Abstract
In his Treatise
on Vampires and Revenants (1746), Calmet argued that although Western
Europe may have witnessed troublesome revenants in the past, the vampires of Eastern Europe were a unique type of undead-corpse. In
this paper, I examine the characteristic features of the various types of
undead-corpse that supposedly existed in Europe from the medieval period to the
Enlightenment, so too the revenants of nineteenth-century New
England. I argue that, unlike other types of undead-corpse, the
distinguishing feature of eighteenth-century vampires was their apparent thirst
for blood.
Introduction
The Slavic
notion of blood-sucking corpses arose in south-eastern Europe sometime in the
early medieval period (Perkowski 1989, 18), and by the eighteenth century
belief in their existence was so extensive that in Poland, for example, not to
believe in vampires was tantamount to heresy (Calmet 2001, 333). Popular fascination with
revenants was further fuelled by reports of vampire outbreaks erupting across Eastern Europe in the early decades of the eighteenth
century. In their wake, the Austro-Hungarian authorities, under whose
jurisdiction the occurrences took place, enacted legislation to quell the
situation, conducted official investigations into the matter and documented
their findings. The Visum et Repertum (1732), for example, is the
official report into the activities of a reputed vampire, Arnod Paole, and his
undead progeny, that supposedly haunted a Serbian village and killed many of
the inhabitants. Furthermore, the Church hierarchy and educated elite embarked
upon an ambitious programme to re-educate and “enlighten” the masses of eastern
Europe and to discourage popular belief in the existence of revenants
(Klaniczay 1987, 166–74).
Subsequently,
the vampire outbreaks inspired many learned dissertations on the topic, the
most influential and well known being that of Augustin Calmet, a respected
Benedictine scholar and antiquarian from Lorraine,
France (Bennett 2001, xiii–xiv). In 1746, Calmet
published his best-selling compendium on vampires and revenants, Dissertations
sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits: Et sur les
revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohème, de Moravie et de Silésie. A
revised edition appeared in 1751, which was subsequently re-edited and
translated by Rev. Henry Christmas in 1850 and renamed The Phantom World.
[1] According to Calmet, however, blood-sucking
corpses were unknown in Western Europe until
the late seventeenth century, some sixty years prior to the publication of his
treatise. And, although there may have been troublesome undead-corpses in Western Europe during the past, the Slavic vampires of
the eighteenth century were unique:
In this
age, a new scene presents itself to our eyes and has done for about sixty years
in Hungary, Moravia, Silesia and Poland; men, it is said, who have been dead
for several months, come back to earth, talk, walk, infest villages, ill use
both men and beasts, suck the blood of their near relations, destroy their
health and finally cause their death; so that people can only save themselves
from their dangerous visits and their hauntings, by exhuming them, impaling
them, cutting off their heads, tearing out their hearts, or burning them. These
are called by the name of oupires or vampires, that is to say, leeches …
In the twelfth century also, in England
and Denmark, some
resuscitations similar to those of Hungary were seen. But in no
history do we read anything similar, so common, or so decided, as what is
related to us of the vampires of Poland,
Hungary and Moravia (Calmet 2001, 207–8).
In order to
test the validity of Calmet's notion that eighteenth-century vampires were a
unique type of revenant, I shall compare and contrast some representative types
of undead-corpse that supposedly existed in Europe from the medieval period to
the Enlightenment, as well as the revenants of nineteenth-century New England, especially in regard to their bodily
appearance. Indeed, I will argue that apart from their reported lack of
putrefaction (Figure 1), the distinguishing feature of
eighteenth-century vampires was their apparent thirst for blood.
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The Undead-corpse in England
According
to William of Newburgh's twelfth-century chronicle, Historia Rerum
Anglicarum, popular belief in undead-corpses apparently thrived in early
medieval England.
[2] A troublesome corpse that haunted the
environs of Anantis
Castle, for example,
accosted his former neighbours and brought about a deadly contagion:
… he
wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their
doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning
of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and
blue by this vagrant monster. But those precautions were of no avail; for the
atmosphere, poisoned by the vagaries of this foul carcass, filled every house
with disease and death by its pestiferous breath … (William of Newburgh Book 5,
chapter 24).
Impatient
with the apparent inaction of the town elders, two brothers who had lost their
father to the contagion resolved to go to the cemetery and dispose of the
undead-corpse:
… whilst
they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they
suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse,
swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid
and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared
nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not,
and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently
flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled
with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they
speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the
pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid
open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and thrusting in his
hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body
now consigned to the flames, it was announced to the guests what was going on
…When that infernal hell-hound had thus been destroyed, the pestilence which
was rife among the people ceased, as if the air, which had been corrupted by
the contagious motions of the dreadful corpse, were already purified by the
fire which had consumed it … (William of Newburgh Book 5, chapter 24).
It should
be noted, however, that although this revenant is compared with a leech swollen
with blood, and although the undead-corpse of a chaplain buried at Melrose
Abbey bled profusely from the wounds he sustained, none of the undead-corpses
depicted by William of Newburgh were thought to actually prey upon the blood of
the living. Indeed, most deaths resulted from the inevitable contagion that
resulted from being in proximity to a putrid corpse, rather than the actions of
the revenant itself.
Undead-corpses
that spread deadly contagion also rate a mention in Geoffrey of Burton's
twelfth-century hagiography, the Life and Miracles of Virgin Saint Modwenna,
an obscure Irish saint whose relics were deposited in the abbey at Burton (Geoffrey of
Burton 2002, 191–9). Accordingly, two peasants
who lived at Stapenhill, a village that came under the jurisdiction of the
abbey, fled to Drakelow, a nearby hamlet that belonged to a certain knight. When
the latter refused to return the peasants, enmity developed between the knight
and the abbey. The monks then besought their patron saint for help and, shortly
afterwards, the two peasants, while eating lunch one day, suddenly fell down
dead. Subsequently buried in the churchyard at Stapenhill, the deceased
peasants were seen that very evening walking along the road to Drakelow,
carrying their coffins on their backs.
