A vampire conspiracy séance for your party

For a dime, the carnival would show you a vampire's heart

A hundred years ago you could hand a barker a coin and be shown a genuine vampire hunting kit. Stakes and a mallet, a crucifix, glass vials, a pistol loaded with silver — and at the center of it, always, a heart. Billed as the still‑beating organ of something that refused to die. People swore that if you stared long enough, you could see it move.

Carnival theater, of course. A dime's worth.

But the kits didn't start on the midway. They were built decades earlier, and they were built for a reason nobody was ever supposed to find.

So they made evidence. Forged journals. Staged rescue reports. Fabricated medical findings signed by real doctors. Whole hunting kits, aged and worn and handed over with a straight face. Every detail built to convince these men they were fighting for God and for mankind.

They weren't. They were instruments, pointed at inconvenient people, by men considerably more monstrous than anything in the journals.

The Hargreaves file

William Hargreaves was one of their best. A former army surgeon, precise and calm, handed a kit and told he was hunting monsters. He believed every word.

Then he fell in love. He married in June of 1865, and by late summer he wanted out. The men running the operation did not let their best instruments walk away. Months later he found his wife murdered, and the scene had been staged to look like a vampire attack.

His diary is where it gets strange. He writes about hearing her moving through the house at night. He writes about driving a stake through her heart, and keeping that heart in this kit, hoping to bring her back once he'd had his revenge.

What comes out of the box

A wooden case with a crucifix set into the lid, worn the way a thing gets worn by being carried a long way. Inside:

• A hand-bound diary, in the handwriting of William Hargreaves himself
• Four photograph cards, the sort a Victorian studio sold by the dozen
• A stake and a mallet. Both have been used
• Three bottles, labeled by hand: holy water, graveyard dirt, and one your guests will read twice
• And a heart — dried, split, with the hole still in it. His wife's, if you believe the diary

Your guests work it the way you'd work a real cover-up. What did his wife know? Who wanted her gone? And why does a man who buried her keep writing that he can hear her at night?

And somewhere in the middle of all that detective work, the table stops cooperating.