CHAPTER FIVE
SKELETONS AND GRINNING SKULLS in niches and church windows; “Dances of Death” woodcuts in which cadavers take people by the hand and lead them to the grave; transi tombs bearing the effigies of their occupants, who—being in transition between body and skeleton—are shown as festering corpses; a church banner depicting a spear-wielding angel fighting a winged demon clad in putrescent flesh.
Images such as these flowered, if that word can be applied to such a ghastly phenomenon, during the late 14th century—a response, some scholars believe, to the greatest pandemic of them all, the Black Death, which swept into Europe and peaked somewhere between 1348 and 1350, killing perhaps half the Continent’s population.
The plague had come from the east and had left 25 million dead in China and Mongolia, where it erupted around 1320. By 1347, it had reached the Crimean Peninsula, where Khan Jani Beg of the Golden Horde—the Mongol conquerors of Central Asia—was laying siege to the Genoese trading city of Kaffa. When the infection descended upon the encircling army, however, the besiegers became the beset. Jani Beg was forced to decamp, but not before he flung a few pestilential souvenirs at his triumphant enemy: He ordered his army to catapult plague-ridden corpses over the walls and into the streets of Kaffa. Many residents died as a result, but some escaped in ships to the west—and carried the epidemic with them.
Once those ships arrived in European ports, the infection metastasized throughout the populace. People broke out in dark spots and swollen lymph glands. They coughed up blood, vomited, writhed in agony, slipped into comas, and died. La peste was all they could call it: the plague.
Physicians of the time were baffled. Those at the University of Paris advised consuming no meat, fat, fish, or olive oil; vegetables, they decreed, were to be cooked in rainwater. Others suspected that wool, fabrics, or pelts harbored the source of the strange new scourge. Convinced that the pestilence resided in pets, some authorities killed and skinned domestic cats and dogs.
They were aiming way too high on the food chain. Instead, they should have targeted the grain sitting in the holds of ships, for grain, it seems, was a primary communicator of the plague; where grain resides, there dwell rats as well. And indeed, rats were everywhere in the medieval world: They lived inside thatch roofs and walls, in barns and in markets. Rats battened on filth. In some places, the plague was known as the “Viennese death” because, lacking sewers, that city was a byword for garbage and offal.
The real culprit was not the rat but the rat flea, whose bite might be laced with a virulently toxic bacterium, Yersinia pestis (though that crucial fact would not be discovered for another 500 years). Rat fleas can live for months inside clothes and straw mattresses. A bite from an infected flea usually transferred the bacillus to the human lymph system, where it flourished, causing the classic bubonic plague (named for the buboes, or painfully swollen lymph nodes, that erupted on victims). About half its victims died. That percentage soared, however, if the parasite entered the blood, in which case it caused septicemic plague, or the lungs, in which case the result was pneumonic plague. The latter could then be spread by the simple but brutally efficient contagion mechanism of infected droplets expelled by a cough. Both septicemic plague and pneumonic plague were generally death sentences.
People fled, sequestered themselves, or abandoned themselves to the pursuit of lust and hedonism. In Pistoia, Italy, travel was prohibited and guards were posted throughout the town. Coffins became a precious commodity; as fast as carpenters could turn a new one out, a body was placed inside and the lid nailed shut to contain the stench and contagion. Mourners were forbidden any contact with the dead. Traditional burial customs lapsed—a trend accelerated by municipal officials, who mandated, in historian Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s words, “an end to wailing for the dead and the ringing of the cathedral’s bells as a means of avoiding panic in the living when they realized how many had died.”
“It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth,” scrawled one Sienese chronicler, who had buried his five children and feared the end of the world was nigh. “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another…. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug…with the multitude of dead.” In Paris, 500 corpses a day were stacked awaiting burial at Les Innocents Cemetery. In Vienna, one mass grave was said to hold as many as 40,000 corpses. And in Avignon—seat of the papacy from 1305 to 1378—it took only six weeks to bury 11,000 people in a single cemetery. As graveyards overflowed, Pope Clement VI consecrated the Rhone River so that the bodies of Christians might be dumped into its waters.
