CHAPTER FOUR
IN 1685, THE TRAVELER who left the gates of Vienna and turned east “seems to take leave of our World,” as the English writer Edward Browne reported, “and before he cometh to Buda, seems to enter upon a new stage of world, quite different from that of the western countrys.”
This was Hungary, final port on the great sea of grass that, stretching ever eastward, ended only on the borders of China. Out of these prairielands had swept the mounted archers of Attila the Hun, of the Avars, of the Mongols, and finally of the Ottoman Turks. East of Vienna, even the natural world seemed imbued with the oriental: The oaks had a different cut to their leaves and bore acorns capped, like Turkic tribesmen, with a wild fringe of pendant and tassel.
Rimmed by hills and mountains, the sea of grass that was the Hungarian plain was also a Hapsburg lake. An imperial dynasty, stolidly German, devoutly Catholic, the Hapsburgs ruled from Vienna’s Hofburg Palace a polyglot empire that embraced not only the Magyars, or Hungarians, but also those subject peoples who dwelt in the surrounding hills: Bohemians, Moravians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Romanians. Each could be told by their distinctive dress. The Hapsburgs even ruled Poles, whose natural affinities—like the course of Poland’s rivers—ran toward Prussia and the Baltic, and Ruthenians, who looked toward Russia and “Little Tartary,” the nomad-swept grasslands north of the Black Sea.
In the south, the Hapsburgs would come to absorb Slovenes, Croats, and Bosnians as well. Greeks, Bulgars, Turks, and Jews swarmed the cities and towns. Gypsies wandered everywhere, especially in Transylvania, where they had long been famed as musicians and great dancers—whirling, stomping, hand-clapping dancers. Though the hills and orchards, wheat fields and vineyards of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia and Slavonia, were all classically European, the presence of these colorful peoples lent those lands an air of exoticism to the Hapsburgs and their fellow elites. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart regarded his visits to Prague, more than 150 miles northwest of Vienna, as “excursions into a culturally different world.”
Armies had long fought for those hills and grasslands. Vlad the Impaler had battled the invading Ottomans on the plains of Wallachia in the 15th century, and the Turks had surrounded the gates of Vienna on more than one occasion. Few travelers had willingly ventured into such a dangerous region, and when they finally did begin to arrive, they found, anthropologist Edith Durham discovered in 1906, that its inhabitants “live in the past to an extent which it is hard for us in the West to realize.”
Harvests in Hungary, Slovakia, or Romania had on occasion been so abundant that grain was left to rot in the fields. As late as the eve of World War I, agriculture in the region was not merely unmechanized but practically medieval: Oxen still pulled wooden plows and harrows, while reaping and haying were done by sickle and scythe.
These crude conditions were even more pronounced in lands long subjected to Ottoman rule. The ebbing of the Turkish tide took centuries: Greece freed itself in 1830, but Romania and parts of Serbia and Bulgaria did not break free until 1878. Lines of castles edged the former tidemarks, as did a shifting zone of desolate countryside, abandoned and wild. The few border crossings were not just Austrian military posts but lazzaretti, or quarantine stations. These had been compulsory stops for all travelers coming from the east since at least the mid-18th century, and they had been erected out of fear of a new invader, or rather an old one: the plague.
Seen from a distance, looming over the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, was the dazzling white fortress of Belgrade—Beo-grad, the “white city,” gateway to the maze of mountains that were the Balkans (balkan is Turkish for “mountain”). From Serbia and Bulgaria down through Macedonia, Albania, and northern Greece, men might be garbed in sheepskin and clad in knee-high sandals reminiscent of Alexander the Great. Women might be decked in colorful embroidery and half-hidden behind scarves and kerchiefs. These were lands of vendetta, but of hospitality, too: the fiery plum wine called slivovitz, the spitted lamb, the Turkish coffee, and the music of horsehair-stringed instruments and goatskin bagpipes.
Although the Ottomans still dominated here, their mosques were squat and uninspiring. Ottoman graveyards, by contrast, were picturesque in the extreme, the tombstones raked at every conceivable angle by the passage of time. Islam had won only Albania and parts of Bosnia; elsewhere, the censer of Eastern Orthodoxy held sway. No organs sounded in those churches, however—only chants that seemed to issue from smoke-blackened icons with large, expressive eyes. Outside its doors might stand an ancient tree, emblazoned with a cross that barely disguised its origins as an object of pagan devotions.
