A dive into the demonic at the Musée des Vampires in Paris

21.07.2023 - 08:35 / roughguides.com / Oscar Wilde

In the quiet Parisian suburb of Les Lilas, down an anonymous side street, is a scarlet door. I knock on it three times; no one answers. I wander around the corner to look for another entrance. Beyond a wrought iron padlocked gate is a thickly overgrown garden; beyond that, a frosted window dimly illuminated by a flickering light. A wonky sign saying ‘Musée’ is stuffed between the foliage and the bars of the gate. This is definitely the place — Paris' Vampire Museum.

I raise my hand to knock again when the door swings open. Standing before me is what appears to be a completely unremarkable man: in mid-middle age, on the short side, with thick glasses and clipped dark hair. This is Jacques Sirgent, France’s pre-eminent vampirologist and the proprietor of what he claims is the world’s only vampire museum. Long black leather jacket aside, you’d never guess.

The Vampire Museum houses everything from movie posters to antique demonic texts © Dan Stables

Jacques greets me cheerfully and leads me through the small, neglected garden into his museum: a gloomy room stuffed from floor to ceiling with decades’ worth of accumulated vampiric and demonological curios. It immediately strikes me as a strange combination of the kitsch and the genuinely creepy. Rubber werewolf masks and plastic skulls jostle for space on a dusty bookshelf with a vampire bat, stuffed and encased in glass. One wall is pasted with Dracula film posters and signed photos of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and other actors to have portrayed the world’s most famous vampire. As I’m scanning them, my eye is drawn to something else: the mummified remains of a cat, spray-painted gold.

“I specialise in the physical embodiment of evil in Gothic literature, and the devil in European literature,” Jacques tells me. “I was raised in a harsh Irish Catholic school in Canada, and I discovered very young that vampires can be nicer than Christians.”

Jacques’ expertise in the worlds of folklore and mythology have seen him give talks in universities all over the world, but his interest is not merely academic. Jacques is on a mission to give vampires a PR makeover.

“The first nasty vampire is Dracula,” Jacques says. “Dracula feeds his vampire wives babies.” Nasty indeed – but the story goes back a long way before Bram Stoker’s 1897 creation crystallised the modern archetype of the suave, villainous vampire. Stories of undead bloodsucking creatures go back thousands of years, and crop up in most cultures across the world. Often, they have been feared, demonised and despised – but Jacques prefers to see things differently.

Many famous people are buried at Père Lachaise cemetery, including Oscar Wilde © Dan Stables

“Vampires are the nicest creatures ever,” he says. “The