Thereafter,
the revenants haunted the environs of Drakelow, often in the form of bears or
dogs or some other animal, and would batter on the doors and walls of the
houses and call out to the occupants to come and join them. Soon enough, a
deadly plague broke out that killed all the inhabitants of Drakelow within a
few days, except for three men who were determined to put an end to the
devastation. Given permission to exhume the two undead peasants, their bodies
were found to be fresh and intact, although the linen cloths on their faces
were covered with blood. The head of each revenant was then hacked off and
placed between their legs, their hearts cut out and burnt, and the remains then
reburied with their coffins nailed shut. And although the contagion ceased from
that moment, the village
of Drakelow was abandoned
for a long time afterwards. Notably, the bodies of the two peasants were said
to be fresh and intact and there is no mention of their corpses being bloated
with blood.
Indeed,
English revenants were very similar to the reanimated corpses, or draugrs,
of medieval Scandinavia. In the Eyrbyggja
Saga, for example, we are told that after his death Thorolf Twist-Foot
became a troublesome draugr and, when exhumed, his appearance ugly to
behold:
Off they
went to Twist-Foot's knoll where Thorolf was buried, broke open the grave, and
saw Thorolf still lying there, uncorrupted with an ugly look about him. He was
as black as death [i.e. bruised black and blue] and swollen to the size of an
ox. They tried to move the dead man but were unable to shift him an inch. Then
Thorodd put a lever under him and that was how they managed to lift him out of
the grave. After that they rolled him down to the foreshore, built a great pyre
there, set fire to it, pushed Thorolf in and burnt him to ashes (Palsson and Edwards
1989, 155–6).
Hence, draugrs
were particularly noted for their malevolent nature and brutal attacks upon the
living, and the bloated, blackened appearance of their corpse. And although in Denmark, draugrs
liked to eat animal and/or human flesh (Chadwick 1946, 54–5), there is no mention of draugrs
being swollen with the supposed blood of their victims.
In England,
there are many instances in subsequent centuries of very corporeal revenants
with the apparent power to maim and kill that can be interpreted as
undead-corpses, rather than traditional ghosts, even though there is no mention
of their bodily remains being exhumed and cremated. Written in the thirteenth
century by an anonymous Scottish monk, the Chronicle of Lanercost, for
example, portrays the activities of a deceased cleric that molested a local
squire. And while we are not told what became of the revenant, the deceased had
a very corporeal presence, even though it displayed some unusual features when
stabbed by a weapon, for example, or shot by an arrow:
Having then
assumed a body (whether natural or aerial is uncertain, but it was hideous,
gross and tangible) he used to come at noonday in the habit of a black monk and
settle on the highest parts of the homes or storehouses. And when men either
shot at him with arrows or thrust him through with forks, straightway whatever
was driven into that damned substance was burnt to ashes … he so savagely threw
to the ground and battered those who attempted to struggle with him as nearly
to shatter all their joints … one evening when the father was sitting with the
household round the hearth, this malignant creature came in their midst,
throwing them into confusion with missiles and blows. All the rest having taken
to their heels, the esquire attacked him single-handed; but, most sad to say,
he was found on the morrow slain by the creature (Maxwell 1913, 118–19).
A
collection of ghost stories written down in the early fifteenth century by an
anonymous monk at Byland Abbey (Yorkshire) also tells of revenants that are
very reminiscent of undead-corpses, although there is no mention of the corpse
itself being exhumed, nor any indication that there was something unusual in
regard to its condition, such as a lack of decomposition or supple limbs. A
deceased clergyman, for example, accosted a man ploughing his field, tore his
clothes to shreds and refused to let the ploughman go until he had promised to
restore some stolen silver spoons to their rightful owner, and thereby absolve
the revenant of his sins (Chamberlaine 1979, 43). Afterwards, however, the
ploughman became seriously ill, the supposed result of coming into close
contact with the undead, and languished for many days before he recovered. In
other examples, however, the revenants exhibited a more semi-corporeal nature,
in keeping with traditional ghosts, including the ability to shape-shift. A
woman seized a revenant, for example, and carried it home on her back, some
witnesses noting that her hand sunk deeply into the ghost's body as if “the
flesh of the said ghost was rotten, and not solid but an illusion”
(Chamberlaine 1979, 43). Furthermore, a certain tailor
at the time, who encountered a shape-shifting revenant was told that “your
flesh will putrefy and your skin will weaken and fall away from you completely
in a short time,” from encountering the undead (Chamberlaine 1979, 38). Nonetheless, after the tailor
had done the revenant's bidding, he was told to go to a certain river and there
find a particular rock, to rub the sand from underneath it all over his body,
and within days he would be healed of the sickness.
Although
Summers (1961, 99) claims that belief in wandering corpses ceased in England after
the twelfth century, such notions evidently continued into the seventeenth
century. In Shakespeare's play Hamlet, for example, the protagonist is
confronted by what can only be described as the undead-corpse of his deceased
father:
Let me not
burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy
canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst
their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we
saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath opened
his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast
thee up again! What may this mean,
That thou,
dead cor[p]se, again, in complete steel,
Revisit'st
thus the glimpses of the moon …
It can be
argued that in seventeenth-century England, many encounters with
revenants actually represent troublesome corpses rather than traditional
ghosts. In the Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), for example,
Richard Baxter tells us that in Glamorgan, in 1655, a woman awakened one
night to find her deceased spouse standing by her bedside, wanting to climb
into bed (Baxter 1691, 24). Steadfastly rebuffed, the
revenant returned three nights later and mercilessly bashed everyone in the
household, until they were covered in bruises, similar to the treatment meted
out by Scandinavian draugrs, and was accompanied by “an insufferable
stench”:
… the noise
of [a] whirlwind began again, with more violence than formerly, and the
apparition walked in the chamber, an insufferable stench like that of a
putrefied carcass, filling the room with a thick smoke, smelling like sulphur,
darkening the light of the fire and candle, but not quite extinguishing it:
sometimes going down the stairs, and coming up again with a fearful noise,
disturbing them in their prayers, one while with the sound of words which they
could not discern, other while striking them so that the next morning their
faces were black with smoke, and their bodies swollen with bruises (Baxter 1691, 25).
