In September 1998, the journal Neurology—which usually consumes its column inches with such thrilling topics as “detection of elevated levels of α-synuclein oligomers in CSF from patients with Parkinson disease”—gave voice instead to an eccentric theory on a historical conundrum. Over four densely cited pages, a Spanish physician named Juan Gómez-Alonso put forward the argument that rabies, a subject dear to neurologists for its uniquely devastating effects upon the brain, might also serve as an explanation for one of our oldest horrors: the vampire, whose roots stretch back to ancient Greece but whose alleged romps through eastern Europe during the eighteenth century launched a mass fascination that continues to this day.
Gómez-Alonso’s hypothesis made headlines around the world, from Los Angeles to London to Sydney. Even Playboy weighed in, noting the doctor’s linking of both rabies and vampirism to hypersexuality. “Bite me!” the writer enthused. It’s easy to understand why the public’s interest was so piqued. Our myth of bloodsucking ghouls has proven remarkably durable throughout the last two hundred years of churning popular culture, sinking its teeth into everything from Victorian novels and Hollywood confections to Anne Rice’s wildly popular novels and, of course, the multiplatform tween juggernaut that is Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. We feel we owe a hearing to any theory that might explain the origins of these surprisingly unkillable undead.
Gómez-Alonso’s paper does raise many intriguing parallels between the vampire and the sufferer of hydrophobia. First, and most obvious, both rabies and vampirism spread from organism to organism through bites: not a small coincidence in man, an animal that does not instinctively use its teeth in aggression. Also, the throes of a rabies infection usually involve facial spasms, which can render an appearance—as a 1950 French medical text described it—of “the teeth clenched and the lips retracted as those of an animal.” Vampires were believed to possess the ability to become dogs at will, and in this form they would often kill the other dogs nearby. Male rabies patients, as Playboy was so excited to learn, are sometimes given to undue sexual abandon; vampires, meanwhile, rose from their graves to engage in sexual conquest. And finally, the life span of a vampire was said to be forty days, similar to the average duration of human rabies infections from the time of bite until death.
The doctor points out in passing that rabies might also account for the werewolf, or lycanthrope, that mythical human who changes wholly or partially into a wolf and preys upon his neighbors. Gómez-Alonso does not provide specifics, but the broad strokes of the comparison are obvious: the biting, the clenching teeth, the animal transformation, are all even more pronounced in the myth of the wolf-man. The parallel to rabies is, if anything, even more direct with lycanthropy, which is nothing more nor less than a man seized with an animal nature.
How much credence should we give to the link between rabies and the undead? In his paper, Dr. Gómez-Alonso goes so far as to assert that the vampires and werewolves in historical accounts were literally rabid humans, their symptoms misunderstood as supernatural by an unscientific populace. In propounding this theory—in attempting to explain away folkloric evil through science—the doctor joined a noble tradition that extends back at least to Europe’s great vampire boom, in the early part of the eighteenth century, when supposedly true-life tales of vampires from the East chilled the drawing rooms of England, Germany, and particularly France, where, as Voltaire famously wrote, “nothing was spoken of but vampires, from 1730 to 1735.” This was the self-described age of reason, after all, and its eminent minds, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, brooded over how seemingly respectable people could display such credulity toward popular hysterias. Thus even during the vampire’s heyday, men of reason gamely tried to offer scientific explanations; some saw vampires as victims of food poisoning or as opium fiends.
When one digs into historical accounts, however, such literalistic explanations seem far-fetched, to say the least. Werewolves, during the sixteenth century, were apprehended and would seem entirely lucid (and fully human) during what by accounts were lengthy interrogations and trials—not something that a rabies sufferer could have accomplished. In the accounts of vampires from the eighteenth century, observers would disinter real corpses that appeared, in the light of day, to be entirely dead, not writhing in any sort of rabic agony. And there is the unavoidable fact that rabies, for all the violence of its manifestation in humans, rarely prompts them to bite and also does not shed abundantly in their saliva as it does with dogs. Simply put, humans do not spread rabies.
Yet Dr. Gómez-Alonso’s theory, if questionable in its literal meaning, taps into a deeper metaphorical truth. So many of our most enduring horrors, the vampire and the werewolf included, have common narrative elements that derive naturally (in both senses of that word) from rabies. Just browse the horror-movie section of your local video store and see what’s on offer. It’s villains pouncing from the darkness, biting, lunging, tearing with claws. It’s contagion: a malevolence that creeps from victim to victim, spreading through bites, kisses, licks. It’s a familiar creature—a trusted soul, often residing within one’s own inner circle or even within one’s home—that becomes surprisingly and unaccountably infected by a savage animal evil. Going as far back as the days of lyssa, and even before, these fiendish tropes have been forever intertwined with rabies, a constant presence across continents and across eras. Indeed, for most of human history, among those who knew little or nothing of medicine, rabies was merely another horror story in the same genre: a scream heard today in the next town over, quite possibly to resound in one’s own town tomorrow.