Before the 20th century, travelers had to rough it in the Balkans. Roman roads had degenerated into mere cart tracks, and even four-wheeled carts were rare for years; you went by foot or on horseback. The endless oak forests were haunted by bear, wolf, and the lean, rakish pig that saddled Serbia with the label of “a nation of swineherds.” Higher on the hillsides stretched somber beech woods. “Those of us who have ridden for hours through what is left of the Balkan primeval forests…,” wrote Edith Durham nearly a century ago, “know the awe inspired by the silence, the gold green light, and the endless army of mighty grey trunks towering erect from the soil that is muffled and bedded with the dead leafage of a thousand years and echoes no tread. The horse sinks knee-deep. You dismount and plunge through it with difficulty.”
Those were the forests travelers once had to cross on their way from Belgrade to Nis, where stood the notorious Skull Tower, made from the severed heads of Serbian rebels. There they crossed the mountains to Sofia and rode down the via militaris, the old imperial road that once echoed to the tramp of the legions, to Constantinople. From the 1880s on, they could follow that route in relative comfort by riding the Orient Express.
By that time, a visitor could stand on the ramparts of the old fortress at Belgrade and gaze out over the rippling Hungarian plain at its famous sunsets. With the fall of night, he might turn away, call for a fiacre, and head for a delicious dinner at the Crown of Servia, never suspecting that his perch of the past half hour had once been an execution ground where the reigning pasha displayed the blackened corpses of impaled Christians as a warning to the infidels.
Nightfall, however, brought enormous isolation deep in the interior of the Balkans. There, the traveler caught far from a village had better check his pistols. Bandits and smugglers were rumored to be at large—but were they the sole reason his driver, before snapping the reins in the gathering gloom, had so tremulously crossed himself?
DEEP IN THE FOREST
In 1717, when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu passed through Belgrade, it was still a Turkish frontier fortress garrisoned by elite Janissaries, and she was accompanying her husband, the newly appointed British minister to the Ottoman Empire, on his way across the Balkans to Constantinople. For seven days, they and a company of these Janissaries wound their way up the Morava River valley, traversing what Lady Montagu described as the “deserts of Servia.” Others knew it less poetically as the great Serbian forest—a primeval place of giant oaks and beeches, its dread reinforced by the beatings the Janissaries inflicted on the inhabitants of each village they passed through. The abuse brought tears to Lady Montagu’s eyes.
Fifteen years later, much had changed yet little had changed. Having been on the losing side of the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz, the Turks had withdrawn from Belgrade and most of the Morava River valley. Austrians were now the overseers of that demoralized, undernourished population. Yet, the forest was still there, and quite likely it was up that same road that an Austrian military detachment rode in January 1732. Regimental Field Surgeon Johannes Flückinger, accompanied by two medical examiners and two regular army officers, had departed Belgrade, bound for the village of Medvegia.
Several weeks earlier, an Austrian officer who was a contagious disease specialist had visited Medvegia to investigate the unusually high mortality rate reported there. In three months, 17 people—a large number for a small village—had died, many after an illness of two or three days. The officer had found no evidence of pestilence—only chronic malnutrition. He was urged, however, to examine some of the recent dead—the inhabitants were blaming the deaths on the dead—and probably blanched at what he saw, for he recommended that the villagers be indulged in their desire to destroy the bodies of their former neighbors.
But Belgrade was not yet prepared to go that far. Instead Flückinger and his retinue were dispatched to make a thorough investigation. Medvegia stood near the new border with Turkey, so the Austrians had settled there a company of hajduks—Serbian guerrillas who had once fought the Ottoman occupiers. Upon arriving in the village, Flückinger met with the leading hajduks and the hadnack, or village elder. From them, he heard the story firsthand—or as much of it as could be interpreted, as the villagers surely did not speak German.
Five years earlier, it seemed, a hajduk named Arnold Paole had lived in Medvegia. Paole had served as a Turkish conscript in Kosovo—where, he believed, he had fallen prey to a vampire. At the direction of some folkloric remedy, he had eaten dirt from his assailant’s grave and somehow had smeared himself with its blood. Yet around Medvegia, it seems, such actions were deemed only to deepen, not to remove, the taint. Several weeks after Paole was killed in a fall from a hay wagon, his neighbors began complaining that he had returned as a vampire and was throttling them at night. Soon four of them died, as did some of the village livestock.
Forty days after being buried, therefore, Paole was exhumed and staked through the heart. The villagers then burned his carcass and tossed its ashes back into the grave. And because his four supposed victims would certainly become vampires, too, their bodies were likewise dug up and subjected to similar treatment. Yet, all that had occurred five years earlier, and Medvegia had since returned to normal. Then came this new round of deaths, which the villagers believed to be a fresh outbreak of vampirism.