Subsequently,
the house was frequented by “schreechings, yellings and roarings,” and the
smell of “fire and brimstone” (Baxter 1691, 30–1). Furthermore, the “shadow of
one walking” could often be seen upon the walls, shadows on the wall being a
characteristic feature of the otherwise invisible Bulgarian vampire (obour),
at least in its larval stage (Summers 1961, 317). And, while preparing for
sleep one night, the wife discovered a putrid stink in her bed as if a “carcass
some-while dead” had been sleeping there. Needless to say, she fled the house
soon thereafter.
Richard
Burton, in his Kingdom of Darkness (1688), describes a similar incident
whereby the deceased wife of John Ritchy of Edinburgh supposedly returned from her grave
to reclaim her adulterous husband who within days of her demise had asked his
mistress to marry him. Accordingly, Ritchy was conversing with his mistress at
home one night when he saw staring in the window at them the undead-corpse of
his former wife:
… the body
and face of the dead wife in her burying clothes … and saw the buried woman
lifting up her hands as they imagined to pull off the dead dress from her head
(Burton 1688, 23–4).
Nonetheless,
he continued with his plans to remarry and was putting on his shoes one morning
when his dead wife reappeared and walking up to him said, “John, will you not
come to me,” and promptly vanished. Thereafter, he became increasingly sick, a
common enough symptom from being in close proximity to the undead. And, within
a month he had died, and was buried with his former wife in the same grave.
Furthermore,
in Satan's Invisible World Discovered (1685), we are told that in 1680
Isobel Heriot, former servant to the local minister at Ormiston, Scotland, was
seen walking from the chapel to the minister's house, three days after her
burial (Sinclair 1969, 144–53). Notably, her face was said
to be “extremely black,” akin to that of the Scandinavian draugr, a sure
sign that the deceased had become a revenant. For the next nine weeks, stones
and clods began to assail the household, objects went missing, the horses would
be found in the morning in a “great sweat,” and numerous pranks were played
upon the family, akin to the poltergeist-type machinations reported of the spectrums
of sixteenth-century Silesia.
A fellow servant came upon the revenant walking about the garden, collecting
stones and hiding them under a bush, and demanded that the revenant tell her
why she was haunting the household. The deceased then confessed that she had
supposedly made a compact with the Devil and was being punished for her crimes.
Given his Protestant convictions, however, the minister refused to believe that
the revenant could really be that of the deceased. Instead, his opinion was
that the revenant was “only the Devil taking upon him her shape and form,
acting and imitating her,” in order to malign the deceased, especially since
“fervent prayers” had apparently been enough to drive away the revenant.
Similarly,
an anonymous seventeenth-century pamphlet, Sad & Wonderful Newes from
the Faulcon at the Bank Side (1661), tells about the troubled revenant of a
recently deceased baker that haunted his former household. Accordingly, the
revenant appeared in the likeness of a goat, or a black cat, or in human form
with his “eyes half sunk in his head,” wearing the same clothes when alive
(Anonymous 1661, 3–4). Notably, his face was
“extraordinarily black,” as with the other undead-corpses mentioned previously.
Eventually, some “conjurers” arrived at the house to exorcise the revenant—and
constructed a magical circle to protect them during their deliberations, akin
to the aforementioned tailor in fifteenth-century England, who had to construct
a magic circle about himself, to keep at bay the revenant with whom he had an
assignation (Chamberlaine 1979, 36–42). Nonetheless, one of them
was struck on the leg by the revenant and became permanently lame:
… some
artists (by some called conjurers) remain there night and day, using all
possible means they can to lay this troubled spirit, and are continually
reading and making of circles, burning of wax candles and juniper wood … some
nights ago, having made a great circle in the garden, the spirit of Master
Powel [i.e. the deceased] appeared, to whom one of them said: “We conjure thee
to depart to thy place in hell.” He answered, “Woe to those that were the cause
of my coming hither.” The rest (being eight in number) kept close to their
books and fain would have brought him into the circle but could not; whereupon
one of them said, “The Son of Man appeared to destroy the works of the Devil,”
which caused him to vanish away in a flash of fire, hitting one of them on the
leg, who has been lame ever since, and left such a scent of brimstone in the
garden, that all the juniper wood they could burn for many hours together,
could not take away that sulphurous smell … (Anonymous 1661, 4–5).
Hence, it
can be argued that, in England,
folk belief in wandering corpses continued well into the pre-modern period. Similarly,
in Iceland,
reports of malevolent draugrs were still being recorded during the
latter seventeenth century (Simpson 1975, 69–71).
Undead-corpses in Sixteenth-century Silesia
In his Antidote
against Atheism (1655), Henry More tells us that in 1591 a certain shoemaker of Breslau, having cut his own throat, arose from the grave
six weeks later to haunt the town:
Those that
were asleep it terrified with horrible visions, those that were waking it would
strike, pull or press, lying heavily upon them like an ephialtes so that
there were perpetuall complaints every morning of their last nights rest,
through the whole town … For this terrible apparition would sometimes cast
itself upon the midst of their beds, would lie close to them, would miserably
suffocate them and would so strike them and pinch them that not only blew
[blue] marks but plain impressions of his fingers would be upon sundry parts of
their bodies in the mornings (More 1655, 210–12).
