The Devil, the Vampire, and the Wardrobe
By Hilary R. Sparks
Horror for me is a fascination with the undead which has its roots in my childhood. As a child I was a voracious reader and would read pretty much anything I could lay my hands on. When I was 8 or 9 years old I found a book of British ghost stories on the bookshelf in my parents’ bedroom. I can’t remember the title but it had a matt black cover with a picture of a grey skull on the spine. If my parents’ bedroom door was open I could see the skull staring out as I walked across the landing.
The only story from the book which I can remember, probably because it made the most impact on my young imagination, was of the Croglin Grange vampire. It’s a well-known tale but here’s a quick recap for anyone unfamiliar with this piece of British vampire lore:
A woman and her two brothers rented a single storey house called Croglin Grange in Cumbria. One hot summer’s night the woman was unable to sleep and sat up in bed gazing at the moonlit garden through her bedroom window. Suddenly she noticed lights bobbing about in the graveyard of the Grange’s chapel which was adjacent to the garden. A shadowy shape appeared on the lawn and began moving towards the house. Unnerved the woman went to leave her room but the door was locked. As she frantically tried to open it, she heard a scratching sound coming from the bedroom window; a creature with a shrivelled brown face and fiery eyes was outside scratching away at the lead which held the glass panes in place. It managed to remove a pane by the latch, enabling it to reach in, open the window, and clamber into the room. Still unable to unlock the door, the terrified woman huddled in her bed. The creature ran up to her, grabbed her by her hair and bit her throat. Her screams alerted her brothers who broke open the door to find their sister unconscious. There was no sign of the intruder.
After the incident the siblings spent some time away in Switzerland to restore the woman’s health, before deciding to resume their stay at Croglin Grange. The vampire also decided to return. Once again it began scratching at the window of the woman’s bedroom. The sound woke her and she screamed. Her brothers, carrying loaded pistols, ran into the bedroom but the creature was already escaping across the lawn. However, one of the brothers managed to shoot it in the leg. Despite the injury, the creature continued to flee until it reached the chapel graveyard where it vanished into a family vault. The following day the brothers went to the graveyard and opened the vault. To their horror all the coffins had been smashed open except for one. On opening it, the men found the body of the vampire which had attacked their sister. It had a wound to its leg.
So the idea of malevolent supernatural creatures trashing graves was implanted in my young mind. It came to be reinforced a few years later during a school break time. I was hanging around with a group of girls on the playing field. The day was hot and humid and in the distance thunder rumbled. As the clouds darkened, one of the girls related a tale about a relative who had attended a funeral during a thunderstorm. Shortly after the coffin was placed in the grave, the mourners were alarmed by noises seeming to emerge from within the coffin. It was retrieved and the lid prised off. Inside the body of the deceased was found to be ripped up. I can’t remember the exact details after all these years but somehow the Devil was involved in this corpse-shredding process. At that moment, as if on cue, the story was interrupted by forked lightning flashing across the sky.
The outcome of this incident combined with my reading of the Croglin Grange story was that I not only developed a fear of the Devil mutilating the bodies of the newly buried, but also a belief that forked lightning was a sign of the Devil, and that the Devil was lurking under the pavements that led to the school.
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Not only was I was a very imaginative child, I also suffered badly from anxiety. My parents found both qualities difficult to cope with and most of the time I was told to stop being so silly. However, my newfound fear of the Devil taking and mutilating the dead must have rattled my mother as the following year she took me to a funeral. I had never been to a funeral before and I didn’t know the deceased (the husband of one of Mum’s friends), but Mum said she wanted me to see an actual funeral to help dispel my fears.
It worked. Kind of. I was still deeply suspicious of forked lightning (I am to this day!) but I did stop believing that the Devil shredded corpses or that he dwelt under pavements. However, just because I no longer had a concern that when the Devil wasn’t desiccating corpses, he was lurking beneath pavements, didn’t mean that I was “Devil-free”. Oh no. He had moved to a whole new location. The Prince of Darkness had taken up residence in the wardrobe in my bedroom.
I’d always been slightly creeped out by the wardrobe in my bedroom. It belonged to my maternal grandmother who lived with us. Grandma had been moved to a smaller room when my brother and I came along but the wardrobe was too big for her new room so it remained in my bedroom.
It was large, plain, and made of pale brown wood – not the obvious candidate for a creepy bit of furniture – and I never saw any ghosts emerging from it or heard spectral howls echoing from within its depths. The only vaguely strange occurrence I can remember is waking one morning to find that the doors, which had to be locked to remain closed, were open. They had been shut the night before. Some of my grandmother’s clothes were still kept in the wardrobe but it was highly unlikely she would have come in to get any out as by that time she was so ill she rarely left her bedroom.
After Gran died when I was 12, Mum moved my stuff into the wardrobe and I always felt uncomfortable going in there to get clothes out. Somehow (and to this day I’m really not sure how I came to be convinced of this) the discomfort became a feeling that the Devil was connected with the wardrobe.
I couldn’t say anything to my parents as I’d have been told not to be so silly – the stock answer to most of my childhood issues - but I knew I needed to do something so that I could retrieve my clothes without being possessed or worse. So I developed a ritual. Before opening the wardrobe doors I would stand in front of it and pray to God three times, “Please don’t let the Devil get me”. If I stumbled over a word I’d have to go back and repeat the sequence all over again.
This ritual carried on well into my teens. I can’t remember when it actually stopped or why. Growing up maybe and life becoming filled with all the usual teenage stuff. The stopping of the ritual also coincided with my questioning of Christianity. We were a church-going family and my mother taught Sunday school. By my mid-teens I still went to church and Bible study classes regularly but I felt increasingly alien sitting in services, getting the sense that other people were communicating with a higher power while I sat there feeling absolutely nothing. However, although I didn’t feel any personal connection with God and the church we attended was middle-of-the-road Church of England so the Devil didn’t get much of a mention, attending services impressed on me the idea of a world full of spirits which has remained to this day.
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I left home at 21 and the last time I stayed in my old bedroom was when I was in my mid-20s. I was a Goth and was wearing a t-shirt with a medieval-style image of animal-headed witches (possibly one’s a demon) taking flight on a broomstick. Going to hang something up in the wardrobe and all the old memories came flooding back to me. But they were much fainter and had an unreal “did I really believe that?” quality about them. I did, however, change my t-shirt.
I’m a UK-based independent researcher of folklore and Caribbean history. On my X account The Folklore of Warwickshire, I post about the lore of my home county– an area rich in ghost lore and witchcraft. On my blog “Nature and Supernatural Nature” looks at the associations between Jamaicans flora and fauna and the spirit world.
“Nature and Supernatural Nature”: https://natureandsupernaturalnature.wordpress.com/
The Folklore of Warwickshire: @WarksFolklore
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