CHAPTER SIX
WHEN SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET encounters the ghost of his father on the battlements of Denmark’s Elsinore Castle, he cannot believe his eyes: “Let me not burst in ignorance,” he begs, “but tell why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements.” A moment later he asks why his father’s “dead corse” is making the night hideous.
Bones? Corpse? Is it a ghost or a corpse that Hamlet sees? Today we make a distinction between a ghost, which is an incarnate spirit, and a vampire, which is a walking corpse. But in Shakespeare’s day, that separation wasn’t quite so pronounced. Even Englishman Henry More (1614–1687), a leading authority on the world of spirits, chose to call walking corpses specters.
More had recoiled from the “too sterile” Puritanism of his Lincolnshire youth, embracing instead the Neoplatonist philosophy he had discovered as a Cambridge undergraduate. His lifelong fascination with spirits was said to have led him into many a ruined vault echoing with dismal sighs and groanings and heaped with skulls and bones. His collected ghost stories—“stories sufficiently fresh and very well attested and certain,” he claimed—were published in An Antidote Against Atheism (1653), which More offered as an attempt to prove the metaphysical priority of spirit, and thus the primacy of God.
Two of those tales have since become touchstones in the literature of vampirism. In More’s retelling of the first story, on September 20, 1591, in the Polish city of Breslau (today Wroclaw), a prosperous shoemaker slipped into his back garden and, for reasons unknown, slit his own throat. For more than a thousand years, Christians have viewed suicide as a sin against God and man, so according to doctrine, this unnamed shoemaker never should have been buried in consecrated ground. Yet his family successfully concealed his crime. He had died of disease, they maintained, so as a stalwart member of the community he was interred in terra sancta: the churchyard.
Soon, however, the good burghers of Breslau began to whisper. Rumors of suicide spread. The town council launched an investigation, and the widow confessed the truth.
But by then, in More’s words, the shoemaker had reappeared:
Those that were asleep it terrified with horrible visions, those that were waking it would strike, pull or press, lying heavily upon them like an ephialtes [nightmare] so that there were perpetuall complaints every morning of their last nights rest, through the whole town…. For this terrible apparition would sometimes cast itself upon the midst of their beds, would lie close to them, would miserably suffocate them and would so strike them and pinch them that not only blue marks but plain impressions of his fingers would be upon sundry parts of their bodies in the mornings.
As more and more people reported such visitations, hysteria spread. Soon the authorities, as More continued his tale, had no choice but to disinter the corpse:
He had lain in the ground near eight months, viz. from Sept. 22, 1591 to April 18, 1592, when he was digged up which was in the presence of the magistracy of the town, his body was found entire, not at all putrid, no ill smell about him, save the mustiness of his grave clothes, his joints limber and flexible, as those that are alive, his skin only flaccid but a more fresh grown in the room of it, the wound of his throat gaping but no gear [pus] nor corruption in it….
Nearly a week passed before the shoemaker was reburied—this time in terra damnata, beneath the gallows. Yet the “spectrum,” as More called the apparition, raged all the worse until the widow gave in, and once again the body was unearthed. Now even more swollen and repulsive, it was decapitated and its limbs were cut off. The heart, still appearing fresh and whole, was ripped out and burned to a cinder, whereupon its ashes were cast into the Oder River. The spectrum was never seen again.
More’s second iconic ghost story related the eerie tale of Johannes Cuntius, a wealthy alderman of Pentsch in Poland, who died after being kicked by a horse. Soon, rumors circulated that, on his deathbed, Alderman Cuntius had admitted forging a pact with Satan to gain his riches. That had led to stories that a tempest had arisen at the moment of his death, and that a black cat had rushed into the room and scratched his face. One sighting triggered another, and soon a revivified Cuntius was being spotted all over town. In More’s recapturing of the sinister events that followed, Cuntius shook houses, turned milk to blood, and defiled the altar cloth with blood stains. He sucked cows dry; he violently assaulted former friends; he ravished his widow. At one time Cuntius was a mere phantom, disappearing when a candle was lit; at other times, he was only too corporeal, with a fetid stink and a touch as cold as ice.
