The story is in Augustus Hare’s journal for 24 June 1874, printed in volume 4 of The Story of My Life (George Allen, 1900). He says Captain Fisher told it to him. Fisher said the name might sound ordinary, but that his family was old and had long held a one-storey house in Cumberland called Croglin Grange, with a terrace and grounds running down toward a church in the hollow. When the family no longer needed it, he said, they did not build upward. They moved south to Thorncombe, near Guildford, and let the house.

The tenants, in his telling, were two brothers and a sister. He does not name them. They spent a winter there. On a very hot day the next summer they sat out until the moon was up, then went to rooms that were all on the ground floor. The sister left the shutters open. She watched two lights come out of the trees between the lawn and the churchyard, set in something dark that grew as it crossed the grass. It seemed to turn aside. She got up to unlock the door and heard scratching at the window. A brown face with flaming eyes was there. The scratching became a pecking. A diamond of glass fell in. A long bony finger reached through and turned the handle. The figure crossed the room, twisted its fingers into her hair, pulled her head over the side of the bed, and bit her throat. She screamed. The door was locked on the inside. The brothers broke it with a poker. She was unconscious and bleeding. One brother chased the figure across the lawn until it seemed to go over the wall into the churchyard.

A doctor was sent for. The wound was a real one, in Fisher’s account, and it healed, but the doctor wanted her taken away. The brothers took her to Switzerland. She was the one who wanted to go back. They had taken the house for seven years and had used one. Lunatics, she said, do not escape every day. They returned. She kept the same room and shut the shutters, which in that house still left one top pane bare. The brothers moved into a room opposite hers and kept pistols loaded.

The winter was quiet. The following March she woke to the same scratching. The same brown, shrivelled face was at the top pane. She screamed. The brothers ran out with the pistols. One shot the figure in the leg. It went on, over the wall, and seemed to drop into a vault belonging to a family long extinct. Next day the brothers called the tenants, and the vault was opened in front of them. Coffins were broken and the bodies inside torn about, except one coffin, its lid loose. In it was the same brown, withered figure, whole, with a fresh pistol wound in the leg. They burned it. Hare ends on Fisher’s line that burning is the only thing that lays a vampire.

That is the whole contemporary record: a story told to Hare in 1874, with both attacks and the burning already in it. The sister is not called Amelia. The brothers are not named. The family is not called Cranswell. Those names, and the years 1875 and 1876, are Valentine Dyall’s, in Fate for April 1954. Dyall has the vault opened in March 1876. Hare had already written the finished story, burning included, on 24 June 1874.

Croglin Low Hall, in the parish of Kirkoswald, is the house the name points at. It is listed, and the old name Croglin Grange is one of the names on the record. The list describes a tower reduced at one time to a single storey and later built up again, to about two and a half storeys, with a chapel belonging to the house that was pulled down in the nineteenth century. Fisher’s line that the house had never been more than one storey high does not match the building that stands. F. Clive-Ross, writing in 1963, was told by a Mrs Parkin that the deeds of Croglin Low Hall still used the name Croglin Grange until about 1720, and that she put the tale in about 1680 to 1690. She also said a Fisher born in the middle of the 1860s had heard it all his life, from his grandparents. That is what she told Clive-Ross. It is not a date in Hare, and it is not a register of a body taken out of a vault and burned.