Chasing Up the Ojai Vampire

After writing my previous entry, I e-mailed the Ventura County Parks Department (who administer Camp Comfort) with the following ("A Query about Camp Comfort Park", Tuesday, 9 February 2010 5:02:50 AM):

Good morning,

Have you heard of the Ojai Vampire?

If so, what's the story you've heard?

It's apparently centred around Camp Comfort County Park.

There's rumours of a sarcophagus that's meant to be somewhere in the area, containing the remains of a vampire.

I don't believe in the story, but I'm wondering if the sarcophagus might actually exist. Can you confirm or deny this?

Sinc.,
Anthony Hogg

And here's what they wrote back ("Re: A Query about Camp Comfort Park", Tuesday, 9 February 2010 7:37:41 AM):

The Parks Department Administrative staff knows nothing about a sarcophagus onsite at any of the County parks.

And you'd think they would, if there was one out there.

Nonetheless, they weren't very forthcoming about the vampire legend, so maybe they "get that a lot".

If any readers out there have been to Camp Comfort and seen a sarcophagus, or, better yet, have a picture of it, I'd love to hear from you!

Not All's Sunny in California

I first read about the Ojai Vampire in Martin V. Riccardo's "Vampire Haunts" chapter for Rosemary Ellen Guiley with J.B. Macabre's The Complete Vampire Companion (New York: Macmillan, 1994).

The story is told on pp. 47-48 and relates the account of (unnamed) local ranchers finding their cattle mutilated and exsanguinated in the 1980s. They suspect a vampire, arm themselves and target a new landowner.

They come across something that resembles a "large stone box near a crossroad off Creek Road" and hear a vicious growl. It comes from a large black dog guarding this "box" (actually a sarcophagus). One of the ranchers whips out a large, silver crucifix, which keeps the dog at bay.

When they get closer to the box, the dog lunges for them, and they fire at it, with no effect. A plucky rancher flings holy water at it and the dog shrieks and runs away, leaving them free to approach the tomb "surrounded by tall weeds under the tree".

They pried off the lid and find "the cadaverous body of a nobleman" and stake it through the heart, just as the sun begins to set, and replace the lid.

Riccardo points out that the story contains "common pagan, Christian, and fictional elements of the vampire myth", taking note of the "crossroad, the spectral black dog, the nobleman, the silver crucifix, and the approaching dusk" (47). He also notes that a black dog is sometimes seen in the area and the sarcophagus has apparently been found, on occasion, with a window in the lid that reveals the vampire's unholy remains.

The story still circulates in Ojai, and is related on a section of Weird California's "Char Man" article. However, the date given in the story is vastly different from Riccardo's account. It also gives a bit of a background to the mysterious nobleman, too:

According to urban legend, a vampire relocated to the Ojai area around 1890 from either Italy or Spain. He acquired a small ranch and kept a low profile. However, as soon as he arrived, local cattle began turning up dead and drained of blood. Shortly thereafter locals were assaulted by strange wolf like creatures. The townsfolk got up in arms and realizing that a vampire was in their midst, raided the vampire’s ranch during the day.

There's also speculation as to the story's origins and a more specific geographic location of the vampire's resting place. It ends with a sombre warning:

It has been speculated that this legend cropped up from a possible real life above ground tomb. It is plausible that an old family near the turn of the century could have buried their dead in this manner upon their estate. It is not only not unheard of, but also apparently the custom at the time in certain parts of Europe. Even the window in the stone coffin isn’t completely unheard of. Stating that, however, if you are wandering around Camp Comfort County Park and come upon a stone sarcophagus with a skeleton inside, don’t pull out the wooden stake.

I did some more browsing on the case and found a classic friend-of-a-friend account:

Supposedly in the mid 1800s a Vampire Settled in the Ojai valley. In the late 1800s the villagers of Nordhoff, now Ojai, hunted him down and staked him through the heart. Now I have heard that the poeple incased the remains of the vampire in a slab of cement. A buddy of mine actually says that he knows the location of the concrete slab. he says it is about a mile back from the intrance of Camp Comfort across the stream and over the first hill.....a bit of a hike but worth checking out....On my next trip to Ojai it is in the agenda. This is the area where the Phantom Dog roams as well as Charman

I tried registering with the forum, to ask this guy to produce a photo of the tomb, but was sadly confronted with this: "Sorry but you cannot register at this time because the administrator has disabled new account registrations."

