There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

10

Stranger
Than Fiction

Throughout the pages of this book we have searched long and hard to unravel the mysteries of the dreaded creature the world has come to know as the vampire. From the sandblown ruins of ancient Mesopotamia it was seen rising on howling desert winds as an insatiable night demon; from the sweltering jungles of the east it was heard in the pounding drums of strange cults as they called out to bloodthirsty gods; and from the mist-shrouded graveyards of Eastern Europe, villagers fled in abject terror as its shambling form moved through the tombstones on dark nights.

Over the course of this harrowing journey one important observation stands out above the rest: that the vampire has not one face but many, and the form it chooses to appear in at any given time changes depending on the needs of the culture that embraces it. In 1871 the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor wrote in his definitive work Primitive Culture that “vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts …” (Tylor 1994, 192).

It’s true that Tylor was referring specifically to primitive notions surrounding unexplained diseases, but the same principle applies to any number of natural phenomena that early men could not account for, making vampires the ultimate explanation for that which was ultimately unexplainable.

Ancient Answers

By the time vampires made their way into the cuneiform writings of the Babylonians, they were already an ancient belief among early peoples and took the forms of frightful spirits or night demons responsible for a host of evil activities. Beyond their obviously destructive traits, however, they also served to help reinforce societal norms by providing the threat of otherworldly reprisal if a taboo were broken. As examined early in this book, the ekimmu were evil spirits that resulted when someone died alone and without relatives to remember them or place the appropriate offerings of food and drink at their grave. According to many early societies, the worlds of the living and the dead were often closely intertwined and even impacted one another on a daily basis. If the living relative therefore did not provide sustenance for the dead, the spirits would grow famished and eventually turn to human blood to quench their hunger.

While a number of remedies existed to combat such spirits, it’s telling that the most effective means was simply to perform the necessary burial rites at the grave of the one suspected of being an ekimmu and thereby uphold the conventions, so necessary for survival, that bound the individual to the familial unit.

At other times vampires acted as a sort of universal scapegoat for all the natural evils that seemed to befall people, including famines, diseases, storms, nightmares, and unexplained deaths. A host of vampiric demons existed to take the blame for these tragedies, such as the Lamashtu, Lamme, gallu, and lilith.

Of all the fiends that walked through these stories, however, it was perhaps the demoness Lilith that was most feared for her role as a child killer. Infant mortality being what it was at the time, it was easier to justify how a healthy infant had died in his or her sleep by believing that an evil force crept into the room and took the child’s life. Today we call the phenomenon crib death or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and even with all our medical advances we are no closer to providing an explanation to the causes of this tragedy. In instances of miscarriages or stillbirths, where spontaneous bleeding occurs, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how the demoness became associated with blood drinking as well.

Dilemma of the Dead

As the belief in vampire-like creatures moved west into Europe along the well-traveled caravan routes and migration paths, it transformed itself in order to find greater acceptance in the new lands in which it took root. Previous images of antagonistic spirits and night demons capable of shocking atrocities were replaced by a monster born from the worst of nightmares, a maniacal corpse bent on human blood. Yet despite the complete horror of this image, the revenants of Eastern Europe served an invaluable function for the communities that feared them, resolving dilemmas connected with improper burials, bodily decomposition, and the spread of highly contagious diseases.

Take, for instance, the differences between modern burial practices and those conducted as few as two hundred years ago. In the typical twenty-first century burial, when a person dies their body is first subjected to a postmortem examination by a coroner, known as an autopsy, to determine the cause and manner of death. The body then undergoes an embalming process during which the blood and other fluids are replaced with preservative chemicals to slow the rate of decomposition. After being dressed and placed in a metal coffin by a mortician, the body is lowered into a concrete vault four to six feet underground. Following a funeral service, the lid to the vault is sealed with long metal bars and the soil, originally excavated by heavy earth-moving machines, is piled back on top. By the end of the lengthy process the final remains are more secure than the national gold reserve at Fort Knox.

