It was a simple note in an email from my auction friend Rebecca: “Take a look at the auction site of Brunk Auctions, the March 23rd auction. Lot #23. Interesting item for your blog.”
Rebecca knew that I would jump at the word “interesting,” so I stopped what I was doing and headed over to the Brunk website to see what she was talking about. Lot 23 was two Russian gilt silver enamel spoons (they later sold for $750). Those, obviously, were not the right items.
Then she told me to try #43: A Karl Wilhelm Christian Malchin landscape with barn, figures, chickens and shepherd (it later sold for $14,000). Wrong again.
She finally directed me to Lot 64, and bingo. It was a “Vintage Vampire-Killing Kit,” and I was indeed intrigued. She’d heard of people killing vampires, Rebecca said later, but didn’t believe that it was real. Neither did I.
The only vampires I knew about were the ones from old Hollywood films and bad late-night TV movies. I love the old vampire movies (not the new “Twilight” and “True Blood”) like the 1960s “Dark Shadows” with Barnabas Collins and the 1930s “Dracula” with Bela Lugosi. But surely, vampires didn’t actually exist – even in Transylvania.
Here’s how the auction house described the kit:
Late 19th/early 20th century assemblage, comprising an 18th/19th century tooled leather and brass-studded hinged box, interior fitted with marbleized cruciform tray, contains rosary, wax-sealed bottle of holy water, two crucifixes, wooden stake, two German 19th century bottles, knife with leather sheath with gilt cross, folding pocket map of an area in France (fabric backing), other amulets, magnifying glass, 4-1/4 x 12-1/4 x 9 in. box. case with chips and losses; contents with various wear.
It was estimated at $2,000 to $3,000.
I went sleuthing via Google to see if there were others of these things around. To my surprise, page after page of results turned up.
In 2010, Christie’s in London sold a 19th-to-20th-century kit for $8,712 (including buyer’s premium). That same year, someone was featured with a kit on the Auction Kings show on the Discovery channel. Last year, Sotheby’s of New York sold a “circa 1900 and later” kit for $13,750 (including buyer’s premium).
I was curious about how the folks at Brunk of Asheville, NC, ended up with a kit. In an email, a staffer told me that they had gotten it from a private consigner and had no more information about it.
For me, the obvious questions about the kit were: Is it authentic? Or just as fake as the notion of vampires themselves?
There apparently are a lot of fakes out there, as the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, PA, found out about its kit. In a YouTube video, a museum official said they still bring it out for discussions on beliefs about vampires, among other things, and to talk about how to determine the authenticity of objects.
Real kits are said to be rare, according to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum – which has 30 authentic kits, 26 of them in its museums throughout the world.
The kits were bought by Americans traveling to areas of Eastern Europe like Transylvania, according to Ripley, in case they were accosted by vampires. Most were made in Boston and could be gotten by mail order. The kits are said to date back to the mid-1800s.
Some kits also included a gun along with silver bullets, which the kit at auction was lacking.
Vampires have long been the stuff of legends – going back to the 10th century in Europe (or more) – and may have found their way to this country with immigrants in the 1700s. They were popularized in the early 1800s in Eastern Europe and then in 1897 when Bram Stoker put a face on them in his novel “Dracula.”
The vampire kit at Brunk was apparently pretty popular: Someone snapped it up for $3,800.