I also came across what appears to be a slight variant of the story, but much less literate:

A guy that transformed into a vampire is repeatedly observed concealing a dead body by a large boulder in Camp Comfort Park after midnight. One thing's for certain, this spirit undoubtedly is bloodcurdling; one that you don't want to encounter at the stroke of midnight.

The Ojai Vampire has all the classic urban legend traits, but I'm also reminded of certain elements in 1959 Western, Curse of the Undead.

Not only is it set in California, but the plot revolves around a mysterious gunman, ranch wars and a vampiric plague.

To cap it off, the vampire turns out to be Don Robles, a Spanish nobleman.

Public Service Announcement

I know I've been neglecting this blog for a little bit (well, ok, not that long), but you'll see why very shortly!

I generally don't like referring to my writings on the Highgate Vampire Case (and its participants) as they tend to attract unwanted attention.

Even Niels has encountered the shady types associated with the Case and his blog is about as innocent as you can get.

I'm guessing other readers have, too.

But this time 'round, I think I need to make a sort of public service announcement on it, especially due to the topics I've covered in the last few days.

This is also to give readers an idea of just how deceptive its primary protagonists can be.

Oh, by the way, if you're not familiar with the Highgate Vampire Case, then here's its Wikipedia page.

Read it?

Ok, good. Let's start with David Farrant.

Despite his insistence that the "feud" between himself and his arch-nemesis, Bishop Sean Manchester, is a "one-sided" affair, it very clearly isn't.

Despite pathologically trying to avail himself of the "vampire hunter" tag and promote his lack of belief in "Hammer-style" undead, he's also the same guy insisting that the "vampire" is "still active" (at rather timely circumstances) and still gives talks on the Case, despite declaring his interest in it "dead".

Query him further about certain quotes and actions, and you come up against a slippery slide of wanton deceit and sidestepping.

And now, onto Manchester.

Hoo boy.

In the last few days, I've focused on the fact that he's a blatant plagiarist.

Now, you'd think that a Bishop would (at the very least) admit to such misdeeds, and apologise for the error of his ways, wouldn't you?

Not this one.

It all began when I noticed that a blog post he "wrote" commenting on Barack Obama, seemed slightly, mmm, off-kilter. On a hunch, I decided to google portions of it.

Here's what I uncovered.

Most interestingly, large chunks of the post were cribbed from the blog of a right-wing British political party, the BNP.

I confronted Manchester on this matter by commenting on his blog.

Rather than confess, he instead deleted my comments and presented heavily-truncated versions of them as part of answers to unsuspecting readers.

The saga of this back-and-forth lunacy is compiled here.

In the meantime, I decided to have a peek into the Bishop's ecclesiastic "credentials". You might be surprised to see what I found.

As a side note, it might be amusing to know that he also wound up excommunicating one of the men who ordained him.

But the saga doesn't quite end there, ladies and gents! Oh no!

For the "crime" of trying to get the Bishop to admit to his "sins of omission", I was banned from commenting on his blog and also publicly labeled an anti-Catholic homosexual! (note: I'm neither anti-Catholic, or homosexual.)

So, if you wish to traipse into the minefield of dung that is the Highgate Vampire Case, I advise that you wear very sturdy boots!

Other than that, if you encounter either of these shady characters, or their affiliates, be it in person or on your blog/forum, I'd recommend extreme caution (lest you be publicly maligned or harassed by e-mail or some other means) and a hefty dose of skepticism.

Oh, and be very cautious of giving access to personal info.

Thanks for listening!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program...

Vamping Out with Hort

Barbara E. Hort's Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves and Others (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1996) arrived in the mail yesterday.

From a cursory glance, it seems to deal with vampirism in a psychological manner à la Albert J. Bernstein's Emotional Vampires: Dealing with People Who Drain You Dry (2000). But, it does have some interesting stuff to say about the vampire archetype.