In our more enchanted, pre-cinematic past, these types of stories spread not from the capacious minds and marketing budgets of Hollywood but out of tales told from house to house, town to town. These horrors were often related with the visceral sense (believed by both parties) that the menace in question was real and imminent. Stories evolved, too, as they spread, and so we can consider what remained after centuries of such “audience testing” as having a perverse sort of evolutionary fitness. It was not just the vampires and werewolves as such but a more generalized obsession with vicious half-human creatures, with dogs and wolves amok: girls (and boys) gone wild, familiar canids gone wrong.
The question, then, is not who the werewolves of the sixteenth century were, or the vampires of the eighteenth; the former were obviously victims of mass hysteria, the latter clearly corpses. The more relevant question is why: Why should it have been widely believed, and widely feared, that men were stalking the land as wolves? What is so terrifying about the vampire, a creature that, despite its human form, bites at the flesh of its victims? Why do dark forces so often manifest themselves in the shape of a dog? To such questions, our answer is the same as that of the good doctor Gómez-Alonso. The animal infection—the zoonotic idea—is mankind’s original horror, and its etiology traces back inevitably to the rabies virus. Before our saga of the world’s most diabolical virus careens into the nineteenth century, it is worth stopping for a moment to catalog the manifestations of this horror, from demon dogs to wolfish men and everything in between.
The original lycanthrope, from whose name the term derives, was Lycaon, the mythical first king of Arcadia. As the legend went, Zeus himself had descended to lodge in Lycaon’s palace, and the king decided upon a wicked test of his guest’s divinity. The king killed a boy and served him to Zeus at the table. On beholding the unappetizing cut he had been served, the god, immortally offended, slew fifty of Lycaon’s sons with lightning bolts. Then, for good measure, he changed Lycaon into a wolf—a transformation that Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, describes in undeniably rabid terms:
Frightened, [Lycaon] runs off to the silent fields
and howls aloud, attempting speech in vain;
foam gathers at the corners of his mouth;
he turns his lust for slaughter on the flocks,
and mangles them, rejoicing still in blood.
His garments now become a shaggy pelt;
his arms turn into legs, and he, to wolf,
while still retaining traces of the man:
greyness the same, the same cruel visage,
the same cold eyes and bestial appearance.
Such an account conveys the Homeric lyssa, the infection with wolfish rage, except in this case the wolfishness is rendered quite literally. Likewise, many other ancient accounts of men becoming wolves, or of men possessed by animals, seem to stem from the inhuman ferocity with which some warriors were said to comport themselves in battle. Old Norse gives us the legend of the berserkers, ferocious fighters who wore the skins of bears or wolves atop their armor. Their rage was seen as a species of demonic possession, during which time they became immune to pain; one description of their prebattle mien has them foaming at the mouth, barking like wolves, chewing on the rims of their shields and sometimes gnawing them clean through. Similarly, centuries of Irish lore tell of the Laighne Faelaidh, a race of men who take the form of wolves whenever they please, killing cattle and devouring the flesh raw. A number of ancient Indo-European tribal names, such as the Luvians, the Lucanians, and the Hyrcanians, mean some variant of “wolf-men.”
Some of the ancient accounts of wolf-men, and dog-men, shade into simple xenophobia. When Herodotus writes of the Neurians—a tribe in what is now eastern Europe, each member of which “changes himself, once in the year, into the form of a wolf,” remaining thus for several days before changing back—it reads as the assertion less of a fearsome ferocity than of a subhuman curiosity. Another ancient chronicler, Ctesias of Cnidus, offers an account of a half-human tribe in India: “It is said that there live in these mountains dog-headed men; they wear clothes made from animal skins, and speak no language but bark like dogs and recognize one another by these sounds…. They couple with their women on all fours like dogs; to unite otherwise is a shameful thing for them.” Strabo, a geographer from the first century B.C., wrote of the Cynamolgi, an Ethiopian tribe numbering some 120,000 dog-headed men who spoke in barks. Similarly, the Ch’i-tan, a tenth-century people in what is now Manchuria, believed that one of the regions to their north was “the Kingdom of Dogs,” whose inhabitants “have the bodies of men and the heads of dogs. They have long hair, they have no clothes, they overcome wild beasts with their bare hands, their language is the barking of dogs.” With some regularity did medieval maps place cynocephali, or “dog-headed men,” in the edges of the known world, a practice carried out not just by Christian cartographers but also by their Muslim opposite numbers.
The easy explanation for such beliefs, and for the werewolf legend as well, is that these folk traditions employed the dog (and the wolf, her fierce or rabid cousin) as an expression of the so-called Other: that is, as a means by which to attribute a subhumanity to foreigners, outlaws, adherents to strange and scary creeds, and so on. And that explanation no doubt carries some truth. But isn’t it telling that the animal chosen for “otherness” is, in fact, the opposite of strange? Indeed, what makes the demon dog such a powerful source of dread is precisely how familiar, in all senses of that word, the canine presence can be. When human beings keep dogs by choice, the dogs become our constant, often silent companions, living with us inside our strongholds. We become complacent about the animal nature that lurks in them still. But with the intrusion of rabies (or a passing squirrel, for that matter), such slavering essence can return with sinister immediacy.