After eight
months of such disturbances, the authorities decided to exhume the undead
shoemaker and, despite being buried for eight months, his intact corpse showed
little evidence of putrefaction:
He had lain
in the ground near eight months, viz. from Sept. 22, 1591 to April 18, 1591,
when he was digged up which was in the presence of the magistracy of the town,
his body was found entire, not at all putrid, no ill smell about him, save the
mustiness of his grave clothes, his joints limber and flexible, as those that
are alive, his skin only flaccid but a more fresh grown in the room of it, the
wound of his throat gaping but no gear nor corruption in it … (More 1655, 212–13).
For the
next six days, the corpse was put on public display. Nonetheless, the revenant
persisted in its nightly wanderings. Reburied under the gallows, there the
corpse lay for another month until the authorities decided to disinter the
corpse again and finally put an end to its molestations. It was noted, for
example, that the corpse appeared to have fed well and grown “more sensibly
fleshy since his last internment”; that is, become bloated. Accordingly, they
“cut off the head, arms and legs of the corpse and opening his back took out
his heart which was as fresh and entire as in a calf newly killed,” and
cremated the corpse, after which the shoemaker's spectrum was seen no
more.
Similarly,
the spectrum or undead-corpse of Johannes Cuntius began to haunt the
town of Pentsch
(More 1655, 217–18), indulged in malicious
poltergeist-type pranks, molested the livestock, st>d old men in their sleep
and bashed infants to death, and became such a nuisance that eventually the
deceased was exhumed:
… they dig
up Cuntius his body with several others buried both before and after him. But
those both after and before were so putrefied and rotten, their skulls broken,
and the sutures of them gaping, that they were not to be known by their shape
at all, having become in a manner but a rude mass of earth and dirt; but it was
quite otherwise in Cuntius. His skin was tender and florid, his joints not at
all stiff but limber and moveable, and a staff being put in his hand, he
grasped it with his fingers very fast. His eyes also of themselves would be one
time open and another time shut; they opened a vein in his leg and the blood
sprang out as fresh as in the living. His nose was entire and full, not sharp
as in those that are ghastly sick or quite dead. And yet Cuntius his body had
lain in the grave from Feb. 8 to July 20, which is almost half a year (More 1655, 225–6).
Given the
evidence before them, a judicial committee decided that the town executioner
should cremate the troublesome corpse and put an end to its molestations. But,
although such revenants were noted for the life-like appearance of their corpse
and general lack of decomposition, there is no mention of Cuntius being swollen
with the supposed blood of their victims.
The Greek Vrykolakas of the Seventeenth Century
During the
seventeenth century, numerous reports of undead-corpses (s.: vrykolakas,
pl.: vrykolakes) emerged in the Greek world. In his De quorumdam
Graecorum opinationibus (1645), Leo Allatius, a Catholic priest from Chios, for example, noted that:
Now such
bodies unlike those of other dead men do not when they have been buried suffer
decomposition and fall to dust, but having, as it seems, a skin of extreme
toughness, they are puffed and swell out and are much inflated throughout every
limb so that the joints and tendons can scarce be crooked or bent, but the skin
is taut like the parchment of a drum, and when struck returns the same sound;
wherefore the vrykolakas [i.e. “drum-like”] has been given the name (Summers
1961, 224).
In Relation
de l'Isle de Sant-erini (1657), however, Fr. Francois Richard, a Jesuit
priest from the Greek Island of Santorini, made a distinction between
reanimated corpses that preyed upon the living and dead bodies that “are
discovered blown up and inflated like balloons, and when they are thrown on the
ground or rolled along, they sound like hollow drums,” even after many decades
(Lawson 1910, 370). Indeed, the various
incidents cited by Fr. Richard do not even mention the bloated, drum-like
features normally associated with the vrykolakes described by Allatius. Nor
did the vrykolakas go about “sucking blood” like the Slavic vampire (Lee
1942, 127), although on occasion a vrykolakas
might “torture a man or kill him so as to eat his liver and other inner organs”
(Lee 1936, 303).
In A
Voyage into the Levant (1718), Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, a French
botanist, claimed to have been present at the exhumation of a so-called vrykolakas
on the island of Mykonos (Tournefort 1718, vol. 1, 103–7). According to his informants,
a certain peasant who had been found dead in the field began to wander about
and so molested the local people that his corpse was exhumed and then butchered
before the gathered crowd. The person conducting the autopsy, however, was
ill-suited to the task. He began by cutting open the belly of the corpse
instead of the chest, and rummaging about in the entrails, until someone urged
him to cut upwards into the diaphragm, where he eventually found the heart and
ripped it out, much to the exclamation of the crowd. The stench of the
putrefying corpse became so overpowering, however, that large quantities of
incense had to be burned to mask the foul miasma, but this only inflamed the
spectators that much more, and many panicked and fled. Indeed, Tournefort
attempted to persuade the assembled crowd, without success, that the seemingly
unnatural condition of the corpse had a simple rational explanation, and that
rummaging about the entrails was sure to create a stench (Tournefort 1718, vol. 1, 104). Subsequently, the
heart was cremated and the deceased reburied. But the corpse underwent an
apparent regeneration and made even more commotion than it had before, and had
to be exhumed once again, conveyed to a remote island and cremated to ashes. Nonetheless,
there is no mention of the deceased drinking blood or being bloated with the
blood of the living.
The Oupire or Vampire of the Eighteenth Century
The Travels
of Three English Gentlemen, a travelogue first published in the Harleian
Miscellany of 1745, provides an apt description of the vampires said to be
haunting Eastern Europe in the early decades of the eighteenth century:
The
Vampyres, which come out of the graves in the night-time, rush upon people
sleeping in their beds, suck out all their blood and destroy them. They attack
men; women and children, sparing neither age nor sex. The people attacked by
them complain of suffocation and a great interception of spirits; after which,
they soon expire …Their countenances are fresh and ruddy; and their nails, as
well as hair, very much grown and, though they have been much longer dead than
many other bodies, which are perfectly putrefied, not the least mark of
corruption upon them. Those who are destroyed by them, after their death,
become Vampyres; so that, to prevent so spreading an evil, it is found
requisite to drive a stake through the dead body, from whence, on this
occasion, the blood flows as if the person was alive. Sometimes the body is dug
up out of the grave and burnt to ashes; upon which, all disturbances cease (Harleian
Miscellany 1810, 232).
