She lay there in her bed, her eyes staring in horror at the shady silhouette motioning towards her house from the surrounding graveyard. Cold sweat trickled down her forehead. Her heart was thumping. She wanted to leave. But she was too afraid to move. Suddenly, the figure turned to the other side. She gathered strength in her buckling knees. Desperate to leave, she reached out for the door. The silhouette reappeared at her window.
Aahh...
she screamed! The chilling tale of the Vampire of Croglin Grange, that rose from the dead to drain the living dry!
In the late 1890s, English writer Augustus Hare published his autobiography,
The Story of My Life. In it, he inscribed a blood curdling tale from Medieval Cumberland, Britain. He
was narrated the following legend by a descendant of the Fisher family in 1896, who had occupied the Croglin Grange for centuries.
According to Hare, the events had taken place somewhere around 1875. The Fishers had found a large farmhouse in the south and put the Croglin Grange to lease. At the time, the Grange was a one-storey building with a chapel in its proximity and the Howard family cemetery nearby. With the beginning of spring, the Grange was occupied by Miss Cranswell and her two brothers.
On a particularly oppressive summer night, Miss Cranswell was lying on her bed, bed clothes
cast, gazing fixedly through the closed glass window that faced the opposing cemetery. Two lights shone from amidst the dark belt of forestry. Suddenly, her eyes widened. In that penumbra she could make out a shadow pacing towards her house. It came closer, and closer. She lay frozen in horror. To leave would mean to unlock the door adjacent to the window. The shadow was still approaching. Suddenly, it turned. Miss Cranswell grabbed the door knob in a hurry, her heart palpitating. The terror intensified, she heard a scratch at the window. She heard the lead unfastened. She dared turn towards the window. Then, in the split of a second, the skeletal monster was on to her, his bony hands pressing through her hair, his fangs piercing her delicate flesh. She screamed, the brothers rushed in. The phantom had fled. There lay Miss Cranswell, wriggling on the floor, her neck
exsanguining from a fatal bite.
Miss Cranswell recovered, but her brothers took her to Switzerland to recover. A few months later, they returned howbeit, at Miss Cranswell's own request. It appeared that she was deterred to ensnare the marauder this instance, herself acting as bait.
Nothing happened till one March night. That night Miss Cranswell lay abed in her chambers, when a pair of bright lights shone from the woods. She quickly recognized them as a familiar pair of demonic eyes. A wrinkly brown face pressed against the window glass. A bony hand proceeded to unfasten the lead. Miss Cranswell screamed aloud. Her brothers, armed with pistols, rushed in. The creature now alarmed, started running towards the graves. The brothers shot, and a bullet hit it in the leg. Nevertheless, it jostled its way into disappearance.
The next morning the Cranswells called their neighbors. The young daughter of the family residing in the nearby Croglin High Hall had also suffered similar attacks. The townspeople made their way into the cemetery. One vault was reputed to be home a to a particularly notorious monster. It was opened up, revealing the panorama of several demolished coffins, but one coffin lay untouched. As they opened it, inside lay the body of the same fiendish vampire, the same wrinkly brown face, the same bullet wound in the leg. The horrified people set the body to fire, as is tradition, closing the case forever.
In 1924, Charles harper visited Cumberland to investigate the truth behind this eerie legend. He found a Croglin Low Hall and a Croglin High Hall, but no Croglin Grange, neither was he able to locate any chapel or graveyard. Although he deemed the legend fake, F. Clive-Ross found that there existed a chapel and a graveyard in Cumberland, which was later turned down. He even found a witness Mrs. Parkin, who claimed to have known the Fishers, and had heard of this legend before. She informed that the Croglin Low Hall was commonly called the Croglin Grange until 1720.
Recent researches by Lionel Fanthrope show that the Croglin Grange incident had occurred, not in 1875, but in the 1600s! But how did Hare, an established writer as he was, mistake the date by no less than two centuries!?
