Harrowing Historicals: Keeping the Spirits Alive | A Guest Post by Sarah Jane Stratford

The city of York, England, doesn’t need Halloween to spook you. It is one of the most haunted cities in Europe, with over 140 separate ghosts sighted over the years. The richness of the city’s history, both normal and para, made it an obvious home for my sophisticated, ancient vampires (until they moved to London at the dawn of the Renaissance). It’s a city I know well, having done a master’s degree in medieval history at the university there. You can learn a lot simply from walking the streets – and you don’t need a ghost tour to feel the phantoms that still lurk.

York’s history is fascinating, but some of it is very ugly. In creating the beginning of the centuries-long romance between my vampire heroine Brigit and her partner Eamon, I was drawn to the devastating story of the 1190 massacre of York’s Jews. The small Jewish community had fled to what is now Clifford’s Tower when an anti-Semitic riot began and was awaiting the arrival of the King’s Men. But the rioters set fire to the tower, hoping to force them out. Rather than surrender to the mob, the Jews took their own lives.

Having lived in York, I knew this story well and had visited the site several times. As I was rereading the details prior to fictionalizing it, I was surprised to come across an eerie legend, of which I had never before heard. After the tower was rebuilt in stone, red stains appeared on it – stains that citizens believed was the blood of the victims. More recently, tests show that the stains are due to iron oxide or rust from the stone – but no other stone from the same quarry has ever been found to contain either mineral. I tend to be a skeptic in such matters, but having walked around the tower and felt the history beneath my feet, the story gives me pause.

I often thought about the ghosts in Clifford’s Tower as I created my own story, wherein Brigit sees the Jews entering the Tower and knows they won’t come out. The sight of Eamon, and the sound of his singing, makes her fall in love at once – she lures him away and turns him into a vampire. Attracted though he is to her, he spends years mourning those he lost in the massacre before they can at last be lovers. When Brigit gets a chance to salvage the botched vampire mission to prevent World War II, she finds it’s also, at long last, a means of redressing this more personal past.

In juxtaposing this story against the Nazi persecution of Jews, my interest was less in the fears of both those murdered and those haunted, than in the inspiring bravery of the victims. It’s a story few people know outside of Britain – indeed, outside of York – and I wanted to change that. There must always be some consideration in taking such a shocking true story and using it in fiction, but I found it to be inherent to the narrative. The horror of the history formed the backbone of the romance – Eamon knew he would have died had he stayed in the Tower. As a vampire, he forges a new “life” and keeps alive the memory of those involved for centuries.

Eamon’s ghosts are benign spirits, which I like to think makes them more true to the original notion of Halloween. The Celtic Halloween marked the new year, the day when the divide between the spirit and physical realms was closest and so the dead could readily step over and walk the earth. The Celts welcomed the dead – these were ancestors and recently deceased relatives and friends. It was less an occasion for fear than celebration. I wanted to honor this idea – that although the characters are vampires and thus, by the most standard definition, “monsters,” they might still have ghosts they embrace. And in Brigit and Eamon’s romance, they both literally and figuratively keep those spirits alive.

About the Author
SARAH JANE STRATFORD received an MA in medieval history from the University of York in England. She lives in New York. The Midnight Guardian is her first novel. Before becoming a novelist Sarah wrote screenplays, including her contest-winning The Tale of the Torturer’s Daughter. In addition to writing the next set of millennial adventures, Sarah Jane is also working on two stage plays.

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