Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  None of these bodies had been in the ground longer than three months. That meant most of them had been buried in October or November. The onset of winter might have slowed their decomposition—yet how to account for the corpses that did not display “vampirism”? The hadnack’s own wife had been dead for seven weeks, and her newborn child had not survived her for long. Yet, both mother and child were completely decomposed, although their grave lay in ground no different than that of the apparent vampires nearby. A servant named Rhade, 21, had died following a three-month’s illness. After five weeks in the ground, his remains, too, were completely decomposed. So were those of yet another mother and child, who had been laid in their joint grave more than a month earlier.

  The hajduks would have had an explanation: The five decomposed bodies were the result of natural death, while the dozen others had been victims of vampire attacks—and were becoming vampires in turn. Unless these vampires were destroyed quickly, the rest of the village was doomed. Flückinger must have given them permission: “After the examination had taken place,” he reported, “the heads of the vampires were cut off by the local gypsies and burned along with the bodies, and then the ashes were thrown into the river Morava. The decomposed bodies, however, were laid back into their own graves.”

  It is debatable how much of this Flückinger and the four other members of the Austrian military detachment actually witnessed. They did not enter the graveyard until at least midday, which would have left them only five hours or so to examine 17 corpses. Not only that, but human remains do not burn easily. The cremation of a single body (much less a dozen) would have been a daunting task, even if some were newborns. Then the pyres would have to cool before the ashes could be gathered. Darkness was surely falling, and the gypsies may already have begun their gruesome work.

  Having just sanctioned this mass desecration, the Austrians were doubtless eager to depart. Perhaps they would find an old Ottoman caravanserai somewhere along their return route to Belgrade. Or perhaps they stayed in the village instead, watching the massive pyres roar throughout the night, the severed heads rolling about as the burning wood shifted and settled. After what they had just seen and heard, it would be understandable if they chose not to return through that dark forest by night.

  FALLACIOUS FICTIONS OF HUMAN FANTASY

  Back in Belgrade, Flückinger dutifully prepared his report. “Visum et Repertum”—“Seen and Discovered”—was sealed and notarized by the surgeon, his two medical associates, and the two regular officers. They further attested that all that had been observed “in the matter of vampires…is in every way truthful and has been undertaken, observed, and examined in our own presence.” It was dated January 26, 1732, and dispatched to Hapsburg emperor Charles VI.

  Within weeks of being reprinted in a Nuremberg scientific journal, “Visum et Repertum” became a surprise best seller at the 1732 Leipzig Book Fair.

  Not that stories about revenants—those returned from the dead—were new; reports of vampire eruptions had been regular features of central and eastern European life for years. But “Visum et Repertum” was not just another compendium of fantastic tales; there was no fiendish corpse in it. Rather, as a report of scientific observations, it appealed to Enlightenment scholars precisely because Flückinger’s conclusions amounted to a medical acknowledgment that a phenomenon called vampirism might exist. It thus kindled a fierce debate throughout the German academic and medical establishment.

  Suddenly Arnold Paole and Stanoika were on lips from Leipzig to London. Newsstands carried copies of “Dissertatio de Vampyris Serviensibus” (“On the Serbian Vampires”), “Dissertationes de Masticatione Mortuorum” (“On the Chewing Dead”), “Dissertatio de Cadauveribus Sanguisugis” (“On the Bloodsucking Dead”), and so on. At least 14 treatises and 4 dissertations on the subject were published within a year or two of “Visum et Repertum.”

  Smelling sensational copy, journalists quickly picked up on the trend as well, and the word vampire began to infiltrate western European languages. It appeared in Britain, for example, in the March 11, 1732, London Journal— mere weeks after Flückinger returned to Belgrade. Two months later, the May 20 issue of The Craftsman described a dispute “between a grave Doctor of Physick and a beautiful young Lady, an Admirer of strange Occurrences. The Doctor ridicul’d such romantick Stories, as common Artifices of News-writers to fill up their Papers; The Lady insisted on the Truth of this Relation; which stood attested by unexceptionable Witnesses….”

  That typified the public reaction to the vampire madness: It was either peasant superstition, or it was chillingly true. According to English novelist Horace Walpole, King George II was a confirmed believer, while in 1750, one Constantino Grimaldi of Italy claimed that no vampires were found where peasants drank wine; according to him, they existed only in countries “where beer, this unhealthy drink, is widespread.”

  To the Marquis D’Argens of France, however, it was all hysterical self-fulfilling prophecy. “In examining the Story of the Death of these pretended Martyrs to Vampirism,” he wrote in the 1737 edition of his celebrated Lettres Juives, “I discover all the Marks of an epidemick Fanaticism, and I see clearly that the Impressions of their own Fears was the true Cause of their Destruction.” Thanks to D’Argens’s influence, incidents like the Serbian ones came to be called vampire epidemics wherever they cropped up.