Since dogs and humans possess an almost biological familiarity, having coevolved over millennia, even a strange and semi-wild dog today will take liberties with an unfamiliar human that other creatures will not. Barbara Allen Woods, a folklorist at the University of California in the late 1950s, built a taxonomy for the thousands of different European oral legends in which the devil appears in dog form. Regarding one such legend type, in which a demonic dog stalks a traveler, she observes:
If there is any merit in the suggestion that legends of the devil in dog form are inspired by actual encounters with real dogs, it is most easily seen in stories about a night traveler who met with a demonic dog on the road one night. There is nothing extraordinary or mythical about such an incident. On the contrary it is entirely natural that a dog should be out trotting the deserted streets and paths…. Nor is it remarkable that a dog should follow a certain route; instead, it is typical of the canine species to make certain rounds. And it is perhaps least of all noteworthy that a stray dog encountered by chance should accompany a person for a time before jogging off on its own affairs. Yet, any or all of these normal characteristics can seem positively uncanny, especially when observed under eerie circumstances or in an anxious state of mind.
Ironically, the noted sixteenth-century demonologist Nicholas Remy turned this same reasoning on its head, in attempting to explain why evil spirits assume the form of dogs in the first place: “When [demons] go with anyone on his way, they most often take the form of a dog, which may follow him most closely without raising any suspicion of evil in the onlookers.” Dogs have earned our trust, and we are used to their (sometimes unsolicited) companionship; what better vessel, in Remy’s view, for a demon to exploit?
Woods’s catalog is full of folktales in which a devil dog appears at moments of particular wickedness. A demon dog is encountered at a haunted place, such as a grave site, a churchyard, or a ruined castle. Or the appearance of the dog portends a death, even encourages someone to commit suicide. Humans shoot bullets at the demon dog, but it cannot be wounded. Dogs perch at the feet of cardsharps whose winnings flow from pacts with the devil. A dog lurks in front of a child’s coffin and prevents his receiving a proper Christian burial.
Often the demon dog can be creepily communicative. A Danish boy in Frlund, when reading his parents’ copy of a forbidden magic book, is interrupted by a noise in the hall. He opens the door to find a large black poodle, which gazes at the boy “with strange pleading eyes.”* In one Swiss legend, two men see a dog watching a dance and ask why he is there. The dog replies, matter-of-factly, that a fight is about to break out and someone will be killed; he, the devil, intends to claim that soul. In a similar Swedish tale, the dog is considerably more articulate. Two brothers from Sandåkra, after they commit perjury and escape detection, promise each other that whichever dies first shall return as a ghost, in order to tell the other what he has learned of the afterlife. Soon after the death of one brother, the second finds a large black dog sitting on the steps of his cottage. Knowing it is his brother, he asks the dog what he has found. “That which is once forsworn is eternally lost,” replies the dog glumly. The living brother decides he must confess to his crime.
During witch trials, the accused often were found to have had canine “familiars” (that word again), demons who accompanied them in the form of dogs. Elizabeth Clarke, who during the seventeenth century admitted to having slept with the devil himself thrice weekly, was kept company during her sexploits by Jarmara, a white spaniel with spots, as well as by an ox-headed greyhound named Vinegar Tom. When the Devices—Alison, James, and Elizabeth—were convicted of witchcraft in 1612, all three of them claimed to have murderous dog familiars, with names like Dandy and Ball. In Alison’s account of her dog’s attack on a peddler, it is she who summons the dog to act but the dog who explains her options.
“What wouldst thou have me to do with yonder man?” the dog is alleged to have asked, as the peddler fled what he could tell would be an imminent attack.
“What canst thou do at him?” Alison replied.
“I can lame him.”
“Lame him,” replied the girl; and within forty yards the deed was done.
Notice the balancing act that is struck by this last tale, of the witch’s canine accomplice. The dog must be possessed bodily by the most fearsome rage in order to carry out his bloodthirsty attacks, for example, to lame the peddler. And yet he must also be possessed spiritually of an almost human reason and capacity for understanding in order to present to the audience as properly and chillingly evil. It is the ancient dichotomy of the dog—between the intuitive, loyal companion and the savage, potentially rabid beast—with each pole of the dualism merely ratcheted out a notch. The uncanniness of the demon dog lies in his being simultaneously more familiar and more prone to insensate frenzy than the typical four-footed friend.
A similar formula undergirded the werewolf tales of the sixteenth century. Unlike the dog-headed men of maps, these were real people, often known to their alleged victims, who would testify with apparent sincerity that their neighbors had taken the form of vicious wolves. One oft-repeated tally, though perhaps apocryphal, puts the number of recorded cases in France at thirty thousand between 1520 and 1630. Regardless of the specific figure, history has bequeathed us enough specific cases to make clear that something like an epidemic was afoot. A sample:
1521. Two admitted werewolves, Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun, stand trial in Poligny for many murders: of a four-year-old girl, of a woman gathering peas, and more still. Along with another lycanthrope confederate the two are convicted, burned.
1530. Near Poitiers, three enormous wolves set upon three young men, one of whom slices off a wolf ear in the melee. The following day, a known harlot in the town is observed to have lost an ear.