Not surprisingly, Cuntius, too, was evicted from his grave:
…they dig up Cuntius his body with several others buried both before and after him. But those both after and before were so putrefied and rotten, their skulls broken, and the sutures of them gaping, that they were not to be known by their shape at all, having become in a manner but a rude mass of earth and dirt; but it was quite otherwise in Cuntius. His skin was tender and florid, his joints not at all stiff but limber and moveable, and a staff being put in his hand, he grasped it with his fingers very fast. His eyes also of themselves would be one time open and another time shut; they opened a vein in his leg and the blood sprang out as fresh as in the living. His nose was entire and full, not sharp as in those that are ghastly sick or quite dead. And yet Cuntius his body had lain in the grave from Feb. 8 to July 20, which is almost half a year.
The corpse was burned but even that brought no relief, for the carcass seemingly refused to be cremated; only after it was hacked to bits did the flames finally consume it.
To a modern reader, these stories are all too predictable. A prosperous citizen dies. Rumors of suicide or secret sin begin to circulate and ignite mass hysteria. Finally, the corpse is dug up and discovered to be undecomposed, seeming to substantiate the tittle-tattle. No blood has been sucked; nobody has died.
Henry More, however, saw it otherwise:
I look upon it as a special piece of Providence that there are ever and Anon such fresh examples of Apparitions and Witchcraft as may rub up and awaken [the atheists’] benumbed and lethargic Minds into a suspicion at least, if not assurance that there are other intelligent beings besides those that are clad in heavy Earth or Clay.
More’s ultimate inspiration may have been Plato, but Christianity had long offered a rival vision of a fundamentally spiritual universe. Although the Christian world was fragmenting—Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodoxy had split in 1054, the Protestant Reformation was well under way, and the English had recently beheaded their king, the Anointed of God—that vision would linger well into the 18th century. And the impression of its saints and angels, its miracles and monsters, and above all its witches and demons can be traced in the features of the vampire today.
THE ART OF DYING
Ars moriendi—the art of dying—and its popular woodblock illustrations brought that spiritual universe into sharp focus. On a bed lies the dying person, attended on one side by haloed angels and saints, and on the other by a gang of leering, impish demons, all horns and tails. The clear implication is that the forces of heaven and hell have gathered to battle for the soul at the moment of death.
Those demons were but foot soldiers in the vast hierarchy of hell. With its dominions, principalities, and powers, its thrones and choirs and seraphim, hell was the infernal parody of heaven. Satan was its god, Beelzebub its lord, Carreau its prince of powers, and so on down through all those unpronounceable names: Anticif, Arfaxat, Astaroth, Asmodeus, Behemoth, Calconix, Enepsigos, Grongade, Leontophone, Leviathan, Saphathorael, Sphendonael, and even Shakespeare’s “foul fiend Flibbertigibit,” to name only a demon’s dozen. No complete roster of their legions was ever compiled, and no wonder: If a single satanic prince was said to have 60 billion dukes in his retinue, the foot soldiers of the vasty deep—horned, spiked, scaled, ass-eared, and cloven-footed—must have been numberless indeed.
That’s why last rites were administered to that person expiring on his deathbed: They helped purify his soul so that it might be received by the hands of ministering angels, not lurking demons. Confession, absolution, extreme unction, and the final Eucharist, or viaticum, was the prescribed order for Roman Catholics, but Eastern Orthodoxy observed a similar ritual. Then, as now, Catholics dreaded the prospect of sudden death because no one wanted to die without benefit of confession and absolution. Life had to be ebbing rapidly before the oil of extreme unction could be applied; those lucky enough to return from the brink after that potent touch were dismayed to find themselves deemed ritually dead—living corpses on the order of “stinking Lazarus,” whom Christ had brought back from the tomb. There was also the option of exorcism, the expelling of “evil” or “unclean” spirits from diseased bodies. Finally, there was viaticum, or “provision for the journey” this last Eucharist or communion might be the final experience the flickering consciousness perceived before departing.
