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The Victorian era was an age of scientific advancement and rigid social mores, but it was also a time of superstition and fear. Stories of vampires haunting the countryside were more than just gothic horror, they were manifestations of anxieties about death, disease, and the unknown. From complex burial rituals to personal vampirological kits, the Victorians developed a range of practical and ritualistic methods to fight undead threats.

Historical Practices in Britain

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The method of staking through the heart to pin the undead is thought to have originated in the medieval southern Slavic countries, during which time entire communities would sometimes exhume bodies if the area was struck by a suspected vampire epidemic. Bodies that appeared unnaturally well-preserved, bloated, or covered with blood were often used as proof of vampirism; however, these characteristics are now known to be common to decomposition.

Lord Hailey’s Vampire-Fighting Kit

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Concern about the undead didn’t stop at what to do when someone passes, as a number of Victorians and early 20th-century folk took precautions in the event that they met a vampire face to face. One such person’s preparations recently sold at auction for five times the estimated price. The vampire-fighting kit dates from a century ago, but when it went on sale in Derbyshire last week, it sold for £13,000, five times what was expected.

The kit, in the form of a lockable box, is embellished with two brass crucifixes which double as sliding locks. Inside were an assortment of weapons and accoutrements including a wooden stake, small mallet, brass candlesticks, a Gothic Bible, holy water, and rosary beads, along with a pair of pistols. Many of the items have been stamped with the initials of the box’s former owner, British peer Lord Hailey. Whether Hailey ever actually used the kit is unknown, but the presence of paperwork from the Metropolitan Police registering an “alien enemy” in 1915 also tells us something about the state of the world during the First World War.

William Malcolm Hailey, 1st Baron Hailey, was born in 1872 and had a distinguished career in the colonial service, first as Governor of the Punjab and later as Governor of the United Provinces. It is of some interest that a man who reached such high office should have taken the trouble to assemble and keep a vampire-fighting kit, but this fact doesn’t necessarily suggest that Hailey’s Victorian superstitions were ill-informed. Educated elites were no less susceptible to the cultural influence of tales about the undead. Hailey passed in 1969 and is memorialised in Westminster Abbey.

Victorian vampire-hunting techniques can appear to the modern reader as a series of more or less practical applications of a generalised fear of the unknown and natural phenomena that could not be explained due to limited understanding at the time. From nails hammered through the hearts of victims to very personal and ornate vampire-hunting kits owned by some of the more nobly born, these techniques were often a combination of folklore, superstition, and ritualised behavior deemed necessary by society.