We don’t have quite that many documents on the topic—a lot of our search hits are duplicates—but it looks as if, for a long period (from about 1792 through 1969), every single vampire novel published in the United Kingdom was read and synopsized by our Occult Entities Monitoring Desk, or the Zoological Enquiry Bureau, or the Linnean Anomalies Committee. (It got renamed every couple of decades, like clockwork.) I am absolutely gobsmacked to discover this. I already knew that we had far more information about unicorns on file than seems strictly necessary to anyone without EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN clearance, but vampires? You can’t even write it off as the work of a single demented fan; not when it ran for 177 years. (Well, 153 years. We have synopses going back to 1792, but the first folios didn’t get compiled until 1816.)

But wait, there’s more! There is a once-classified (Top Secret, fifty-year rule) file on one Abraham Stoker of London (d. April 20th, 1912). It’s quite thick and appears to contain a bunch of PV interview records with his friends and family, for pre–First World War values of positive vetting. (Full of comments along the lines of, “Jolly good chap, eminently clubbable for an Irishman.”) I checked with HR, and there’s no record that we ever employed him.

There’s a report of an investigation, circa 1899, into the book Dracula, which appears to have investigated the possibility that it was based on fact (and drew a blank). A much more urgent investigation into The Lair of the White Worm followed in 1912, but Mr. Stoker was indisposed to answer questions in person, and the investigator hinted darkly that “excited delirium due to an unspeakable ailment” had more to do with the phantasmagoric (not to say misogynistic) visions in that book than any supernatural experience.

There are all sorts of other things, investigations into silent movies and TV serials (I pulled the file on “Quatermass” for shits and giggles—strictly speaking not germane to the project in hand, but I’d hit burn-out by that point and badly needed some relief reading that wasn’t the eleventh Harry Dresden novel). As I implied earlier, the frequency of reports tailed off after the late 1950s, until there were only a couple a year coming in. And then everything stopped dead, as if guillotined, on April 5, 1969.

April 5th. You know what that means to me? That means the budget for the project expired at the end of financial year 1968 and was not renewed. (Yes, British government budgets—and the tax year—start on April 6th. Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t your tax years start and stop on a random date in April?)