Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  From that time on, he sought, in every possible way to see and, where practicable, to taste the fresh blood of females. That of young girls was preferred by him. He spared no pain or expense to obtain this pleasure.

  Case number 48 described a young man with scars covering his arms who had sought out Dr. von Krafft-Ebing. It turned out they were incidental to his wife’s lovemaking technique: “[H]e first had to make a cut in his arm,” Krafft-Ebing reported, and “she would suck the wound and during the act become violently excited sexually.” In the good doctor’s opinion, this case recalled the “widespread legend of the vampires, the origin of which may perhaps be referred to such sadistic facts.”

  Might “clinical vampirism,” as the compulsion to drink another person’s blood has been diagnosed, really explain the origin of the vampire legend? Certainly it describes a syndrome of pathological behaviors easily correlated to that legend. Vampirism was once rather widely used to describe activities ranging from the ingestion of blood to cannibalism. These would have to be irresistibly compulsive behaviors, almost ritualized, the discharge of which would afford only temporary relief. That spelled trouble if such compulsions manifested themselves in psychopathic personalities—especially in people who appeared to be functioning perfectly normally.

  In 1931, as Americans packed movie palaces to watch Béla Lugosi play Dracula, German audiences were treated to a far darker tale. Fritz Lang’s M is a film about a serial killer of children, purportedly inspired by a series of horrible crimes that had plagued the dark days of postwar Germany.

  In the mid-1920s, after police in Hanover began dredging human bones from the nearby Leine River, a hunt was undertaken for what the press called the “Vampire of Hanover” or the “Werewolf of Hanover.” Eventually police arrested a petty crook, stool pigeon, and sexual predator named Fritz Haarmann (1879–1925). Under the impulse of what his accomplice called his “wild, sick urges,” Haarmann had picked up at least 27 young men—homosexual prostitutes, runaways, and street urchins—had taken them to his squalid room, and had gnawed through their throats during sex to kill them. He then butchered their remains, cast the offal and bones into the river, and sold the meat and clothes in the city’s various markets. Not surprisingly, after a sensational two-week trial, Haarmann was beheaded in April 1925.

  Five years later, it was the turn of the “Vampire of Düsseldorf” to make headlines. In late 1929, numerous bodies of women and girls—slashed and sometimes decapitated by knives and scissors, or bludgeoned by hammers—surfaced with sickening frequency in and around Düsseldorf. Eventually, a lifelong criminal named Peter Kürten (1883–1931) was arrested and charged with the murders. A neat man not devoid of feeling, he seemed unable to resist the compulsion toward sexual gratification that he found in the spurting blood of his victims. As he was led to the guillotine, Kürten supposedly asked the prison psychiatrist whether, “after my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck?” He hoped that might be “the pleasure to end all pleasures.”

  On the other hand, the story of John Haigh (1909–1949), dubbed the “Acid Bath Murderer,” is a bad B movie, complete with drums of sulfuric acid—Haigh’s means of concealing the perfect crime. Haigh killed at least six people (he claimed nine) in or around London and dumped each body into an acid bath. After a day or two, the ghastly concoction had reduced each victim to a sludge that could easily be poured down a manhole. Eventually the police caught him, and found the remains of three human gall bladders and a partial set of dentures in one of the drums. At his trial, the nation was horrified to witness the offhand, even affable manner with which Haigh confessed to having cut his victims’ throats in order to enjoy a revivifying glass of blood. His testimony earned him the inevitable sobriquet of “Vampire of London.” If it was an attempt to cop an insanity plea, the prosecutor saw through it: Haigh, whose primary motive seems to have been the petty one of theft, was hanged in August 1949.

  Then there was a deaf-mute laborer named Kuno Hoffman who, in 1972, gained notoriety as the “Vampire of Nuremberg” after he shot a kissing couple one night and lapped up their blood—blood that was much fresher than the blend he habitually imbibed from buried corpses, several dozen of which he had disinterred expressly for that purpose.

