Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  Before he was buried, there were stories that his ghost had appeared and attempted to rape a woman. After the burial, the ghost began to behave like a mischievous hobgoblin, throwing things about, opening doors, and causing banging noises so that ‘the whole house shaked again’—on the morning after these events, animal footprints or hoofmarks were found outside in the snow. His widow had the maid sleeping in her bed; the ghost of Cuntze appeared and demanded to be allowed to take his proper place beside his wife. And the parson of the parish (who is mentioned as the chronicler of these events) dreamed that Cuntze was ‘squeezing’ him, and woke up feeling utterly exhausted. The spirit was also able to cause a nauseating stench to fill the room.

  The conclusion is much as in the story of the shoemaker of Breslau. Cuntze was finally disinterred on July 20, five months after his burial, and was found to be undecayed, and when a vein in the leg was opened, the blood that ran out was ‘as fresh as the living’. After having been transported to the bonfire with some difficulty—his body had apparently become as heavy as a stone—he was dismembered (the blood was found to be quite fresh) and burnt to ashes.

  So the earlier vampire stories are very clearly about poltergeists, not blood-drinkers. And the Greek and eastern European cases bear a strong resemblance to stories of ‘demonic possession’, like so many reported in Chapter 11.

  If we can once concede the possibility of ‘psychic invasion’, as well as the possibility of ‘spirits’, then the notion of vampires suddenly seems less absurd. In The Magus of Strovolos, an American academic, Kyriacos C. Markides, has described his friendship with a modern Cypriot mystic and ‘magus’, Spyros Sathi, known as Daskalos, who lives in Nicosia. Daskalos takes the actual reality of spirits for granted. It also becomes clear that Daskalos takes ‘possession’ for granted, and Markides tells a number of stories, in some of which he was personally involved.

  There are, Daskalos, claims, three kinds of possession: by ill-disposed human spirits, by demonic entities, and by elementals (the latter being human thoughts and desires which have taken on a life of their own). And he goes on to describe a case of spirit possession of the first type: Daskalos was approached by the parents of a girl who claimed that she was being haunted by the spirit of her dead fiancé. Although they had lived together, she had refused to allow him to possess her until they were married. He died of tuberculosis, haunted by unfulfilled cravings. ‘Each night before she would go to bed he would semi-hypnotise her and induce her to keep the window of her room open. He would then enter inside a bat and would come to her. The bat would wedge itself on her neck and draw blood and etheric (energy).’ The local priest told Daskalos how to deal with it. He must wait in the next room, and when he heard the bat entering, should go in and quickly shut the window; then, since the bat would attack him, he must stun it with a broom. Then he must wrap the bat in a towel and burn it in a brasier (stove). Daskalos did this, and as the bat burned, the girl screamed and groaned. Then she calmed down and asked: ‘Why were you trying to burn me?’ The ‘haunting’ ceased thereafter.

  Daskalos told another story that has elements of vampirism. On a journey in southern Greece he had encountered another girl who was being haunted by a former lover. A shepherd who had been in love with her had died in a motor accident. Five years later, when looking for some goats, the girl saw the shepherd—whose name was Loizo—and he followed her, finally making her feel very sleepy so she felt obliged to sit down. He then ‘hypnotised’ her, and caused her to experience intense sexual pleasure. When she reported the incident, she was medically examined and found to be a virgin. But three days later the shepherd came to her bed and made love to her. Medical examination revealed she was no longer a virgin. Daskalos noticed two reddish spots on her neck. ‘He kisses me there, but his kisses are strange. They are like sucking, and I like them.’

  Daskalos claimed that, two days later, he saw the shepherd coming into the house and greeted him. Loizo explained that he had wanted the girl for many years, and had never had sexual relations with a woman—only with animals like donkeys and goats. Now he was possessing her, he had no intention of letting her go. He refused to believe it when Daskalos told him he was dead. Daskalos warned him that if he persisted in possessing the girl, he would remain ‘in a narcotised state like a vampire’. His arguments finally convinced the shepherd, who agreed to go away.

  The doctor who examined the girl believed that she had torn the hymen with her own fingers; Daskalos seems to accept this, but believes that Loizo made her do this.