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Similarly,
in 1693, a
journal called the Mercure Galent gave a detailed account of the
vampires (oupires) that supposedly existed in Poland
and Russia
at the time, noting that vampires were driven by an all-consuming thirst for
blood:
They make
their appearance from noon to midnight, and come and suck the blood of living
men and animals in such abundance that sometimes it flows from them at the
nose, and principally at the ears, and sometimes the corpse swims in its own
blood oozed out in its coffin …This reviving being, or oupire, comes out
of his grave, or a demon in his likeness, goes by night to embrace and hug
violently his near relations or his friends, and sucks their blood so much as
to weaken and attenuate them, and at last cause their death. This persecution
does not stop at one single person; it extends to the last person of the
family, if the course be not interrupted by cutting off the head or opening the
heart of the ghost whose corpse is found in his coffin, yielding, flexible,
swollen, and rubicund, although he may have been dead some time (Calmet 2001, 235).
Indeed, the
typical vampire was so bloated with the blood of its victims that blood issued
from every orifice of its body:
… vampires
suck the blood of the living, insomuch, that these people appear like skeletons
while the dead bodies of the suckers are so full of blood that it runs out of
all the passages of their bodies and even at their pores (Argens 1739–40, vol. 4, 124).
Subsequently,
those fed upon by the vampire would waste away and eventually die from severe
anaemia, only to become vampires in turn (Argens 1739–40, vol. 4, 124):
A person
finds himself attacked with languor, loses his appetite, grows visibly thinner
and at the end of eight or ten days, sometimes a fortnight, dies, without
fever, or any other symptom than thinness and drying of the blood (Calmet 2001, 239).
An official
report written in 1725 by the Imperial Provisor of the Gradisk District,
Serbia, for example, details the purported activities and subsequent exhumation
of Peter Plogojowitz from the village
of Kisilova, whose
undead-corpse was accused of molesting his former acquaintances (Barber 1988, 6–7). Nine people, both old and
young, reputedly died within days from a debilitating illness that they
attributed to the deceased Plogojowitz, buried several months previously. And
that he had “come to them in their sleep, lain himself on them and throttled
them, so that they would have to give up the ghost.” Subsequently, the
villagers decided to be rid of the troublesome corpse and invited the parish
priest and the authorities to attend the exhumation, the latter being
represented by the Imperial Provisor, who noted that:
I did not
detect the slightest odour that is otherwise characteristic of the dead, and
the body, except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away, was completely
fresh. The hair and beard—even the nails, of which the old ones had fallen
away—had grown on him: the old skin, which was somewhat whitish, had peeled
away, and a new fresh one had emerged under it. The face, hands, and feet, and
the whole body were so constituted, that they could not have been more complete
in his lifetime. Not without astonishment, I saw some fresh blood in his mouth,
which, according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people
killed by him … but still other wild signs [i.e. an erection], which I pass by
out of high respect, took place … (Barber 1988, 6–9).
Satisfied
that Plogojowitz was indeed a vampire, the villagers then sharpened a wooden
stake and plunged it into the heart of the corpse. And thereupon a great
quantity of blood spurted from the wound and flowed from its ears and mouth, a
supposed indication that the corpse was gorged with the blood of those it had
killed (Barber 1988, 7). Finally, the bodily remains
were cremated, as per the usual practice.
The most
oft-quoted example of eighteenth-century vampirism, however, is that of Arnod
Paole—who became a revenant and spawned numerous undead progeny that infested
the village of Medvegia,
Serbia,
from 1727 to 1732. Indeed, the occurrences became the subject of an official
investigation by the civil authorities at the time whose findings were
subsequently documented in a report entitled the Visum et Repertum (Seen
and Discovered), compiled by Johannes Fluchinger, the regimental doctor who
led the inquiry and participated in many of the subsequent exhumations (Figure 2). Accordingly, in 1727, Paole had fallen from
the back of a wagon, broken his neck and died. But a month later, his
undead-corpse began to molest his former neighbours and had soon killed four
people. And when the villagers decided to exhume Paole's corpse, they found
that:
… he was
quite complete and undecayed and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes,
nose, mouth and ears; and that the shirt, covering and the coffin were
completely bloody; that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the
skin, had fallen off, and that new ones had grown, and since they saw from this
that he was a true vampire, they drove a stake through his heart, according to
the custom, whereby he gave an audible groan and bled copiously. Thereupon they
burned the body the same day to ashes and threw these into the grave (Barber 1988, 16).
Eighteenth-century
vampires like Peter Plogojowitz and Arnod Paole were noted for the life-like
condition of their corpse, flexible limbs, and an apparent lack of putrefaction.
This feature is also reminiscent of other types of undead-corpse, however. When
exhumed, the undead shoemaker of sixteenth-century Silesia, for example, was found to be
“entire, not at all putrid, no ill smell about him, save the mustiness of his
grave clothes, his joints limber and flexible, as those that are alive.” More
importantly, vampires were noted for being bloated with blood, supposedly that
of their victims, evidence that vampires had an insatiable thirst for blood. By
comparison, none of the medieval undead-corpses portrayed by William of
Newburgh, for example, were thought to be bloodsuckers and, although
Scandinavian draugrs were depicted as swollen corpses, such revenants
did not suck the blood of the living nor did they bleed profusely when wounded,
as did eighteenth-century vampires. Neither is there any evidence that the spectrums
of sixteenth-century Silesia
consumed the blood of the living. And even though the Greek vrykolakas
was swollen up like drum, there was no gushing of blood with the dissection of
the vrykolakas whose autopsy de Tournefort attended, nor was the vrykolakas
ever thought to be a bloodsucker. Hence, the vampires of the eighteenth century
were especially noted for their supposed thirst for blood.
