Your Nice Photos - list camera details too if you like [2022-02]

Next year, submit your pic. It’s as good as any here.

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Exorcism kit?

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Dueling pistols?

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This is a vampire slaying kit, very old. Sold at auction for $20k while expected to sell for 1/10th that. It is from ~1900 and was owned by Lord Hailey administrator of British India.

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Believe it or not, that was my next guess with the stake and hammer. But, are pistols effective against vampires?

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Only if they had some Garlic loaded ammo.:grin:

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Silver bullet apparently!

Mystery surrounds aristocrat’s vampire hunting kit - BBC News

*Is this a real kit…?
To answer this question, I completed a thorough survey of vampire slaying in both folklore and fiction. In the process it became clear that kits like our one could not have existed until the era of Hammer horror films in the 1950s–70s. Our kit is inspired by the movies, not Victorian stories and folklore.

This may come as a disappointment to some, and one would think this would affect the trade in these kits, if they are increasingly known to be ‘fake’. Yet in reviewing sales, something curious becomes apparent. Even kits catalogued as pieces of art or whimsy command high prices.

We in the museum world recognise the importance of ‘contemporary collecting’; after all, art galleries have been doing it for centuries. At the Royal Armouries we also collect modern pieces, including those made for stage and screen, often to the same standards as medieval originals.

We also collect the weird and unusual. The vampire kits clearly fall into this category. However, I maintain that they are valid pieces of material culture in their own right. With no other physical means of representing the historical conflict between people and imaginary creatures like vampires, these manufactured substitutes, themselves a good generation or two old already, are a way to interpret that lost part of history.

It is fitting, therefore, that the Armouries should preserve this example for the nation. It remains an invented artefact that reflects our cultural obsession with the vampire and tells the story of the people that believed in, and tried to fight, our favourite monster.*

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Wasn’t that for werewolves?

What? (10 char)

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@Jim_F . I know. It’s hard to dispel the illusion…unless you know different :vampire:

The meaning behind the silver bullet

Although the 1959 Universal film Curse of the Undead does feature a vampire being staked with silver, a silver bullet was not used in fiction until Peter Cushing melted down a silver cross in Hammer’s Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) and moulded it into a bullet.

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Perhaps a dual purpose kit for also dealing with werewolves? It is like having a blender that is also a juicer.

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Garlic loaded catridges…now that has potential.

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Did he say imaginary? I just wish that they did not exist, but I know the beast beneath my bed, in my closet…in my head.

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Darn movies…

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@7NoteScale . In the voice of Columbo “just one question sir. Dr. A, Are you aware that people could interpret those letters as the first three letters in the word DrAcula?”
Do you know more than you are currently revealing? :bat:

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That’s been my experience also.

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Excellent revelation. I feel that I have been exposed. There are dangers in this becoming known…sleep with one eye open, clutching your pillow tight.

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Can one kill vampires with a sun-flower? :wink:

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Getting closer .



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