  Of all those who weighed in on the vampire question, perhaps no one had a greater impact than Dom Augustin Calmet, abbot of the Benedictine Abbey at Senones in France’s forested Vosges Mountains. A biblical exegete of unimpeachable authority, Calmet was probably the Catholic church’s leading intellectual when he published his mammoth Traité sur les Apparitions des Esprits, et sur les Vampires in 1746. A treasury of tales of angels and demons, specters and apparitions, ghosts and resurrections and revivals, the Traité was one of the first works to apply rudimentary rules of evidence to folklore. “Every age, every nation, every country has its prejudices, its maladies, its customs,” the abbot observed. Then, warming to his subject, he continued in the most vivid terms:

  In this age, a new scene presents itself to our eyes, and has done for about sixty years in Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland; men, it is said, who have been dead for several months, come back to earth, talk, walk, infest villages, ill use both men and beasts, suck the blood of their near relations, destroy their health, and finally cause their death; so that people can only save themselves from their dangerous visits and their hauntings, by exhuming them, impaling them, cutting off their heads, tearing out their hearts, or burning them. These are called by the name of oupires or vampires, that is to say, leeches; and such particulars are related of them, so singular, so detailed, and attended by such probable circumstances, and such judicial information, that one can hardly refuse to credit the belief which is held in those countries, that they come out of their tombs, and produce those effects which are proclaimed of them….

  Leery of charges of frivolity, Calmet emphasized that his examination was important from a religious point of view: “For, if the return of vampires is real, it is of import to defend it, and prove it; and if it is illusory, it is of consequence to the interests of religion to undeceive those who believe in its truth, and destroy an error which may produce dangerous effects….”

  At times, the abbot’s view of the undead seemed positively cavalier. Not only did Calmet believe medieval tales of the sinful dead trudging out of their churchyard graves during divine services and then dutifully filing back, but also he was not overly concerned with the condition of the corpses found in the Medvegia graveyard:

  That bodies which have died of violent maladies, or which have been executed when full of health, or have simply swooned, should vegetate underground in their graves; that their beards, hair, and nails should grow; that they should emit blood, be supple and pliant; that they should have no bad smell, &c.,—all these things do not embarrass us: the vegetation of the human body may produce all these effec
ts.

  For Calmet, the “grand difficulty,” not surprisingly, lay in explaining how vampires could emerge from the grave in the first place. That would be the “most interesting part of the narrative”:

  How a body covered with four or five feet of earth, having no room to move about and disengage itself, wrapped up in linen, covered with pitch, can make its way out, and come back upon the earth, and there occasion such effects as are related of it; and how after that it returns to its former state, and re-enters underground, where it is found sound, whole, and full of blood, and in the same condition as a living body? This is the question. Will it be said that these bodies evaporate through the ground without opening it, like the water and vapours which enter into the earth, or proceed from it, without sensibly deranging its particles? It were to be wished that the accounts which have been given us concerning the return of the vampires had been more minute in their explanations of this subject.

  It was this habit of conditional conclusions, not without art—“If these revenants are really dead, whatever state they may be in in the other world, they play a very bad part here”—that hinted at the very real possibility of vampires for many readers. And the prestigious Calmet had many readers, as his book went through numerous reprintings.

  A more clear-cut, ringing denial was needed, according to Monsignor Giuseppe Davanzati, the archbishop of Trani in southern Italy. As early as 1738, he began writing the dissertation eventually called I Vampiri, or The Vampires. Fierce and uncompromising, Davanzati deplored the vampire hysteria primarily because the desecration of corpses mocked and undermined the doctrine of the resurrection. By 1744, a manuscript copy of his work had found its way to the Vatican, where some very sympathetic eyes indeed fell upon it.

  Pope Benedict XIV, a man of sunny temperament, had risen to the papacy despite having declared himself neither a saint nor a statesman but simply a stubbornly honest man. He was also a distinguished scholar, having steeped himself in the lore of bodies corruptible and incorruptible while writing his treatise on the beatification of saints, De servo-rum Dei beatificatione et Beatorum canonizatione. When published in 1734, it studiously ignored the vampire craze in full swing at the time. In the book’s second edition, however, published 15 years later, Pope Benedict addressed the undead issue head-on, branding vampires the “fallacious fictions of human fantasy.”

  Roma locuta; causa finita—“Rome has spoken; the case is closed.” Dom Calmet duly fell in line. In 1751, in the final edition of his work, the old abbot penned a new conclusion: “I doubt that there is another stand to take on this question other than to deny absolutely that vampires return from the dead.” Then, in 1774, the imprimatur was bestowed on Monsignor Davanzati’s I Vampiri. The gates to the tomb were sealed shut. For Roman Catholics, there were no such things as vampires.

  The temporal powers also obeyed. The devout Maria Theresa now sat on the Hapsburg throne, and in 1755, she moved to halt any further exhumations in her realm. After her personal physician, the eminently rational Gerard van Swieten, had investigated vampire hysteria and called it all a “vain fear,” she issued a resolution condemning belief in vampires as “superstition and fraud.” The resolution likewise criminalized the staking or burning of corpses. In August 1756, the empress further strengthened her hand by transferring responsibility for witchcraft, vampire, or any other cases “not readily explainable in natural terms” from the priests to the Conciliar Appellate Court. Her mortal enemy, Frederick the Great of Prussia, with whom she was already again at war, quickly followed suit.