Perhaps it was the hadnack’s description of the exhumed Paole that intrigued Field Surgeon Flückinger; he emphasized it in his subsequent report. After 40 days in the grave, the village elder related, the dead man had shown no signs of decay. Quite the contrary: Not only had he sloughed off his old skin and nails, but new ones were apparently growing in their places. Though blood was widely supposed to coagulate after death, Paole was said to be wallowing in a coffin full of liquid blood. Blood also flowed from his mouth, his nose, his ears, and even his eyes. When a wooden stake was driven through Paole’s heart, the hadnack asserted, he had emitted an audible groan.
Perhaps Flückinger had read about a similar case in the Wienerisches Diarium back in the summer of 1725. This case had taken place in Kisilova, a Serbian village on the Danube east of Belgrade. Villagers there had demanded that an Austrian official be present at an exhumation, else the hamlet might be destroyed—not an uncommon occurrence “in Turkish times,” they claimed. After a peasant named Peter Plogojowitz had died, nine other people had followed him to the grave in the space of just eight days. All had complained of being throttled at night by the resurrected Plogojowitz, who was also said to have visited his wife and asked for his shoes; trusting her own heels instead, the sensible woman had promptly fled the village. By the time an Austrian official arrived, Plogojowitz had already been exhumed.
Though he had been ten weeks in the grave, the Austrian official noted, Plogojowitz’s body was apparently ruddy and plump, its eyes still open. The nose had collapsed, but otherwise the corpse seemed completely fresh. There was not the slightest whiff of odor. Hair, beard, and nails had apparently grown. Old skin was giving way to new. Moreover, the mouth was full of “fresh” (liquid) blood—which, to hear the villagers tell it, belonged to his victims. As the official looked on in horror, a sharpened stake was pounded into the chest of the corpse, whereupon more blood gushed from its mouth and ears, accompanied by certain “wild signs” (customarily interpreted as an erection). The villagers then burned the body—an act that the official insisted had not been his fault: The “rabble…were beside themselves with fear.”
Whether or not Field Surgeon Flückinger had read the official’s report, he probably entered the Medvegia graveyard that January afternoon knowing what to expect. Even so, it must have taken a cold few hours to perform field autopsies on 17 corpses.
The renewed vampirism, the villagers concluded, must have been occasioned by two women: Stana, who had admitted to once painting herself with vampire blood, and Miliza, who had eaten part of a sheep Paole had supposedly killed. These actions had guaranteed that the pair of women would become vampires at death—and their deaths had come just before those of the 15 others.
Stana, 20, had died in childbirth three months earlier. The baby had died, too—but, being unbaptized, it had been carelessly buried behind a garden fence and half eaten by dogs. With the exception of her ravaged womb, Flückinger noticed, Stana—like Paole and Plogojowitz—was remarkably undecayed. Her old skin and nails had given way to new, and her arteries and veins were full of fresh, not coagulated, blood, which was also pooling in her chest cavity. Her lungs, liver, stomach, spleen, and intestines appeared quite fresh, too.
Miliza, 60, had been dead even longer. Her chest, too, was full of liquid blood, Flückinger discovered, while her viscera—like Stana’s—appeared fresh and normal. Most remarkable, however, was the hajduks’ reaction upon viewing the bloated figure stretched out before them; Miliza had been very lean when she was alive, they asserted, and therefore she must have “come to this surprising plumpness in the grave.”
The same thing was observed, with sickening regularity, in one corpse after another. Flückinger described it as das Vampyrenstande—the “vampiric condition.” An eight-day-old child, also dead for three months, was in that state. A ten-year-old girl, two months in the grave, was similarly undecayed, and fresh blood pooled in her chest. Sixteen-year-old Milloe, nine weeks under the earth, “was found like the other vampires,” as was 17-year-old Joachim, “buried eight weeks and four days.”
A 60-year-old man who had been dead for 6 weeks; a girl named Ruscha, prey to a 10-day illness; an 18-day-old child; a 25-year-old man—all exhibited profuse liquid blood and a puzzling lack of decay. Stanoika, 20, was quite vividly ruddy. Her viscera appeared healthy, her skin and nails were fresh, and her blood flowed freely. Before she had died, Flückinger learned, Stanoika had complained of being throttled by the dead teenaged Milloe at night. On the right side of her throat beneath the ear was the evidence, a “bloodshot blue mark, the length of a finger.”
None of these bodies had been in the ground longer than three months. That meant most of them had been buried in October or November. The onset of winter might have slowed their decomposition—yet how to account for the corpses that did not display “vampirism”? The hadnack’s own wife had been dead for seven weeks, and her newborn child had not survived her for long. Yet, both mother and child were completely decomposed, although their grave lay in ground no different than that of the apparent vampires nearby. A servant named Rhade, 21, had died following a three-month’s illness. After five weeks in the ground, his remains, too, were completely decomposed. So were those of yet another mother and child, who had been laid in their joint grave more than a month earlier.
