Vampires Through the Ages

by Brian Righi

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

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

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

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

  • Failing strength or lethargy

  • Symptoms that worsened at night

  • Weight loss

  • Feelings of heaviness in the chest

  • Pale skin

  • Loss of appetite

  • Coughing fits that produced blood in the mucus

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

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

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

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

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

  Weird Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [contents]

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