That was about all that could be done for the soul. The body, still supernaturally charged, had to be attended to soon thereafter. Funeral and burial rites were performed so that the body might be wrapped, not merely in its shroud, but also in a protective cocoon of sanctity, within which it might await the last trump and the resurrection. That’s why cremation was so abhorrent to the medieval Christian: It not only smacked of paganism but also destroyed the “temple of the Holy Ghost,” denying the soul any vehicle for restoration. (Despite Saint Paul’s pronouncement that we are sown a natural body but raised a spiritual one, most people in the Middle Ages believed that resurrection meant a reawakening in their familiar flesh.)
By the time the corpse arrived at the graveyard—whether borne in a closed coffin by bearers, as in England, or carried in an open casket trailing long black streamers, as in Greece—it had already been washed, sprinkled, censed, purified, enshrouded, prayed for, chanted over, and blessed for days, almost without surcease. Although the grave site already lay in consecrated ground, the priest would sanctify it again by making the sign of the cross over it and sprinkling it with holy water. The body, too, would be blessed, censed, and sprinkled one final time—and, once the appropriate words had been read over it, lowered into the grave. Finally, before the grave was closed, a handful of dirt would be strewn over the coffin in the shape of a cross.
Yet, even then, the ritual wasn’t over: Obsequies would be made at certain times—typically the 3rd, 9th, and 40th days after burial, as in the Orthodox Church, and then yearly on the anniversary of the death.
If all went well, the decedent—both body and soul—would be not just protected but integrated into the larger community of the faithful existing in eternity. The Catholic notion of purgatory, with its cult of intercession—well-paid priests in chantry chapels praying to saints to speed a given soul’s progress through the purging fires—greatly enriched this overall sense of community. So much money flowed into the upkeep and beautification of churches in order to propitiate the saints that purgatory wound up having a positive economic impact, making medieval Catholicism, as one historian put it, a “cult of the living in the service of the dead.”
In Eastern Orthodoxy, by contrast, there was no purgatory; the 40-day period after burial was its rough equivalent. By the end of that period, the soul should have completed its journey, and the physical decomposition of the body would be under way. Occasionally, the dead were exhumed at that time to allow the priests a peek. Apparently they didn’t always relish what they saw, for three years became the standard in most places. The grave was then opened and the body examined. If the priest seemed relieved, all was well; the bones would be collected and, after due observances, either reinterred or sent to the charnel house.
But if doubt flickered over the pastor’s features, things might be looking ominous. An undecomposed body, as we have seen, was typically interpreted as a sign of vampirism. In the absence of any vampire complaints, however, the priest might simply seal the grave. The ritual might be repeated three years later—by that time, surely, the worms would have done their work.
Vampire symptoms were often attributed to mishaps along the ritual trail. A cat jumping over the corpse, to cite a well-known folklore example, might allow a demon to exploit an opportunity. It was much easier to suspect demonic possession, however, if the corpse was that of an excommunicate. There were many reasons for excommunication—heresy, chiefly, but also smaller infractions such as a refusal to confess—and to die in an excommunicated state meant, quite literally, permanent exile from the community of the faithful. Buried in unconsecrated ground, the bodies of excommunicates—as well as those of witches, sorcerers, suicides, criminals, or any other anathematized people—were bereft of God’s holy protection. Demons could then possess their corpses, using them as instruments to sow evil and destruction. The unmistakable sign that demonic possession had occurred, to many village priests in the Slavic world, was a corpse found bloated, ruddy, and undecomposed in its grave.
So often and so insistently was demonic possession used as an explanation for vampirism that the vampire came to be seen as the typological inverse of the saint: One was a blessed soul with the power to heal and protect, while the other was a wandering corpse strewing death, disease, and pestilence in its wake. The vampire’s very existence was an infernal parody of the resurrection, and its chief means of sustenance was a diabolical twist on Christ’s words: “Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life.”
