Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  These and other bulwarks were breached all too often, but at least they helped confine outbreaks to flare-ups. An example of how seriously the plague was taken can be found today in the sacristy of Santa Maria della Salute on the Grand Canal: There, Titian’s St. Mark Triumphant, probably painted during or after a plague outbreak in 1510, depicts an enthroned St. Mark, the patron saint of Venice, flanked by Cosmas, Damian, Roch, and Sebastian—the saintly foursome traditionally invoked to ward off the affliction.

  Despite such prophylaxis, la peste returned to Venice with a vengeance in the autumn of 1576. The usual strict ordinances were imposed, with severe penalties for breaking them: New cases should be promptly reported, the sick immediately isolated, the clothes and bedding of the dead swiftly burned. The contagion only spread. Officials imposed a weeklong quarantine on the entire city. It had no effect.

  On the Rialto, life came to a standstill. The Piazza San Marco stood empty. Innkeepers locked their doors, and shopkeepers shuttered their stalls. Those who could afford it headed for the hills inland. Too often, though, they were felled before they could flee. Most senators departed, but not the Republic’s courageous leader, Doge Alvise Mocenigo I, who steadfastly remained in office as the epidemic burned through his city month after month, eventually infecting half of its 180,000 citizens.

  Anyone who fell sick or showed even the slightest symptom was exiled to the lazarettos until they recovered or died. When those outposts reached (and exceeded) capacity, two ancient galleons were towed into the lagoon and used as isolation wards. Even that did not suffice. Soon both Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo were ringed with ships, giving them the appearance of beleaguered island fortresses.

  Within the walls and aboard the vessels, doctors sheathed in protective garments, their face masks packed with aromatic herbs, used hooked sticks to examine patients from a safe remove. With thousands of people falling sick, however, hundreds died each day. “It looked like hell…. The sick lay three or four in a bed,” wrote the 16th-century Venetian chronicler Rocco Benedetti. “Workers collected the dead and threw them in the graves all day without a break. Often the dying ones and the ones too sick to move or talk were taken for dead and thrown on the piled corpses.”

  Thus did the burial grounds quickly fill up, becoming so saturated that gravediggers had to lay each new shrouded corpse on top of the one below. Constantly being opened and reopened, the cemeteries took on the appearance of festering mass graves.

  DR. BORRINI DIGS BONES

  Nearly 400 years later, the Archaeological Superintendence of Veneto decided to excavate the remains. Across the sparkling waters of the lagoon from the old city, members of La Spezia Archaeological Group assembled to undertake a dig on Lazzaretto Nuovo.

  In August 2006, with Venice given over to tourists for the summer season, this small band of archaeologists was carefully spading away under the watchful eye of their supervisor, Dr. Matteo Borrini. A forensic anthropologist associated with the University of Florence, Dr. Borrini had logged countless hours helping the Italian police investigate various crime scenes. He was using this dig, in fact, as an opportunity to refine some old methods—and to test out some promising new ones on how best to recover bodies from clandestine graves.

  The plot they were excavating, though only 17 yards (16 meters) square, abounded with skeletons. Borrini was using what he called “taphonomic know-how” (from Greek taphos, “grave”) to make sense of this jumble of bones by tracing their layers of deposition. Because this was not a conventional cemetery—rather a burial ground crammed with bodies every which way—the anthropologist’s task was a little trickier. It soon became clear, however, that Borrini was dealing with at least two “stratigraphic macro-units,” or two layers of bodies buried at different times. The topmost layer showed no postburial disturbance. Judging from medallions found among these remains from the Venice Jubilee of 1600, it represented the dead of the 1630–1631 plague epidemic, which had killed some 40,000 people.

  Underlying and interpenetrating that layer of dead, however, was an older one composed of more fragmented skeletons, broken and shattered as if by the spades of gravediggers. The bodies in this layer had been skeletons for several decades when the victims of the 1630–1631 plague were laid on top of them. Borrini’s team was able to establish that they almost certainly represented the dead from an earlier outbreak, this one the 1576–1577 plague.

