Malew church, dedicated to St Lupus, stands among fields between Castletown and Ballasalla. In its churchyard is a grave that nobody passes without a second look. Four iron stakes are sunk into the ground at its corners, and heavy iron chains are strung between them over the slab. It belongs to Matthew Hassal and his wife Margaret, who died in 1858 at the age of 52 and is described on the stone as a faithful and affectionate wife.
The story told about it is that while Matthew was laid out and his family and friends sat mourning, the corpse sat up and let out a long moan. Word went round that he was something worse than dead. Before he was buried a sharpened wooden stake was driven through his heart, and to make sure he stayed where he was put, the iron stakes and chains were fixed over the grave.
There are other explanations. One local story says Matthew killed himself, and so could not be buried in consecrated ground, and that his coffin had to be passed in under the boundary wall so he lay just on the right side of it. The dullest and likeliest is that the chains were meant to stop body snatchers, who were active across Britain and Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The Isle of Man Today has pointed out that Malew churchyard had a real strange episode a few years later. On Easter morning 1863 two brothers-in-law of a woman named Morrison secretly opened her grave to untie knots left in her shroud, because of the Manx belief that knots would hold her spirit back. They were caught and tried. That one is documented. The vampire is not.
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