Whereas the plague ravaged lands from Armenia to India—it is known as “the Great Destruction in the Year of Annihilation” in Muslim annals—it utterly desolated Europe. Abandoned ships drifted at their moorings. Farm animals became feral, while people died in droves in the fields. Nearly 200,000 villages are said to have disappeared from the medieval map. In Scotland, a standing stone commemorates a hamlet where everyone but an older woman perished; she collected the corpses on a donkey cart and buried them herself in a nearby field. Near Ragusa (today’s Dubrovnik, in Croatia), weakened plague victims were eaten alive by wolves.
Ragusa at that time belonged to the Venetian empire. Venice itself, despite stringent health measures—vessel quarantines, the use of barren islands as burial grounds, and the enforcement of burials at five feet deep—suffered one of the worst outbreaks, with close to 75 percent fatalities. Entire noble families vanished, while every morning, cries of “Corpi morti!” (“Dead bodies! [Bring out your] Dead bodies!”) echoed from the building fronts and along the canals.
Eventually, the plague dissipated. Venice not only recovered but also entered its golden age. “Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee / And was the safeguard of the West,” wrote Wordsworth in a panegyric to Venetian glories. At the city’s height in the 15th and 16th centuries, much of the commerce of central Europe flowed across the Alps to Venice—whence, transferred to galleys, it was carried down the Adriatic to far-off Constantinople and the Levant.
As a maritime empire trading with lands to the east, where plague always smoldered, Venice may have been the European city best prepared to fight its eventual return. Venetian public health measures became second to none. The first lazaretto in the lagoon had been established as early as 1423; the second one, Lazzaretto Nuovo, or “new lazaretto,” came into operation in 1468, primarily as a quarantine station. Its hospital, surrounded by high walls, ensured its being used during times of pandemic as a place where people went to die.
These and other bulwarks were breached all too often, but at least they helped confine outbreaks to flare-ups. An example of how seriously the plague was taken can be found today in the sacristy of Santa Maria della Salute on the Grand Canal: There, Titian’s St. Mark Triumphant, probably painted during or after a plague outbreak in 1510, depicts an enthroned St. Mark, the patron saint of Venice, flanked by Cosmas, Damian, Roch, and Sebastian—the saintly foursome traditionally invoked to ward off the affliction.
Despite such prophylaxis, la peste returned to Venice with a vengeance in the autumn of 1576. The usual strict ordinances were imposed, with severe penalties for breaking them: New cases should be promptly reported, the sick immediately isolated, the clothes and bedding of the dead swiftly burned. The contagion only spread. Officials imposed a weeklong quarantine on the entire city. It had no effect.
On the Rialto, life came to a standstill. The Piazza San Marco stood empty. Innkeepers locked their doors, and shopkeepers shuttered their stalls. Those who could afford it headed for the hills inland. Too often, though, they were felled before they could flee. Most senators departed, but not the Republic’s courageous leader, Doge Alvise Mocenigo I, who steadfastly remained in office as the epidemic burned through his city month after month, eventually infecting half of its 180,000 citizens.
Anyone who fell sick or showed even the slightest symptom was exiled to the lazarettos until they recovered or died. When those outposts reached (and exceeded) capacity, two ancient galleons were towed into the lagoon and used as isolation wards. Even that did not suffice. Soon both Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo were ringed with ships, giving them the appearance of beleaguered island fortresses.
Within the walls and aboard the vessels, doctors sheathed in protective garments, their face masks packed with aromatic herbs, used hooked sticks to examine patients from a safe remove. With thousands of people falling sick, however, hundreds died each day. “It looked like hell…. The sick lay three or four in a bed,” wrote the 16th-century Venetian chronicler Rocco Benedetti. “Workers collected the dead and threw them in the graves all day without a break. Often the dying ones and the ones too sick to move or talk were taken for dead and thrown on the piled corpses.”
Thus did the burial grounds quickly fill up, becoming so saturated that gravediggers had to lay each new shrouded corpse on top of the one below. Constantly being opened and reopened, the cemeteries took on the appearance of festering mass graves.
DR. BORRINI DIGS BONES
Nearly 400 years later, the Archaeological Superintendence of Veneto decided to excavate the remains. Across the sparkling waters of the lagoon from the old city, members of La Spezia Archaeological Group assembled to undertake a dig on Lazzaretto Nuovo.
