The only canonal Sherlock Holmes story where Holmes investigates the claims that someone is a vampire.
Holmes and Watson's views on vampires[]
"Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It's pure lunacy."
"But surely," said I, "the vampire was not necessarily a dead man? A living person might have the habit. I have read, for example, of the old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain their youth."
"You are right, Watson. It mentions the legend in one of these references. But are we to give serious attention to such things? This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."
The explanation[]
"Let me tell you, then, the train of reasoning which passed through my mind in Baker Street. The idea of a vampire was to me absurd. Such things do not happen in criminal practice in England. And yet your observation was precise. You had seen the lady rise from beside the child's cot with the blood upon her lips."
"I did."
"Did it not occur to you that a bleeding wound may be sucked for some other purpose than to draw the blood from it? Was there not a queen in English history who sucked such a wound to draw poison from it?"
"Poison!"
"A South American household. My instinct felt the presence of those weapons upon the wall before my eyes ever saw them. It might have been other poison, but that was what occurred to me. When I saw that little empty quiver beside the small birdbow, it was just what I expected to see. If the child were pricked with one of those arrows dipped in curare or some other devilish drug, it would mean death if the venom were not sucked out."
Notes[]
- There may be a little inside joke/pun in the title of the story.
- "The Hound of the Baskervilles" episode of Nightmare: The Birth of Victorian Horror states that Conan-Doyle never mixed his two lives of the rational and the spiritual again though this story does shows a mix of the rational and the supernatural.
- It is interesting that Holmes could only find information on one type of vampire.