WITCHES AND WEREWOLVES
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull making witchcraft a heresy in Catholic Europe. Yet, the hysteria that overtook Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, when 30,000 to 60,000 people were burned at the stake, never really ignited in the Slavic east. There the witch was, more often than not, the village “wise woman.” The horseshoes, hares’ heads, and boars’ tusks nailed on walls and barns, or the garlic cloves, blue beads, and bloodstones that decorated houses, horses, and caps were as much a defense against the evil eye—the intense gaze, the unblinking stare, the envious glance—as they were charms against witches or vampires. Anyhow, in folklore, witches and vampires were often the same thing.
In Romania, strigoi are vampires, while strigele are the spirits of witches. In Italy, strega are witches or vampires, as the occasion demands. Both shared the same attributes: Witches were said to have long teeth, their bodies might be possessed by demons, and they could leave the grave to eat people. Witches could enter a house through a keyhole; many had to disappear by cockcrow. The hexing action of a witch could dry up cattle’s milk, blast the crops, and unleash the plague among people. All of these activities are likewise imputed to vampires. Little wonder, then, that a Slavic proverb holds that the “vampire and the devil are blood relatives of all witches.”
Many folklorists would include the werewolf in that list. The Serbs, for instance, conflate vampire and werewolf in a single word —vukodlak— as do the Greeks in vrykolakas. Ukrainians believe a vampire to be the offspring of a witch who mated with either a werewolf or a demon. And in Russia, all three became one: According to 19th-century dictionaries, a vampire was “a sorcerer who turns into a wolf.” You could tell one by its tail.
Werewolves were depicted as particularly savage. Were-wolf madness existed alongside witchcraft hysteria. From 1520 to 1630, there were 30,000 reported cases of lycanthropy—men becoming wolves—in central France alone.
The most notorious werewolf, however, was German. Under torture in 1589, a Westphalian farmer named Peter Stubbe, or Stumpf, confessed to having made a pact with Satan. In return, Stubbe claimed, he had received a magical wolfskin belt that allowed him to rampage in the guise of a wolf for the next 25 years. According to Stubbe’s confession, he had indulged in every act of bestiality that the depraved imaginations of his inquisitors could dream up. This included killing and eating children, pregnant women, and even his own son. Rounding out this litany of horrors was incest with his daughter.
Or so Stubbe said—as might anyone who had been broken on the wheel. His demise was especially grisly. First, Stubbe was flayed alive, his skin peeled off with red-hot pincers. Next, all of his bones were broken with the blunt end of an axe. Finally, he was decapitated. As Stubbe’s carcass went up in flames (alongside those of his daughter and mistress), his severed head was placed on a spike and mounted atop the ghastly agent of his martyrdom, the wheel.
DISENCHANTMENT BY DECAPITATION
Medieval Christendom may have envisioned the world as a spiritual battleground, but it inflicted horribly real outrages on earthly tabernacles as well. The desecration of dead bodies—the beheading, the dismembering, the burning of them—was a recapitulation of the capital punishments inflicted on living ones. Such abominations were rooted in a primitive desire to destroy the corpse—an action that in turn was designed to deprive the malefactor of the blessings of resurrection, or to deny a vengeful ghost any instrument for retaliation.
“Disenchantment by decapitation” is a phrase that folklorists have coined to describe those actions in fairy tales where the hero, by cutting off a monster’s head, releases a soul trapped in the fiend’s body by evil enchantment. That motif has deep roots in global culture: The severed head has traditionally constituted the ultimate gory trophy.
Beheading, in fact, was the execution method of choice for kings and aristocrats of old. Of the many heads lost in England, only one had been crowned, anointed, and hedged about with all the supernatural protection that ritual and ceremony could provide. Yet none of that could shield its owner from his own disenchantment by decapitation. “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown,” declared deposed King Charles I as he stepped out of London’s Banqueting House and onto the scaffold on a dark January day in 1649, when he lost his head in a terrible culmination to the English civil wars. Though Charles I was hastily buried in Windsor Castle’s St. George’s Chapel, it was soon bruited about that he had been denied the burial rites in the Book of Common Prayer.Eleven years later, the son of Charles I was restored to the English throne, and he went looking for his father’s remains. Neither head nor body could be found.
