dangerous creature, one that walked right among us.

The witch.

And yes, we all already know that there was a hysteria and persecution.

Yes, there were hangings and burnings and other superstition-fueled acts of violence.

But at the center of much of it, there were hunters.

In 1486, a German Dominican friar named Heinrich Kramer wrote a book that he called the Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of the Witches.

Kramer was more than a friar, though.

He served for years as an inquisitor with orders from Pope Innocent VIII.

After his retirement, he wrote what he believed to be the gold standard for understanding and identifying witches.

The Catholic Church condemned the book just three years after it was published, but it was too late.

The Malleus Maleficarum acted like an accelerant, thanks in part to Gutenberg's printing press, and it spread across Europe where it fueled the flames of religious hysteria and social unrest.

The book was used for centuries to teach others about witches, where they came from, how to detect them, and what to do when you found one.

And this was the world that Matthew Hopkins was born into in 1620, England.

He was the son of a Puritan minister and was raised to fear the devil and lash out at what he saw as heresy.

At the age of just 24, Hopkins had set up shop in Sussex under the title of Witch Finder General and began a short but devastating career in the discovery and conviction of witches.

In the 350 years that spanned the early 1400s to the late 1700s, it's estimated that less than 500 people in total were executed for witchcraft in all of England.

That's less than two executions per year, right?

During their short two-year operation though, Hopkins and his team were responsible for 300 of those 500 deaths.

This is the man who invented the swimming test for witchcraft that most people have heard about.

The accused would be tied to a chair and tossed into a pond or a lake, and then Hopkins would wait to see if they floated.

If they did, they were a witch and they would be killed.

If they sunk, well, they still died, but with a clear name.

I know it doesn't make much sense to us today, but in the 1640s, Hopkins could do no wrong.

Everyone trusted him.

His book, The Discovery of Witches, went on to fuel witch trials in the American colonies in the late 1600s, and some of his interrogation methods were even used in the Salem, Massachusetts trials.

Don't get me wrong, the man was a monster, but he clearly left his mark as a witch hunter.

One last thing.

According to the Bulgarian folklore surrounding vampire hunters, there was also one big risk for those in the profession.

Anyone who served as a sabotnik or vampirdzia were the most at risk of becoming a vampire themselves.

And even in England, Hopkins didn't die a hero.

Instead, he was viewed as a monster and a boogeyman.

Rather than going down in history as some sort of heroic hunter, he inherited the reputation of the evil that he hunted.

Because sometimes, whether the creature is a thing of our own invention or simply the focus of a personal obsession, the hunter is always at risk of becoming the very thing they pursue.

In 1968, Paramount released Rosemary's Baby, based on the hit novel from a year before.

1973 saw the release of the original Exorcist, followed by The Omen in 76.

There was a satanic craze sweeping through America, a mixture of fear and fascination, and Hollywood wanted to capitalize on it.

It's often overlooked that that craze was preceded by an earlier wave of fear, way across the Atlantic and England.

During the late 1960s, everywhere parents looked, they saw danger and darkness.

Reports of kidnappings and drug use led to panic, and as a result, It took on the flavor of a witch hunt, which was ironic because one of the recurring tropes in stories that portrayed Satanists as monsters was the idea that they killed babies.

And that's an idea that was born centuries before, in the pages of none other than the Malleus Maleficarum.

For many, that connection was more than a coincidence.

They saw a conspiracy, and as we know, fear has a way of clouding our perceptions.

So when London locals began to notice graffiti and vandalism inside the historic Highgate Cemetery, they jumped to dark conclusions.

Highgate is an old cemetery.

200 years old, in fact.

It was popular for the first century, but then tastes changed and war broke out.

During World War II, most of the men who served as groundskeepers and caretakers in the cemetery were called into military service, leaving the place unattended.

Later, German bombs left parts of the graveyard damaged and exposed.

Then over the following decades, trees and brush began to overtake the property.

Youth and vandals began to spend more time inside the cemetery and reports circulated of occult symbols, open graves, and bodies that had been moved for unknown reasons.

Obsessed with the dangers of Satanism, the public began to do what the public has always been so good at doing.

They lashed out.

In early 1969, a group emerged that promised to help.

They called themselves the British Occult Society, and their aim was to investigate the unusual events and vandalism taking place in the cemetery.

Unlike a lot of the general public, this group was even brave enough to enter the overgrown graveyard and explore it with hopes of finding answers.

According to the two men at the center of the group, Sean Manchester and David Ferrett, what they found confirmed earlier reports.