By contrast, burials in the past were nowhere near as efficient or as sanitary and required more of the community’s limited resources and manpower. Unless the deceased was a person of nobility or wealth, most gravesites were nothing more than a shallow hole scraped from the earth with the hands and shovels of loved ones. In regions where the soil was rocky or during the winter months when the ground was frozen, the task was especially difficult. Once the grave was prepared the body was washed and dressed by family members before being wrapped in a burial shroud. Coffins were of course a luxury and few could afford them, so most bodies were placed directly into the earth with dirt or sometimes rock laid over them. In some cultures the proceedings were lengthy and filled with elaborate ceremony, while in others, or in cases of murder or suicide, they were hastily conducted with little thought. During periods of deadly outbreaks, when the body count became too much to keep up with, the bodies of the victims were simply thrown into mass graves if they were buried at all.

Improper burials often led to disturbing consequences, including bodies being washed out of graves during heavy rains or attracting hungry dogs and wolves looking for a snack. Villagers passing by were commonly treated to the horrific sights of graves in disarray with headstones toppled over, half-eaten body parts here and there, and burial sites that had been clawed at as if something were trying to dig its way out.

Many of these signs came to be interpreted as evidence that evil was afoot and that a foul vampire had taken up residence among the corpses. Even when the traditional test of having a horse wander through a cemetery until it found a grave it would not cross was used, it’s easy to understand—considering that the half-exposed body smelled, the ground underfoot was unstable, and the beast could probably sense the fear of the crowd gathering around it—what the result would be.

Once a corpse was suspected of being a blood drinker, it was only a matter of time before it was disinterred and searched for signs of vampirism. Many who were unfamiliar with the way that the body breaks down often misinterpreted the natural process of decomposition for something far more sinister. For most rural communities the post-death process was a simple one: when you died, if you were a good and faithful Christian you were buried in consecrated ground where in time your body stiffened, your hair fell out, your flesh became bones and dust, your clothing rotted away, and your soul went to heaven. In cases of reported vampire outbreaks, eyewitnesses attested that the bodies of the vampires remained preserved in an unnatural state that by all descriptions bordered on the demonic. The face was characterized as dark or ruddy-complexioned with fresh blood around the nose and mouth; and the body, flexible and swollen to the point of bursting, was stretched as tight as a drum from all the blood it had recently engorged itself with.

A careful examination of how the human body truly decomposes after death, however, sheds light on how some of these startling observations were made by witnesses. When the body’s heart ceases to pump blood through the circulatory system, gravity pulls the fluid to the lowest parts of the body. If as in many cases the corpse was buried facing downwards to prevent it from digging its way out, the blood pooled in the face, giving it a reddish appearance as the eyes protruded and the lips peeled back in a macabre sort of snarl. While rigor mortis does indeed set in initially, causing the limbs and joints to stiffen when depleted of enzymes, the condition is only temporary, and after approximately thirty-six hours the muscle fibers deteriorate, leaving the corpse as pliable as it was in life. Bacteria within the body, known as bacillus aerogenes, then begin to multiply, feeding on the internal organs and releasing a gangrenous gas that swells the body.

As this pressure builds, the body moves and shifts as the gas occasionally redistributes itself and blood and other fluids are forced out of the body’s orifices including the eyes, mouth, and nose. Later, when would-be vampire hunters attempted to drive a stake through the chest cavity of the corpse, they were often frightened by the body giving off an eerie moan, which although they attributed it to the vampire, was actually gas forced past the undecayed vocal cords by the force of the blow. It’s interesting to note that many of the early methods of dispatching vampires coincidentally inhibited the development of bacillus aerogenes and therefore seemed to have their desired results. Garlic, for instance, is an antiseptic that kills gangrene, while heat and sunlight impede bacterial growth.