A century and a half later, in 1813, workmen in the vaults of St. George’s Chapel accidentally broke in to the crypt of King Henry VIII. Although the crypt was supposed to contain just two coffins—King Henry’s and Queen Jane Seymour’s—the workmen found three. The prince regent assembled a small party, which included Sir Henry Halford, future president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and together they climbed into the dark, musty vault to investigate.
They couldn’t resist peering into the leaden coffin supposed to contain King Henry VIII’s remains. They spied the skeleton within—“some beard remained upon the chin”—but nothing else of note. They chose, however, to leave inviolate the sepulcher containing the queen, as they deemed “mere curiosity” an insufficient motive for disturbing her remains.
The investigators then turned to the third coffin, likewise made of lead. First they discovered an inscription bearing the name of King Charles. Then, prying the lead back, they peered inside.
If the martyred king had indeed been refused burial rites, his body would have been vulnerable to demonic possession. And they did see inside a figure, wrapped in cerecloth, “into the folds of which,” Halford later reported, “a quantity of unctuous or greasy matter, mixed with resin, as it seemed, had been melted, so as to exclude, as effectually as possible, the external air.” Carefully removing these cerements, they beheld a remarkably well-preserved face. This was no skeleton; clearly, Charles I had been embalmed. The cartilage of the nose was gone, “but the left eye, in the first moment of exposure, was open and full….”
A transfixing eye in that dismal place—but instantly it turned to dust. Then, carefully lifting the severed head, the party gazed at the long-dead monarch: The familiar Vandyke beard was perfect, many teeth were still in place, and the left ear was likewise intact. The fourth cervical vertebra had been cleaved in half, “an appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow,” Halford continued, “inflicted by a very sharp instrument….” Before laying the head back in its coffin, where presumably it remains to this day, the men noticed—the passage of 164 years notwithstanding—that it was “quite wet” with what everyone present, including the surgeon, believed to be blood.
Severed heads. The sultan in his palace supposedly greeted Vlad Dracula’s impaled head with delight. The severed heads of malefactors—especially bandits and rebels—adorned city gates, bridges, and public squares all over the ancient and medieval worlds, and could be found in China as late as the 20th century. Such gruesome mementos made the most explicit of warnings. They were bloody cousins of the “hanging” executions, which encompassed crucifixion and impalement in addition to the rope and gallows commonly denoted by the term. All were abominably exemplary: Corpses were often left to rot where they dangled. Little wonder that gallows and execution grounds were seen as polluted, demon-haunted places—every bit the terra damnata of any heretic’s grave.
To be hanged, drawn, and quartered was the particularly barbaric punishment reserved for high treason in England. The condemned man (women convicted of treason were burned at the stake) would be carted to the place of execution, hanged until near the point of death, then cut down, castrated, and disemboweled, his entrails and genitals burned before his dying eyes. His carcass was then decapitated and cut (or often pulled by horses) into four quarters, with the gory head propped atop a pike for all to see.
Such was the punishment meted out to many of the men who had signed the death warrant of King Charles I. The diarist Samuel Pepys watched one of those regicides, Thomas Harrison, get ripped apart in October 1660. Looking “as cheerful as any man could do in that condition,” Pepys recorded, Harrison was hanged, drawn, and quartered. His “head and heart [were] shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.” Tearing him asunder might not stop his returning, however; “he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again.”
Even the dead were not immune from this long arm of the law, for traitors could be hanged, drawn, and quartered posthumously. Three months after Harrison’s demise, for example, his fellow regicide, Oliver Cromwell—the lord protector who had ruled the Commonwealth of England with an iron fist—was removed from his tomb in Westminster Abbey. On January 30, 1661, what was left of his putrefying cadaver was ceremonially hanged, drawn, and quartered before being tossed, it seems, into a pit (although his family was rumored to have spirited it away). Cromwell’s severed head, however, was impaled before Westminster Hall, where it stood in the sun, wind, and rain for nearly 15 years before finally being blown to the ground by a storm. Passed from one collector to another, it became one of the most grotesque objects in any cabinet of curiosities—brown and wizened and repulsive. Mercifully and at long last, Cromwell’s head was interred in the gardens of Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge—in 1960.
