On a stifling summer night in a Cumberland valley, a young woman lay awake with her shutters open and watched two small lights move through the churchyard beyond the lawn. She thought they were lanterns. They were not lanterns.

The Croglin Vampire is the closest thing England has to a native bloodsucker — a brown, shrivelled, flame-eyed figure that picked the lead from a window frame with its fingernails and bit a woman’s throat in her own bedroom. Its story reaches us through a single Victorian memoir, a dinner-party anecdote set down decades after the fact.

And when investigators went looking for Croglin Grange, they found no such house. No church. No family in the records. A plot that closely echoes a penny dreadful half of England had read.

Then someone went back, and talked to the people who lived there — and found the story was older than the man who told it, and found the foundation stones of a chapel still lying in the grass.