Tales of Northern Vampires: Ancient Revenants in the Borders and Cumbria

A lot of northern folklore includes the figures you’d expect to see – fairies, ghosts, brownies, and black dogs. But you might not expect to see northern vampires among the folk tales and legends.

Yet three tales about vampires in the north, most notably in Berwick, Alnwick, and Melrose, occur in the historical record Canon William de Newburgh discusses them in his Historia rerum Anglicarum, a collection of five volumes that told a history of England from 1066 to 1198. Book 5 features the vampire stories, although they’re perhaps more properly referred to as ‘revenants’, given the vocabulary of the 12th century when William was writing.

While they’re perhaps better referred to as “revenants” than “vampires”, they’re certainly worth knowing about if you’re interested in our fanged friends. And they’re not the only northern vampires in British lore – the Vampire of Croglin Grange is a famous example from Cumbria.

Let’s find out what’s going on with these strange bloodsucking creatures in northern England and southern Scotland.

The Berwick Vampire

According to William, the Berwick vampire story occurred in the thirteen century during Richard I’s reign. The plague kept ravaging the country, and during one outbreak, a rich merchant died of the plague. People had considered him pious and charitable in his good deeds.

But after he died, people discovered he’d actually been incredibly corrupt. The church refused to bury him in consecrated ground.

The combination of his unconsecrated burial and his sinful life meant that the merchant couldn’t rest easy in his grave. Every night, he crawled out of his grave and rushed through the town in search of blood.

According to the legend, a pack of howling dogs ran after him, and people heard the merchant yell that, “Until my body is burnt, you folk of Berwick shall have no peace!” (Roberts 1990: 6)

How thoughtful of him to let them know how to destroy him!

The townsfolk evidently agreed and decided to end such nocturnal shenanigans. They chose ten young men to exhume, dismember, and burn the corpse. They did so, but unfortunately, the plague arrived in Berwick again shortly after, and people swore they still heard the vampire’s screams (Roberts 1990: 7).

The Melrose Vampire

His telling of the Berwick story is relatively brief, but he begins his section on the Melrose vampire by noting that it would be difficult to believe in corpses leaving their graves and causing havoc “did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony” (no date). He even notes that there are so many examples of such creatures in his own time that “the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome” for him to note them all down (no date). So he restricts himself to the three we’re discussing here.

He devotes a lot more time to discussing the Melrose creature. This revenant had been a priest, one who enjoyed material pleasures and hunting. He gained the nickname of the Hundeprest (Roberts 1990: 7).

His former mistress started complaining to the priest’s monastery that his spirit haunted her bedchamber, and he kept her awake all night with his noise. The church assigned four monks to help her, and they took up a vigil beside the Hundeprest’s grave. William adds a slightly bitchy comment about how much she deserved their help, thanks to her frequent donations to their monastery (no date).

The Vigil

When the Hundeprest didn’t appear at midnight, three of the monks decided to seek warmth nearby. Surely the Hundeprest wouldn’t appear now the witching hour was over?

How wrong they were. Once they left, the Hundeprest emerged from his grave, monstrous and enraged. He attacked the remaining monk, who stood firm and drove his axe deep into the monster. The monk chased it right back into its grave.

The three monks finally returned, but the rest of the night passed without incident. At dawn, they decided to open the grave. But as their shovels dug into the soft clay, blood oozed up to meet them. They were shocked to discover the corpse still looking as fresh as it had on the day the priest was buried. Blood poured from a gaping axe wound. The monks carried the corpse away from the monastery, and burned it to ashes, thus ending the reign of the Hundeprest (Roberts 1990: 7).

According to William, he heard the story of this vampire “recounted by religious men” (no date). Apparently, this means we just have to take his word for it.

The Alnwick Vampire

William lumps the Melrose Vampire and the Alnwick Vampire together, although I should point out, there are two slightly different versions of the Alnwick Vampire story.

In William’s version, a somewhat criminal and evil man from Yorkshire managed to find employment at Alnwick Castle, and worked hard to raise his station in life. Eventually, he married, but soon learned that his wife was cheating on him. After catching her in the act, he fell from his hiding place in the beams of the castle and suffered great injuries. His priest advised him to confess his sins, but being so consumed with thoughts of his wife’s adultery, he put it off until the following day.

The man died before he could confess his sins, and while he received a Christian burial, he couldn’t rest easy. The vampire of Alnwick Castle left his tomb at night to prowl around the town. So strong was the scent of death from his body that the plague spread through the town. The locals decided the vampire must be to blame for the outbreak. Strangely, people feared “being beaten black and blue” by him, rather than bitten.

William described how two brave brothers, armed with spades, decided to dig up the monster. Rather than digging down as far as you’d normally find a body, they found a body just inches down. The body was distended and swollen with blood, and when the men hit the corpse with their spades, fresh blood poured out of the wound.

They took the corpse away from the castle and burned it, at which point the plague outbreak ended. It’s unclear to which the extent people believed the vampire responsible for the plague, or whether the story provided a neat explanation for it. What’s truly astonishing about it is the way in which William tells this story…and then switches gears to go back to his historical narrative!