In August 2006, with Venice given over to tourists for the summer season, this small band of archaeologists was carefully spading away under the watchful eye of their supervisor, Dr. Matteo Borrini. A forensic anthropologist associated with the University of Florence, Dr. Borrini had logged countless hours helping the Italian police investigate various crime scenes. He was using this dig, in fact, as an opportunity to refine some old methods—and to test out some promising new ones on how best to recover bodies from clandestine graves.
The plot they were excavating, though only 17 yards (16 meters) square, abounded with skeletons. Borrini was using what he called “taphonomic know-how” (from Greek taphos, “grave”) to make sense of this jumble of bones by tracing their layers of deposition. Because this was not a conventional cemetery—rather a burial ground crammed with bodies every which way—the anthropologist’s task was a little trickier. It soon became clear, however, that Borrini was dealing with at least two “stratigraphic macro-units,” or two layers of bodies buried at different times. The topmost layer showed no postburial disturbance. Judging from medallions found among these remains from the Venice Jubilee of 1600, it represented the dead of the 1630–1631 plague epidemic, which had killed some 40,000 people.
Underlying and interpenetrating that layer of dead, however, was an older one composed of more fragmented skeletons, broken and shattered as if by the spades of gravediggers. The bodies in this layer had been skeletons for several decades when the victims of the 1630–1631 plague were laid on top of them. Borrini’s team was able to establish that they almost certainly represented the dead from an earlier outbreak, this one the 1576–1577 plague.
August 11, 2006, promised to be as tediously exacting as any other day at the site. Borrini was making his usual rounds when a voice summoned him to a corner of the site where his sister had begun coaxing yet another skull from the dirt.
But not just any skull.
As was his habit when it came to unusual finds, the director took over and painstakingly removed the accretion from around the skull. It seemed that a brick, lodged between its jaws, was propping its mandible wide open.
That was odd. No other bricks or stones had been found in the backfill of that grave. Otherwise, the skeleton—or what was left of it, for the only portion not shattered by later gravediggers extended from the rib cage to the skull—seemed normal enough. It had been interred supine (on its back), its arms apparently at its sides, although the left clavicle, or collarbone, was pushed up at an angle—probably the result of a shroud wound too tightly about it. Quite likely from the older, or 1576, layer, it was catalogued as “ID6.”
That brick bedeviled Borrini. He had enough experience as a forensic anthropologist to recognize an artifact of intentional action when he saw it. His first thought, in fact, was that this signaled some kind of bizarre, ritualized murder carried out at the height of a raging epidemic. Because there was no damage to the teeth, however, and because the jawbones were still perfectly aligned, the brick had probably not been rammed into the mouth of a violently struggling person. Instead, it had been inserted between the jaws of a corpse, when soft tissue was still present.
So far, so good. But why?
Throughout that autumn and into the winter, Borrini—now back at his academic office in Florence—puzzled over the find. Eventually, he was drawn to the university library, where he read up on the history of the plague and researched funerary practices common during pandemics. One book led to another, until finally Borrini came across a tract published in 1679 by Philip Rohr, a Protestant theologian at the University of Leipzig. It was called “De Masticatione Mortuorum”: “On the Chewing Dead.”
This volume described the Nachzehrer— German for “after-devourer”—a kind of mindless, vampirelike corpse that chews its shroud in the grave before consuming its own fingers. As it nibbles away, by some occult process, it also slowly kills the surviving members of its family. It may then begin gobbling corpses in neighboring graves.
As if all that were not grisly enough, the Nachzehrer’s appalling dietary habits can be heard aboveground, where they come through loud and clear as a grunting, smacking sound like that of a pig snarfing garbage (dignified in Latin as sonus porcinus).
Born somewhere on the north German and Polish plains, this horrible figure made his appearance all over central Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. In “De Masticatione Mortuorum,” Rohr culled examples from several even more obscure German dissertations, emphasizing that the grunting noise in particular was heard mostly, if not exclusively, during eruptions of the plague. One of his sources, in fact, had concluded that “corpses eat only during the time of plague.” Rohr went on to cite a certain Adam Rother, who claimed that, as pestilence ravaged the German university town of Marburg in 1581, the dead in their graves could be heard uttering ominous noises from all over the town and surrounding countryside.
The same thing happened in Schisselbein, according to another little-known chronicler named Ignatius Hanielus. “Although both the corpses of men and of women are known to have grunted, gibbered, and squeaked,” Rohr reported, for some inexplicable reason “it is more often the bodies of the weaker sex who have thus uttered curious voices.”