And then there was burning. As an explicit punishment for heresy, burning is at least as old as the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century. Upon spreading to Catholic Europe, this most dreadful of all methods for sundering body from soul was employed with appalling frequency during the witchcraft hysteria of the 16th and 17th centuries. Death by flame, though agonizing, was swift; the corpse itself, however, seemed to almost actively resist incineration—as we saw in the case of Johannes Cuntius. When St. Joan of Arc, the soldierly Maid of Orleans, was convicted of witchcraft by an opposing English army and put to the torch in 1431, she had to be burned three times; some of her organs, it was said, were impervious to the flames. This was interpreted as a miracle, leading to her canonization 500 years later.
Intriguingly, in 1867, a jar was discovered in the attic of a Paris pharmacy bearing the label “Remains found under the stake of Joan of Arc, virgin of Orleans.” Inside was a paltry set of objects: a charred human rib, some carbonized wood, a fragment of linen, and what turned out to be a cat femur, probably the result of tossing black cats—witches’ familiars—onto the pyres. Yet, all of the items quickly achieved the status of relics.
In 2006, a French forensics team gained permission to examine the articles. Applying cutting-edge spectrometry alongside such traditional techniques as pollen analysis, the team also engaged the noses of celebrated perfumers, who detected traces of “burnt plaster” and “vanilla” in the remains—yet vanillin is the product of decomposition, not cremation. The black crust on the rib bone, long assumed to have resulted from charring, instead turned out to be a mixture of resin, bitumen, and malachite—a mixture akin to that used in primitive embalming. The linen fragment, for its part, matched similar ones from ancient Egypt. Finally, carbon-14 dating fixed the origin of the remains between the third and sixth centuries B.C. Far from being saintly relics, these were pieces of an ancient mummy.
Perhaps the dead feed off the living, perhaps not; but in the cultural cannibalism that was the medieval mummy trade, the living were feeding off the dead.
Mummy, or mumia, comes from the Arabic word mumiya, which originally meant “bitumen”—the sticky, tarlike petroleum derivative that was once spread abundantly over the sands of Mesopotamia. Its use as an embalming agent in ancient Egypt gave the word its modern meaning; it also encouraged the belief that bits of a cadaver treated with bitumen, once swallowed, would have a strangely powerful preservative effect on the eater.
This is why, by the 12th century, pulverized Egyptian mummies, mixed with bitumen, pitch, tar, and spices, were being imported into Europe in astonishing numbers, there to be consumed as a tonic, a panacea, and a preservative. “Mummie is become Merchandise,” mused Sir Thomas Browne, “Mizraim [ancient Egypt] cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for Balsoms.”
These nostrums didn’t always come from Mizraim, and they certainly weren’t always pharaoh. Unscrupulous middlemen, it appears, made substitutions. The corpses of suicides were passed off as mummies, as were those of executed criminals who had hung in the sun too long, and even bodies discovered in bogs by Danish peat cutters. In 1645, a Dutch apothecary scolded his colleagues for labeling certain concoctions “mummy” when what they were really offering was an “arm or a leg of a decaying or hanged leper or of some whore-hopper suffering from syphilis.”
WARNINGS FOR POSTERITY
Twelfth-century England, in our imaginations, is the green and pleasant land of Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and Richard the Lionhearted. We do not normally associate it with pestilence, much less with sanguisuga, or “bloodsuckers.”
Yet, such creatures were apparently plentiful, at least in the imaginations of the ecclesiastical chroniclers who, by guttering candles in cold abbeys, penned their tales of prodigies “as a warning to posterity.” The Abbot of Burton told of two peasants who returned from the grave with their coffins on their shoulders, roamed village and field, and spread disease everywhere they went. But once their bodies were exhumed, the heads cut off, and the hearts removed, the evil abruptly ceased.
