Monks, Leeches and Lestat: Hunting Scotland’s Lost Vampires

There is a reason we usually record these over video, and that reason is that I am apparently incapable of starting a conversation in a room with another human being in it.

We’d set up at SugarBird Wines on the Terrace for our very first in-person recording, book centred nicely on the table, and I announced that I wanted to do my best Oprah. Or possibly morning telly. I sat up straight, I said “hi guys, how are you”, and then I completely lost my nerve. So Dee stepped in and did the introduction herself, which she was absolutely not supposed to be doing, and it was far better than anything I had planned.

What followed was a lot of nonsense about the Stepford Wife smile, whether Dee needed enormous Sally Jessy Raphael glasses, and whether future episodes should open with a game-show-host run-in. For the record, Dee was drinking decaf on purpose. She knew her adrenaline was going to go through the roof the second we started talking, and reckoned caffeine on top of that would have made her entirely unintelligible. Given how much we both ended up giggling, I think that was wise.

Then we got to the actual point, which is Dee’s new book on vampire folklore in Scotland.

Why monks?

My first burning question after finishing the book was simple: why are there so many monks?

Dee’s cynical answer is that nobody is ever as well behaved as they’re supposed to be, so there has to be mischief somewhere. The more interesting answer is the dichotomy. At that point in history you’re really talking about revenants rather than vampires, and you became a revenant by living a sinful life. A monk who was meant to be holy and wasn’t makes for a far more shocking story. So yes, there is a definite trend of monks coming back as troublesome revenants.

The vampire caterpillar

My favourite story in the whole book is the caterpillar, which took me completely by surprise. A giant creature coming out of a gutter in Edinburgh and attacking a horse.

We got talking about leeching, which was perfectly ordinary medical practice at the time, and the fact that a fully grown leech can reach around two and a half feet. We’re used to the little ones. Dee found a folklore creature from elsewhere in Scotland, a giant leech that attacks horses, and it fits the Edinburgh story far better than the demon caterpillar reference she’d once come across connected to Borley Rectory. She described finding it as one of those great research moments where everything suddenly clicks.

What even is a vampire?

This turned out to be the hardest part of writing the book, and Dee never quite nailed it down.

Say a vampire is an undead humanoid that drinks blood, and then try to define undead. Most are humanoid, but plenty around the world aren’t. Not all of them drink blood. Some eat seeds. Some drink goat’s milk. Some don’t want your blood at all, they want your energy. And the revenant question is worse again, because all traditional vampires are revenants but not all revenants are vampires, and the same Scottish story will call its creature one thing in one version and the other in the next.

In the end, Dee lumped them in together, and included things like the redcap simply because they’re too interesting to leave out. They kill you for your blood rather than drinking it, which technically fails the test, but the book is better for having them.

The vampire as ambush predator

This is the bit I’ve been thinking about ever since.

Dee comes from a biology background, specifically zoology, with a particular love of evolutionary biology. Looked at that way, the vampire is an ambush predator: something that lures prey to it rather than running it down the way a lion runs down a zebra.

Which raises a lovely question. What if the eternal youth, the health, the charm and the good looks aren’t a reward for being a vampire at all? What if they’re the lure? You want your prey coming to you. Older literature does it with hypnosis, modern stories do it with romance, but it’s the same mechanism. We’re planning a whole episode digging further into the vampire from a biological and behavioural angle, and I cannot wait.

We also covered the traditional vampire being a ruddy, bloated walking corpse rather than anything suave, and how literature gave it a glow-up. Dee’s favourite vampire, for the record, is Anne Rice’s Lestat, mostly because he seems to enjoy being a vampire instead of moaning about it. Her view on the brooding modern ones is that you get eternal youth, so you should probably just get over the eating people part.

The gap in Scotland’s undead history

Here’s the question the book ends on, and the one Dee can’t let go of.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries are full of revenant activity. The Catholic Church was formalising its doctrine on the soul, including purgatory, which is a process rather than a place, and if a soul is still going through that process then it can come back. The groundwork for belief was all there. One medieval chronicler makes it sound as though Britain is practically overrun.

Then, somewhere around the fourteenth century, it all stops. Two hundred years of nothing. Eastern Europe gets its vampire hunts in the eighteenth century while Scotland gets only occasional sprinklings. Dee’s theory is that when Britain shifted from Catholicism to Protestantism, we lost the framework that made a returning soul make sense. Witches still made sense to us. Vampires didn’t.

Her favourite unresolved case is the Galloway vampire: a single eighteenth-century letter from a monk describing a suspicious figure he believed was a vampire. Not a superstitious villager, but an educated, travelled, intelligent man. One letter, and nothing else found so far. Dee is convinced there’s more out there, and if you fancy doing a PhD on it, she’d like to know what you find.

Sorry, Aberdeenshire

We had to address the local elephant in the room. Everyone here will tell you that Slains Castle inspired Dracula.

Bram Stoker had already begun writing Dracula before he came to Cruden Bay. Dee is clear that Aberdeenshire contributed rather than started it, and the octagonal room is very likely direct influence. For the full picture she recommends Mike Shepherd’s excellent When Brave Men Shudder. We also got onto Emily Gerard, the Jedburgh-born writer whose work on Transylvanian folklore was hugely influential on Dracula, and whom Stoker himself credited. Her writing is free on Project Gutenberg and well worth your time.

Add Byron, violent folkloric unicorns, Whitby’s cliffs, and Aberdeen’s genuinely alarming historical pirate problem, and you have the shape of the episode.

Huge thanks to SugarBird Wines on the Terrace for having us, and to our first ever live audience, who supplied the question we should have asked ourselves. Our book club starts there next month, the first of many.