Footsteps of the past – part III

People often say when you begin digging up your past, you may unearth a few skeletons in the closet along the way, but I never expected my family history to contain a vampire.

My aunty has spent decades delving into our family history, as my parental grandfather did before her and we know that, through the Halsall side of our lineage, there are Norman barons, medieval knights and Cavaliers who owned large swathes of land in Lancashire and on the Isle of Man. They married wealthy Lancashire heiresses but, as history rarely records the lives of women, we don’t know much about them but we have got photos of portraits of a few, resplendent in their Tudor ruffs, and far closer to the court of Kings and Queens of England than I’d ever known or imagined. My late father had told me the Halsalls were the henchmen of Henry VIII, whatever that meant, while others were members of the Sealed Knot involved in assassination attempts on Oliver Cromwell and helped restore the monarchy, putting Charles II back on the throne. Yet, ironically, their Roman Catholic faith meant they faced huge fines in future generations and – as Recusants – lost much of their lands.

Fast forward to July 2021 and, because of the pandemic, I decided to staycation back in the north-west, spending a few days on the sunny shores of Southport and Formby, before driving inland to spend some precious time with my mum, three sisters and their children. Tricia, my sister, invited me to stay at her house for part of my stay and the two of us were sitting with a glass of gin and tonic in her hot tub one night in her back garden, overlooking golden fields of corn as twilight gently drew upon us, chatting about which bits of DNA we may have inherited from our late grandparents…as you do. Tricia, we figured, was the dark Celtic side from our Welsh Pugh forebearers, while my height meant I’d perhaps picked up a bit of Viking way back through the Norsemen in our line.

Then Tricia asked whether or not I knew we had a vampire in our family history. WTF? She proceeded to tell me the spooky story of Matthew Halsall, who is chained and staked in his grave in a churchyard on the Isle of Man. I swear if a bat had dipped down and taken a drink from the hot tub, I’d have dived out quicker than you could say Bram Stoker, probably leaving behind my new Bravissimo bikini as I made my escape.

I had a restless night’s sleep, imagining tap, tap, tapping on the window as I said the eternal rest over and over. I’d already shut the window, despite the sweltering heat, as didn’t want to look out and find our distant relative looking back at me, having escaped his chained grave across the water, to offer me immortality because we’d been talking of him. No thanks; I’d have to consider going down the route of plastic surgery and all kinds of fillers if that were ever to be the case. The family thought my reaction was hilarious, yet how to explain the howling wind whistling past the house the following day and eerie mist rising off the fields at the height of a hot summer’s day?