Witty, charming Walter Map—prelate, sometime diplomat, and friend of both Henry II and Thomas Becket—wrote of a Welsh maleficus, or wizard, who had been reanimated by an “evil angel.” The maleficus returned from the dead to sow death and destruction before a particularly heroic knight beheaded him at his tomb.
But William of Newburgh mined the richest vein of such stories. William spent most of his life as an Augustinian canon at Newburgh Abbey, which once nestled at the foot of the Yorkshire moors. It is long gone now, having been dissolved by Henry VIII and replaced by the house where, curiously enough, Oliver Cromwell’s desecrated remains may have been clandestinely reburied. Newburgh Abbey was not far from the Old Northern Road that once ran from London to Edinburgh, and along that road, William’s fame as a chronicler and historian spread. His masterpiece was the Historia rerum Anglicarum, or History of English Affairs, which told of the varying fortunes of kings and nobles in the century since the Norman invasion of 1066. It also included a section entitled “Of Certain Prodigies.”
“It would not be easy to believe,” William wrote, “that the corpses of the dead should sally…from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact….” Ever the dutiful historian, William had combed through works of all the ancient authors known to his age but had found nothing to compare with the stories he was about to relate. “Moreover,” he wrote, “were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome.”
William heard one such instance from a “venerable archdeacon” in Buckingham, southwest of London. A certain man died and was laid in his tomb:
On the following night, however, having entered the bed where his wife was reposing, he not only terrified her on awaking, but nearly crushed her by the insupportable weight of his body. The next night, also, he afflicted the astonished woman in the same manner, who, frightened at the danger, as the struggle of the third night drew near, took care to remain awake herself, and surround herself with watchful companions. Still he came; but being repulsed by the shouts of the watchers, and seeing that he was prevented from doing mischief, he departed. Thus driven off from his wife, he harassed, in a similar manner, his own brothers, who were dwelling in the same street; but they, following the cautious example of the woman, passed the nights in wakefulness with their companions, ready to meet and repel the expected danger. He appeared, notwithstanding, as if with the hope of surprising them should they be overcome with drowsiness; but being repelled by the carefulness and valour of the watchers, he rioted among the animals, both in-doors and out-of-doors, as their wildness and unwonted movements testified.
Soon the entire town was alarmed, and before long, the dead man began wandering during daylight as well, though he was visible to only a few people. The terrified populace sought the protection of the church. William of Newburgh’s informant then wrote for advice to the Bishop of Lincoln:
…but the bishop, being amazed at his account, held a searching investigation with his companions; and there were some who said that such things had often befallen in England, and cited frequent examples to show that tranquillity could not be restored to the people until the body of this most wretched man were dug up and burnt. This proceeding, however, appeared indecent and improper in the last degree to the reverend bishop, who shortly after addressed a letter of absolution, written with his own hand, to the archdeacon, in order that it might be demonstrated by inspection in what state the body of that man really was; and he commanded his tomb to be opened, and the letter having been laid upon his breast, to be again closed: so the sepulchre having been opened, the corpse was found as it had been placed there, and the charter of absolution having been deposited upon its breast, and the tomb once more closed, he was thenceforth never more seen to wander, nor permitted to inflict annoyance or terror upon any one.
A more dependable means for dispatching the roving dead was resorted to at Berwick, at the mouth of the river Tweed, where an “equally wonderful” event had occurred. A wealthy man died and was buried, but he soon “sallied forth (by the contrivance, as it is believed, of Satan) out of his grave by night, and was borne hither and thither, pursued by a pack of dogs with loud barkings.” This struck terror into the townsfolk, and soon the leaders convened to debate the best course of action. No one wanted to be beaten senseless by this “prodigy of the grave,” and the wiser among them concluded that, “were a remedy further delayed, the atmosphere, infected and corrupted by the constant whirlings through it of the pestiferous corpse, would engender disease and death.”
