Casper Freake was born in 1967 in Salem, Massachusetts, USA. That, in any case, is what his passport declares. He can vouch as well for an education at a small New England Prep school, a few years at Yale, and a stint in the Navy - a plausible past, not terribly far off the mark. That is to say, only about three centuries off the mark. For Casper was born, in fact, in the year 1630. He was born at sea in the mid-Atlantic, on a ship bound from Southampton, England to the New World. His family were among the first settlers of Boston. They were soon obliged, however, in the wake of a religious controversy, to quit that settlement. When Casper was all of eight years old, the Freakes removed themselves to the nearby village of Salem. They have been upstanding burghers of that town ever since.

Casper was pressed into the British Navy in his early 20s, but after the initial shock of the rude interruption of his pious New England youth, he ended up liking it and going for a military career. He eventually became an officer of marines, and in 1664 Freake was involved in the seizing by the British of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, later renamed New York. It was in the course of that campaign that Casper became a vampire, in foggy circumstances, as he says but is hard put to elaborate, "at the Tooth of the Nubian." 

Today Casper divides his time between the family home in Salem and an abandoned office tower high above the financial district of lower Manhattan. The Freake House in Salem is a great Victorian pile of turrets, porches and widows walks, all in need of repair. How it is that the young man Casper has been seen coming and going for as long as the oldest person in town can remember, is a matter of the usual gossip. But the oddity of it is generally lost in the muddle of things. After all, there have been so many Freakes, and enough Caspers among them, in Salem over the years, that who's to tell one from the other, or if they are the same person, or second cousins, and so on.

Withal, the Freakes are a tad eccentric, and keep to themselves, and so no one bothers them. They have, for as long as anyone can remember, seemed to have lead a life of shabby gentility. "Retire at birth, toil in death" runs the informal family motto. But in this late day, the sordid gossip has been mollified. A "Museum of Witchcraft" stands at Salem now, and to whisper behind another's back is considered politically incorrect. On certain accounts, exoneration attends the Freake name, and even a certain distinction of historical victimhood - of those puritans, patriots, slaves, Indians, shackled indentured servants, and of the simply slandered and the patently hunted, who all in their ways have bled at the tree of liberty.