  August 11, 2006, promised to be as tediously exacting as any other day at the site. Borrini was making his usual rounds when a voice summoned him to a corner of the site where his sister had begun coaxing yet another skull from the dirt.

  But not just any skull.

  As was his habit when it came to unusual finds, the director took over and painstakingly removed the accretion from around the skull. It seemed that a brick, lodged between its jaws, was propping its mandible wide open.

  That was odd. No other bricks or stones had been found in the backfill of that grave. Otherwise, the skeleton—or what was left of it, for the only portion not shattered by later gravediggers extended from the rib cage to the skull—seemed normal enough. It had been interred supine (on its back), its arms apparently at its sides, although the left clavicle, or collarbone, was pushed up at an angle—probably the result of a shroud wound too tightly about it. Quite likely from the older, or 1576, layer, it was catalogued as “ID6.”

  That brick bedeviled Borrini. He had enough experience as a forensic anthropologist to recognize an artifact of intentional action when he saw it. His first thought, in fact, was that this signaled some kind of bizarre, ritualized murder carried out at the height of a raging epidemic. Because there was no damage to the teeth, however, and because the jawbones were still perfectly aligned, the brick had probably not been rammed into the mouth of a violently struggling person. Instead, it had been inserted between the jaws of a corpse, when soft tissue was still present.

  So far, so good. But why?

  Throughout that autumn and into the winter, Borrini—now back at his academic office in Florence—puzzled over the find. Eventually, he was drawn to the university library, where he read up on the history of the plague and researched funerary practices common during pandemics. One book led to another, until finally Borrini came across a tract published in 1679 by Philip Rohr, a Protestant theologian at the University of Leipzig. It was called “De Masticatione Mortuorum”: “On the Chewing Dead.”

  This volume described the Nachzehrer— German for “after-devourer”—a kind of mindless, vampirelike corpse that chews its shroud in the grave before consuming its own fingers. As it nibbles away, by some occult process, it also slowly kills the surviving members of its family. It may then begin gobbling corpses in neighboring graves.

  As if all that were not grisly enough, the Nachzehrer’s appalling dietary habits can be heard aboveground, where they come through loud and clear as a grunting, smacking sound like that of a pig snarfing garbage (dignified in Latin as sonus porcinus).

  Born somewhere on the north German and Polish plains, this horrible figure made his appearance all over central Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. In “De Masticatione Mortuorum,” Rohr culled examples from several even more obscure German dissertations, emphasizing that the grunting noise in particular was heard mostly, if not exclusively, during eruptions of the plague. One of his sources, in fact, had concluded that “corpses eat only during the time of plague.” Rohr went on to cite a certain Adam Rother, who claimed that, as pestilence ravaged the German university town of Marburg in 1581, the dead in their graves could be heard uttering ominous noises from all over the town and surrounding countryside.

  The same thing happened in Schisselbein, according to another little-known chronicler named Ignatius Hanielus. “Although both the corpses of men and of women are known to have grunted, gibbered, and squeaked,” Rohr reported, for some inexplicable reason “it is more often the bodies of the weaker sex who have thus uttered curious voices.”

 
; Ever the inquiring theologian, Rohr offered an explanation for this postmortem mastication: The devil was using corpses to induce epidemics of plague by the mere act of their chewing. Why? For one thing, the very monstrousness of such an act was guaranteed to sow terror and confusion among the living. For another, every time a body had to be exhumed to stop its gnawing, the unearthed corpse would broadcast its infection and pestilence even farther afield.

  Yet, unearthing a Nachzehrer was apparently the only way to stop the damned thing from grinding its teeth during the night: One had to seal its mouth with a handful of soil. Denied the ability to chew, it would then die of starvation. “Some deeming this not altogether sufficient,” Rohr wrote, “before they close the lips of the dead place a stone and a coin in the cold mouth, so that in his grave he may bite on these and refrain from gnawing further.”

  When Matteo Borrini read that, he understood why the brick had been thrust into the mouth of ID6: This person was suspected of being a vampire.

  TO SCAPEGOAT IS HUMAN?