Ever the inquiring theologian, Rohr offered an explanation for this postmortem mastication: The devil was using corpses to induce epidemics of plague by the mere act of their chewing. Why? For one thing, the very monstrousness of such an act was guaranteed to sow terror and confusion among the living. For another, every time a body had to be exhumed to stop its gnawing, the unearthed corpse would broadcast its infection and pestilence even farther afield.
Yet, unearthing a Nachzehrer was apparently the only way to stop the damned thing from grinding its teeth during the night: One had to seal its mouth with a handful of soil. Denied the ability to chew, it would then die of starvation. “Some deeming this not altogether sufficient,” Rohr wrote, “before they close the lips of the dead place a stone and a coin in the cold mouth, so that in his grave he may bite on these and refrain from gnawing further.”
When Matteo Borrini read that, he understood why the brick had been thrust into the mouth of ID6: This person was suspected of being a vampire.
TO SCAPEGOAT IS HUMAN?
For centuries, epidemics had been viewed not in natural terms but rather in supernatural ones, as by-products of the struggle between God and Satan. As late as 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, a desperately cold winter had been followed by a smallpox outbreak; the deadly confluence was viewed as evidence that witches, allied with Satan, were at work. The stage was set for the Salem witchcraft trials.
The Old Testament attributed visitations of pestilence to God. In 1679, the same year that Rohr published “De Masticatione Mortuorum,” an outbreak of plague in Vienna was blamed on a kind of supernatural visitant called a Pest Jungfrau, or “Plague Maiden.”
Other scapegoats, tragically, were all too human.
In 1321, Philip V of France made leprosy a treasonable offense. Lepers, it seems, were supposed to be in league with Muslim Moors in Spain and Jews in Europe to poison the wells of Christendom. Lepers were burned at the stake—or locked in their houses while the houses burned down around their ears. Their property confiscated, they were interred without religious blessing. Soon leprosaria were in flames from southern France to Switzerland. Jacques Fournier, bishop of Mirepoix, oversaw the execution of thousands of lepers—shortly before he became Pope. Such was the mentality that reigned over Europe on the eve of the Black Death.
Once that epidemic hit, the scapegoating turned to even older targets. Anti-Jewish pogroms flared in cities all over Europe. In Basel, more than 600 Jews were burned at the stake, and their remains were deliberately left unburied. In Frankfurt, Jews were incinerated in their own houses. In Speyer, the burghers sealed Jewish corpses in wine casks and tossed them into the Rhine River, while Jewish mothers threw their babies into the fires and leaped in after them. And in Strasbourg, 2,000 Jews were rounded up, corralled on a wooden scaffold in the Jewish cemetery, and burned. Finally, in 1348, Pope Clement VI issued two papal bulls condemning such actions and declaring that the perpetrators had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil.”
Witches were also to blame. In the 15th century, Sisteron in France was so beset by plague that its citizens executed suspected witches—a bid to perform a sort of communal pestilential exorcism. In 1545, judges in Geneva accused 62 people, 49 of them women, of being engraisseurs, or “plague spreaders” 32 of them were burned at the stake. As the plague devastated Milan as well as Venice in 1576, Jews, beggars, and gypsies were victimized once again, being hunted down and killed. When that failed to end the pestilence, health workers were targeted instead.
Or might the fault lie in the stars? During the Black Death, King Philip VI of France convened the medical faculty at the University of Paris to explain what was happening. Following Hippocrates and the Arab physician Avicenna, they ascribed the plague to an evil conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn in the sign of Aquarius that had occurred on the afternoon of March 20, 1345, generating noxious fumes and a putrefaction that rotted the heart.
So, two centuries later, it might not have seemed so improbable to attribute the plague to corpses gnawing away in their graves at the goading of the devil.
HARD DAYS’ LIFE
Back at the University of Florence, as winter turned to spring in 2009, Matteo Borrini was launching an intensive study of that brick-in-mouth skeleton, ID6. It would amount to a literal odyssey, with Borrini driving his suspected vampire from one high-tech lab to another all over Italy. Though he had only a partial skeleton to work with, he was going to subject it to a battery of tests to better understand who this person once was.