And then they listened to the others in the neighborhood who had stories of their own to share.

which is where they first encountered the rumors of something, maybe a person, maybe something else, that prowled the graveyard at night.

These stories described it as a tall, dark figure that could paralyze those who encountered it.

Ferrant was intrigued, and so on December 21st of 1969, he camped out in the cemetery overnight.

It was the winter solstice.

He was a paranormal investigator.

It all sort of lined up, in his mind at least.

And according to him, The night was a huge success.

The way he described it, at some some point during the hours between dusk and dawn, Ferrent witnessed a person that stood over seven feet tall.

This figure apparently had eyes that glowed brightly, but when Ferret looked away for a moment, it vanished.

He wrote to the local paper and asked if others had seen the same figure.

Amazingly, for about two months, letters flooded in from others who described similar experiences.

About the same time though, Ferrent's partner Sean Manchester left the group to start his own and made further discoveries.

His findings though were more bloody.

He believed the stories of the mysterious dark figure, but he also found numerous animals in the cemetery that had been drained of blood.

Upon inspection, he reported that each of them had small holes in their necks.

When the local papers asked him if he had a theory, he told them he did.

The figure according to Manchester, was clearly a vampire.

And not just any vampire.

This was what he called a king vampire, brought over from Wallachia in the 1700s by a curious noble and then buried on the estate that eventually became Highgate.

All of the satanic activity, according to him, was the work of local occultists trying to resurrect this creature.

So Manchester offered to hunt it down and exorcise it.

He acknowledged that the law made it a bit difficult, I guess, to go around plunging wooden stakes into corpses, but he'd already done it twice before.

According to him, he was willing to put his life on the line to track down and destroy the king vampire.

Few people bought it.

They did believe that something was going on inside the cemetery, though, so the police began to patrol the area, watching for anything out of the ordinary.

Over the next few months, they chased a number of vandals out of the graveyard, but none of them turned out to be anything more than teenagers pretending to be vampire hunters, just out looking for a thrill.

And then on August 1st of 1970, something happened that changed all of that.

That night, police were called to Highgate Cemetery and directed to one particular crypt that was deep inside the property.

When they arrived, they found the tomb door standing wide open, and inside, stretched out on the cold stone floor, was a body.

Not particularly odd given the location, but it was the condition of the body that alarmed them.

It had been charred beyond recognition and then decapitated.

The police went public with the discovery and admitted that this, of all the things they'd found in Highgate so far, could actually be the work of occultists.

And that was all the public needed.

The papers were filled with headlines.

People couldn't help but jump to conclusions.

And both Sean Manchester and David Ferrent were right there in the middle of it, examining the clues and trying to make sense of it all.

They weren't on the same side anymore, though.

Each man had started to adopt his own unique methods of investigation, some of which were a bit unorthodox.

Two weeks after the burned body was discovered, Ferrent was discovered by police to be wandering the cemetery at night.

When they arrested him for trespassing, they found that he was carrying a large crucifix and a sharp wooden stake.

His group didn't stop, though.

They began to camp overnight in the graveyard on a more regular basis, finding unusual clues, all of which pointed, to them at least, to the work of a group bent on resurrecting the king vampire.

One night, Ferrin took a reporter from the evening news into Highgate with him, and together they discovered a crypt with an eerie scene.

The body had been removed from the coffin inside the building, and placed in the center of a large pentagram that had been drawn on the stone floor.

Ferrent and his group also claimed to find bodies with voodoo dolls, bodies with missing heads, skulls placed in odd locations, and symbols that hinted at rituals from previous nights.

All of it, they said, pointed to a dark evil that needed to be stopped.

Their efforts, as risky as they seemed, were aimed at doing just that.

Months later, Ferret was arrested a second time, and this time his girlfriend joined him.

The police apparently thought the couple were transporting marijuana, but it turned out to just be a plastic bag of chamomile, of all things.

They claimed it was an ingredient in one of their rituals.

According to them, they had found a crypt that showed signs of a recent black magic ceremony, and so their group had gone there to cleanse it.

Once they'd all gathered inside the open tomb, they stood in a circle around the perimeter of the room, reading passages from the Bible, along with spells they claimed to have been lifted from ancient books of magic.

Some of the women in the group even stripped to dance naked in the center of the room.

They were symbols of purity, according to Ferret.

Manchester publicly disapproved.

He preferred to conduct his exorcisms in broad daylight, which allowed him to be safer and, as some critics pointed out, also made it a lot more likely there would be an audience around to watch him.

But that didn't mean his rituals were any less entertaining.

At one point, Manchester claimed that he was led to a tomb by a young woman who was possessed by a demonic spirit named Lucia.