The hajduks would have had an explanation: The five decomposed bodies were the result of natural death, while the dozen others had been victims of vampire attacks—and were becoming vampires in turn. Unless these vampires were destroyed quickly, the rest of the village was doomed. Flückinger must have given them permission: “After the examination had taken place,” he reported, “the heads of the vampires were cut off by the local gypsies and burned along with the bodies, and then the ashes were thrown into the river Morava. The decomposed bodies, however, were laid back into their own graves.”
It is debatable how much of this Flückinger and the four other members of the Austrian military detachment actually witnessed. They did not enter the graveyard until at least midday, which would have left them only five hours or so to examine 17 corpses. Not only that, but human remains do not burn easily. The cremation of a single body (much less a dozen) would have been a daunting task, even if some were newborns. Then the pyres would have to cool before the ashes could be gathered. Darkness was surely falling, and the gypsies may already have begun their gruesome work.
Having just sanctioned this mass desecration, the Austrians were doubtless eager to depart. Perhaps they would find an old Ottoman caravanserai somewhere along their return route to Belgrade. Or perhaps they stayed in the village instead, watching the massive pyres roar throughout the night, the severed heads rolling about as the burning wood shifted and settled. After what they had just seen and heard, it would be understandable if they chose not to return through that dark forest by night.
FALLACIOUS FICTIONS OF HUMAN FANTASY
Back in Belgrade, Flückinger dutifully prepared his report. “Visum et Repertum”—“Seen and Discovered”—was sealed and notarized by the surgeon, his two medical associates, and the two regular officers. They further attested that all that had been observed “in the matter of vampires…is in every way truthful and has been undertaken, observed, and examined in our own presence.” It was dated January 26, 1732, and dispatched to Hapsburg emperor Charles VI.
Within weeks of being reprinted in a Nuremberg scientific journal, “Visum et Repertum” became a surprise best seller at the 1732 Leipzig Book Fair.
Not that stories about revenants—those returned from the dead—were new; reports of vampire eruptions had been regular features of central and eastern European life for years. But “Visum et Repertum” was not just another compendium of fantastic tales; there was no fiendish corpse in it. Rather, as a report of scientific observations, it appealed to Enlightenment scholars precisely because Flückinger’s conclusions amounted to a medical acknowledgment that a phenomenon called vampirism might exist. It thus kindled a fierce debate throughout the German academic and medical establishment.
Suddenly Arnold Paole and Stanoika were on lips from Leipzig to London. Newsstands carried copies of “Dissertatio de Vampyris Serviensibus” (“On the Serbian Vampires”), “Dissertationes de Masticatione Mortuorum” (“On the Chewing Dead”), “Dissertatio de Cadauveribus Sanguisugis” (“On the Bloodsucking Dead”), and so on. At least 14 treatises and 4 dissertations on the subject were published within a year or two of “Visum et Repertum.”
Smelling sensational copy, journalists quickly picked up on the trend as well, and the word vampire began to infiltrate western European languages. It appeared in Britain, for example, in the March 11, 1732, London Journal— mere weeks after Flückinger returned to Belgrade. Two months later, the May 20 issue of The Craftsman described a dispute “between a grave Doctor of Physick and a beautiful young Lady, an Admirer of strange Occurrences. The Doctor ridicul’d such romantick Stories, as common Artifices of News-writers to fill up their Papers; The Lady insisted on the Truth of this Relation; which stood attested by unexceptionable Witnesses….”
That typified the public reaction to the vampire madness: It was either peasant superstition, or it was chillingly true. According to English novelist Horace Walpole, King George II was a confirmed believer, while in 1750, one Constantino Grimaldi of Italy claimed that no vampires were found where peasants drank wine; according to him, they existed only in countries “where beer, this unhealthy drink, is widespread.”
To the Marquis D’Argens of France, however, it was all hysterical self-fulfilling prophecy. “In examining the Story of the Death of these pretended Martyrs to Vampirism,” he wrote in the 1737 edition of his celebrated Lettres Juives, “I discover all the Marks of an epidemick Fanaticism, and I see clearly that the Impressions of their own Fears was the true Cause of their Destruction.” Thanks to D’Argens’s influence, incidents like the Serbian ones came to be called vampire epidemics wherever they cropped up.