Might ID6 have been a Jew? A Levantine merchant? A North African Moor, like Othello? To find out, Borrini sought out any vestiges of hair, fiber, or other materials that might still be clinging to ID6’s bones. Using powerful forensic light source lamps, he fired beams of multispectral light onto the traces of dirt adhering to the skull—and discovered two rosary beads. That was a key clue, for it meant that ID6 had almost certainly been Roman Catholic—as were most Venetians. And its skull fit known European profiles.
Determining its sex was a bit trickier. Judging from what was left of the skeleton, ID6 had once belonged to a small person—someone, Borrini estimated, who stood about one and a half meters tall, or a little over five feet. Yet it was missing the telltale hip bones, which usually revealed gender at a glance. He therefore turned to the skull. The mastoid process—a spurlike projection just behind the ears, where the neck muscles attach—is generally larger in men than in women. On ID6, it seemed quite small. Furthermore, the chin seemed demurely pointed. So this was most likely a woman.
If so, how old was she? Calcification of the ribs is one way to judge age. But the condition of ID6’s skeleton was too fragmented to reveal anything more precise than that it belonged to somebody probably older than 50. High-tech X-ray imaging of the canine teeth (of all things) is notably more precise because their internal cavities age at a known rate. Those tests indicated that ID6 was a chronological standout for her era. She had reached the remarkably advanced age of 61 to 71 years old.
This vampire, if such it was, had been a little old lady—and a not particularly bloodthirsty one at that. Trace element testing of her bones had turned up a high sodium reading, consistent with a largely vegetarian diet, perhaps supplemented with a little fish from time to time. She had also lived a physically demanding life, judging from a ridge that had formed around the head of her right humerus, or upper arm bone, where it fits into the shoulder socket. This indicated constant and repetitive lifting; from this, Borrini deduced that the shoulder might have been causing her pain.
ID6 was an ordinary, working-class Venetian woman—neither poor nor rich, but most decidedly a survivor. Though Borrini divined that she had suffered a skull injury as a young girl, evidently she had recovered from that and had managed to live past 60—no mean feat at the time. A century later in London, an examination of the Bills of Mortality from 1629 to 1660 revealed that “of 100 quick Conceptions about 36 of them die before they be six years old, and that perhaps but one surviveth 76.”
In between those two ends of the age spectrum lay some even more sobering actuarial details: Only one-fourth of all those born were still alive by the age of 26, and only 6 out of every 100 lived to see 56. The main killers were infectious diseases—the grim gauntlet through which the race of life was run. ID6 had gotten pretty far down the course before being tripped up by tiny Yersinia pestis. The bacillus landed her in a quarantine hospital, where she may have spent her final few days in agony.
She was just one of the tens of thousands the plague swept away. Borrini had seen it in the cemetery: Plague was the great leveler, and in those layers, he could glimpse a cross section of the human condition on a fine day in the Piazza San Marco circa 1575, just before the invader struck. Rich and poor, soldier and diplomat, merchant and laborer, servant and beggar, ladies in oriental silks and gallants in brightly colored hose—all soon to be mowed down by death’s scythe and deposited equally in the boneyard.
“An old woman who lived a long, hard life,” Borrini reflected about ID6, “and was falsely accused after her death of being a vampire.”
As a forensic anthropologist, Borrini knew the reason why. It all had to do with the state of her corpse.
DEATH BE NOT PROUD
In the 1980s, the forensic approach to the study of vampires was pioneered not by a pathologist but rather by a folklorist. Paul Barber took the widely accepted notion that a vampire was a reanimated corpse and pursued it to its logical conclusion: “[A] vampire,” wrote Barber in his now-classic Vampires, Burial, and Death (1988), “is a body that in all respects appears to be dead except that it does not decay as we expect, its blood does not coagulate, and it may show changes in dimension and in color.”
Barber’s contention was that nearly all the traits associated with the folkloric vampire originated in misunderstandings about decaying bodies. Blood sucking? Just a “folkloric means [for clarifying] two unrelated phenomena: unexplained deaths and the appearance of blood at the mouth of a corpse.” Before the late 19th century, when embalming started to become standard practice in Western nations, dead bodies did strange but perfectly natural things in their graves. The course of physical corruption—and this is not for the weak of stomach—does not always run true.