1541. A farmer in Pavia takes the form of a wolf and murders multiple victims. Upon his confession, the magistrates order the severing of his arms and legs, from which separations he dies.
1558. Near Apchon a huntsman, asked by a local gentleman to bring him some game, falls under attack by a wolf and severs its paw. Later, as he reaches into his bag to deliver this paw to his noble friend, he finds it has been transformed into a feminine hand—the hand, indeed, of the gentleman’s own wife, who, when found to be missing it, confesses to being a werewolf. She is burned to ashes.
1573. The town of Dole, in the Franche-Comté region of western France, formally enjoins its peasantry to hunt down a marauding werewolf, authorizing the use of “pikes, halberts, arquebuses, and sticks.”
1598. An entire family near Dole, the Gandillons, is executed for lycanthropy. The first to go, Pernette, had allegedly set upon two children, intending to devour them, but managed to slay only one of them, a four-year-old boy, with the pocketknife the child had brandished to defend his sister. Pernette is torn limb from limb by the citizenry.
Her crime draws the authorities’ attention to her brother, Pierre, and to his son, Georges, both of whom confess (after what one suspects is rather insistent questioning) to having taken the form of wolves through the application of a salve. Pierre also has a daughter, Antoinette, who admits to starting hailstorms. All three are hanged, their bodies burned.
Meanwhile, two departments south, in the town of Châlons, a tailor is sentenced for having apparently lured, murdered, and eaten a numberless throng of small children. His alleged crimes are so terrible that the court orders the incineration of all the case records—and, naturally, of the tailor.
That same year, near Angers, a fifteen-year-old boy is murdered and a half-naked man, with long hair and beard, is taken into custody. This man, Jacques Roulet, admits to using a salve to transform himself into a wolf. He, too, is sentenced to death, though—in a sign the werewolf hunters of France have perhaps lost some of their moxie—the parliament in Paris later commutes his sentence to two years’ incarceration.
1603. Jean Grenier, a teenager near Bordeaux, is arrested after terrorizing a series of local children, allegedly as both a boy and a wolf. Grenier’s story was later recounted at length by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century English parson perhaps best known for composing the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” but also the author of more than 130 books. Baring-Gould’s Book of Were-Wolves (1865) to this day remains by far the most readable account of the werewolf phenomenon—so readable, in fact, that we hesitate to dwell upon the provenance of his elaborate narrative color and instead will simply draw upon it.
On a spring afternoon that year, as some young women are tending sheep (“the brightness of the sky,” Baring-Gould writes, “the freshness of the air puffing up off the blue twinkling Bay of Biscay, the hum or song of the wind as it made rich music among the pines which stood like a green uplifted wave on the East…conspired to fill the peasant maidens with joy, and to make their voices rise in song and laughter, which rung merrily over the hills”), they encounter a redheaded boy of perhaps thirteen, perched on a log. Evidently poor, given his gaunt frame and tattered clothing, the boy nevertheless cuts a menacing figure, his prominent white teeth protruding from a grinning leer.
“I have killed dogs and drunk their blood,” he tells the girls. “But little girls taste better; their flesh is tender and sweet, their blood rich and warm. I have eaten many a maiden, as I have been on my raids together with my nine companions. I am a were-wolf!” he goes on, as if that still needed spelling out. “Ah, ha! if the sun were to set I would soon fall on one of you and make a meal of you!”
The young women flee and tell others of this strange child they have encountered. As it happens, another local girl, Marguerite Poirier, knows the boy even better, having regularly tended sheep with him near their village of St. Antoine de Pizon. His name is Jean Grenier, she reports, and he has frequently terrified her with similar stories. Worse than that, he recently followed through on his threat to her: One day, when Jean was absent from his herding duties, a wolf attacked her and tore her clothes. The creature had red hair, like Jean’s!
Grenier and his case are taken up by the parliament in Bordeaux, in an investigation that, as in other witch and werewolf trials of the era, yields a surprising array of confessions. A certain “black man” named M. de la Forest gave Grenier a salve and a wolf skin, he says, both of which he used to turn himself into a wolf. Besides his attack on Poirier, which he confirms in every particular, Grenier admits to having eaten three children, including an infant snatched from a cradle.
But as with the case of Jacques Roulet five years earlier, the parliament eschews execution, in favor of life imprisonment in a nearby monastery. Pierre de Lancre, a famous witch-hunter who had been involved with Grenier’s trial, would visit the young man there in 1610. Grenier still copped to having once been a werewolf. Moreover, reported de Lancre, he “confessed to me also, in a straightforward manner, that he still wanted to eat the flesh of little children, and that he found the flesh of little girls particularly delicious. I asked him if he would eat it if he had not been prohibited from doing so, and he answered me frankly that yes he would.” But the boy would never get his second helpings; soon after his interview with de Lancre, he would die in confinement, the cause unrecorded.