Inside the tomb, he claimed, was an ancient coffin with no nameplate.

He had just opened the coffin and was about to plunge a wooden stake into the corpse when another member of the group stopped him.

Instead, Manchester simply sprinkled the body with holy water and cloves of garlic.

According to witnesses, as he did this, loud rhythmic booms could be heard, growing louder the deeper into the ritual they went.

Events in Highgate seemed to end shortly after January in 1974.

On the 12th of that month, local police were called to inspect the car of a local resident parked near the cemetery.

Inside, they found an embalmed corpse seated at the wheel, its head removed and nowhere to be found.

Ferrett was interviewed as a suspect, but in the end, it turned out to be a a prank put on by a group of local teenagers.

One of them had actually taken the head home to keep it on his mantle, until it began to smell, that is.

Manchester found a way to make a career out of his adventures in Highgate and over the past few decades has become known as a vampire expert, appearing in many television documentaries on the subject.

He's written two books, one about the Highgate vampire and another, a handbook for would-be hunters.

David Ferrin experienced less success in the wake of the events.

He was arrested in 1974 for vandalizing property within the cemetery.

He denied any involvement, of course, but the police were hungry for a real suspect after nearly five years of activity.

He was sentenced to four years in prison, but was paroled after just two, when it was determined that his rights had been violated.

He went back to heading up the British Occult Society, where he still works today.

Newspapers at the time featured photos of him with his vampire hunting tools.

He was referred to as the graveyard ghoul by one local paper, and another called him a wicked witch.

In a book written by Manchester in 1991, he refers to Ferrent as a wayward witch who dabbled in the black arts.

In the eyes of some, at least, David Ferrend seemed to suffer a fate similar to Matthew Hopkins.

Rather than succeeding, it seems, the young man became the thing he hunted.

For most of you, today is Halloween.

It's one of my favorite times of the year.

It's one of the very few moments when we stop and acknowledge the shadows, the mystery, and the unknown.

Because life without mystery is stale and flat, and days like today help to add texture to our lives.

Tonight, millions of children are going to dress up and walk through their neighborhoods.

They've each got a favorite character, something they want to become for this one night of the year when it's expected and normal.

And they'll do all of this, like hunters on a mission.

Interestingly, The teens who live near Highgate still creep into the graveyard every year.

Each Halloween, they find a way way inside, gather together, and go on their own vampire hunts.

And that's no easy task these days.

The cemetery has been cleaned up, locked up, and opened to the public only for paid guided tours.

Still, the youth of the area managed to celebrate Halloween there each and every year.

20 years before the events in Highgate Cemetery though, there was another gathering of youth farther north in the Scottish city of Glasgow.

Glasgow is a port city that straddles the River Clyde and is the second largest city in the country.

South of the river, just north of the M74, is a neighborhood known as Gorbals.

It's an area of the city that has a rough history.

The industrialization and overpopulation of the late 1800s led to the construction of tenement slums throughout the first half of the 20th century.

It's gone through some attempted redevelopment, but in the 1950s, it was probably at its lowest point.

One night in September of 1954, a police constable named Alex Deeprose was called to investigate a disturbance at the southern necropolis, a burial ground as old as Highgate and just as textured and creepy in its own way.

When the officer got to the cemetery, he found that some of the neighborhood children had gathered there, hundreds of them, in fact, ranging in ages from 4 to 14.

and they were armed.

Deeprose managed to gather them all together and lead them out of the graveyard, but the following night they were back.

Each of the children carried something dangerous with them ⁇ knives, sticks, metal bars.

Some even brought dogs along.

And Deeprose wanted to know why.

Some of the children told him that two local boys had been killed and they had come to the graveyard for revenge.

The constable didn't know of any murders in the area, but then again, there was a lot that went on in Gorbel's that went unreported.

But he was concerned about the gatherings, so he spoke with some of the parents.

Understandably, they were concerned.

Some were worried about the safety of their children.

Some were concerned about the stories and what it said about their fascination with violence and danger.

But despite the concern, hundreds more arrived in the cemetery the very next night.

Constable Deep Rose returned to disperse them again.

But he also wanted to know what it was they were hunting.

Who killed these two two mysterious boys?

And why did they think that they could find the suspect here in this particular graveyard?

The killer, he was told, was a vampire.

A vampire that stood over seven feet tall, with sharp teeth and glowing eyes.

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So, what do this animal

and this animal

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They all live on an organic valley farm.

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Learn more at ov.coop and taste the difference.

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This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marcette Crockett.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place: theworldoflore.com/slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

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