Of all those who weighed in on the vampire question, perhaps no one had a greater impact than Dom Augustin Calmet, abbot of the Benedictine Abbey at Senones in France’s forested Vosges Mountains. A biblical exegete of unimpeachable authority, Calmet was probably the Catholic church’s leading intellectual when he published his mammoth Traité sur les Apparitions des Esprits, et sur les Vampires in 1746. A treasury of tales of angels and demons, specters and apparitions, ghosts and resurrections and revivals, the Traité was one of the first works to apply rudimentary rules of evidence to folklore. “Every age, every nation, every country has its prejudices, its maladies, its customs,” the abbot observed. Then, warming to his subject, he continued in the most vivid terms:
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; and such particulars are related of them, so singular, so detailed, and attended by such probable circumstances, and such judicial information, that one can hardly refuse to credit the belief which is held in those countries, that they come out of their tombs, and produce those effects which are proclaimed of them….
Leery of charges of frivolity, Calmet emphasized that his examination was important from a religious point of view: “For, if the return of vampires is real, it is of import to defend it, and prove it; and if it is illusory, it is of consequence to the interests of religion to undeceive those who believe in its truth, and destroy an error which may produce dangerous effects….”
At times, the abbot’s view of the undead seemed positively cavalier. Not only did Calmet believe medieval tales of the sinful dead trudging out of their churchyard graves during divine services and then dutifully filing back, but also he was not overly concerned with the condition of the corpses found in the Medvegia graveyard:
That bodies which have died of violent maladies, or which have been executed when full of health, or have simply swooned, should vegetate underground in their graves; that their beards, hair, and nails should grow; that they should emit blood, be supple and pliant; that they should have no bad smell, &c.,—all these things do not embarrass us: the vegetation of the human body may produce all these effects.
For Calmet, the “grand difficulty,” not surprisingly, lay in explaining how vampires could emerge from the grave in the first place. That would be the “most interesting part of the narrative”:
How a body covered with four or five feet of earth, having no room to move about and disengage itself, wrapped up in linen, covered with pitch, can make its way out, and come back upon the earth, and there occasion such effects as are related of it; and how after that it returns to its former state, and re-enters underground, where it is found sound, whole, and full of blood, and in the same condition as a living body? This is the question. Will it be said that these bodies evaporate through the ground without opening it, like the water and vapours which enter into the earth, or proceed from it, without sensibly deranging its particles? It were to be wished that the accounts which have been given us concerning the return of the vampires had been more minute in their explanations of this subject.
It was this habit of conditional conclusions, not without art—“If these revenants are really dead, whatever state they may be in in the other world, they play a very bad part here”—that hinted at the very real possibility of vampires for many readers. And the prestigious Calmet had many readers, as his book went through numerous reprintings.
A more clear-cut, ringing denial was needed, according to Monsignor Giuseppe Davanzati, the archbishop of Trani in southern Italy. As early as 1738, he began writing the dissertation eventually called I Vampiri, or The Vampires. Fierce and uncompromising, Davanzati deplored the vampire hysteria primarily because the desecration of corpses mocked and undermined the doctrine of the resurrection. By 1744, a manuscript copy of his work had found its way to the Vatican, where some very sympathetic eyes indeed fell upon it.
Pope Benedict XIV, a man of sunny temperament, had risen to the papacy despite having declared himself neither a saint nor a statesman but simply a stubbornly honest man. He was also a distinguished scholar, having steeped himself in the lore of bodies corruptible and incorruptible while writing his treatise on the beatification of saints, De servo-rum Dei beatificatione et Beatorum canonizatione. When published in 1734, it studiously ignored the vampire craze in full swing at the time. In the book’s second edition, however, published 15 years later, Pope Benedict addressed the undead issue head-on, branding vampires the “fallacious fictions of human fantasy.”
Roma locuta; causa finita—“Rome has spoken; the case is closed.” Dom Calmet duly fell in line. In 1751, in the final edition of his work, the old abbot penned a new conclusion: “I doubt that there is another stand to take on this question other than to deny absolutely that vampires return from the dead.” Then, in 1774, the imprimatur was bestowed on Monsignor Davanzati’s I Vampiri. The gates to the tomb were sealed shut. For Roman Catholics, there were no such things as vampires.
The temporal powers also obeyed. The devout Maria Theresa now sat on the Hapsburg throne, and in 1755, she moved to halt any further exhumations in her realm. After her personal physician, the eminently rational Gerard van Swieten, had investigated vampire hysteria and called it all a “vain fear,” she issued a resolution condemning belief in vampires as “superstition and fraud.” The resolution likewise criminalized the staking or burning of corpses. In August 1756, the empress further strengthened her hand by transferring responsibility for witchcraft, vampire, or any other cases “not readily explainable in natural terms” from the priests to the Conciliar Appellate Court. Her mortal enemy, Frederick the Great of Prussia, with whom she was already again at war, quickly followed suit.
THE MORE THEY ARE BURNED…
The “vampire epidemics” seemed contained. Church and state had closed ranks. It remained only for the Enlightenment to administer the coup de grâce. And who better for that task than François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire?