  These two cases, taken in conjunction with the others we have considered, offer some interesting clues about the nature of the vampire. According to Daskalos, the ‘earthbound spirit’ of the dead fiancé was able to enter an ordinary bat and then to suck her blood. This was an expression of his sexual desire, his desire to possess her. There had been many cases in the history of sex crime of so-called ‘vampirism’. In the early 1870s, an Italian youth named Vincent Verzeni murdered three women and attempted to strangle several more. Verzeni was possessed by a powerful desire to throttle women (and even birds and animals). After throttling a 14-year-old girl named Johanna Motta, he disembowelled her and drank her blood. Verzeni admitted that it gave him keen pleasure to sniff women’s clothing, and ‘it satisfied me to seize women by the neck and suck their blood’. So it is easy to imagine that the earth-bound fiancé mentioned by Daskalos should enjoy drinking the girl’s blood. But we can also see that his desire to ‘possess’ her was also satisfied in another way—by somehow controlling her imagination. As the bat was burning, the girl cried out, ‘Why are you trying to burn me?’.

  Again, in the case of Loizo, we can see that the shepherd had entered the girl’s body and taken possession of her imagination, enough to cause her to tear her own hymen with her fingers. This implies—as we would expect—that the lovemaking was not on the physical level, since Loizo possessed no body.

  All this has an interesting implications. The act of lovemaking seems to involve a paradox, since it is an attempt at interpenetration by two bodies, an attempt which is doomed to failure by their separateness. Plato expresses the paradox in an amusing myth. Human beings were originally spherical beings who possessed the characteristics of both sexes. Because their sheer vitality made them a challenge to the gods, Zeus decided that they had to be enfeebled. So he sliced them all down the centre, ‘as you and I might slice an apple’, and turned their faces back to front. And now the separated parts spent their lives in a desperate search for their other half, and they ceased to constitute a challenge to the gods.

  It is also clear that, in its crudest form, the male sexual urge is basically a desire for ‘possession’, and that the act of physical penetration is an act of aggression, (Most writers on Dracula have noted that it is basically a rape fantasy.). As a man holds a woman in his arms, he experiences a desire to absorb her, to blend with her, and the actual penetration is only a token union. So we might say that a ‘vampire’ like Loizo is able to achieve what every lover dreams about: a possession that involves total interpenetration.

  The notion of vampirism that begins to emerge from all this is simple and (provided one can accept the notion of ‘earthbound spirits’) plausible. Daskalos told Markides that those who commit suicide may become trapped in the ‘etheric of the gross material world’, unable to move to the higher psychic planes. A suicide dies in ‘a state of despair and confusion’, and ‘may vibrate too close to the material world, which will not allow him to find rest’. He becomes a ‘hungry ghost’, wandering in and out of the minds of human beings like a man wandering through a deserted city. Yet he is incapable of influencing his involuntary host, or of making his presence felt, unless the host also happens to be on the same ‘wavelength’ and to share the same desires.

  Vampirism, then, involves the notion—which we have already encountered in Wickland’s Thirty years Among the Dead—that ‘earthbound spirits’ are attracted by the vitality of the human aura, and m
ay do their best to share it. A book called Hungry Ghosts, by the journalist Joe Fisher, makes this point with great force. Fisher had written a book about reincarnation, in the course of which he had become convinced of its reality. One day, after being interviewed on radio in Toronto (where he lives), he received a phone call from a woman who explained that she had accidentally become a mouthpiece of ‘discarnate entities’. She was being hypnotised in an attempt to cure her of leukaemia, and various ‘spirit guides’ had begun speaking through her mouth. (Myers points out that a ‘spirit’ can only enter a body when the usual ‘tenant’ is absent, a point to note when considering that early accounts of vampires involve attack during sleep.)

  The first time Fisher went to her house, a ‘spirit’ named Russell spoke through her mouth with a reassuring Yorkshire accent, and told him that he had a female ‘guide’, a Greek girl named Filipa, who had been his mistress in a previous existence three centuries earlier. This struck Fisher as plausible, since he had always felt some affinity with Greece. He began attending the seances regularly, and devoting some time every morning to relaxing and trying to contact Filipa. Eventually he succeeded; buzzing noises in his ears would be succeeded by a feeling of bliss and communication. Filipa was a sensual little creature who liked to be hugged, and Fisher implies that, in some sense, they became lovers. It broke up his current love affair; his live-in girlfriend felt she was no match for a ghost.