Richard Mead, one of England’s most influential eighteenth-century physicians, published an account of rabies in 1702 that can only be described as lycanthropic. As with all fine horror tales, the case had been related to Mead secondhand, but (he assures us) by a man who was “very near of kin to the unhappy patient.” In Scotland, the doctor recounts,
a young man was bit by a mad dog, and married the same morning. He spent (as is usual) that whole day, till late in the night, in mirth, dancing and drinking: in the morning, he was found in bed raving mad; his bride (horrible spectacle!) dead by him; her belly torn open with his teeth, and her entrails twisted round his bloody hands.
The brevity of time between bite and neurological symptoms—less than a day!—dispels any notion that this was actually a case of rabies. The details of the attack, too, seem rather improbable. Rabies can elicit violence in human victims, to be sure, but these generally take the form of maddened outbursts, in which biting is uncommon. The concerted effort required to chomp open a human abdomen, not to mention dealing with the rush of fresh blood—it’s all a bit more than the typical hydrophobic could handle.
Nevertheless, the parallels between this medical case report, on the one hand, and the then-popular reports of lycanthropy, on the other, are notable. Mead even goes so far, just a few pages later, as to cite the influence of the moon. “Looking over the histories of the many patients I have attended in this deplorable condition,” he writes, “I observe about one half of the number to have been attacked with the spasms preceding the hydrophobia either upon the full moon, or the day before it.” Like many physicians of his day, Mead attempted to apply to the human body the mechanical insights of Isaac Newton, whose mathematical demonstrations of the properties of physical objects had left a deep imprint on the late seventeenth-century psyche. Mead’s theory was that the moon’s gravity pulled the bodily fluids in various directions at various times, contributing to the patient’s health or lack thereof. But despite this scientific (or at least quasi-scientific) framework, his nods to the moon in practice could seem arbitrary, even superstitious. Epileptic patients, he wrote, suffered spots on the face that resembled the dark patches on the surface of the moon; indeed, these spots “varied both in colour and magnitude, according to the time of the moon,” and so would help the observant physician predict when seizures were imminent. Mead even cited approvingly a case, as related by an earlier author, of a woman whose beauty “depended upon the lunar force, insomuch that at full moon she was plump and very handsome.”
The most striking aspect of Mead’s lurid rabies case, though, is the setting of the scene: the wedding night, in which a young bride is deflowered in a horrifyingly unconventional manner. Domestic attacks, in which the assailed party is a spouse or lover, do sometimes figure in werewolf lore. One such tale is so widespread—having taken root from Transylvania to Uruguay—that folklorists gave it its own name: the “legend of the torn garment.” In the most common version of this story a man, while riding home alongside his wife, unexpectedly hands the reins over to her and steps off into the bushes. The wife waits; suddenly a furious dog bolts out from the brush and bites down on her savagely. Afterward, alone, she makes her way home and finds her husband waiting there. As he walks to meet her with a smile, she spies scraps of her shredded dress in his teeth.
These sorts of intimate assaults, however, are considerably more common in vampire tales, where the dead spouse or lost love returns to haunt the living partner. Sabine Baring-Gould cites a vampire account from Baghdad, in the early fifteenth century, that bears more than a passing resemblance to the rabies tale of Richard Mead—though in this case it is the young woman who is driven to animal feastings. On the wedding night of one Abul-Hassan, the son of a wealthy merchant, the bride steals away from the marriage bed when she believes her new husband to be asleep. This she continues to do, night after night, until Abul-Hassan resolves to follow her. By moonlight he trails her to a cemetery, where he is faced with a terrifying tableau: a gang of ghoulish creatures, chowing down on corpses. With revulsion he sees his wife—who, Baring-Gould notes, “never touched supper at home”—playing “no inconsiderable part in the hideous banquet.” The following night, Abul-Hassan confronts her with what he has witnessed. She lashes back quite literally with tooth and nail, tearing at his neck, attempting to drink his blood. At this, Abul-Hassan strikes and kills her; but three nights later, at midnight, she returns, again trying to sup at his neck. Only upon opening her tomb and burning her corpse is the vampire finally dispatched.
Before we move along to still more vampiric matters, it is worth reprinting the remedy for dog bite that Richard Mead advocated to forestall any onset of violent lunacy. First, the patient was to be bled from the arm, with nine or ten ounces removed. Second, a medicinal powder—a blend of black pepper and ground liverwort—was to be mixed into a half-pint of warm cow’s milk and drunk by the patient each morning for four consecutive days. Finally, for a full month, the patient must bathe every morning in cold water. This last stage, Mead felt, was of the utmost importance, as demonstrated by the case of “a lusty young woman” treated by a certain Dr. Willis. Having been “raving mad seven or eight days,” this woman, on Willis’s orders, was “carried abroad at midnight, and thrown naked into a river: where she swam about without help for more than a quarter of an hour.” Soon thereafter, reports Mead, she “recovered without the help of any other remedy.” Presumably, this means the patient was no longer mad; whether she remained lusty, Mead does not say.
If the sixteenth-century werewolf epidemic had been a word-of-mouth hysteria, the vampire boom of the eighteenth century played out as a mass-media phenomenon. It was touched off by a series of published dispatches from eastern Europe, lands where vampirism served as a consistent force in the local folklore, written by Western correspondents, who reported on these strange happenings with horror. Le Nouveau Mercure Galant, a French newspaper, ran an account in 1694 of vampires “sucking the blood of people and cattle in great abundance.” It went on: “They sucked through the mouth, the nose but mainly through the ears. They say that the vampires had a sort of hunger that made them chew even their shrouds in the grave.”
