The same processes so horribly apparent in those summer fields were equally present in the grave, although burial—again, depending on the circumstances of deposition—might slow them considerably. Bodies decompose most rapidly when exposed to air, most slowly deep in the earth. The more air, insects, moisture, bacteria, and other microorganisms that are present, generally speaking, the faster it happens. The slain soldiers were decomposing before the eyes of stunned survivors; by contrast, the dead in their wintry graves in Medvegia, as we saw in the last chapter, were just getting under way—this despite the fact that some of them had been underground a full three months.
And then there is the mindset of those forced to gaze upon such spectacles: If people are determined to find a vampire, they will find one. Writer Elwood B. Trigg, in Gypsy Demons and Divinities, neatly sums up the double bind: “If, after a period of time, [the corpse] remains incorrupt, exactly as it was buried, or if it appears to be swollen and black in color, having undergone some dreadful change in appearance, suspicions of vampirism are confirmed.”
Nevertheless, some telltale signs of bodily decomposition that have often been mistaken as evidence of vampirism include bloodstained liquid flowing from nose or mouth, bloating, changes in skin color, enlargement of the genitals (in both sexes), and the shedding of nails or hair. (With other signs—the liquefaction of eyeballs, the conversion of tissues into a semifluid guck or the presence of maggots—even the hardened vampire hunter must admit defeat.)
The appearance on a corpse of growing hair, nails, or teeth is illusory. They do not grow. Instead, the surrounding skin and gums contract, making them look longer or more prominent. By the same token, reports that a vampire has sloughed off its old skin like a snake, revealing a grisly new reddish one beneath, represent what forensic pathologists call skin slippage, or the loosening of the epidermis from the underlying dermis—again, all perfectly normal.
A body long buried in a deep, cool, moist environment is often subject to saponification, another natural process in which fats are rendered into adipocere—a waxy, soapy substance, sometimes called corpse wax or grave wax, that sheathes the entire carcass like some gruesome body cast. Although rarely correlated with supposed vampirism, saponification may explain why some corpses were seen as being incorruptible. Barber even quotes a former lecturer in “Morbid Anatomy” at the University of London, W. E. D. Evans, as claiming that the reddish color of saponified muscles can “give the impression of muscle freshly dead, even though the death occurred more than 100 years previously.”
Another charge hurled at the coffined vampire is its lack of rigor mortis (the stiffening of the body after death). True, rigor mortis follows swiftly on the heels of death as chemical changes start to stiffen the muscles—producing those upthrown arms and fiendish grins of the Gettysburg slain—but it starts fading as early as 40 hours after death. In the old days, the corpse would likely be in its grave by the time its limbs settled and flopped into whatever position gravity dictated. That, combined with the shifts occasioned by internal pressures and bloating, might contort the body into a position different from the one in which it was originally buried—with all the alarums that development might engender were it to become known.
The exhumed vampire is often described as ruddy in appearance. Yet, color changes in corpses are transitory—and contingent on innumerable variables. Not long after death, for instance, the settling of blood lends the human face the bluish cast that has become familiar as livor mortis, or death blue. Usually there follows a sequence of changes known as the chromatic stages of decomposition, running from red to green to purple and then to brown. Furthermore, a corpse may actually grow warmer as serious decomposition sets in—heat being a natural by-product of microorganisms hard at work.
And then there were the bloated bodies: Dracula in his coffin swollen “like a filthy leech,” the once-lean Miliza in Medvegia astonishing her former neighbors by the “surprising plumpness” she had gained in the grave. All that, of course, is the result of gas, mostly methane, that accumulates in the body’s tissues as those same microorganisms metabolize a corpse. Though postmortem swelling is most pronounced in the abdomen—home to legions of intestinal bacteria—every part of a corpse may puff up to two or three times its natural size, rendering its features unrecognizable. This ghastly appearance was a familiar enough encounter in war zones. Just a few days before they were discovered on the killing fields of Gettysburg, for example, those bloated and blackened bodies had been lean and hungry young men.
Given the right circumstances, this gas might erupt—often with explosive force. “It is well known to those engaged in burying the dead,” Dr. George Walker writes in his Gatherings from Grave Yards, “that when leaden coffins are employed, the expansive force of the gas, and the consequent bulging out of the coffin, compels the workmen frequently to ‘tap’ it, that the gas may escape.” This demanded some skill. After boring a hole with a gimlet—a handheld auger that resembles nothing so much as a corkscrew—a “jet of gas instantly passes through the aperture, and this, when ignited, produces a flame, that lasts from ten minutes to half an hour. The men who perform this operation are perfectly aware of the risk they encounter, and they are extremely careful how they execute it.”
And then there is the disturbing matter of “corpse light.” At Gettysburg, the layer of dirt covering the mass graves was so thin that a strange phosphorescence emanated from the ground at night. For years, understandably, locals shunned such places as haunted. Eerie glows reported near cemeteries, will-o’-the-wisp phenomena, even the blue flames that Slavic folktales describe as appearing over the sites of buried treasure on St. George’s Eve (and used to such chilling effect in the opening pages of Dracula) are typically written off as cases of hyperimagination. Yet, they might be actual instances of bioluminescence: Photobacterium fischeri, forensic pathologists will tell you, is but one of many luminous bacteria known to settle on a shallowly buried body.
