It\u2019s that time of year again, when ghoulies and ghosties walk abroad and things go bump in the night. I used to love Halloween. Back in the 1970s it was an\u00a0understated, charming affair: a ghostly poem read at school, perhaps; a corny old black-and-white horror film on the television, or a spooky cartoon. One golden Halloween afternoon, my grandmother taught me to carve little turnip lanterns. That was about it.\u00a0I doubt my parents were even aware of the significance of the date.<\/p>\n
These days I\u2019ve got mixed feelings. Halloween\u2019s everywhere. The shops are full of tacky merchandise, and gangs of masked teenagers roam the streets demanding \u2018Halloween candy\u2019. Every year I barricade our front door and Venetia hangs out the garlic \u2013 we turn off the lights and pretend we\u2019ve gone to Positano for the week. This year, I\u2019m tempted to buy an \u2018antique\u2019 vampire hunter\u2019s kit to ward them off. That\u2019s if I could ever afford one.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Do you know about these kits? They come up for sale at auction<\/a> from time to time. They\u2019re great fun. There\u2019s usually a fitted, velvet-lined Victorian mahogany box containing all manner of useful goodies for\u00a0slaying vampires:\u00a0silver crucifixes,\u00a0stakes, wooden\u00a0mallets, bibles and\u00a0prayer books, little glass vials (for the holy water), silver bullet moulds, rosary beads and percussion cap pistols.<\/p>\n And the prices ain\u2019t cheap. In 2010 a \u2018vampire killing kit\u2019 sold at Christie\u2019s South Kensington for \u00a36,000 and, two years later, a \u2018vampire slaying kit\u2019 sold at Tennants for \u00a37,500 before ending up in the collection of the Royal Armouries in Leeds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s all fine, as long as you understand that as \u2018kits\u2019 they\u2019re about as old as that dog-eared Dennis Wheatley paperback found for sale at a summer fete. They\u2019re fake. Or, to be fair to the auction houses, they\u2019re \u2018composites\u2019 \u2013 made up from genuine 19th-century boxes, antique pistols and vintage<\/a> paraphernalia, fitted together with skill at a later date.<\/p>\n The first vampire slaying kit is thought to have appeared for sale in the United States in 1986, attributed to a mysterious Professor Blomberg and one Nicolas Plomdeur, gunsmith of Li\u00e8ge, Belgium. Others followed.<\/p>\n Some believed they were novelty items, sold off the back of Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula to well-heeled tourists\u00a0travelling across Eastern Europe in the early 20th\u00a0century. It\u2019s a nice idea, but there\u2019s one little snag. The kits\u00a0typically include pistols and moulds to make silver bullets.\u00a0But, as those of you who know your horror films will remember, silver bullets are for slaying werewolves, not vampires. The idea that you could kill a vampire with a silver bullet only took hold in the popular imagination following the release of Hammer\u2019s The Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1973.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nYou might also enjoy:\u00a0<\/h4>\n
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