- I started out actually debunking these things.
Immediately there's a buzz, you know, “Is it real?”
And then you sort of go down the rabbit hole
of, “What is real?”
I'm Jonathan Ferguson, I'm Keeper of Firearms and Artillery
at the Royal Armouries Museum,
and we are here in stores
at the Royal Armouries in Leeds.
What we're here to look at today is,
I would hope is self-explanatory,
but it's a vampire-killing kit.
We've had this kit for about eight years now,
purchased at auction in the North of England.
There are only two of these, as far as we know,
in museums around the world: one in America and one here.
Like us, they want something tangible
of the culture of vampirism, if that makes sense.
They're an aspect of history, they're a part of folklore,
fiction, which is one of the great things about this,
it sort of allows us to talk about that history
and that sort of lost aspect of our subject,
of arms and armor.
It has all the various accoutrements you would need,
in theory, to slay a vampire,
often said to date from the late-19th century.
Very difficult to disprove that, but I have my doubts.
So we've got our stakes here, and a mallet, obviously,
very difficult to pound that stake in unless you're,
I don't know, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," or something.
We've got a crucifix to ward off the vampire, perhaps,
and then down here is a tiny crucifix on a rosary,
set of rosary beads, so it's a very Catholic angle on this,
which is interesting in that vampires originate
from the Slavic countries, where
the Eastern Orthodox Church predominates, but nonetheless.
There's actually also a little Bible inscription in here,
which has the word “slaying" in it,
which I suspect is why it's in there,
otherwise not massively relevant.
The gun, I suppose it sticks out like a sore thumb,
'cause are guns really for killing vampires with?
Well, depends what films you watch, what books you read,
they do feature.
Sometimes, with silver bullets, and we have a mold down here
in that cavity there for casting perhaps silver bullets.
And finally,
there are three bottles containing assorted condiments,
as I like to think of it, so we got garlic in there,
holy water, long since evaporated,
and along with the holiness presumably,
and a labeled bottle that says, "Sacred earth,"
which is possibly a reference to a detail in "Dracula,"
but it's kind of backwards.
"Dracula" can only sort of recharge himself
in his own soil,
and that's the opposite of sacred earth really,
but nonetheless we have a bottle of sacred earth.
These are kind of found objects that we've got in here,
every component is probably of the right date,
the gun is from the 1850s, the prayer book’s from 1851,
the bottles are about the right era.
In this case, the box, according to a box expert,
is about 1920, so "Nosferatu" era rather than "Dracula" era,
but nonetheless of some antiquity.
But when was it all put together?
There's a historical approach
of looking at fiction and folklore:
What do people really think about how to kill vampires,
going back to about the 18th century?
And if you think of these things
as a product like any other,
there's got to be a time in history
where someone would look at this and go,
"Yeah, that's a vampire-killing kit, I want one of those."
When in pop culture, for example,
did the gun become a thing for killing vampires?
Prior to that, no one's gonna want it,
there'd be no market, so all of the items in here
have to be recognizable, iconic, I would say.
So, putting all that together,
I still came out at around about 1970.
But as it turns out,
although I would disappoint some people,
a lot of us are of the opinion that this is still
a contemporary museum object.
You can see them as fakes if you like,
but as far as we know,
there's nothing that they're a fake of,
they're an original thing in their own right.
We weren't quite sure where to put it at first.
At one point we put it on display in the hunting gallery,
so vampire hunting.
And some of them are very functional things,
and they would work if you needed them to work.
Let's hope we don't need this to work at any point.