Tieck Time Again

In the previous entry, I mentioned a volume called Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823) as a source for a mis-attributed work called "Wake Not the Dead".

It's apparently to blame for mistaking Raupach's authorship for Tieck's.

Thanks to the wonders of Google Book Search, you can actually read the tome, yourself. The story appears on pp. 233-291.

Interestingly enough, Tieck is not directly cited as the source of the story in that volume. The only reference to him appears in the book's "Preface":

On the same principle are two volumes of PopularTales, published at Eisenach, without the author's name, but many of them are exceedingly entertaining. Lebrecht and Tieck are the authors of many beautiful legends, but they have generally trusted to their own fancy instead of building themselves on antient traditions. Backzo's legends are something in the manner of La Motte Fouqué, though neither so fanciful nor so original. But to detail all the volumes of German legend and romance would be to give a bookseller's catalogue ; for, not only has Moravia, Silesia, Thuringia, and Austria, each its distinct legends, but every quarter of the Harz Mountains, east, west, north, and south, has its own exclusive terrors; and when to these are added the fictions of later writers, the catalogue swells beyond all reasonable limit (xi-xii).

That's about as close as it gets.

However, I was somewhat doubtful of Crawford's suggestion that Haining is the source of the error. So, I decided to do some Googling.

Haining's Gothic Tales of Terror was published in 1973, but earlier attributions of Tieck to "Wake" exist. He had already done it in 1972 with Great Tales of Terror From Europe and America, but renamed the story "The Bride of the Grave".

But Charles M. Collins had already beaten him to the punch in A Feast of Blood (1967).

I'd be almost certain that other editors and writers have attributed it to Tieck, too. It's been doing the rounds for so long, it's hard to tell just where it started.

Not Tieck's Vampire

I was inspired to write this entry by Andrew's latest movie review.

"Wake Not the Dead" (c. 1800) is a short story commonly attributed to German Romanticist, Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773 - 1853). Its importance to the genre is enhanced by the fact that it preceded John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819) by nearly 20 years.

Or so we thought.

Recent studies have revealed that Tieck wasn't actually the author of the story. That credit is now going to Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach (1784-1852).

I'm not sure if Rob Brautigam, a Dutch vampirologist, was the first to uncover this point of attribution, but his comment on the matter was certainly the first reference I've seen (it was incorporated to this review).

The attribution is also elaborated in "Relato Gotico/Vampirismo: Deja a los Muertos en Paz - Avances Programa Nº 425 (21/11/09)" (English translation here) and Heide Crawford has composed a paper for the 2010 Kentucky Foreign Language Conference.

As she and the other articles reveal, not only was Tieck not the author of the story, but it was actually first published in 1823.

Here's what she has to say on the matter, also revealing a possible source of the error:

When Theodor Hildebrandt published the first German vampire novel Der Vampir oder die Todtenbraut in 1828, he was contributing to a long tradition of literary representations of the vampire in European poetry and prose that began with Heinrich August Ossenfelder's poem "Der Vampir" in 1748. Two years before Hildebrandt published his vampire novel, the popular dramatist Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach (1784-1852) had published the vampire story "Lasst die Todten ruhen" (1823), which has been erroneously attributed to Ludwig Tieck by American and British scholars of Gothic Horror literature since at least 1973 when Peter Haining published the English translation, "Wake Not the Dead" in his volume two of his Gothic Horror anthology Gothic Tales of Terror and named Tieck as the author.

I should note that "Relato" cites Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823) as the source of the error.

But, Tieck does have a saving grace: Crawford attributes the "earliest known German prose work that features a female vampire" to him, in the shape of his 1812 story, "Liebeszauber".

And thus, Tieck's place in the vampire genre is still solid. Even if it's for a completely different story.

Vampires in Bulgaria

S. G. B. St. Clair and Charles A. Brophy's Twelve Years' Study of the Eastern Question in Bulgaria (1877) is commonly cited as a source on vampires in Bulgarian folklore.

But what probably isn't as well-known, is that the book's actually a revised edition of their 1869 work, A Residence in Bulgaria, or Notes on the Resources and Administration of Turkey.

Compare an excerpt from the 1877 book against the 1869's chapter on Bulgarian superstitions.