cases. Cases of vampirism may be said to be in our time, a rare occult phenomenon,

wrote English clergyman and author Augustus Montague

Summers, who died in 1948. He continues, yet whether we are justified in supposing that they

are less frequent today than in past centuries, I am far from certain. One thing is plain, not that they do not occur,

but that they are carefully hushed up and stifled. Summers was an independent scholar,

who published many works on the English dramas of the Stuart Restoration and helped to organise

the performance of plays from that period. Noted for his eccentric personality and interests,

Summers became a popular figure in London High Society. But there was something else that he became renowned for too,

an abiding fascination with vampires. And he undertook substantial research into the topic.

Summers was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, although he gained only a fourth class degree in theology,

he then went on to become ordained, and he became a curate in Bristol,

although many at the time questioned whether he had ever actually been ordained at all.

Summers left his church role pretty quickly after managing to escape

unscathed from a scandal involving himself and choir boys. According to a memoir by Jerome Joseph,

when a friend of Summers from Oxford, J.wood Anderson, visited Summers at his vicarage,

he found Summers, quote, in a thoroughly neurotic state and exhibiting a morbid fascination with evil.

Father Brockard Sewell in the foreword to Summers' book, The Vampire in Europe,

wrote, Summers was something of a mystery even during his lifetime. Rumour and legend had it,

that he was, or had been, something more than an academic historian of the Black Arts,

which he chronicled with such learning and gusto.

It is quite probable that the warnings sounded in his books against the dangers of dabbling in necromancy were based on some early experiences of his own.

Sir Henry Chanon, a conservative politician, says in his diaries that Summers claimed in private conversation with him to have attended Black Masses in Bruges, Brighton and London,

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