  Other people at the seances were told about their ‘guides’ or guardian angels. One guide was an ex-RAF pilot named Ernest Scott, another an amusing cockney named Harry Maddox. Fisher’s disillusionment began when, on a trip back to England, he decided to try and verify Ernest Scott’s war stories—with no doubt whatever that they would prove genuine. The airfield was certainly genuine; so was the squadron Ernest claimed to have belonged to; the descriptions of wartime raids were accurate; so were the descriptions of the squadron’s moves from airfield to airfield. But there had been no Ernest Scott in the squadron, and a long search in the Public Record Office failed to throw up his name. Fisher went back to Canada in a bitter mood and accused Ernest of lying. Ernest strenuously denied it. Anyway, he said, he was due to reincarnate in another body, so had to leave . . . The ‘guide’ Russell later told Fisher that Ernest had been reborn in England, and gave the name of the parents and date of birth. Oddly enough, when Fisher checked on this it proved to be accurate. He even contacted the parents, who were intrigued, but decided they had no wish to get more deeply involved.

  With Russell’s approval, Fisher tried to track down the farm in Yorkshire where Russell claimed he had lived in the 19th century. Here again, many of the facts Russell had given about the Harrogate area proved to be accurate; but again, the crucial facts were simply wrong. It seemed that Russell was also a liar. And so, upon investigation, was the loveable World War One veteran Harry Maddox. His accounts of World War One battles were accurate; but Harry did not exist.

  Finally, Fisher took his search to Greece. In spite of his disillusion with the other guides, he had no doubt whatever that Filipa was genuine. She possessed, he states early in the book, ‘more love, compassion and perspicacity than I had ever known’. The problem was that all his attempts to locate Theros—a village near the Turkish border—in atlases or gazetteers had failed. Yet that could be because it had been destroyed by the Turks in the past three centuries. But a town called Alexandroupoli, which Filipa had mentioned, still existed. After a long and frustrating search for the remains of Theros, Fisher went to Alexandroupoli, a city that he assumed had been founded by Alexander the Great. But a brochure there disillusioned him. Alexandroupoli was a mere two centuries old; it had not even existed at the time when he and Filipa were supposed to have been lovers . . . Like the others, Filipa was a liar and a deceiver.

  In a chapter called ‘Siren Call of the Hungry Ghosts’, Fisher tries to analyse what has happened to him. And the answer seems simple. He had been involved with what Kardec called ‘earthbound spirits’, spirits who either do not realise they are dead, or have such a craving to remain on earth that they remain attached to it. These earthbound spirits or, in Tibetan Buddhist phraseology, pretas or ‘hungry ghosts’, are individuals whose minds, at the point of physical death, have been incapable of disentangling from desire. Thus enslaved, the personality becomes trapped on the lower planes even as it retains, for a while, its memory and individuality. Hence the term ‘lost soul’, a residual entity that is no more than an astral corpse-in-waiting. It has condemned itself to perish; it has chosen a ‘second death’. He quotes Lt-Col.Arthur E.Powell, in a book called The Astral Body: ‘Such spooks are conscienceless, devoid of good impulses, tending towards disintegration, and consequently can work for evil only, whether we regard them as prolonging their vitality by vampirising at seances, or polluting the medium and sitters with astral connections of an altogether undesirable kind.’

  He also cites the modern American expert on ‘out of the body’ journeys, Robert Monroe: ‘Monroe tells of encountering a zone next to the Earth plane populated by the ‘dead’ who couldn’t or wouldn’t realise they were no longer physical beings . . . The beings he perceived kept trying to be physical, to do and be what they had been, to continue physical one way or another. Bewildered, some spent all of their activity in attempting to communicate with friends and loved ones still in bodies or with anyone else who might come along.’

  The conclusion would seem to be that the vampire cannot be dismissed as a myth. But the reality of vampirism has very little in common with the Dracula legend. There is no fundamental difference betwaeen vampires and poltergeists—except that, fortunately, vampire phenomena seem to be far more infrequent.