  THE MORE THEY ARE BURNED…

  The “vampire epidemics” seemed contained. Church and state had closed ranks. It remained only for the Enlightenment to administer the coup de grâce. And who better for that task than François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire?

  A man of many interests, ranging from the nature of fire to biblical criticism, Voltaire possessed a scathing wit. By the 1750s, he was holding court in Ferney, his chateau outside Geneva, because his satire had won him too many enemies in France. At Ferney, he finished his masterpiece, Candide (1759), and completed his Dictionnaire philosophique, fruit of a lifetime’s musings on God, metaphysics, immortality, the soul, ethics, and any number of other topics—all turned to so many arrows fired at his favorite targets: the Catholic Church, fanaticism, and political or religious persecution. Published anonymously in 1764, the Dictionnaire was punchy rather than lengthy—the better to hide in one’s pocket.

  Under V, of course, was an article on vampires. “What!” mocked Voltaire. “Is it in our eighteenth century that vampires exist? We never heard speak of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess, that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces….”

  As for the vampire epidemics:

  After slander, nothing is communicated more promptly than superstition, fanaticism, sorcery, and tales of those raised from the dead. There were [vampires] in Wallachia, Moldavia, and some among the Polanders, who are of the Romish church. This superstition being absent, they acquired it, and it went through all the east of Germany. Nothing was spoken of but vampires, from 1730 to 1735; they were laid in wait for, their hearts torn out and burnt. They resembled the ancient martyrs—the more they were burnt, the more they abounded.

  Nor did Voltaire spare his friend Dom Augustin Calmet: “Calmet became their historian,” he concluded, “and treated vampires as he treated the Old and New Testament, by relating faithfully all that has been said before him.”

  If he intended to instruct and amuse in portable format, Voltaire was vindicated: The Dictionnaire philosophique sold out its first edition, brought down the wrath of the Catholic Church, and was banned and burned in France and Geneva.

  Meanwhile, that other lion of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was likewise invoking vampires. In 1762, the apostle of the “natural man” had been called upon to defend himself against ecclesiastical attacks, too. The archbishop of Paris had taken great offense at Émile, Rousseau’s antiestablishment treatise promoting educational reform and “natural religion.” Both author and book were banned from France; there, thankfully, only the book could be burned, for the author took to his heels. Protesting this treatment, Rousseau wrote an open letter to the archbishop in which he sought to drive home a point about the interpretation of evidence:

  If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of the vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

  The answer was seemingly no one—at least no one in Enlightenment France.

  Voltaire and Rousseau died within weeks of each other in the summer of 1778. Because Voltaire was an excommunicate and Rousseau was rumored to have shot himself, they should both, by the rules of folklore, have risked becoming vampires. But during the French Revolution, their bodies—or at least their coffins—were removed from their lonely graves and installed in the Panthéon in Paris, the former church that was supposed to become the sacred space for a new secular state.

  By the 1830s, the Panthéon had become a church again, and it was whispered that the remains of Voltaire and Rousseau had been clandestinely dumped in a sewer. As one newspaper reporter put it, the “faithful and pious couldn’t worship over the heads of two such infidels.” Or was it the other way around? As a waggish King Louis XVIII was said to have put it, had those two heads simply grown annoyed at having Mass celebrated above them? Perhaps they had risen from the crypt and trooped out of the church, like Dom Calmet’s excommunicates in the Middle Ages.

  In December 1897, an official delegation tiptoed down into the vaults of the Panthéon and had the tombs opened. The great men were indeed still there, although no signs o
f vampirism despoiled their bodies. A New York Times article reported that “A viscous matter, apparently coagulated sawdust” coated Voltaire’s remains. Although his skull had been sawed in half when his brain was removed soon after death, he was still eerily recognizable. Voltaire, who had looked mummified even in life, was now a dead ringer for the famous bust of him by the sculptor Pigalle: “…even the sardonic smirk was recognizable in the thin skin drawn tightly over the cheek bones and frontal.”

  Rousseau’s hands were still clasped over his chest, and though the “thread of the shroud enveloped the skeleton; the body had evidently been imperfectly embalmed.” A few teeth were still visible, as were a few hairs on the skull—a skull, it was observed, that showed no signs of a self-inflicted gunshot wound: Jean-Jacques Rousseau had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  THE DEATH VINE

  Though far removed from the European world of Medvegia, New England, with its rock-ribbed hills and once-dense forests of chestnut and white pine, originally bore a striking resemblance to parts of the Balkans.

  Among headstones carved with skulls and destroying angels in the Old Burying Point in Salem, Massachusetts, lie the graves of the judges who presided over the notorious witchcraft trials of 1692. Nearby is Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the final resting place of Emerson, Thoreau, and other leaders of 19th-century transcendentalism. New England would seem to have come a long way between those two milestones.