Undead-corpses in the Nineteenth Century
Although
occasional vampire outbreaks continued into the nineteenth century (Fine 1998), the Austro-Hungarian authorities
and socio-religious elite had largely succeeded in quelling popular belief in
vampires throughout Eastern Europe by the end
of the eighteenth century (Klaniczay 1987, 165). But although belief in
flesh-and-blood vampires might have declined, the emergence of theosophy and
spiritualism in the latter nineteenth century encouraged a reinterpretation of
the traditional vampire, and fuelled notions such as astral vampirism. According
to this notion, it was the ghost or astral spirit of the deceased that
supposedly wandered about the countryside and preyed upon the blood and
vitality of the living, while their actual corpse remained buried in the grave
in a state of suspended animation. In his Posthumous Humanity (1887),
Adolphe D'Assier, for example, argued that the vampire is divisible into an “inert
corpse” and the “projectible double, or astral body,” and that blood, or rather
its quintessence, flows freely from the astral body (via an astral umbilical
cord) to the moribund corpse, sustaining its continued existence:
… the
fluidic being [i.e. astral body], instead of abandoning the body from which
death has just separated it, persists in stopping with it and in living with it
a new life … what becomes of the blood aspired by the spectre … [the] structure
[of the astral body] is bound so intimately with that of the body [i.e. corpse]
of which it is the image, that all absorption of liquid by the former passes at
once into the organs of the latter. It must be the same in the phenomena of
posthumous vampirism, since the post-sepulchral phantom is the continuation of
the living phantom. All the blood swallowed by the specter passes instantly
into the organs of the corpse which it has just left and to which it returns as
soon as its poaching work is finished. The constant arrival of this vivifying
fluid, which at once disseminates itself through the circulation, prevents
putrefaction, preserves in the limbs their natural suppleness and in the flesh
its fresh and reddish tint. Under this action is seen to continue a sort of
vegetative life which causes the hair and nails to grow, forms a new skin as
the old one dries up, and, in certain cases, favours the formation of adipose
tissue … Powerless to attack the phantoms, the people disinterred and burned
the body. The remedy was infallible, for from that moment the vampire ceased
his dreadful depredations. [3]
Similarly,
in an editorial for the Occult Review (November 1924), Ralph Shirley
invoked the notion of ectoplasm, the semi-physical substance supposedly exuded
by certain mediums during trance, which allows deceased spirits to partially
materialise and interact with those present:
… we must
assume that the body in question is built up by the methods adopted at a materialising
séance, i.e. with the aid of a medium or mediums …We may assume that in the
case of vampirism the etheric body of the vampire remains intact and that he
withdraws ectoplasmic material from his own body in the tomb, which enables him
to build up a physical form externally with further aid from the person or
persons whom he vampirizes … (Shirley 1997, 19).
And, given
the semi-corporeal nature and supposed malleability of the etheric body,
revenants could easily shape-shift and perform supernatural feats such as
walking through walls, akin to the spirits at a séance. Remembering, too, that
in the popular imagination witches could also send forth their astral double,
in a variety of shapes and forms, to afflict the living. [4] Nonetheless, in the case of
eighteenth-century vampires like Arnod Paole, their corpse was supposedly
swollen with the actual blood of their victims, whereas the astral vampire had
to transform the blood of its victims into a more ethereal form in order to
transport the blood back to its moribund corpse.
Johann von
Görres, an early-nineteenth-century German theologian, however, argued for a
more organic explanation; in his multi-volumed Die Christliche Mystik
(1836–42), Görres noted that although the soul had long departed, on occasion,
enough “vegetal life” remained in a particular corpse to prevent further bodily
corruption (Introvigne 1997, 8–9). Corpses in this state,
however, would act like a sponge and drain the vitality of anybody living
within a certain radius of its location. And, unless the corpse was cremated,
the latter would develop a debilitating sickness and eventually die,
accompanied by hallucinations in which they imagined the deceased was accosting
them. Furthermore, their own corpse would undergo a similar transformation and
become a vampire in turn.
Similarly,
in late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century New
England, rampant consumption (that is, tuberculosis) was
frequently blamed on a deceased relative, whose buried corpse was draining the
vitality and life of other family members. In the Journal of American
Folklore (January–March 1889), for example, Jeremiah Curtin describes an
incident that occurred at Woodstock Green, Vermont, in about 1830, which involved the
exhumation of a corpse said to be feeding upon its still living relatives. Accordingly,
the heart of the deceased would be cut out and examined, and if the heart
appeared to be fresh and contained liquid blood, it was a sure sign that the
deceased was responsible for the contagion:
…[a man
died of consumption] and his body [was] buried in the ground [about 1830]. A
brother of the deceased fell ill soon after and in a short time it appeared
that he too had consumption: when this became known the family decided at once
to disinter the body of the dead man and examine his heart. They did so, and
found the heart undecayed, and containing liquid blood. Then they reinterred
the body, took the heart to the middle of Woodstock Green [Vermont], where they
kindled a fire under an iron pot, in which they placed the heart and burned it
to ashes … if a person died of consumption and one of the family, that is a
brother or sister, or the father or mother, was attacked soon after, people
thought the attack came from the deceased. They opened the grave at once and
examined the heart; if bloodless and decaying, this disease was supposed to be
from some other cause, and the heart was restored to its body; but if the heart
was fresh and contained liquid blood, it was feeding on the life of the sick
person (Curtin 1889, 58–9).