Then, between 1710 and 1756, the great wave arrived: accounts from Prussia, Hungary, Silistra (in present-day Bulgaria), and Wallachia (in Romania; the haunt of Vlad the Impaler, whose name would later be appropriated by Bram Stoker for Dracula). Most famous among these accounts was the story of Arnod Paole, a dead Serbian soldier who locals believed had become a vampire. Due to the Peace of Passarowitz, signed by the Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Empire in 1718, the Serbian territory had been recently transferred to Austria, and so most of the Austrian soldiers detailed from the West were encountering Serbians and their lore for the very first time. Spurred by the local claims about Paole and others, an Austrian medical officer named Johannes Flückinger wrote up a brief report in 1732 called Visum et repertum (Seen and Discovered) that quickly saw wide dissemination and translation throughout western Europe. No doubt its appeal owed much to its persuasive form: a signed account by a soldier (and doctor, no less) who claimed to be laying out the facts soberly, just as he witnessed them. “After it had been reported that in the village of Medvegia the so-called vampires had killed some people by sucking their blood,” Flückinger begins,
I was, by high decree of a local Honorable Supreme Command, sent there to investigate the matter thoroughly, along with officers detailed for that purpose…. [The haiduks (that is, Serbian soldiers in the area)] unanimously recount that about five years ago a local haiduk by the name of Arnod Paole broke his neck in a fall from a hay wagon. This man had, during his lifetime, often revealed that, near Gossowa in Turkish Serbia, he had been troubled by a vampire, wherefore he had eaten from the earth of the vampire’s grave and had smeared himself with the vampire’s blood, in order to be free of the vexation he had suffered. In twenty or thirty days after his death some people complained that they were being bothered by this same Arnod Paole; and in fact four people were killed by him. In order to end this evil, they dug up this Arnod Paole forty days after his death—this on the advice of their Hadnack [or elder], who had been present at such events before; and they found that he was quite complete and undecayed, and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears; that the shirt, the 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 their custom, whereby he gave an audible groan and bled copiously.
Intrigued by this account, Flückinger and his fellow officers accompanied the haiduks to the Medvegia graveyard and watched as they opened the graves of other suspected vampires, including the Hadnack’s own wife, who had died just seven weeks before. Flückinger’s team dissected a number of the corpses themselves, and it is clear from the report that they came away from this grisly work as believers. By the end, Visum et repertum has taken on the judgment of the locals, asserting that many of the corpses are in a “condition of vampirism.”
Most vampire reports of the era are essentially similar: in each the shocking observation, made by a dispassionate Western observer, is that the vampire’s corpse looks surprisingly intact, with fresh blood lingering around its mouth. But the American scholar Paul Barber, in his wonderful 1988 book, Vampires, Burial, and Death (from which the above excerpt of Flückinger’s report is drawn), makes a very compelling case that these reports, even those by medical men, simply misapprehend the ways that bodies can decompose after death. The epidermis often slips off, revealing the dermis, which resembles a “second skin”; the nail beds resemble new nails. And, most important, bodies are prone to swell, pushing what looks like fresh blood—in fact reliquefied blood—out from the nose and mouth. The “chew[ing] of shrouds in the grave,” as Le Nouveau Mercure Galant put it, is in fact the sound of swelling bodies gurgling and bursting; the ever-present “groan” of a staked vampire is no more and no less, in Barber’s view, than the release of pent-up gases.
Barber’s other key point is that many of the attributes we associate with vampires—indeed, quite a few of those cited by Dr. Gómez-Alonso—are in fact creations of the fictional vampire, as drawn by Western writers of the nineteenth century. It’s true that Eastern folklore did sometimes assert that the vampire changed shape into animals, but not always, and not generally as dogs: a tale from Siret, in northern Romania, has the vampire becoming a cat in order to escape detection, while another folklorist lists the animal forms of the vampire as “wolf, horse, donkey, goat, dog, cat, pullet, frog, butterfly.” The snarling black dog form of the vampire, and the yelping dogs that greet the vampire’s presence as he silently treads down gloamy country paths, are fictive creations of a particularly English character.
More crucially for our purposes, the vampire’s bite—so key to our understanding of him today—is largely absent from folkloric accounts of vampires. If he bites at all, it is at the chest or torso; more often, he smothers his victims to death or attempts to smother them as they sleep. Indeed, sleep, that nightly dress rehearsal for death, is so often the meeting place between vampire and victim. In his original incarnation, it seems to have been the unbridgeable crossing of death, rather than the uncanny animal furies of man, that conjured up the vampire in the popular imagination. But during his westward migration, and his rebirth during the nineteenth century as a fictional force, the vampire changed into something new and yet, for the purposes of our tale, more biting.