A man of many interests, ranging from the nature of fire to biblical criticism, Voltaire possessed a scathing wit. By the 1750s, he was holding court in Ferney, his chateau outside Geneva, because his satire had won him too many enemies in France. At Ferney, he finished his masterpiece, Candide (1759), and completed his Dictionnaire philosophique, fruit of a lifetime’s musings on God, metaphysics, immortality, the soul, ethics, and any number of other topics—all turned to so many arrows fired at his favorite targets: the Catholic Church, fanaticism, and political or religious persecution. Published anonymously in 1764, the Dictionnaire was punchy rather than lengthy—the better to hide in one’s pocket.
Under V, of course, was an article on vampires. “What!” mocked Voltaire. “Is it in our eighteenth century that vampires exist? We never heard speak of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess, that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces….”
As for the vampire epidemics:
After slander, nothing is communicated more promptly than superstition, fanaticism, sorcery, and tales of those raised from the dead. There were [vampires] in Wallachia, Moldavia, and some among the Polanders, who are of the Romish church. This superstition being absent, they acquired it, and it went through all the east of Germany. Nothing was spoken of but vampires, from 1730 to 1735; they were laid in wait for, their hearts torn out and burnt. They resembled the ancient martyrs—the more they were burnt, the more they abounded.
Nor did Voltaire spare his friend Dom Augustin Calmet: “Calmet became their historian,” he concluded, “and treated vampires as he treated the Old and New Testament, by relating faithfully all that has been said before him.”
If he intended to instruct and amuse in portable format, Voltaire was vindicated: The Dictionnaire philosophique sold out its first edition, brought down the wrath of the Catholic Church, and was banned and burned in France and Geneva.
Meanwhile, that other lion of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was likewise invoking vampires. In 1762, the apostle of the “natural man” had been called upon to defend himself against ecclesiastical attacks, too. The archbishop of Paris had taken great offense at Émile, Rousseau’s antiestablishment treatise promoting educational reform and “natural religion.” Both author and book were banned from France; there, thankfully, only the book could be burned, for the author took to his heels. Protesting this treatment, Rousseau wrote an open letter to the archbishop in which he sought to drive home a point about the interpretation of evidence:
If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of the vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?
The answer was seemingly no one—at least no one in Enlightenment France.
Voltaire and Rousseau died within weeks of each other in the summer of 1778. Because Voltaire was an excommunicate and Rousseau was rumored to have shot himself, they should both, by the rules of folklore, have risked becoming vampires. But during the French Revolution, their bodies—or at least their coffins—were removed from their lonely graves and installed in the Panthéon in Paris, the former church that was supposed to become the sacred space for a new secular state.
By the 1830s, the Panthéon had become a church again, and it was whispered that the remains of Voltaire and Rousseau had been clandestinely dumped in a sewer. As one newspaper reporter put it, the “faithful and pious couldn’t worship over the heads of two such infidels.” Or was it the other way around? As a waggish King Louis XVIII was said to have put it, had those two heads simply grown annoyed at having Mass celebrated above them? Perhaps they had risen from the crypt and trooped out of the church, like Dom Calmet’s excommunicates in the Middle Ages.
In December 1897, an official delegation tiptoed down into the vaults of the Panthéon and had the tombs opened. The great men were indeed still there, although no signs of vampirism despoiled their bodies. A New York Times article reported that “A viscous matter, apparently coagulated sawdust” coated Voltaire’s remains. Although his skull had been sawed in half when his brain was removed soon after death, he was still eerily recognizable. Voltaire, who had looked mummified even in life, was now a dead ringer for the famous bust of him by the sculptor Pigalle: “…even the sardonic smirk was recognizable in the thin skin drawn tightly over the cheek bones and frontal.”
Rousseau’s hands were still clasped over his chest, and though the “thread of the shroud enveloped the skeleton; the body had evidently been imperfectly embalmed.” A few teeth were still visible, as were a few hairs on the skull—a skull, it was observed, that showed no signs of a self-inflicted gunshot wound: Jean-Jacques Rousseau had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
THE DEATH VINE
Though far removed from the European world of Medvegia, New England, with its rock-ribbed hills and once-dense forests of chestnut and white pine, originally bore a striking resemblance to parts of the Balkans.
Among headstones carved with skulls and destroying angels in the Old Burying Point in Salem, Massachusetts, lie the graves of the judges who presided over the notorious witchcraft trials of 1692. Nearby is Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the final resting place of Emerson, Thoreau, and other leaders of 19th-century transcendentalism. New England would seem to have come a long way between those two milestones.
Or maybe not. On September 29, 1859, three years before he died of tuberculosis, Thoreau noted in his journal, “I have just read of a family in Vermont who, several of the members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs, heart and liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.”