An earlier
incident, however, comes from late-eighteenth-century Exeter, Rhode Island,
and involved the Tillinghast family, the children of which began to die one
after the other from consumption. Before they died, however, each complained
that Sarah, the first to suffer that fate, had come to them “every night and
sat upon some portion of the body, causing great pain and misery.” So, in order
to save the rest of his family, the father decided to exhume the six children
who had died, cut their hearts out and cremate them, as per the usual custom. And
although the bodies were generally found to be in an advanced stage of
decomposition, Sarah was found to be in a very remarkable condition:
The eyes
were open and fixed. The hair and nails had grown, and the heart and arteries
were filled with fresh red blood. It was clear at once to these astonished people
that the cause of their trouble lay there before them. All the conditions of
the vampire were present in the corpse of Sarah, the first that had died, and
against whom all the others had so bitterly complained. So her heart was
removed and carried to the designated rock, and there solemnly burned. This
being done, the mutilated bodies were returned to their respective graves and
covered. Peace then came to this afflicted family … (Bell 2002, 67)
In order to
effect a cure, however, the heart and/or other bodily organs such as the liver
or lungs of the deceased would be cremated and the ashes consumed, as in the
case of Mercy Brown in late-nineteenth-century Exeter:
The body
[of Mercy Brown] was in a fairly well preserved state. It had been buried two
months. The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart,
clotted and decomposed blood was found, which was what might be expected at
that stage of decomposition. The liver showed no blood, though it was in a
well-preserved state. These two organs were removed, and a fire kindled in the
cemetery, they were reduced to ashes…the belief is that, so long as the heart
contains blood, so long will any of the immediate family who are suffering from
consumption continue to grow worse; but, if the heart is burned that the
patient will get better. And to make the cure certain the ashes of the heart
and liver should be eaten by the person afflicted … (Bell 2002, 66–7)
There are
similarities between the American type of undead-corpse and the European
vampires of the eighteenth century. For so long as the corpse of someone who
had died of consumption remained undecomposed, either wholly or in part, the
surviving members of the family would be drained of life. As with Mercy Brown,
the hearts of such revenants contained “liquid blood” and appeared to be still
fresh, akin to the undead shoemaker of sixteenth-century Silesia, for example,
whose heart was found to be as “fresh and entire” as a newly killed calf (More
1655, 213). And when the corpse of Sarah Tillinghast was exhumed, the eyes were
found “open and fixed,” the hair and nails had grown, and the heart and
arteries were “filled with fresh red blood,” akin to the vampires of the
eighteenth century. Unlike their American counterparts, however, European
vampires were never associated with consumption per se—although
cremating the bodily remains of a vampire and consuming the ashes to stem the
vampire contagion was a common enough practice in Eastern
Europe (Murgoci 1998, 16–17). Furthermore, none of the
American revenants had ever been identified as, for example, a suicide or
heretic, as was generally the case with European revenants (Bell 2002, 229). Neither was there any
specific mention of the former actually leaving the grave and wandering about
the countryside. Nonetheless, the siblings of Sarah Tillinghast did complain
that their deceased sister came to them “every night and sat upon some portion
of the body, causing great pain and misery,” akin to that reported of
eighteenth-century vampires, [5] and the spectrums of sixteenth-century
Silesia. [6] Finally, there is no mention of American-type
revenants sucking blood, or being bloated with the blood of their victims, like
that of traditional vampires.
Were the Vampires of the Eighteenth Century Unique?
In this
paper I have so far examined various types of undead-corpse that supposedly
existed in Europe and North America from the
medieval period to the nineteenth century. Whereas medieval revenants were
generally thought of as putrid corpses that spread contagion, later revenants
such as the spectrums of sixteenth-century Silesia, and eighteenth-century vampires
like Arnod Paole, were noted for their apparent lack of decomposition and
flexible limbs, for example. Eighteenth-century vampires were unique, however,
in that they fed upon the blood of their supposed victims. Nonetheless, Summers
(1961) attaches the label “vampire” to
the revenants of twelfth-century England,
the spectrums of sixteenth-century Silesia and other types of undead-corpse,
even though there is no evidence that such revenants preyed upon the blood of
the living.
Cultural
idiosyncrasies and regional differences, however, soon gave rise to numerous
types of folkloric vampire that hungered for a variety of foodstuffs, not just
blood. The Serbian gypsies, for example, would leave out bowls of animal blood
and offerings of milk, cheese and bread in an effort to dissuade the vampire (mullo)
from attacking their families and livestock (Trigg 1973, 180–1). Similarly, the Ukrainian
vampire (upyr) was constantly hungry, and a ravenous upyr is
depicted in a folktale as turning up at a wedding, killing the bridal party and
devouring all the food, as well as the plates and cutlery (Afanas'ev 1976, 177). Furthermore, the Bulgarian
vampire (obour) was said to be a voracious scavenger of carcasses, both
animal and human, and only consumed blood when supplies of the former were
exhausted (Summers 1961, 318-9).
Many of the
features associated with the vampires of folklore, however, can be attributed
to “daemonic contamination,” whereby the distinguishing characteristics of one
type of folkloric being (that is, the vampire) merge with that of other
folkloric kinds of beings so that it becomes difficult to differentiate between
them, at least in the popular imagination (Perkowski 1989, 72). Until the nineteenth century,
for example, Bulgaria was
occupied by the Ottoman Empire and came under
the influence of Islamic culture and folk belief (Hayes 1948, vol. 1, 802). So it is not
surprising that the obour acquired the characteristics of the Arabian
ghoul, a flesh-eating Jinn that haunted cemeteries (Summers 1991, 231–7). But if we broaden the term
vampire to include any being that “derives sustenance from a victim, who is
weakened by the experience” (Perkowski 1989, 54), then the American revenants
of the nineteenth century, for example, which drained the vitality of their
living relatives, could also be classed as vampires. Nonetheless, the Slavic
vampire of the eighteenth century remains a unique type of revenant, given its
supposed thirst for human blood.