  And what of the vampire’s equally celebrated cousin, the werewolf? Here, as in the case of the vampire, we have many highly circumstantial reports: in the one hundred and ten years between 1520 and 1630, there are thirty thousand in central France alone. (Here they were called loup-garous.) But there are also reports from Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Iceland, Lapland and Finland. So it is difficult to dismiss them, as Rossell Hope Robbins does in his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, as a sign of superstition or madness. A typical report is as follows. In 1598 a 16-year-old boy named Benoit Bidel, who lived at Naizan in the Jura region of France, was found dying from a stab wound. He claimed that he had climbed a tree and was picking fruit when his sister, who was down below, was attacked by a wolf. The boy tried to fight off the wolf with a knife, but he claimed that the wolf had snatched the knife from him—it had human hands—and stabbed him. The boy died, and a search of the area was made; a semi-imbecile girl named Perrennette Gandillon was found. Deciding that she might be the werewolf, the townspeople killed her. Then someone remembered that her brother Pierre was scarred with scratches; he was arrested, together with his sister Antoinette and his son George. All three confessed to being werewolves. Judge Henri Boguet, author of Discourse on Sorcerers, visited the Gandillons in jail and said that they ran around on all fours. They confessed that they had turned themselves into wolves with the aid of a witch’s salve, and that they had attended ‘Sabbats’. All three were sentenced to death and burned. Rossell Hope Robbins takes the commonsense view that all three were insane. Another interesting possibility is suggested by Neville Drury and Stephen Skinner in The Search for Abraxas (1971). Discussing Carlos Castaneda and his Don Juan books, they note that Castaneda described how the ‘witch doctor’ Don Juan had taught him to make a paste of the root of the datura plant, also called Devil’s Weed, and how, when he rubbed it on his body, he felt he was flying at great speed through the air. Is it possible, ask the authors, that the witches’ salves of past centuries were made of some similar substance that produced the hallucination that they were flying? (In fact, Lord Lytton had already made such a suggestion in his occult novel A Strange Story.) Of course, much of Castaneda’s work has been discredited since astute critics noticed that his book
s were full of factual contradictions, especially regarding dates; yet this particular suggestion remains highly plausible.

  In studying the reports of werewolves one thing becomes clear: the werewolf was very closely bound up with witchcraft. The Gandillon family, whether they were insane or not, believed that they had attended witches’ Sabbats and that they were able to turn themselves into wolves by means of a salve. They believed that their powers came ultimately from the Devil. It is interesting to note that Pierre Gandillon fell into a trance on Maundy Thursday and, when he had recovered, claimed to have attended a Sabbat of werewolves. He believed, then, that he attended these Sabbats ‘in the spirit’ rather than in the flesh, a belief which ties in with theories of ‘astral bodies’. Indeed according to the 19th-century French ‘magician’ Eliphas Lévi, a werewolf is simply the astral body of the sorcerer projected into the shape of a wolf.

  It is undoubtedly true that many ‘werewolves’ were people who suffered from delusions. In 1603 a mentally defective youth named Jean Grenier claimed to some girls that he was a werewolf; when he was arrested, he implicated his father and a neighbour. In fact, children had been attacked in the area. But the Parlement of Bordeaux took a surprisingly reasonable view for that period and accepted the father’s explanation that his son was an imbecile; Jean was placed in custody in a monastery, where he died a few years later.

  In other cases, the explanation may be less simple. In the late 16th century the case of a ‘werewolf named Peter Stubbe caused a great stir all over Europe. There had been many wolf attacks in the Cologne area; after a wolf had attacked a group of children, nearly tearing the throat out of one of them, a hunt was organized; the wolf vanished, but the hunters found a man—Peter Stubbe—walking towards Cologne in the area where the wolf had apparently vanished. Under torture Stubbe confessed to being a werewolf, claiming that he was a witch and that the Devil had given him a magic belt (which was never found) which enabled him to transform himself. He admitted to incest with his sister and daughter, with whom he had had a child. He claimed that he had killed many children, as well as large numbers of sheep, lambs, and goats, over a period of twenty-five years. He was broken on the wheel, his flesh pulled off with red hot pincers, and then decapitated; his daughter and sister were sentenced to be burned.