Bodies exposed to summer heat and air, for instance, tend to decay quickly. At the end of the battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to 3, 1863, a 27-year-old Confederate artilleryman named Robert Stiles encountered the carcasses of those who had been slain only two or three days previously:
The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable—corpses swollen to twice their original size, some of them actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gases and vapors. I recall one feature never before noted, the shocking distention and protension of the eyeballs of dead men and dead horses. Several human or unhuman corpses sat upright against a fence, with arms extended in the air and faces hideous with something very like a fixed leer, as if taking a fiendish pleasure in showing us what we essentially were and might at any moment become. The odors were nauseating, and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.
The same processes so horribly apparent in those summer fields were equally present in the grave, although burial—again, depending on the circumstances of deposition—might slow them considerably. Bodies decompose most rapidly when exposed to air, most slowly deep in the earth. The more air, insects, moisture, bacteria, and other microorganisms that are present, generally speaking, the faster it happens. The slain soldiers were decomposing before the eyes of stunned survivors; by contrast, the dead in their wintry graves in Medvegia, as we saw in the last chapter, were just getting under way—this despite the fact that some of them had been underground a full three months.
And then there is the mindset of those forced to gaze upon such spectacles: If people are determined to find a vampire, they will find one. Writer Elwood B. Trigg, in Gypsy Demons and Divinities, neatly sums up the double bind: “If, after a period of time, [the corpse] remains incorrupt, exactly as it was buried, or if it appears to be swollen and black in color, having undergone some dreadful change in appearance, suspicions of vampirism are confirmed.”
Nevertheless, some telltale signs of bodily decomposition that have often been mistaken as evidence of vampirism include bloodstained liquid flowing from nose or mouth, bloating, changes in skin color, enlargement of the genitals (in both sexes), and the shedding of nails or hair. (With other signs—the liquefaction of eyeballs, the conversion of tissues into a semifluid guck or the presence of maggots—even the hardened vampire hunter must admit defeat.)
The appearance on a corpse of growing hair, nails, or teeth is illusory. They do not grow. Instead, the surrounding skin and gums contract, making them look longer or more prominent. By the same token, reports that a vampire has sloughed off its old skin like a snake, revealing a grisly new reddish one beneath, represent what forensic pathologists call skin slippage, or the loosening of the epidermis from the underlying dermis—again, all perfectly normal.
A body long buried in a deep, cool, moist environment is often subject to saponification, another natural process in which fats are rendered into adipocere—a waxy, soapy substance, sometimes called corpse wax or grave wax, that sheathes the entire carcass like some gruesome body cast. Although rarely correlated with supposed vampirism, saponification may explain why some corpses were seen as being incorruptible. Barber even quotes a former lecturer in “Morbid Anatomy” at the University of London, W. E. D. Evans, as claiming that the reddish color of saponified muscles can “give the impression of muscle freshly dead, even though the death occurred more than 100 years previously.”
Another charge hurled at the coffined vampire is its lack of rigor mortis (the stiffening of the body after death). True, rigor mortis follows swiftly on the heels of death as chemical changes start to stiffen the muscles—producing those upthrown arms and fiendish grins of the Gettysburg slain—but it starts fading as early as 40 hours after death. In the old days, the corpse would likely be in its grave by the time its limbs settled and flopped into whatever position gravity dictated. That, combined with the shifts occasioned by internal pressures and bloating, might contort the body into a position different from the one in which it was originally buried—with all the alarums that development might engender were it to become known.
The exhumed vampire is often described as ruddy in appearance. Yet, color changes in corpses are transitory—and contingent on innumerable variables. Not long after death, for instance, the settling of blood lends the human face the bluish cast that has become familiar as livor mortis, or death blue. Usually there follows a sequence of changes known as the chromatic stages of decomposition, running from red to green to purple and then to brown. Furthermore, a corpse may actually grow warmer as serious decomposition sets in—heat being a natural by-product of microorganisms hard at work.
And then there were the bloated bodies: Dracula in his coffin swollen “like a filthy leech,” the once-lean Miliza in Medvegia astonishing her former neighbors by the “surprising plumpness” she had gained in the grave. All that, of course, is the result of gas, mostly methane, that accumulates in the body’s tissues as those same microorganisms metabolize a corpse. Though postmortem swelling is most pronounced in the abdomen—home to legions of intestinal bacteria—every part of a corpse may puff up to two or three times its natural size, rendering its features unrecognizable. This ghastly appearance was a familiar enough encounter in war zones. Just a few days before they were discovered on the killing fields of Gettysburg, for example, those bloated and blackened bodies had been lean and hungry young men.