  An even more stomach-churning case was that of Richard Trenton Chase. The “Vampire of Sacramento,” as he was branded, was a classic paranoid schizophrenic. He not only believed that his pulmonary artery had been stolen, but also was convinced that either UFOs or Nazis were poisoning his soap dish. Chase also showed a compulsion for drinking blood, which precipitated a killing spree. He murdered two infants and two adults—accompanied by disembowelments, the eating of brains, and the quaffing of blood from used yogurt cups—before the police finally caught up with him. Rather than face the electric chair, Chase poisoned himself.

  This litany of latter-day vampirism seems inexhaustible indeed. But it may have reached its grisly apogee in 1980, when 23-year-old James Riva, using gold-plated bullets, shot and killed his 74-year-old disabled grandmother. Riva then drank her blood as it spurted from the wounds. He had attacked her, Riva later claimed, because the voice of a vampire had instructed him to do so. Riva further declared that he himself was a 700-year-old vampire who required his grandmother’s blood to survive, only to discover that she was too old and dried up to serve that purpose. In 2009, he came up for parole. It was denied.

  Such instances might be multiplied a hundredfold. Yet it is dangerous to ascribe too much to clinical vampirism, if only because the evidence for it gets flimsier the further back in history one searches. On a hilltop near Cachtice in Slovakia, for example, stand the moldering ruins of a castle. We shall never know exactly what happened there, for thick slabs of legend have accreted around an elusive core of fact. But this was once the home of Elizabeth Báthory (1560–1614), whom history has crowned the “Blood Countess.”

  The legend is well known: In 1600 or thereabouts, while having her hair combed, Báthory reacted violently to the clumsy brushwork of a maidservant and struck her, bloodying her nose. When a drop of the blood fell on the countess’s hand, the skin beneath it soon turned magically younger. So the 40-year-old widow, anxious to maintain her fabled but fading youth and beauty, instigated a decade of butchery, arranging for upward of 650 virgin girls to be killed and drained to replenish her rejuvenating blood baths.

  Much of that may be fabrication, of course. What’s certain is that the King of Hungary presided over the trial of a Countess Báthory, who was convicted on 80 counts of murder. Seventeenth-century rules of evidence being less stringent than those in force today, many of the rumors—of lesbian orgies, of torture, and even of cannibalism—are hard to prove. Crimes occurred, to be sure, yet it is difficult if not impossible to ascertain their true nature and extent (650 victims seems preposterous).

  Accusations of witchcraft dominated Báthory’s trial, leading two of her maidservants and her majordomo to be executed in horrific fashion. Báthory was spared their fate because she hailed from a noble family that had long produced rulers of Transylvania; but hers was a Protestant clan in a Catholic kingdom, and her sons-in-law—the ones who brought charges against her in the first place—stood to inherit her estates. Whatever the truth behind the gruesome tales, in 1611, the Blood Countess was walled into a suite of rooms in her castle, never to leave again. Her dark and solitary confinement ended only with her death four years later.

  In far too many other instances, by contrast, the sad facts of clinical vampirism are undeniable. Its grisly catalogue of symptoms underscores a point made by Dr. Philip Jaffé, a psychiatrist, and Frank DiCataldo, an expert on juvenile delinquency, in 1994: Clinical vampirism brings together “some of the most shocking pathologic behaviors [ever] observed in humanity.”

  But does clinical vampirism help explain the historical origin of vampires, as Dr. von Krafft-Ebing suspected? Or might it
be merely a convenient label to affix to the file drawer of case histories? Wherever the truth lies, the dramatic convergence of myth and reality contained in those histories is a sufficient goad to seek a better understanding of vampire origins.