The vampire we know today was born, interestingly enough, at the same time and in the same place as his famous gothic friend, Frankenstein’s monster. It was the summer of 1816, in Switzerland, when five bons vivants from England—the poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley; Shelley’s paramour, Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, then pregnant (though this was not known at the time, perhaps not even to herself) with Byron’s child; and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori—all gathered at the Villa Diodati, a manor house near Lake Geneva that Byron had rented for the summer. It is hard to see what peace any of them might have hoped to find at this lakeside retreat, given the interpersonal drama that stalked Byron no matter how far he tried to flee it. Despite his attempts at abandoning Clairmont in England, it was she who convinced the Shelleys they should visit him, and so Byron was forced to deploy Polidori as a human shield, to keep Clairmont from cornering him alone. Meanwhile, he and Polidori were at war with each other, even though the doctor was nominally in his employ: after Byron laughed at the doctor’s spraining his ankle, Polidori retaliated by clocking Byron with an oar. To make matters worse, the outside world believed Byron’s checkered personal life to be even more dramatic than it actually was. The proprietor of a hotel across the lake actually rented out telescopes for the purpose of spying on the famous writer’s carnal depredations. When some tablecloths were hung to dry on the villa’s balcony, the hotel gawkers reported them as ladies’ petticoats, which they naturally assumed were shed on arrival to the villa as the price of admission.
One night, four of the five companions—Clairmont excepted—resolved to engage in a writing project. They had all been reading stories aloud to one another from a French book of supernatural tales called Fantasmagoriana, and Byron evidently felt that the assembled company could do better. “We will each write a ghost story,” he suggested; and, as Godwin recounted later in her introduction to Frankenstein, “his proposition was acceded to.” Her own contribution, of course, soon grew into her most famous creation. Shelley’s and Byron’s notions seemed halfhearted, relative to their creative powers, and neither poet chose later to expand upon his. Then there was “poor Polidori,” as Godwin patronizingly called him: he “had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course.” Her account leaves us to believe that her ghost story alone, from the four conceived during those days at the Villa Diodati, survived to haunt the reading public.
In fact, though, later that summer, one of the dead ideas found new life, albeit in the hands of another of the participants. Having tucked his own “terrible idea” away for future use (it would play a minor role in a larger novel, though still to little acclaim), Dr. Polidori found himself ruminating on Byron’s fragment. It was a very simple ghost story, hardly developed at all. Two friends from England travel to Greece, and one dies while there. Before his demise, the dying man asks his friend to swear never to reveal at home that he is dead, and the friend agrees. But back in England, he soon sees his dead friend return to his place in society, and so the living man is cast into agony: he can never tell his friends—even his own sister, who begins to fall in love with the undead man—that they are trafficking with a specter.
Goaded by a lover, Polidori spent a few days embellishing this bare outline into a ghost story both more frightening and more cutting than originally conceived. It was more barbed, in that Polidori clearly modeled his undead villain on his employer (soon to be ex-employer, for the two quarreled constantly), Byron himself. The dying friend became Lord Ruthven, a dissolute and financially troubled aristocrat, a caddish seducer of women. The name Ruthven itself was a dead giveaway: it was the same name given to the Byron figure in Glenarvon, a thinly fictionalized tell-all about the poet that was penned by Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his many recent entanglements, and published right before Polidori was writing.
But the retooled tale was more terrifying, too, because Byron’s specter became, in Polidori’s hands, not merely a ghost but a vampire, a figure then known well in popular intrigue but not yet so well in fiction. Polidori’s fictional vampire, though not the first in English, would become the template for essentially all the vampire fiction (and, later, film) that was to follow. In his brio to satirize Byron, Polidori was led to make two brilliant metaphorical connections that persist to this day. The first is the vampire as aristocrat, as a man whose dealings with the rabble are confined to predations upon their very flesh. The second, and more crucial, is the vampire as seducer: a man whose attitude toward women is driven by unslakable, quasi-sexual (or literally sexual) appetites. And yet in the moment of consummation, as it were, the vampire takes on a lyssa-like rage, as the innocent male protagonist discovers:
He was lifted from his feet and hurled with enormous force against the ground:—his enemy threw himself upon him, and kneeling upon his breast, had placed his hands upon his throat when the glare of many torches penetrating through the hole that gave light in the day, disturbed him.
Soon thereafter, the female victim is discovered: “There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there:—upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein.”
These two attributes, nobility and lust, also define our own vampires, from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice to Stephenie Meyer. Vampirism is a dark, animal undercurrent that haunts the human—even the most refined among us, and even in our closest relationships. The vampire’s bite shocks most for its shattering of our admiration, our domesticity, our intimacy. Beyond the profusion of vampire fiction that spun out of Polidori’s tale (published as The Vampyre) and reached its apex with Dracula, the vampire also came to function as a powerful trope in less fantastical writing as well. Much like with the lyssa of Homer, or the rage of The Song of Roland, the vampire stalks through nineteenth-century English literature as a ready-made metaphor for the animalistic force undergirding the passions of men—or, as the case may be, of women.