Thoreau was still alive and writing when a small family graveyard, set on a sandy knoll outside Griswold, Connecticut, was abandoned. Gradually it was overgrown, then forgotten—until November 1990, that is, when a sand- and gravel-mining operation began biting into it. As three boys played among the fresh cuts one day, they rolled down the hill and discovered two human skulls bouncing after them.
By the time Connecticut State archaeologist Nick Bellantoni arrived, any headstones that might have remained had been lost to mining machinery. So a grid was set up, and the site was mapped, photographed, and excavated. Like so many others, the site was small—about 17 yards by 25 yards—and apparently marked out by stakes surrounded by heaps of stones. That was not much to go on, but some determined sleuthing uncovered the site’s history: In 1757, a farmer named Walton had purchased the knoll from his sea-captain neighbor for 12 shillings. It was used as a cemetery by several generations—and by several families—until about 1840. Then it was abandoned to the rhythms of seedtime and harvest, summer and winter.
In the end, Bellantoni recovered from the Walton Cemetery the remains of 27 individuals: 5 adult males, 8 adult females, and, in a touching reminder of the appalling rate of infant mortality in previous eras, 14 children and adolescents.
Each corpse was carefully removed from what remained of its pine or oak coffin and was wrapped in acid-free paper. Bits of debris—artifacts, hair, wood, soil samples, or straight pins that once held a shroud in place—were painstakingly plotted, labeled, and collected. The site’s lack of machine-cut nails suggested that most burials predated the 1830s. Two of the bodies had been laid in crypts of stone and unmortared brick; spelled out in brass tacks on their coffins were the designations “NB-13” and “JB-55.” We may never know what names those initials stand for, but the numerals suggest their age at death.
All in all, it seemed to be a representative graveyard for its time and place, distressingly full of infants, perhaps—a quarter of the burials were infants under two years old—but otherwise indicative of a typically hardscrabble, physically demanding rural life. That was the story that Paul Sledzik was reading in the bones. As curator of the anatomical collections at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., Sledzik knew his bones, having the better part of 2,000 Civil War soldiers under his supervision.
It had seemed like just another day among the skeletons when Sledzik’s telephone rang. It was an old classmate of his, Nick Bellantoni, saying he had found something that Sledzik might find interesting.
Back on the knoll near Griswold, when the archaeologists had opened the coffin labeled “JB-55,” Bellantoni was momentarily taken aback. The skeleton looked like no other he had seen: These bones had been rearranged in a classic skull-and-crossbones pattern. This grave had been desecrated, apparently many decades earlier.
Though the University of Connecticut initially processed the remains from the Walton Cemetery, they were then sent to Sledzik and his colleagues for more extensive analysis. As soon as Sledzik received the bones, he laid them out and ran his trained eyes over them. JB-55, a male, showed signs of chronic dental disease, as did most of the adults from the graveyard. Its owner also showed signs of arthritis, especially in the left knee, which meant he had almost certainly limped at times. He had signs of healed fractures, too, especially on the right clavicle, or collarbone, which must have been “insulted”—broken—by some kind of direct blow. It had never been properly set.
What’s more, JB-55 had probably been coughing up blood, if the lesions on the upper left ribs told Sledzik anything. Scattered across the visceral rib surface adjacent to the lung, the pitted, whitish-gray lesions were telltale signs of primary pulmonary tuberculosis. They might have been the residue of typhoid, syphilis, or pleuritis, but tuberculosis was the logical candidate. In any event, they marked a chronic pulmonary infection that would have produced the coughing and expectoration others regarded as tuberculosis, or consumption.
Though not widely known in New England, vampire epidemics are not exactly unknown there, either. Indeed, they have provided consistent fodder for local news stories over the years. Around a dozen incidents have now been documented—mostly from rural Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont—from the late 18th century until the 1890s. Eleven of them involved tuberculosis.
In Foster, Rhode Island, for example, Captain Levi Young and his family settled on a farm—and all too soon provided an occupant for the plot of land they had set aside as a burial ground. Young’s daughter Nancy, 19, succumbed to consumption in April 1827. Then Nancy’s younger sister, Almira, started showing symptoms—as, inevitably, did the other children in the neighborhood. Those neighbors apparently persuaded Captain Young to dig up Nancy’s casket. As the story goes, her disinterred coffin was placed on a funeral pyre and the villagers gathered around it, inhaling the fumes in the belief that this “sympathetic magic” would not only cure those infected with the disease, but also confer immunity on everyone else.