  For centuries, epidemics had been viewed not in natural terms but rather in supernatural ones, as by-products of the struggle between God and Satan. As late as 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, a desperately cold winter had been followed by a smallpox outbreak; the deadly confluence was viewed as evidence that witches, allied with Satan, were at work. The stage was set for the Salem witchcraft trials.

  The Old Testament attributed visitations of pestilence to God. In 1679, the same year that Rohr published “De Masticatione Mortuorum,” an outbreak of plague in Vienna was blamed on a kind of supernatural visitant called a Pest Jungfrau, or “Plague Maiden.”

  Other scapegoats, tragically, were all too human.

  In 1321, Philip V of France made leprosy a treasonable offense. Lepers, it seems, were supposed to be in league with Muslim Moors in Spain and Jews in Europe to poison the wells of Christendom. Lepers were burned at the stake—or locked in their houses while the houses burned down around their ears. Their property confiscated, they were interred without religious blessing. Soon leprosaria were in flames from southern France to Switzerland. Jacques Fournier, bishop of Mirepoix, oversaw the execution of thousands of lepers—shortly before he became Pope. Such was the mentality that reigned over Europe on the eve of the Black Death.

  Once that epidemic hit, the scapegoating turned to even older targets. Anti-Jewish pogroms flared in cities all over Europe. In Basel, more than 600 Jews were burned at the stake, and their remains were deliberately left unburied. In Frankfurt, Jews were incinerated in their own houses. In Speyer, the burghers sealed Jewish corpses in wine casks and tossed them into the Rhine River, while Jewish mothers threw their babies into the fires and leaped in after them. And in Strasbourg, 2,000 Jews were rounded up, corralled on a wooden scaffold in the Jewish cemetery, and burned. Finally, in 1348, Pope Clement VI issued two papal bulls condemning such actions and declaring that the perpetrators had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil.”

  Witches were also to blame. In the 15th century, Sisteron in France was so beset by plague that its citizens executed suspected witches—a bid to perform a sort of communal pestilential exorcism. In 1545, judges in Geneva accused 62 people, 49 of them women, of being engraisseurs, or “plague spreaders” 32 of them were burned at the stake. As the plague devastated Milan as well as Venice in 1576, Jews, beggars, and gypsies were victimized once again, being hunted down and killed. When that failed to end the pestilence, health workers were targeted instead.

  Or might the fault lie in the stars? During the Black Death, King Philip VI of France convened the medical faculty at the University of Paris to explain what was happening. Following Hippocrates and the Arab physician Avicenna, they ascribed the plague to an evil conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn in the sign of Aquarius that had occurred on the afternoon of March 20, 1345, generating noxious fumes and a putrefaction that rotted the heart.

  So, two centuries later, it might not have seemed so improbable to attribute the plague to corpses gnawing away in their graves at the goading of the devil.

  HARD DAYS’ LIFE

  Back at the University of Florence, as winter turned to spring in 2009, Matteo Borrini was launching an intensive study of that brick-in-mouth skeleton, ID6. It would amount to a literal odyssey, with Borrini driving his suspected vampire from one high-tech lab to another all over Italy. Though he had only a partial skeleton to work with, he was going to subject it to a battery of tests to better understand who this person once was.

  Might ID6 have been a Jew? A Levantine merchant? A North African Moor, like Othello? To find out, Borrini sought out any vestiges of hair, fiber, or other materials that might still be clinging to ID6’s bones. Using powerful forensic light source lamps, he fired beams of multispectral light onto the traces of dirt adhering to the skull—and discovered two rosary beads. That was a key clue, for it meant that ID6 had almost certainly been Roman Catholic—as were most Venetians. And its skull fit known European profiles.

  Determining its sex was a bit trickier. Judging from what was left of the skeleton, ID6 had once belonged to a small person—someone, Borrini estimated, who stood about one and a half meters tall, or a little over five feet. Yet it was missing the telltale hip bones, which usually revealed gender at a glance. He therefore turned to the skull. The mastoid process—a spurlike projection just behind the ears, where the neck muscles attach—is generally larger in men than in women. On ID6, it seemed quite small. Furthermore, the chin seemed demurely pointed. So this was most likely a woman.