Given the right circumstances, this gas might erupt—often with explosive force. “It is well known to those engaged in burying the dead,” Dr. George Walker writes in his Gatherings from Grave Yards, “that when leaden coffins are employed, the expansive force of the gas, and the consequent bulging out of the coffin, compels the workmen frequently to ‘tap’ it, that the gas may escape.” This demanded some skill. After boring a hole with a gimlet—a handheld auger that resembles nothing so much as a corkscrew—a “jet of gas instantly passes through the aperture, and this, when ignited, produces a flame, that lasts from ten minutes to half an hour. The men who perform this operation are perfectly aware of the risk they encounter, and they are extremely careful how they execute it.”
And then there is the disturbing matter of “corpse light.” At Gettysburg, the layer of dirt covering the mass graves was so thin that a strange phosphorescence emanated from the ground at night. For years, understandably, locals shunned such places as haunted. Eerie glows reported near cemeteries, will-o’-the-wisp phenomena, even the blue flames that Slavic folktales describe as appearing over the sites of buried treasure on St. George’s Eve (and used to such chilling effect in the opening pages of Dracula) are typically written off as cases of hyperimagination. Yet, they might be actual instances of bioluminescence: Photobacterium fischeri, forensic pathologists will tell you, is but one of many luminous bacteria known to settle on a shallowly buried body.
DON’T MOCK YOUR OWN GRINNING
Certainly the most dramatic manifestation of suspected vampirism is blood at the mouth. Surely that was the vampire’s most recent meal, now trickling down its chin? Horrifying as they appear, bloody lips on the dead are nothing out of the ordinary. “Decay of the internal organs,” Borrini points out, “creates a dark fluid sometimes known as ‘purge fluid’: it can flow freely from the nose and mouth (or from the corpse, if it is staked) and could easily be confused with the blood sucked by the vampire.”
Exhumed cadavers are likewise frequently reported as wallowing in blood-filled coffins. That was an unfailing sign of vampirism because blood was known to coagulate after death. Well, yes and no: Under certain circumstances—especially if death was abrupt—blood might reliquefy. But though blood will out, as the proverb has it, the liquid that seeps out of a corpse’s orifices into the coffin is almost certainly, Borrini says, purge fluid.
Bodies can also literally return from the grave. If not buried deep enough, their natural buoyancy might propel them to the surface. This may explain why archaeologists have found so many skeletons deliberately weighted down by rocks or timbers.
And then there is the groaning—sometimes, in literature or cinema, the screaming—of the vampire as it is staked through the heart. One could easily, and justifiably, pass this off as a folkloric embellishment. On the other hand, it might be a legitimate physiological reflex. “Indeed, it would have been odd if his body had not let out a sound when a stake was driven into it,” Barber remarked of Arnold Paole, staked in 1725 in Medvegia. Hammering a piece of wood into a chest cavity violently compresses the lungs and forces air past the glottis as if expelled through the pipe of an organ.
That the dead grow slack of jaw is familiar enough through literature. “Not one now, to mock your own grinning?” asks Hamlet of poor Yorick, “quite chap-fallen?” Scrooge gazes in horror when Marley’s ghost loosens its head bandage and “its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast.” As the jaw muscles relax with the dissipation of rigor mortis, the mouth predictably falls open. But if a body is wrapped too tightly in its shroud—as ID6 was, for it bent her left clavicle upward—the shroud will collapse into the gaping cavity. Then, as Borrini puts it, “cadaveric gases and purge fluid flowing from the mouth can moisten the shroud” and rot it as it dries. To the unenlightened observer, the resulting gap in the fabric may suggest the corpse has chewed right through it. If that cadaver also shows fingers lacerated by decomposition or the action of maggots, it can be taken for a Nachzehrer.
In view of all this, we may now at long last be able to glimpse what happened to ID6 in her cemetery at Lazzaretto Nuovo. Imagine the loathsome scene: Its overhanging stench, the pockmarked ground suppurating with putrescent bodies hidden by the barest covering of dirt. Flies swarm over the exposed bodies, which are soon crawling with maggots.
