Coming day after day to torment his wife, the Buckinghamshire Vampire terrorized an entire town for days. And he wasn’t stopped until the Bishop intervened.
Hidden among the villages and misty woodlands of Buckinghamshire in south east England, a county better known for its pastoral landscapes and historic estates, lies a strange and unsettling tale of a vampire said to have once terrorized the area.
Unlike the famous aristocratic bloodsuckers of Gothic fiction, this legend, whispered among locals for generations, speaks of a malevolent revenant risen from its grave to prey upon the living.
A Folkloric Fragment from Rural England
This story is also one of the vampiric tales we have from the historian William of Newburgh who wrote down many of the monsters and ghost stories from medieval England and Scotland. Allegedly he got the story from Stephen de Swafeld, the archdeacon of the diocese of Buckinghamshire from 1194-1202.
A well respected man of Buckinghamshire died unexpectedly in 1192 and was buried by his family and his grieving widow on the eve of Ascension Day. He must have been a rich man, as he was buried in a tomb. Buckinghamshire had acquired a lot of wealth during the Anglo-Saxons, soon to be taken by William the Conqueror.
The next night the widow was awakened at night when something laid next to her in her bed. When she opened her eyes, she saw it was her dead husband laying next to her, staring at her with dead eyes. It was said he got on top of her, pressing her down into the bed.
It is unsure and not specified what this actually means. Did he paralyze her like a night terror thing, did he force himself on her?
When the sun rose, the man went back into his tomb. But he would return the next night. Some say he did the same for a second time. But for the third, the widow was prepared. She had invited her friends and family to watch over her, in case her dead husband came back.
He crept through her window, but when he was heading for her bed, the walking dead was attacked by her protectors who chased him off with loud noises and into the fields where the animals were grassing. Some say that he went to attack his brothers instead who were living in the same town.
For a long time, the vampire kept appearing in the town, attacking sleeping people as well as resting animals. Soon, every household was up all night, guarding to defend themselves from the vampire stalking them.
It got so bad he started appearing in broad daylight, seen by big groups of people in the streets and in the fields. Often he was seen with a pack of hounds following him, something the undead in William’s writing did, as well as other British ghost and vampire stories.
Blessings from the Bishop
The story of the undead reached the Bishop and they decided to do an investigation. This has also been said to be the Archdeacon Stephen. He had written to St. Hugh, the bishop of Lincoln, asking for advice. It was said that they had to open his tomb and burn him to ashes, but the archdeacon didn’t want to and asked if there was another way.
They decided to open his tomb and exhumed his body. When the tomb was opened the body was found to have not decomposed. The bishop had written an absolution that they placed on the man’s chest before the tomb was sealed up again.
It is said that this helped and the blessing from the bishop made so the revenant remained in his grave and he never bothered anyone ever again. .
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References:
Buckinghamshire Vampire – OCCULT WORLD
William of Newburgh: Medieval Vampire Hunter? | Our Ancient History
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