In Vampires,
Burial and Death (1988), Paul Barber argues that many of the
characteristics that supposedly indicated the deceased was a vampire, such as a
bloated, blood-filled corpse, can be attributed to normal bodily decomposition
(Barber 1988, 102–19). Mistakenly identified as
being undead, such corpses were subsequently blamed for outbreaks of pestilence
by a populace that, at the time, lacked a proper grounding in physiology and
pathology (Barber 1988, 3). It can also be said that the
salient features of the various kinds of undead-corpse outlined in this paper
are probably a reflection of cultural stereotyping, in that different cultures
at different times appear to have focused on particular facets of the
decomposing corpse. [7] In twelfth-century England, for example,
undead-corpses were commonly associated with putrid smells and the spread of
contagion (William of Newburgh Book 5, chapter 24); while in the Scandinavian
countries, popular imagination focused upon the swollen, blackened appearance
of the undead (Palsson and Edwards 1989, 155–6). Slavic culture, however,
as we have seen, emphasised the apparent accumulation of blood within the
organs and bodily cavities of such corpses, this being taken as supposed
evidence that the deceased had been sucking the blood of the living.
Hence,
anomalous corpses could be interpreted and explained a number of ways,
according to the dictates of local custom and popular folklore. In Catholic
Europe, for example, the apparent preservation of certain corpses was commonly
attributed to the miraculous power of God, especially if the individual
concerned had been known for their sanctity and exemplary life. [8] But if the deceased had an evil reputation,
then their apparent lack of decomposition was evidence that they had joined the
undead. By contrast, the medical fraternity of the eighteenth century was far
more dismissive and proposed various natural explanations to account for such
phenomena, ranging from premature burial, the preservative nature of certain
native soils, to normal vegetative processes at work in the buried corpse (that
is, vestigium vitae).
Indeed,
muted belief in the existence of flesh-and-blood vampires has continued to
survive. In 1993, for example, a curious incident occurred at Pisco,
Peru, when over one thousand
people turned up at the tomb of an English woman, Sarah Ellen Roberts,
supposedly the third wife of “Dracula”—a real personage according to the local
press, who had supposedly visited Peru on numerous occasions. [9] Reportedly buried alive for witchcraft and
murder, Dracula's wife had vowed to rise again on the said day, but when the
appointed hour came and passed without incident, the police moved in to
disperse the disappointed crowd, many of whom were self-styled vampire-hunters,
armed with stakes and crucifixes. In addition, local witchdoctors had turned up
to exorcise the tomb, anti-vampire kits sold out, local houses were festooned
with garlic, and pregnant women had moved away lest the vampire be reborn in
their unborn child. Furthermore, fear of the undead remains commonplace in Romania. In
2004, for example, Gheorghe Marinescu and his accomplices from a small Romanian
village crept into the local graveyard and exhumed the corpse of Petre Tomas
who had supposedly been haunting the Marinescu family and making them sick. [10] Thereupon, the heart of the
deceased was cut out and cremated, and the ashes consumed by the Marinescu
family as a cure against their affliction, although the efficacy of the remedy
is not recorded, and the family was later sentenced to six months imprisonment
for desecrating the dead. Hence, no matter how hard we might try to belittle
the notion of its existence, or ignore its many manifestations, the vampire
belief would appear to be here to stay in the popular imagination, and to
remain the stuff of nightmares.
Acknowledgements
Every
effort has been made to contact owners of what may be copyright material. Where
this has not been possible, omissions, where notified, will be rectified in any
future reprint of this article.
Notes
[2] The
revenants of twelfth-century England, for example, demonstrate that there was
dissension among the clergy and the laity at the time as to the nature of
undead-corpses and how to deal with them (Simpson 2003, 391–3). The undead-corpse that
haunted Buckinghamshire, for example, proved relatively harmless and simply
wandered about in dire need of absolution. When informed that “tranquility
could not be restored to the people until the body of this most wretched man
were dug up and burnt” (William of Newburgh Book 5, chapter 22), the Bishop of Lincoln was appalled that such things were commonplace in England. He
arranged to have a “letter of absolution” placed upon the breast of the
undead-corpse, which evidently proved successful, given that the revenant
thereafter quiet. But in the case of the malevolent undead-corpses that haunted
Berwick and the environs of Anantis
Castle, both of which
killed many of the local inhabitants, the survivors did not wait for the clergy
to decide what should be done (William of Newburgh Book 5, chapters 23, 24). They
instead took matters into their own hands and cremated the offending corpse.
[4] In The Kingdom of Darkness (1688), for example, Richard Burton tells us about a certain witch
who boasted that she could send forth her double in the form of a wolf to slay
livestock:
… a certain
woman being in prison on suspicion of witchcraft, pretending to be able to turn
herself into a wolf, the magistrate before whom she was brought promised her
that she should not be put to death in case she would then in his presence thus
transform herself, which she readily consented to, accordingly she anointed her
head, neck and armpits, immediately upon which she fell into a most profound
sleep for three hours, after which she suddenly rose up, declaring that she had
been turned into a wolf, and had been at a place some miles distant, and there
killed first a sheep and then a cow. The magistrates presently sent to the
place and found that first a sheep and then a cow had then been killed (Burton 1688, 69–70).
[5] Arnod
Paole, for example, came to his victims in their sleep, “laid upon them and
throttled them, so that they would have to give up the ghost” (Barber 1988, 16).
[6]
Similarly, the undead shoemaker of sixteenth-century Silesia would “lie heavily” upon his victims
in their sleep and “miserably suffocate” them (More 1655, 210–1).
[7]
Suggested to me by Dr Jessica Hemming (10 February 2006).
[8]
Neither was seventeenth-century England immune to such beliefs, for when the
corpse of Master Pountney was found to be incorrupt after being buried for many
years, the anonymous author of a tract at the time (Anonymous 1647) proclaimed it to be a miracle from
God, intended to inspire the Protestant faithful.
[9] See Anonymous ( 1993).
[10] See Petrescu ( 2005).
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