The most sorrowful tale of all, however, is that of Mercy Brown. In the late 19th century, George and Mary Eliza Brown and their seven children lived in Exeter, Rhode Island—“Deserted Exeter,” as it came to be called. In December 1883, Mary Eliza died of consumption and was buried in Chestnut Hill Cemetery. But the chain of contagion had already set in: Mary Olive followed her mother six months later. Several years passed before son Edwin fell ill as well. Edwin fled west to the dry mountain air of the Rockies, widely believed to be curative. It seemed to work.
Then, on a cold January day in 1892, Edwin’s sister Mercy Lenna died of tuberculosis. But the ground was frozen, so her coffin was laid in a mausoleum to await the spring thaw. Meanwhile, Edwin had returned home, but he immediately fell ill again. Apparently he was told—by whom we do not know—that one of his deceased relatives must be preying upon him. The only remedy anyone could suggest was to exhume his mother and sisters; if any of the bodies was still undecomposed, Edwin was to rip out the heart and burn it.
Mary Eliza and Mary Olive were exhumed and found to have decomposed into skeletons. But Mercy, her body preserved by the freezing cold of the mausoleum, was found to be in something approaching Flückinger’s “vampiric state.” Blood was in her heart, and blood was at her mouth. A victim rather than a fiend, Mercy was ripped apart so that her heart and liver could be removed and burned on a nearby rock. Edwin apparently mixed the ashes into a potion and quaffed the grisly antidote. “Not surprisingly,” reported a subsequent newspaper article, “he died four months later.”
Might the tragedies of the Young and Brown families be correlated with a forgotten cemetery near Griswold, Connecticut? Surprisingly, yes, in Griswold itself, only two miles from the cemetery and only a few years after JB-55 was likely buried.
The May 20, 1854, issue of the Norwich Courier tells the story of Griswold’s Ray family. Horace Ray died of tuberculosis around 1846. Within the next eight years, two of his sons likewise succumbed. After a third one fell ill, the now-familiar remedy was invoked: In early May, the dead brothers were exhumed and burned.
That tale had been told in books, but Sledzik’s lab contained a version of it written on bones. We may never learn anything more about JB-55, but his skeleton tells us that he probably limped about with a hacking, rattling cough that produced bloody sputum. When consumption flared up again in the community after JB-55 died, did someone remember—and blame—his limping figure? Somebody desecrated JB-55’s grave only a few years after he was laid to rest inside it. The evidence tells us, however, that whoever defiled his grave would have found only a skeleton there, with no heart left to burn. Did the invaders then improvise on the spot and rearrange the bones in a time-honored symbol of death? Were they, in effect, using the dead to ward off death itself?
Griswold had been settled just after 1812 by farmers—probably uneducated, and almost certainly considered crude. Life was hard, and the threat of starvation was a wolf at the door. Several generations of a single family often lived together in crowded, unsanitary conditions—perfect breeding grounds for such epidemic diseases as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis. This family dynamic, writ large, was projected into the grave.
With justifiable exaggeration, the tuberculosis bacillum might be said to consume the life force of its victim, thus overwhelming the victim’s will to live. Yet the pathogen has also evolved to spread via contagion, feeding off a new host before its old one dies, and so on down the line. Take away the understanding of microscopic pathogens, however, and what is left? A mysterious life force consuming one person after another, and believed powerful enough to act from afar—even from the grave.
The evil agent must still lurk in the heart of the recently deceased, where it continues to exhale and to seed itself into the blood and heart of the next person in the house. Burning the dead, infected heart then becomes the only way to root out the malady and destroy it. That belief might underlie this account of an unnamed Connecticut writer in 1888:
The old superstition in such cases is that the vital organs of the dead still retain a certain flicker of vitality and by some strange process absorb the vital forces of the living, and they quote in evidence apocryphal instances wherein exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs still fresh and living, encased in rottening and slimy integuments, and in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastening to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered.
A more picturesque way of saying the same thing had appeared just a few years earlier, in an 1884 magazine article, whose author speculated about how galloping consumption could so quickly fell, one after another, the apparently hale and hearty members of a single family:
Among the superstitions of those days, we find it was said that a vine or root of some kind grew from coffin to coffin, of those of one family, who died of consumption, and were buried side by side; and when the growing vine had reached the coffin of the last one buried, another one of the family would die; the only way to destroy the influence or effect, was to break the vine; take up the body of the last one buried and burn the vitals, which would be an effectual remedy….
The word remedy might be the crucial clue here. As folklorist Michael Bell has surmised, these gruesome rituals constituted more an experiment in folk medicine than a belief in supernatural horrors. The word vampire, in fact, was never used—if indeed it was even known.
Yet, as forensic anthropologist Paul Sledzik and his museum colleagues concluded, the role of tuberculosis is key to understanding these folktales of New England “vampires.” Might epidemiology be fundamental to understanding the vampire wherever he has appeared?