The Story of Baelbrow
Summary
A ghost story with a mysterious twist. Flaxman Low is summoned to Baelbrow, the ancestral home of the Swaffam family, to investigate a strange occurance. Although Baelbrow has long been known to be haunted, the family ghost had for centuries restricted itself to occasional rustlings on the stairs or sighs in the pantry. Suddenly the ghost has taken on a much more sinister and corporeal form. It lies in wait for people and attacks them viciously, leaving them unconscious and exhausted. (Goodreads)
Egyptomania narratives or motifs
Baelbrow House, situated near Britain’s East Anglian Coast, is haunted and a peaceful ghost has lived in its rooms and halls for generations. In recent days, however, the residents of the house, the Swaffam family and the domestic service, have been the victims of attacks by this being, which manifests itself fleetingly with parts of its body covered in yellowish bands and leaves bloody marks on the necks of its victims. “The Story of Baelbrow”, therefore, combines three fundamental premises of horror literature: haunted houses, mummies and vampires.
The vampiric mummy arises from the fusion of two distinct entities: the vampiric evil having been spontaneously conceived in a cursed place, due to the presence of a cemetery in the subsoil of the house, and the physical body provided by the mummy shortly before acquired by Mr Swaffam and placed inside a sarcophagus that decorates one of the rooms of the mansion.
This short story was first published in 1898, a time of great development of the literary sub-genre of “mummy fiction”, mainly in Britain, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892) and Bram Stoker’s "The Jewel of Seven Stars" (1903), among others.
The aristocratic taste typical of 19th century Europe, and even earlier, for the acquisition of mummies, as we see in the case of Mr Swaffam, is also illustrated in E.A. Poe’s story “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), on this latter occasion the mummy with much less malicious intentions than in E. and H. Heron’s story.
Some additional information about the mummy’s appearance and origin is provided during the dialogues between Flaxman Low and Harold Swaffam, the main protagonists of the story:
I fancy this mummy was preserved on the Theban method with aromatic spices, which left the skin olive-coloured, dry and flexible, like tanned leather, the features remaining distinct, and the hair, teeth, and eyebrows perfect.
At the end of the story, the mummy-vampire, wounded by a bullet shot by Low, is abandoned in a burning canoe thrown into the river. This was the last resting place of the unfortunate being who for so many centuries rested in a pyramid in Egypt.
Finally, it should be noted that “The Story of Baelbrow” is possibly the oldest example of the Egyptian vampire in contemporary popular culture, and the only example, to my knowledge, of the symbiosis between vampires and mummies.
The vampiric mummy arises from the fusion of two distinct entities: the vampiric evil having been spontaneously conceived in a cursed place, due to the presence of a cemetery in the subsoil of the house, and the physical body provided by the mummy shortly before acquired by Mr Swaffam and placed inside a sarcophagus that decorates one of the rooms of the mansion.
This short story was first published in 1898, a time of great development of the literary sub-genre of “mummy fiction”, mainly in Britain, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892) and Bram Stoker’s "The Jewel of Seven Stars" (1903), among others.
The aristocratic taste typical of 19th century Europe, and even earlier, for the acquisition of mummies, as we see in the case of Mr Swaffam, is also illustrated in E.A. Poe’s story “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), on this latter occasion the mummy with much less malicious intentions than in E. and H. Heron’s story.
Some additional information about the mummy’s appearance and origin is provided during the dialogues between Flaxman Low and Harold Swaffam, the main protagonists of the story:
I fancy this mummy was preserved on the Theban method with aromatic spices, which left the skin olive-coloured, dry and flexible, like tanned leather, the features remaining distinct, and the hair, teeth, and eyebrows perfect.
At the end of the story, the mummy-vampire, wounded by a bullet shot by Low, is abandoned in a burning canoe thrown into the river. This was the last resting place of the unfortunate being who for so many centuries rested in a pyramid in Egypt.
Finally, it should be noted that “The Story of Baelbrow” is possibly the oldest example of the Egyptian vampire in contemporary popular culture, and the only example, to my knowledge, of the symbiosis between vampires and mummies.
Author: Abraham I. Fernández Pichel
Other information
E. Dobson, Emasculating Mummies: Gender and Psychological Threat inFin-de-SiècleMummy Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 2018, VOL. 40, NO. 4, pp. 398, 401, 405.
Open access
A. Briefel, “Hands of Beauty, Hands of Horror: Fear and Egyptian Art at the Fin de Siècle”, Victorian Studies, Volume 50, Number 2, Winter 2008, pp. 265, 270.
Open access
D.V. Sutherland, The Mummy. Leighton, 2019, p. 20.
Not available
A. Bulfin, “The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal”, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 54, Number 4, 2011, pp. 413, 419, 440.
Open access
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