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| - Vintage "vampire killing kits" occasionally turn up at auction, accompanied by the claim they are genuine antique artifacts from the 19th century. While it may sometimes be the case that such kits contain individual items that qualify as antiques, there is no evidence that vampire killing kits were a real thing in previous centuries, or that this particular example dates from the 1800s.
An image purportedly showing a real antique vampire killing kit circulated (archived) on social media (archived) in October 2024. For example, one X post (archived) that featured a photo of the kit as the first example in a thread of "Crazy things from the past" had received around 19,000 reposts and 249,000 likes at the time of this writing.
Crazy things from the past ๐งต
1. Vampire killing kit pic.twitter.com/FbGctUUGFg
โ James Lucas (@JamesLucasIT) October 20, 2024
In the image's ALT text, the X user who created the post wrote:
While most vampire-killing kits presented as 19th-century artifacts are believed to actually date from the second half of the 20th century, this particular kit belonged to a 19th-century nobleman named Lord William Malcolm Hailey. Hansons Auctioneers, the New York Post, and several other publications have reported that it dates back to the 19th century.
It is true that Hansons Auctioneers โ the company that listed the kit for auction in 2022 โ identified it as a late-19th-century vampire killing kit that once belonged to William Malcolm Hailey, a British lord who lived from 1872 to 1969 and spent the majority of his life working as a colonial administrator in India. The kit, according to the auction listing, contained items including crucifixes, pistols, a glass bottle for holy water, a wooden mallet and a stake.
(Hansons Auctioneers)
It's also true that multiple publications reported the same details about the kit's provenance when the kit sold for 13,000 pounds (around $15,000) in June 2022.
However, there was no concrete evidence to back up claims that the kit was an authentic set of instruments used for killing vampires in the 19th century, nor that it ever belonged to Hailey.
Jonathan Ferguson, keeper of firearms and artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, has investigated so-called vampire killing kits for more than a decade and uncovered no evidence that any such kits existed in the 19th century.
In fact, as he has written in various articles and blog posts, Ferguson has concluded that the kits first emerged in the mid-to-late 20th century as a result of the popularity of low-budget vampire movies made by Hammer Film Productions.
As we found when we investigated another alleged vampire killing kit in 2019, some of these kits may contain individual items โ such as bibles and crucifixes โ that are genuinely old. However, these items would not have originally been part of any kit intended for killing vampires.
The assertion that Hailey once owned the particular kit under investigation here seemingly lent credibility to claims of the kit being an actual artifact from the late 19th century โ which, if true, would make it the oldest known vampire killing kit by decades.
There was no demonstrable evidence to back up claims of Hailey's onetime ownership of the kit under investigation here, however โ and, accordingly, no proof that this particular kit was an exception to the general rule that such kits are modern creations sold as novelty items, as opposed to real artifacts used for hunting vampires.
Over email, Ferguson said he was aware of this specific kit and found no reason to believe it was an authentic 19th-century vampire killing kit โ even if, as is sometimes the case with kits advertised as such, some of the individual items included in it might be genuine antiques.
Ultimately, Ferguson said, the kit looks to him "like a deliberate fake," although he noted that he could not prove this definitively because his attempts to contact the kit's 2022 buyer through the auction house had been unsuccessful. The buyer's identity was not public information.
Ferguson also said that a representative for Hansons Auctioneers told him in 2022 that it did not acquire it directly from any member of the Hailey family and had no hard proof that Hailey ever owned it. This detail was at odds with previous reporting on the kit. For example, in a 2023 article (archived), a reporter for The Washington Post wrote:
According to founder Charles Hanson, his company was approached by a relative of Lord Hailey, who died in 1969, to sell the artifact. Though no documentation exists proving Hailey owned the kit, he was told that Hailey had acquired the kit around 1900 and that it had remained untouched in the relative's home for the last 50 years.
Instead, Ferguson said, the auction house told him that the kit's actual consignor was a private vendor who had no familial connection to Hailey, and who had purchased the kit from an unknown seller in a private sale.
A representative for Hansons Auctioneers confirmed over email that the person who approached them with the kit was not, in fact, a relative of Hailey's, but an unrelated individual who told them he had acquired the kit in Nottinghamshire, England. The evidence for the kit's connection to Hailey, according to the representative, was that "the kit had Lord Hailey's name and address inside and some items were stamped with his initials."
In summary, there was no demonstrable evidence to suggest that the alleged vampire killing kit in the photograph was any more authentic than comparable modern kits created and sold as novelty items. For this reason, we have rated the photograph as miscaptioned.
In the end, Ferguson said, the authenticity of vampire killing kits doesn't matter to many buyers, who are often well aware that the kits are modern novelty items rather than authentic 19th-century sets used for hunting vampires. These buyers, he said, are "buying into the fantasy, like paying a lot of money for a movie prop."
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