One application of vampirology is the study of so-called “Vampire Killing Kits.” I have been intrigued by these ever since I began to see them in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museums and elsewhere. But I chose the “or Not!”: I was suspicious of them almost from the beginning.
I encountered one such item (labeled “Genuine Vampire Killing Kit c. 1850”) in mid-2002 at Ripley’s in Hollywood (see figure 11.1). It appears to be the same one referred to in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Encyclopedia of the Bizarre (Mooney et al. 2002, 247), which states:
Figure ll.l. Reputed “Vampire Killing Kit” dates from circa 1850 (photograph by the author).
The handsome wooden box, lined with red velvet, contains everything a mortal might need to ward off an attack on the undead: a vial of holy water, a necklace of garlic, and a polished wooden stake for skewering the bloodsucker through the heart. But most effective of all: a small pistol in the shape of a crucifix, designed to shoot—you guessed it—silver bullets!
Another kit is found in the Ripley’s museum in Niagara Falls, Ontario. It is dated “circa 1840’s” and identified as “Made in Boston, USA,” ostensibly for American travelers to Transylvania. If that seems an unusually small market for such a commercial item, consider this printed label in the lid, headed “Vampire Killing Kit”:
This kit contains the items considered necessary for the protection of persons who travel into certain little known countries of Eastern Europe, where the populace are plagued with a particular manifestation of evil known as Vampires. Professor Ernst Blomberg respectfully requests that the purchaser of this kit, carefully studies his book in order, should evil manifestations become apparent, he is equipped to deal with them efficiently. Professor Blomberg wishes to announce his grateful thanks to that well known gunmaker of Liege, Nicholas Plomdeur whose help in the
compiling of the special items, the silver bullets, &c, has been most efficient.
The items enclosed are as follows:
(1) An efficient pistol with its usual accouterments.
(2) Silver Bullets.
(3) An ivory crucifix.
(4) Powdered flowers of garlic.
(5) A wooden stake.
(6) Professor Blomberg’s new serum.
Unfortunately, several other kits with similarly worded labels exist, yet, suspiciously, no two are alike. Many look like the result of old boxes and chests possibly having had their insides repartitioned and re-covered in velvet, then having been outfitted with a mishmash of ye olde items culled from antique shops. One such kit sold at Sotheby’s on October 30, 2003, for a reported twelve thousand dollars and was accompanied by a “catalogue note”: “Some vampire experts claim kits such as the present lot were very common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among travelers to Eastern Europe. . . . Others claim that the kits originated in twentieth century America and are nothing more than romantic curiosities.”
In fact, a bibliographic search conducted for me by Center for Inquiry Libraries director Timothy Binga failed to show any vampire book by a “Professor Ernst Blomberg.” This is notwithstanding a pamphlet of dubious typography and plagiarized text (“Regarding” 2008).
One “Blomberg” kit was owned by the Henry J. Mercer Tool Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, but officials became suspicious and had it tested. The labels’ paper contained “fluorescent optical brightening agents” that date from after World War II. The glass in the magnifier also proved modern, and there were other signs of fakery, including the fact that the “silver” bullets were actually of pewter. (Indeed, the notion that silver bullets kill vampires is one largely redirected from werewolf legend by fiction and films [Bunson 2000, 240]).
The Blomberg kits appear universally to be fake. According to one research report (“Regarding” 2008), a man named Michael de Winter of Torquay, United Kingdom, admitted in December 2004 that “The whole VAMPIRE KILLING KIT myth is purely the result of my very fertile imagination and I produced The Original’ in 1972.” He wrote that he had hatched the scheme in order to sell a vintage, but substandard, pistol.
I purchased a different vampire kit—an assemblage of ludicrous items (including a test tube and dental mirror)—that I bought at a reasonable