The Croglin Vampire

Of course, not all of our northern vampire stories occur in the Borders centuries ago. The Vampire of Croglin Grange comes from Cumbria.

In the story, two brothers and a sister rented Croglin Grange. All the neighbours seem to love them, and it seemed the siblings loved the Grange.

One summer, the siblings each retired to bed in their strange single-storey house. The heat still hadn’t subsided, so the sister left the shutters open but closed the window. While gazing outside into the beautiful evening, she watched two small lights appear in the distant churchyard and gradually approach the house.

Eventually, “a definite ghastly something” drew closer to the window, and the sister found herself unable to move. It began scratching at the window, before unpicking the lead around the window pane. It removed a single pane of glass, reached into the room, and opened the window. She still couldn’t move or scream, and the creature climbed into the room. It attacked her, biting her throat, at which point she could finally scream. In the time it took her brothers to break open the door, the creature had fled.

What happened next?

Surprisingly, the sister had a stronger constitution than most Gothic heroines, and she insisted there must be a rational explanation. Once the wound healed, her brothers took her to Switzerland for a change of scenery.

By the autumn, she was fit and hardy again, and she insisted they return to Croglin Grange. After all, they’d let it for seven years and they’d only been in it for one. Everything seemed fine, until the following March, when she was woken by something scratching on the window. The sister screamed, and her brothers chased the creature. After shooting it in the leg, they watched it disappear into a vault in the churchyard.

The following day, the brothers opened the vault. It was full of coffins that had been broken open, and only one coffin remained intact. They lifted the lid, and there inside, was the creature that had attacked their sister. Its gunshot wound on its leg identified it immediately. They burned the creature to end its nightly wanderings.

Is it true?

While the story was publicised in 1894, a point at which vampires were higher in the public consciousness, there is a possibility it referenced a much earlier story from the 1680s. Travel writer Augustus Hare included the tale in his volume, The Story of my Life. He claimed to have been told the story by a Captain Fisher about the strange events at Croglin Grange.

One of the biggest problems with this tale is the name involved since there is no Croglin Grange. There was a Croglin High Hall, and a Croglin Low Hall, but neither really seemed to fit the bill. For a time, this seemed to prove the story was simply fiction. F. Clive-Ross tried to find the correct building and discovered that a chapel had stood near Croglin Low Hall, which was probably the Croglin Grange of the story (Wayland 2021).

There’s still no way of knowing if the story was true or not, since the story doesn’t give us the name of the tenants, any years of when this happened, or the name of the family vault in which the vampire hid. It’s entirely likely it’s simply fiction.

If you’d like to know more about this most famous of northern vampires, I’ve got you! The wonderful Deborah Hyde did an illustrated talk about the Croglin Vampire for The Folklore Podcast Lectures. You can buy the replay here.

What do we make of these tales of northern vampires?

It’s difficult to really call the three creatures from Berwick, Alnwick and Melrose ‘vampires’. Yes, they appear to leave their graves at night. And they also seem to attack other humans. Once they’re dug up, they seem to still be ‘fresh’, and they’re often apparently swollen with blood. Only burning the corpses seems to do much good.

Yet it’s important to note that the word ‘vampire’ is never actually used in William’s description of them. As Nick Groom points out in his excellent book, The Vampire: A New History, people didn’t really start to call them ‘vampires’ until the 1730s (2020: xix). Before that, ‘revenants’ was a better word.

The Croglin Vampire is a much better fit for what we’d consider a vampire here in the 21st century. It also references the three 12th-century stories since the creature is discovered in its grave and burned. No one really has a proper tussle with the creature.

Strangely, in none of the stories, the vampire’s bite does not seem to confer vampirism on the victim. The sister in the Croglin story seems remarkably unhurt by the ordeal. And while the stories William tells do discuss the plague that seems to follow the vampire, there’s no suggestion that people are becoming vampires themselves.

But rather than trying to decide if the tales are vampire stories, it’s perhaps better to consider the stories from a different perspective. William’s trio of tales references concerns from a particular era, which dovetails with outbreaks of plague and terrible illness. It’s possible they’re more a way to explain disease than to titillate or terrify.

Meanwhile, Hale’s Croglin Vampire reads more like an adventure story, which is perhaps the spirit in which we should take it.

Which is your favourite of these northern vampires? Let me know below!

References

de Newburgh, William (no date), ‘Book 5: Chapter 24: Of certain prodigies’, Historia rerum Anglicarum, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/williamofnewburgh-five.asp#25.

Groom, Nick (2020), The Vampire: A New History, Yale: Yale University Press (aff link).

Hare, Augustus (2006 [1894]), ‘The Vampire of Croglin Grange’, Project Gutenberg Australia, https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605661h.html.

Lenora (2014), ‘The Legend of the Alnwick Castle Vampire’, The Haunted Palace, https://hauntedpalaceblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/the-legend-of-the-alnwick-castle-vampire/.

Roberts, Hazel (1990), Ghosts and Legends of Northumbria, Morpeth: Coquet Editions.

Wayland, MJ (2021), ‘Who was the Croglin Vampire?’, MJ Wayland, https://www.mjwayland.com/mysteries/the-croglin-vampire-explored/.