  BENEATH THE CLAY

  “Everything must have a beginning,” Mary Shelley writes in her foreword to Frankenstein, “and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Anyone seeking the origins of the vampire legend must be prepared to uncover one beginning after another. Because the vampire is found mostly in story—perhaps only in story?—he must be tracked, as if down through the levels of an archaeological dig, from one layer of story to another. One must pass from the night world of the present, with its glittering abundance of images, and wend ever downward through the night worlds residing in printed books, or on incunabula, or inscribed on parchment and vellum, or dwelling in generations of folktales whispered in chimney corners, until only the tombs and the bones remain. That might be the ultimate level, the one—as the poet William Butler Yeats put it—where “under heavy loads of trampled clay / Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood; / Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “THE VERY BEST STORY OF DIABLERIE”

  “IT IS A STORY OF A VAMPIRE,” begins the note accompanying the leather-bound presentation copy delivered to former prime minister William Gladstone on May 24, 1897:

  It is a story of a vampire—the old medieval vampire but recrudescent today. It has I think pretty well all the vampire legend as to limitations and these may in some way interest you…. The book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to “cleanse the mind by pity & terror.” At any rate there is nothing base in the book, and though superstition is [fought] with the weapons of superstition, I hope it is not irreverent.

  Because Bram Stoker happily flogged his own books, many people in his wide circle of acquaintance received similar leather-bound volumes—and similar notes. The mystery was how the bluff, burly 50-year-old found time to write his stories and novels while working full-time as manager of the Lyceum Theatre, the toniest stage in London’s West End. No doubt his friends were busy too, for they didn’t acknowledge his gift. Arthur Conan Doyle, however, pulled out his pen and jotted a note: The 38-year-old creator of Sherlock Holmes, already one of Britain’s most popular authors, declared Dracula the “very best story of diablerie that I have read in many years.”

  Late Victorian London, in the imagination’s eye, is a sea of jostling hansom cabs, an ocean of bobbing bowler and top hats. It is the largest and most important city in the world, the seat of majesty and the pivot of empire. Yet it cloaks some very real horrors: Jack the Ripper—the midnight stalker who slashes the throats of women and occasionally eviscerates their bodies—is out there somewhere. Nevertheless, the figure standing near Hyde Park Corner one day in the early 1890s, watching the teeming millions passing by, will have a far greater impact on the world’s apprehension of horror, despite the fact that he inhabits only the world of a novel. For Dracula is the original Undead—a name that Bram Stoker coined, and nearly used as the book’s title—personifying the irruption of an archaic, supernatural terror in the complacent heart of civilization. His special diablerie is that, once loosed, he is not easily repressed:

  My revenge is just begun. I spread it over centuries and time is on my side.

  If we are to understand the vampire, Dracula is the wolf in the path. All roads lead to him.

  LANDS OF SUPERSTITION

  At the close of the 19th century, anyone in England who aspired to write a vampire story could count on his readers to know something about them, for books had made vampires familiar figures. Hardly a literate household did not possess an old Gothic romance or two, whose stories were set in gloomy castles and featured malevolent noblemen with Italian-sounding names. Most homes would also have a copy of John Keats’s “Lamia” or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel, poems with ancient or medieval settings that featured exotic, vampirelike beings.

  Stoker’s genius did not run to poetry; but for a grimly realistic setting, he might have found inspiration in his own heritage. Bram Stoker was born in Clontarf, Ireland, in 1847, when the seven-year potato famine was at its worst. Eventually, it would kill nearly a million people and send a million Irish emigrants to the New World on overcrowded “coffin ships.” Stoker’s mother could also recount the horrors of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which had ravaged her native Sligo; she recalled its victims’ being buried in mass graves while they were still alive. There were also Celtic tales of bloodsucking dearg-due, and English tales (Stoker moved to London in 1879 to work for celebrated actor Henry Irving) such as that of the “vampire” of Croglin Grange in Cumberland: a brown, shriveled, mummified creature—discovered in a vault littered with overturned coffins and spilled corpses—that was said to have terrorized the neighborhood before being burned in the 17th century.