Curiously enough, the monster, “while it was being borne about (as it is said) by Satan, had told certain persons whom it had by chance encountered, that as long as it remained unburnt the people should have no peace.” So ten young men dug up the horrible carcass, and after dismembering it, they burned it. Nevertheless, a “pestilence, which arose in consequence, carried off the greater portion of them: for never did it so furiously rage elsewhere, though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of England….”
Today, the ruins of Melrose Abbey loom in melancholy splendor over the hills of southern Scotland. In William of Newburgh’s day, however, the abbey was a thriving Cistercian center. One of its chaplains, lamentably, was overfond of women and the chase. His weakness landed him in some metaphysical trouble, at least in William’s eyes, for after the chaplain’s death, Satan used his corpse as his “own chosen vessel.” Thanks to the “meritorious resistance” of the monks, the vampire was barred from doing any great harm within the abbey itself, “whereupon he wandered beyond the walls, and hovered chiefly, with loud groans and horrible murmurs, round the bedchamber of his former mistress. She, after this had frequently occurred, becoming exceedingly terrified, revealed her fears or danger to one of the friars who visited her about the business of the monastery; demanding with tears that prayers more earnest than usual should be poured out to the Lord in her behalf as for one in agony.”
The friar enlisted three companions. “[F]urnished with arms and animated with courage,” they maintained a chilly, all-night vigil. When midnight passed with no monster, three of the quartet slipped off to the nearest warm house:
As soon as this man was left alone [William recounted], the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have reposed longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud, and, turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that with which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared to close again with the same facility. In the meantime, they who, impatient of the coldness of the night, had retreated to the fire ran up, though somewhat too late, and, having heard what had happened, rendered needful assistance in digging up and removing from the midst of the tomb the accursed corpse at the earliest dawn. When they had divested it of the clay cast forth with it, they found the huge wound it had received, and a great quantity of gore which had flowed from it in the sepulchre; and so having carried it away beyond the walls of the monastery and burnt it, they scattered the ashes to the winds. These things I have explained in a simple narration, as I myself heard them recounted by religious men.
Finally, there was the story William heard from “an aged monk who…related this event as having occurred in his own presence.”
A man of “evil propensities” had fled the province of York and had found sanctuary at nearby Anantis Castle. There he married, only to become a jealous husband. Determined to catch his wife dallying with her young lover, he pretended to be away and hid on a beam overlooking his wife’s chamber. Enraged at the sight of his wife lying in her lover’s arms, he lost his balance and fell to the floor. Severely injured, the husband died before he had a chance to confess his numerous sins or to receive the sacrament.
That crucial omission should suffice to alert us to his fate. Although the dead husband received a Christian burial, “it did not much benefit him,” wrote William archly, “for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at nighttime, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses; while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster. But these precautions were of no avail; for the atmosphere, poisoned by the vagaries of this foul carcase, filled every house with disease and death by its pestiferous breath.”
The once-bustling town was quickly abandoned. At that point, two brothers who had lost their father to this plague undertook a desperate mission:
Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcase, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart.
Then came the miraculous conclusion: “When that infernal hell-hound had thus been destroyed, the pestilence which was rife among the people ceased, as if the air, which had been corrupted by the contagious motions of the dreadful corpse, were already purified by the fire which had consumed it.”
EVER DEEPER
Some 500 years would pass before Henry More learned about Johannes Cuntius and the Breslau shoemaker. Yet, the same pen could have written both these accounts. There is the same emphasis on sins (of omission or commission) determining the subsequent events; the same depiction of physical brutality in the revenant; the same hysterical reaction in the various towns; and, one letter of absolution aside, the same means of destroying the pests: cutting off the heads, ripping out the hearts, and burning the carcasses.
Another pen might have written the story of Arnold Paole and that graveyard full of Serbian vampires (see Chapter 4), and a third pen still might have described those hideous undead larvae, the nachzehrer (see Chapter 5). But are these really different conceptions? Or are they rather outcroppings, each shaped by the forces of history and geography, of an even deeper, underlying layer?