Although many mistakenly thought that the vampire’s body failed to decompose because it sustained itself with the blood of its victims, modern science reveals that there are a number of factors that affect the decomposition rate of the human body, including temperature, humidity, oxygen levels, chemical composition of the soil, and burial depth. While a body exposed to the elements can decompose in a matter of months, below the surface in a cold, airless environment free of scavengers and insects the process slows considerably. In arid regions, newly buried corpses can mummify, while in moist climates the opposite is true and saponification may develop, encasing the body in a waxy substance that also preserves the flesh.

The Benedictine monk and early vampirologist Augustin Calmet believed that certain compositions of soil aided or retarded the rate of decomposition, pointing to a crypt in a church in Toulouse, France, that housed an order of monks. Along one wall, he wrote, the bodies remained perfectly preserved for nearly two centuries, while on the opposite wall newly interred monks decayed after only a few days. A modern example of note was discovered in the peat bogs of Denmark in the 1950s near the small village of Tollund, when workers stumbled upon the preserved body of a man from the fourth century BCE. Because of the highly acidic nature of the cold bogs and the lack of oxygen, the flesh of the “Tollund Man,” as he is called, turned black and mummified. Since that time, hundreds of bog bodies have been discovered across Northern Europe in the same well-preserved condition.

One of the more feared aspects of the European vampire, however, was not their insatiable craving for human blood but that they were carriers of deadly diseases such as the bubonic plague, yellow fever, and tuberculosis. In fact, a careful study of purported vampire attacks across Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries reveals that they often coincided with outbreaks of infectious epidemics. When a healthy man suddenly took to his bed with a mysterious illness and died, followed shortly thereafter by his wife, sons, and then close friends who visited him on his sickbed, it wasn’t the work of microscopic bacteria inadvertently passed from one host to another, it was the presence of the vampire. In 1922 when director F. W. Murnau titled his cult classic Nosferatu, he chose a name that meant not “the undead” or “the blood drinker,” but “plague carrier,” because it came closer to the original concept of the traditional vampire in Germany.

In the folklore of Europe, vampirism itself was a communicable disease passed from the infected corpse of the revenant to that of its living victim either when it fed or when someone came into contact with its tainted blood. It’s interesting to note when rifling through the eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks that the victims suffered symptoms often found in many life-threatening diseases, including:

• Failing strength or lethargy

• Symptoms that worsened at night

• Weight loss

• Feelings of heaviness in the chest

• Pale skin

• Loss of appetite

• Coughing fits that produced blood in the mucus

Even in parts of rural New England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the wasting disease now called tuberculosis was commonly thought to be the result of attacks from a family member who had become a vampire. An airborne pathogen called Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes tuberculosis, which usually attacks the lungs and without proper treatment kills over half of its victims. The symptoms of tuberculosis include fever, weight loss, chronic coughing, and blood-tinged mucus.

The 1892 case of a young girl named Mercy Lea Brown is one of the last known times in America that a person was exhumed due to fears of vampirism. The Brown family was living in Exeter, Rhode Island, at the time when the “bloody cough” hit, first killing Mercy’s mother and then Mercy’s sister Olive shortly thereafter. Sometime later, Mercy’s older brother Edwin became ill also, and he and his wife moved to Colorado to seek treatment at a sanatorium famed for its healing mineral springs. While they were away, Mercy grew sick as well and died at the age of nineteen.

Edwin returned home, but his condition only worsened and neighbors began to suggest that one of the Brown family members had become a vampire after death and was now responsible for the mysterious wasting disease afflicting the family. If George Brown, the patriarch of the family, wanted to save what was left of his family, they warned, he needed to exhume the bodies and examine them for signs of vampirism.

George Brown was horrified by the notion of desecrating their graves but eventually gave in to pressure from the community. Accompanied by the local medical examiner, Dr. Harold Metcalf, Brown disinterred his wife and two daughters. First he exhumed his wife, whose remains were little more than bones and a bit of hair; then his daughter Olive, who while mummified appeared to have no blood left in her body; and finally he dug up young Mercy, who despite having been in the ground three months appeared fresh and with a rosy blush to her cheeks.