It would not be until the very end of the nineteenth century that rabies’ most ancient host—the bat—would find a permanent home in vampire tales. The association had been made for centuries, though, by those who followed news from the Spanish New World. An early sixteenth-century account of Hispaniola, penned by the historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and published in abridged form during the 1520s, described such curiosities as the pineapple, the hammock, and tobacco. His account also introduced Europeans to a terrifying variety of bloodsucking bat. “Usually they bite at night,” Oviedo reported, “and most commonly they bite the tip of the nose or the tip of the fingers and toes, and suck such a great amount of blood from the wound that it is difficult to believe unless one has observed it…. The wound itself is small, for the bat takes out only a small circle of flesh.” Translations of Oviedo’s abridged history found popularity throughout western Europe during the 1550s; over time, the Spanish conquistadores would come to call the bats vampiros, because of their resemblance to Europe’s mythic monsters.
Comprising three species confined to the tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas, vampire bats are unique among mammals for their habit of subsisting on the blood of other warm-blooded vertebrates. Oviedo’s description of their feeding behaviors is impressively accurate. The bats do preferentially bite the capillary-rich tips of fingers, toes, and noses; and through a small circular aperture made in the victim’s skin, they indeed can lap large quantities of blood for their size—thanks to an anticoagulant in their saliva that also can lead to excessive bleeding in their victims after they drink their fill and flap away. (When this anticoagulant was discovered in the twentieth century, it was puckishly named draculin, a moniker that has stuck.) Almost certainly these bats harbored rabies at the time of the Spanish conquest, and Oviedo’s account provides some support of that fact: he calls their bites “poisonous” and reports that “some Christians died” from the poison before the natives explained their local cure, namely cauterization.
By the early nineteenth century, tales of vampire bats circulated widely in the English-speaking world. J. G. Stedman, in a 1796 account of his years in Suriname, describes his encounter with a blood-feeding bat in fantastical terms. “On waking about four o’clock this morning in my hammock,” he writes,
I was extremely alarmed at finding myself weltering in congealed blood, and without feeling any pain whatever…. I had been bitten by the vampire, or spectre, of Guana, which is also called the flying dog of New Spain, and, by the Spaniards, perrovolador. This is no other than a bat of a monstrous size, that sucks the blood from men and cattle when they are fast asleep, even, sometimes, until they die; and as the manner in which they proceed is truly wonderful, I shall endeavor to give a distinct account of it.—Knowing by instinct that the person they intend to attack is in a sound slumber, they generally alight near the feet; where, while the creature continues fanning its enormous wings, which keeps one cool, he bites a piece out of the tip of the great toe, so very small, indeed, that the head of a pin could scarcely be received into the wound, which is, consequently, not painful; yet through this orifice he continues to suck the blood, until he is obliged to disgorge. He then begins again, and thus continues sucking and disgorging till he is scarcely able to fly, and the sufferer has often been known to sleep from time into eternity…. Having applied tobacco-ashes as the best remedy, and washed the gore from myself and from my hammock, I observed several small heaps of congealed blood, all around the place where I had lain, upon the ground; upon examining which, the surgeon judged that I might have lost at least twelve or fourteen ounces during the night.
Around the same time, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya was using spectral, bat-like figures to symbolize vampiric forces. Great shadowy bats hover above a slumped figure of Reason, in The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, and also, in There Is Plenty to Suck, behind three murderous hags as they prepare to consume a basketful of babies. His Los caprichos illustrates a series of vampire-like figures in the act of devouring sleeping innocents. In 1804, William Blake depicted a vampire bat in two engravings accompanying his poem Jerusalem to symbolize what he calls the Spectre—the divisive and annihilating energies that cannibalize the human psyche. But it took scientists until 1810 to provide a description of the hematophagous (that is, bloodsucking) bat. Even in 1839, when Charles Darwin commented on the feeding habits of a Desmodus bat during his travels aboard the Beagle, he noted that the “whole circumstance has lately been doubted in England; I was therefore fortunate in being present when one…was actually caught on a horse’s back.”
It was left to the British vampire novel to formalize the relationship between the undead creature and its Latin American namesake. The eventual cover of James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre, which began as a horror serial that ran between 1845 and 1847, sported four Satan-headed bats, hovering menacingly around the skeletally dapper Sir Varney as he stands poised to sup at the throat of the raven-haired beauty drowsing beneath him. And then Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in 1897, made the connection unequivocal, with the count’s presence often signaled by his bat rather than by his human form. Ever since, the fictionalized vampire has traveled in the abundant company of bats, whether in novels, in Hollywood, or on Sesame Street—though in that last instance, the number of bats can always be readily counted.
* Strange as this might seem to us today, a poodle appears frequently as the demon dog in old folktales. This association dates back at least to Goethe’s Faust, which has Mephistopheles appearing to Faust in the form of a black poodle, which takes up residence with him and consistently interrupts whenever he tries to translate the Bible. When Faust tries to kick his new dog out, it reveals its true nature to him:
In length and breadth how doth my poodle grow!
…
Huge as a hippopotamus,
With fiery eye, terrific tooth!
Ah! now I know thee, sure enough!
Freemasons, too, were thought to have sold their souls to the devil, who would attend their meetings in the form of a black poodle.