In the late 1860s, Nathaniel Cain, a wealthy merchant who dealt in iron ore, bought a mansion at 40 Upper Parliament Street, and hired a cortege of servants to wait upon him.

Mr Cain was a lover of wine, and decided to extend his cellar.

Workmen were brought in to remodel the existing cellar, and during their excavations, they came upon what seemed to be a tomb of granite.

Upon a wall of this tomb were obscure glyphs which resembled Greek letters.

Georgio Eustratiadi, an Italian merchant, and close friend of Mr Cain, was invited into the cellar to look at the 'tomb' and he advised his associate not to enter the cubic vault.

The Italian crossed himself and told his bemused friend that he felt as if something evil lay within that vault.

Mr Cain told the Italian he was superstitious, and that he'd report the vault to the authorities, so that if it did contain mortal remains, they could be re-interred in a churchyard.

The authorities were not informed however, and workmen excavated around the strange vault.

The men said it would be better to leave the stone structure intact, as it would support the roof of the extended wine cellar.

A solicitor from Montpellier Terrace, Thomas Paget, had studied ancient Greek at university, and Mr Cain invited him into the wine cellar to hopefully decode the baffling inscription on the vault.

After Mr Paget had read the inscription, he fled from the cellar, followed closely by the iron merchant.

The inscription had been barely legible to read in some parts, but Mr Paget got the gist of the writing, which warned that the soul of the person within the vault was too wicked to be allowed within the realm of the dead, and an unknown word - "vurculac" - was referred to twice in the engraved message.

Mr Paget consulted his father's library and discovered to his horror that "vurcu-lac" - according to ancient East European folklore - was a type of vampire.

According to Georgio Eustratiadi, his friend Nathaniel Cain paid a sect of monks a huge sum of money to dismantle the vault, and they told him that all it contained was a burial shroud, which soon disintegrated upon contact with the air.

The monks blessed the wine cellar, and told Mr Cain that the vampire had probably gone to ground in a nearby cemetery.

Strangely enough, a month later, a butler at Mr Cain's mansion told her master that she had answered the door one evening to see a man dressed in a black cape on the doorstep, who said nothing, but stared at her with dark menacing eyes, "smiling like the Devil himself".

The girl slammed the door on the caller. Mr Cain dismissed the servant's claim as the product of her imagination...

By the same author: Did Spring Heeled Jack Attack Again In 1909?

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