  If so, how old was she? Calcification of the ribs is one way to judge age. But the condition of ID6’s skeleton was too fragmented to reveal anything more precise than that it belonged to somebody probably older than 50. High-tech X-ray imaging of the canine teeth (of all things) is notably more precise because their internal cavities age at a known rate. Those tests indicated that ID6 was a chronological standout for her era. She had reached the remarkably advanced age of 61 to 71 years old.

  This vampire, if such it was, had been a little old lady—and a not particularly bloodthirsty one at that. Trace element testing of her bones had turned up a high sodium reading, consistent with a largely vegetarian diet, perhaps supplemented with a little fish from time to time. She had also lived a physically demanding life, judging from a ridge that had formed around the head of her right humerus, or upper arm bone, where it fits into the shoulder socket. This indicated constant and repetitive lifting; from this, Borrini deduced that the shoulder might have been causing her pain.

  ID6 was an ordinary, working-class Venetian woman—neither poor nor rich, but most decidedly a survivor. Though Borrini divined that she had suffered a skull injury as a young girl, evidently she had recovered from that and had managed to live past 60—no mean feat at the time. A century later in London, an examination of the Bills of Mortality from 1629 to 1660 revealed that “of 100 quick Conceptions about 36 of them die before they be six years old, and that perhaps but one surviveth 76.”

  In between those two ends of the age spectrum lay some even more sobering actuarial details: Only one-fourth of all those born were still alive by the age of 26, and only 6 out of every 100 lived to see 56. The main killers were infectious diseases—the grim gauntlet through which the race of life was run. ID6 had gotten pretty far down the course before being tripped up by tiny Yersinia pestis. The bacillus landed her in a quarantine hospital, where she may have spent her final few days in agony.

  She was just one of the tens of thousands the plague swept away. Borrini had seen it in the cemetery: Plague was the great leveler, and in those layers, he could glimpse a cross section of the human condition on a fine day in the Piazza San Marco circa 1575, just before the invader struck. Rich and poor, soldier and diplomat, merchant and laborer, servant and beggar, ladies in oriental silks and gallants in brightly colored hose—all soon to be mowed down by death’s scythe and deposited equally in the boneyard.

  “An old woman who live
d a long, hard life,” Borrini reflected about ID6, “and was falsely accused after her death of being a vampire.”

  As a forensic anthropologist, Borrini knew the reason why. It all had to do with the state of her corpse.

  DEATH BE NOT PROUD

  In the 1980s, the forensic approach to the study of vampires was pioneered not by a pathologist but rather by a folklorist. Paul Barber took the widely accepted notion that a vampire was a reanimated corpse and pursued it to its logical conclusion: “[A] vampire,” wrote Barber in his now-classic Vampires, Burial, and Death (1988), “is a body that in all respects appears to be dead except that it does not decay as we expect, its blood does not coagulate, and it may show changes in dimension and in color.”

  Barber’s contention was that nearly all the traits associated with the folkloric vampire originated in misunderstandings about decaying bodies. Blood sucking? Just a “folkloric means [for clarifying] two unrelated phenomena: unexplained deaths and the appearance of blood at the mouth of a corpse.” Before the late 19th century, when embalming started to become standard practice in Western nations, dead bodies did strange but perfectly natural things in their graves. The course of physical corruption—and this is not for the weak of stomach—does not always run true.

  Bodies exposed to summer heat and air, for instance, tend to decay quickly. At the end of the battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to 3, 1863, a 27-year-old Confederate artilleryman named Robert Stiles encountered the carcasses of those who had been slain only two or three days previously:

  The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable—corpses swollen to twice their original size, some of them actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gases and vapors. I recall one feature never before noted, the shocking distention and protension of the eyeballs of dead men and dead horses. Several human or unhuman corpses sat upright against a fence, with arms extended in the air and faces hideous with something very like a fixed leer, as if taking a fiendish pleasure in showing us what we essentially were and might at any moment become. The odors were nauseating, and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.