In search of monsters

Britain is a land populated by dragons, giants, selkies and supernatural beings – or so the legends go. Kevin Parr meets Monsterland author Nicholas Jubber to hunt for otherworldly creatures

- Kevin Parr

On being told that they had been bitten by a venomous snake, most eight-year-olds would panic.

Not Nicholas Jubber; he was not terrified but disappointed by a diagnosis that contradicted his own. Nicholas had believed that the two small puncture wounds had been inflicted by a subterranean goblin - and that the pain that followed was the beginning of his own transformation into a monster.

This was the moment his young imagination had craved: an actualisation of all the drawings and games in which he had immersed himself. “The skin on my leg was changing colour and there were blisters bursting out,” Jubber recalls. “And I thought, ‘I’m turning into a monster. I’m going to develop sucker pads or tentacles or fangs’. It was all very exciting.”

Instead, thanks to medicine and a non-fantastical cause (an adder bite), Nicholas would remain a human boy - but his childhood fascination for monsters never diminished. “That experience tapped into this fascination that I already had and that illogical fascination for monsters has stayed with me ever since.”

Decades later, Jubber found himself on the slopes of Povlen Mountain in Serbia, where he sought the origins of another being known for inflicting puncture marks. Jubber ventured to a watermill close to the village of Zarožje that was said to have been the haunt of Sava Savanović, an 18th-century vampire who reputedly murdered millers and drank their blood.

As part of a worldwide journey described in his latest book, Monsterland: A Journey Around the World’s Dark Imagination, published earlier this year, Jubber challenged himself to spend a night alone in the mill - a test of nerve that challenged his resolve through eight sleepless hours of darkness. The power of imagination, intensified by the location and the chilling stories that led him there, amplified the sense of terror but also aided his understanding of how such myths evolve.

MIRRORS TO HUMAN HISTORY