Although the doctor cautioned that it was merely a natural part of death’s process, George nonetheless ordered her heart removed for further inspection. After finding thick, dark blood still in the heart, witnesses claimed that it was a sign of vampirism, and the organ was burned to ashes on a nearby rock. Afterwards, the ashes were mixed with various medicines and fed to Edwin in the hopes of breaking the vampire’s curse, but, alas, he died soon after anyway.

Weird Science

While it’s often easy to look back on the beliefs of our forebears and shake our heads in disbelief at the credulousness of their superstitions, in our own time theories surrounding the origin of the vampire continue, with speculations as colorful as anything that came before. Probably one of the most often repeated theories on the genesis of the European vampire is the idea that it stems from the unusual appearance of those suffering from the blood disease porphyria. Also known as King George III’s disease, the genetic disorder causes an abnormality in the hemoglobin, sending part of the blood’s pigment to the urine rather than the body’s cells. Toxic levels accumulate quickly, producing a wide range of symptoms including a reddening of the eyes, skin, and teeth as well as sensitivity to sunlight and necrosis of the skin. Treatment of the disorder involves injections of heme and reducing blood volume to control iron levels.

The theory was first espoused in 1964 by Dr. Lee Illis of Guy’s Hospital in London in a paper for the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine entitled “On Porphyria and the Aetiology of Werewolves,” and then again by author Nancy Garden in her 1973 book, Vampires. It didn’t become popular, however, until it was reintroduced to the public during a lecture for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985 by Canadian biochemist David Dolphin with his paper “Porphyria, Vampires, and Werewolves: The Aetiology of European Metamorphosis Legends.”

Dolphin’s ideas were widely accepted in large part because of the vampire boom in books and movies sweeping the Western Hemisphere and the growing trend among writers and moviemakers to modernize the creature by adding a bit of science to the mix and casting vampirism as a disease. Unfortunately for those suffering from the disorder and who now had to face the added stigma of this new label, Dolphin’s knowledge was limited to that of Hollywood vampires, and none of the corpses accused of vampirism in historical texts actually displayed the characteristic of someone with porphyria.

Other theories followed this growing trend, including one proposed by the Spanish neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso in 1998, published in the journal Neurology, that held that the belief in the European vampire was the result of major epidemics of rabies across Europe in the 1700s. The idea for this new theory came to Dr. Gomez-Alonso late one night as he watched the movie Dracula and suddenly noticed striking similarities between the vampire and victims of rabies. While researching the matter further, he uncovered a wealth of interesting correlations—including the fact that victims suffering from rabies often have the tendency to bite others and that most of the famous vampire outbreaks in Eastern Europe coincided with rabies epidemics in dogs and wolves, especially in Hungary between 1721 and 1728.

Rabies is a viral disease causing swelling in the brain and is passed through the bite of an infected animal, most commonly dogs, wolves, and bats (animals associated with vampires). Symptoms include anxiety, confusion, agitation, paranoia, hallucinations, hydrophobia, and finally death. Interestingly enough, many of the folkloric aversions attributed to vampires are also found in rabies victims. As Dr. Gomez-Alonso pointed out, “Men with rabies … react to stimuli such as water, light, odors, or mirrors with spasms of the facial and vocal muscles that can cause hoarse sounds, bared teeth, and frothing at the mouth of bloody fluid.” In the past, he continued, “a man was not considered rabid if he was able to stand the sight of his own image in a mirror” (Jenkins 2010, 15–16). The deadly bite of the vampire, which could infect a victim, has its obvious parallels with rabies.

Others have surmised that victims of reported nocturnal vampire attacks also show a marked similarity to a condition known as sleep paralysis, which occurs either just before falling asleep or just upon waking, when a person finds himself or herself fully awake yet unable to move. The paralysis can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes and is thought to be the result of a temporary disconnect between the brain and the body as the person drifts in and out of REM sleep. This often terrifying condition may afflict both normal sleepers and those diagnosed with disorders such as narcolepsy, cataplexy, and during the presence of hypnagogic hallucinations.