The pit is a fearsome place. Daniel Defoe, describing the Great Plague that punished London in 1665, reconstructed its burial pits in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722):
I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, tho’ not so freely as to run my self into apparent danger, except when they dug the great pit in the church-yard of our parish of ‘Aldgate’ a terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it; as near as I may judge, it was about 40 foot in length, and about 15 or 16 foot broad; and at the time I first looked at it, about nine foot deep; but it was said, they dug it near 20 foot deep afterwards, in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water…. The pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies, when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six foot of the surface.
There was also the grimly ironic Holywell Pit, or “Black Ditch,” and the one in Finsbury Fields. “People that were infected, and near their end, and delirious also,” Defoe wrote, “would run to those pits wrapt in blankets, or rugs, and throw themselves in, and as they said, bury themselves…. I have heard, that in a great pit in ‘Finsbury,’ in the parish of ‘Cripplegate,’ it lying open then to the fields; for it was not then wall’d about, [they] came and threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any earth upon them; and that when they came to bury others, and found them there, they were quite dead, tho’ not cold.”
The cemetery at Lazzaretto Nuovo surely had its visible horrors. It may have had audible ones as well. The waxing and waning of chewing sounds said to reflect the coming and going of epidemics might arise in the documentable fact that, during such times, hundreds of hastily buried and rapidly decomposing bodies were generating their own horrid symphony. As Barber memorably captured it, the “disruption of large numbers of bodies bloating and bursting caus[ed] a sound rather like an epidemic stomach-rumbling.”
At some point—perhaps months but probably scant weeks after ID6 had died and been buried—a burial detail, having no choice, opened her grave to add yet another occupant to it. At that point, quite likely, they saw that she had “chewed” a hole in her shroud. Someone, likely one of the gravediggers, knew the superstition associated with this, and knew how to stop it—literally, with a brick. Whether they recoiled in horror at the sight, whether they concluded that this particular corpse was responsible for all the suffering of the plague, or whether that brick was placed in the cadaver’s mouth as a precautionary measure, we will never know. But this much is clear: Utterly unfairly, ID6 was treated as if she were a vampire.
REQUIESCANT IN PACE
During the year and a half that it ravaged Venice, la peste carried off 46,000 people—nearly one-third of the city’s population. In due course, however, it abated, and an official proclamation of health was announced on July 21, 1577. In gratitude for the deliverance, the doge and the senate erected the basilica of Il Redentore (The Redeemer) on the island of Giudecca. Over the years since then, every third Sunday in July, bells announce the Feast of the Redeemer with the joy that life has been restored.
The deliverance was short-lived, as we have seen, and when the plague returned between 1630 and 1631, it laid another 40,000 bodies on top of ID6 and her fellow victims in cemeteries scattered throughout Venice. That visitation, many historians believe, spelled the beginning of the end for the Queen of the Adriatic. The city slowly declined until 1797, when Napoleon ended its existence as an independent republic.
If ID6 was a vampire, it is only in the sense that Paul Barber defined the term: “a corpse that comes to the attention of the populace in times of crisis and is taken for the cause of that crisis.” According to anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, writing in 1871, “Vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts of wasting disease.” More than a century later, folklorist Michael Bell refined Tylor’s point: “Reduced to its common denominator, the vampire is a classic scapegoat.”
We have now arrived at one very compelling explanation for vampiric origins: The whole mythology grew out of observations of corpses—superstition wrapped around forensic fact. As Barber puts it, “Our descriptions of revenants and vampires match up, detail by detail, with what we know about dead bodies that have been buried for a time.”
“In the end, from a forensic point of view,” Borrini muses, “we can accept the reports about the ‘vampire corpses’ as real descriptions, but we can also realize why those legends spread especially during plagues.” After all, during pandemics, it was standard practice to reopen tombs and mass graves so as to add more victims. “In this way, it was easier to find bodies that were not completely decomposed, thus increasing dread and superstition among people who were already suffering pestilence and massive deaths.”
Nevertheless, stories about vampires have been evolving for centuries, and we must follow that trail. As we close the case of ID6, however, we leave her—and all other “vampires” whose only crime was to die and be buried—with a heartfelt “Requiescant in pace” (“May they rest in peace”) on our lips.