  A vampire story, however, cried out for a central or eastern European setting, because that’s where the legend had long been flourishing. That was also the region where four empires had long been grinding against one another. The Ottoman Empire, centered on modern Turkey, still embraced the Near East and most of the Balkans, as it had for four centuries—“the Balkans” being a case of geographic synecdoche, taking a part for the whole, for the Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria were just one in a series of ranges rising above the peninsula between the Adriatic and Aegean seas. The various nationalities that lived in this “Turkish Europe”—Romanians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, and Greeks—had been gradually winning their independence, though not without a fight. Hidden behind that Ottoman veil, however, was one of the most deeply rooted vampire folklores to be found anywhere.

  The Russian Empire also harbored deep deposits of upyr, or “vampire,” folklore, mined by such writers as Nikolai Gogol and Aleksey Tolstoy, uncle of another and more famous author of the same surname. Germany, too, would make a tempting choice for a vampire-story setting. When Jane Eyre, for instance, in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name, compared the madwoman in the attic to “that foul German spectre—the Vampyre,” she was associating the monster with a tradition in German literature that had begun a century earlier, in 1748, when Heinrich August Ossenfelder wrote his poem “Der Vampir.” The genre included such masterpieces as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth,” in which the eponymous heroine wanders from her grave to seek “the bridegroom I have lost / And the lifeblood of his heart to drink.”

  Stoker had certainly read Gottfried Bürger’s Lenore, one of the most popular ballads of the late 18th century. It is the tale of a spectral soldier who returns from the wars one moonlit night to claim his bride. Spiriting her away by horseback, then galloping past the ghosts that haunt gallows and graveyards, he leads her to their marriage bed: his coffin, all “plank and bottom and lid” of it, in Hungary. That ballad’s most quoted line, “Die Toten reiten schnell”— “The dead travel fast”—not only became proverbial, meaning that the dead are soon forgotten, but also appeared in a deleted early chapter of Dracula, where the four words were carved on Countess Dolingen’s tombstone.

  Nevertheless, Stoker chose to set his vampire story in the sprawling, polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty from the fin de siècle Vienna of Strauss waltzes and Freudian psychoanalysis. He initially placed his castle in the mountainous Duchy of Styria, the setting for Carmilla, an 1872 vampire story he admired whose author, Sheridan le Fanu, was a Dublin writer and newspaper editor who had once employed Stoker. In Carmilla, Styria was a Gothic landscape of limitless forests, lonely castles, and ruined chapels. And there Stoker’s own fictitious castle might yet be standing had he not come across an article written by the English-born wife of an Austrian cavalry officer; her account described an even more remote corner of the empire, one tucked away in the isolation of the Carpathian Mountains: “Transylvania
might well be termed the land of superstition,” Emily Gerard had written in a July 1885 article for The Nineteenth Century, “for nowhere else does this curious crooked plant of delusion flourish as persistently and in such bewildering variety.

  “It would almost seem,” Gerard continued, “as though the whole species of demons, pixies, witches, and hobgoblins, driven from the rest of Europe by the wand of science, had taken refuge within this mountain rampart, well aware that here they would find secure lurking places, whence they might defy their persecutors yet awhile.”

  Bristling with caves and strange rock formations—Gregynia Drakuluj (Devil’s Garden), Gania Drakuluj (Devil’s Mountain), and Yadu Drakuluj (Devil’s Abyss)—the landscape and superstitions that Gerard described must have appealed to Stoker, because he soon moved his castle to Transylvania. That decision would place the “land beyond the forest” (the literal translation of Transylvania) squarely on the imaginative map of Europe. Even though its paper position would change after World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and Transylvania was ceded to Romania, it was thanks to Dracula that Transylvania, not the Balkans, came to be identified in most people’s minds as the vampire’s true native land.

  “…THE MASTER IS AT HAND.”

  Dracula is an epistolary novel, told through letters, journal entries, and even telegrams—all of which should warn astute readers to be alert to the phenomenon of the unreliable narrator. It is also a sprawling novel, overflowing with characters and incidents. But we might glance anyway at how Count Dracula is portrayed throughout the course of the narrative.