Normally those with sleep paralysis awake unable to move, with what they perceive as the sound of someone or something approaching them. Strange forms or even smells manifest along with the feeling that an immense weight is crushing the person’s chest. In a few moments the paralysis wears off, and they come fully awake to find that they are completely exhausted as if they had not slept at all. In early European folklore many believed that at night an old hag or witch could leave her physical body and sit upon the chest of a sleeping victim, causing nightmares or even crushing the victim to death. In fact, the original name for the phenomenon was itself nightmare, from the combination of the word night and the Old English term maere, meaning “demon” or “incubus.”

Perhaps the newest take on the old myth is the belief that vampires originated from individuals suffering from what psychiatrists today call clinical vampirism. It is also known as Renfield’s syndrome, a term first coined by psychologist Richard Noll in his book Bizarre Diseases of the Mind, which compared the traits of the disorder to those exhibited by the fictional character Renfield in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who eats spiders and flies in order to consume their life force. Those diagnosed with this syndrome display a strong obsession for drinking blood and may develop delusions of being a vampire. The act of drinking blood carries with it an intense sexual aspect coupled with the belief that it will convey certain supernatural powers.

The condition usually occurs in males just before they reach the age of puberty when some trauma or event psychically links blood and sexuality together for them, which in turn leads to vampiric fantasies and auto-vampirism (drinking one’s own blood). In more extreme examples, such as in the case of convicted serial killer Richard Trenton Chase, whose blood-drinking crimes we examined earlier, it can also intensify into necrophilia, necrophagia, cannibalism, and sadism.

The search for the truth about vampires has been a long and arduous journey through a vast collection of exotic countries, belief systems, and languages. When we first began the hunt we were standing next to an empty grave in a deserted island monastery pondering the mystery of one of history’s most notorious blood drinkers, the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince Vlad Dracula Tepes. Through it all we’ve seen what the vampire meant to each of the cultures we examined, studying its various forms, habits, and how some mortals even took arms against it in a centuries-old struggle of good versus evil.

Yet in the end what matters most is what the vampire means to us here and now in the new age dawning before us. Is it still the thing lurking just beyond the glow of the campfire somewhere out there in the darkness, or is it ultimately the darkness that we find lurking within ourselves? Whether or not you believe in vampires, or in what form you believe they exist, will in the end come to depend on what your answer is to that very question.

In light of where we have traveled and the horrors we have seen, it is important to include a cautionary tale about the dangers of hunting vampires. On July 16, 1996, a young reporter for the New York Village Voice named Susan Walsh dropped her son off at her ex-husband’s apartment, saying she would be running some quick errands. At the time, Susan was investigating the vampire clubs then springing up in Greenwich Village, as well as sinister reports of kidnappings and murders connected to the modern blood drinkers.

In her search for the truth some believe she may have delved too far by immersing herself in the vampyre subculture and dating a man who believed he was a vampire. That day she told her ex-husband that she would be back in a few minutes, but she was never seen again. A subsequent search of her apartment revealed that she had taken none of her personal belongings nor her pager or wallet. Some say she committed suicide or ran afoul of the Russian mafia, but others claim that she became a victim of the very vampires she was hunting. Regardless of which version you choose to believe, Susan Walsh dropped off the face of the earth, and her case remains open and unsolved to this day.

Today the monastery at Lake Snagov has become something of a tourist shrine for vampire fans the world over, who make pilgrimages to the site to snap photos of the empty grave and leave flowers or other items. Up until World War II the archeological evidence collected from the second grave was housed in the city of Bucharest’s History Museum, at which time it was transferred by convicts to the mountains near Valenii de Munte in southern Romania (coincidentally Dracula’s former homeland) for safekeeping.

During transport the artifacts thought to belong to Dracula disappeared, removing any hope of solving the riddle of the empty grave and ensuring for generations to come that the hunt for the truth about Dracula and the legend of the vampire will go on.

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