The Sad Story of a Vampire. Eric Stenbock

      Now largely forgotten by all but a few devotees, Eric Count Stenbock was at the end of 19th century London a symbol of his age – a true aristocrat in the society of Decadents – unconventional writers and artists and eccentric dandies, who were influenced by Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement and whose aim was “to exist beautifully“. They had a taste for the exotic and bizarre with wild drinking habits and a morbid preoccupation with death.

      Both the life and the work of Count Eric perfectly captured the mood of the Decadent movement. In his short life he so impressed himself upon his contemporaries that the legends they tell of him in memoirs far outstrip the attention given to his writings, the three slim volumes of verse and one book of sombre short stories.

      The seven stories in the brief collection Studies of Death: Romantic Tales appeared in 1894 and reflect his unique personality. The most successful of these is The True Story of a Vampire which is often included in the collections of classic vampire stories, sometimes under the title The Sad Story of a Vampire. A melancholy, somewhat morbid story about a not at all bloodthirsty vampire.

      Eric Count Stenbock was born on March 12th, in 1860 in England near Cheltenham. He was the son of a Baltic count and a Manchester textile heiress and spent most of his short life in England.

      The Stenbocks were an aristocratic Swedish family with royal connections and had owned vast estates in Estonia since the 17th century. Eric was the oldest direct heir and in February 1885, when his grandfather in Estonia died, he inherited the extensive estates located on the north coast of the Baltic Sea.

      It must have been quite an sensation when he arrived in Kolga (Kolk), which was the largest manor in Estonia, in a green suit and orange silk shirt. He lived there a scant 18 months. Of course he behaved eccentrically: in addition to his love of exotic and vivid costume and the burning of incense, he kept snakes, lizards and toads in his peacock-blue bedroom, and maintained a garden “zoo” featuring a reindeer, a fox, and a bear. He had rows of sunflowers planted in the estate park, he would smoke opium and play the piano late into the night, emerging next day late, naturally, in a dressing gown with a snake wrapped around his neck.