DON’T MOCK YOUR OWN GRINNING
Certainly the most dramatic manifestation of suspected vampirism is blood at the mouth. Surely that was the vampire’s most recent meal, now trickling down its chin? Horrifying as they appear, bloody lips on the dead are nothing out of the ordinary. “Decay of the internal organs,” Borrini points out, “creates a dark fluid sometimes known as ‘purge fluid’: it can flow freely from the nose and mouth (or from the corpse, if it is staked) and could easily be confused with the blood sucked by the vampire.”
Exhumed cadavers are likewise frequently reported as wallowing in blood-filled coffins. That was an unfailing sign of vampirism because blood was known to coagulate after death. Well, yes and no: Under certain circumstances—especially if death was abrupt—blood might reliquefy. But though blood will out, as the proverb has it, the liquid that seeps out of a corpse’s orifices into the coffin is almost certainly, Borrini says, purge fluid.
Bodies can also literally return from the grave. If not buried deep enough, their natural buoyancy might propel them to the surface. This may explain why archaeologists have found so many skeletons deliberately weighted down by rocks or timbers.
And then there is the groaning—sometimes, in literature or cinema, the screaming—of the vampire as it is staked through the heart. One could easily, and justifiably, pass this off as a folkloric embellishment. On the other hand, it might be a legitimate physiological reflex. “Indeed, it would have been odd if his body had not let out a sound when a stake was driven into it,” Barber remarked of Arnold Paole, staked in 1725 in Medvegia. Hammering a piece of wood into a chest cavity violently compresses the lungs and forces air past the glottis as if expelled through the pipe of an organ.
That the dead grow slack of jaw is familiar enough through literature. “Not one now, to mock your own grinning?” asks Hamlet of poor Yorick, “quite chap-fallen?” Scrooge gazes in horror when Marley’s ghost loosens its head bandage and “its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast.” As the jaw muscles relax wit
h the dissipation of rigor mortis, the mouth predictably falls open. But if a body is wrapped too tightly in its shroud—as ID6 was, for it bent her left clavicle upward—the shroud will collapse into the gaping cavity. Then, as Borrini puts it, “cadaveric gases and purge fluid flowing from the mouth can moisten the shroud” and rot it as it dries. To the unenlightened observer, the resulting gap in the fabric may suggest the corpse has chewed right through it. If that cadaver also shows fingers lacerated by decomposition or the action of maggots, it can be taken for a Nachzehrer.
In view of all this, we may now at long last be able to glimpse what happened to ID6 in her cemetery at Lazzaretto Nuovo. Imagine the loathsome scene: Its overhanging stench, the pockmarked ground suppurating with putrescent bodies hidden by the barest covering of dirt. Flies swarm over the exposed bodies, which are soon crawling with maggots.
The pit is a fearsome place. Daniel Defoe, describing the Great Plague that punished London in 1665, reconstructed its burial pits in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722):
I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, tho’ not so freely as to run my self into apparent danger, except when they dug the great pit in the church-yard of our parish of ‘Aldgate’ a terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it; as near as I may judge, it was about 40 foot in length, and about 15 or 16 foot broad; and at the time I first looked at it, about nine foot deep; but it was said, they dug it near 20 foot deep afterwards, in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water…. The pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies, when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six foot of the surface.
There was also the grimly ironic Holywell Pit, or “Black Ditch,” and the one in Finsbury Fields. “People that were infected, and near their end, and delirious also,” Defoe wrote, “would run to those pits wrapt in blankets, or rugs, and throw themselves in, and as they said, bury themselves…. I have heard, that in a great pit in ‘Finsbury,’ in the parish of ‘Cripplegate,’ it lying open then to the fields; for it was not then wall’d about, [they] came and threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any earth upon them; and that when they came to bury others, and found them there, they were quite dead, tho’ not cold.”
The cemetery at Lazzaretto Nuovo surely had its visible horrors. It may have had audible ones as well. The waxing and waning of chewing sounds said to reflect the coming and going of epidemics might arise in the documentable fact that, during such times, hundreds of hastily buried and rapidly decomposing bodies were generating their own horrid symphony. As Barber memorably captured it, the “disruption of large numbers of bodies bloating and bursting caus[ed] a sound rather like an epidemic stomach-rumbling.”
At some point—perhaps months but probably scant weeks after ID6 had died and been buried—a burial detail, having no choice, opened her grave to add yet another occupant to it. At that point, quite likely, they saw that she had “chewed” a hole in her shroud. Someone, likely one of the gravediggers, knew the superstition associated with this, and knew how to stop it—literally, with a brick. Whether they recoiled in horror at the sight, whether they concluded that this particular corpse was responsible for all the suffering of the plague, or whether that brick was placed in the cadaver’s mouth as a precautionary measure, we will never know. But this much is clear: Utterly unfairly, ID6 was treated as if she were a vampire.
REQUIESCANT IN PACE
During the year and a half that it ravaged Venice, la peste carried off 46,000 people—nearly one-third of the city’s population. In due course, however, it abated, and an official proclamation of health was announced on July 21, 1577. In gratitude for the deliverance, the doge and the senate erected the basilica of Il Redentore (The Redeemer) on the island of Giudecca. Over the years since then, every third Sunday in July, bells announce the Feast of the Redeemer with the joy that life has been restored.
The deliverance was short-lived, as we have seen, and when the plague returned between 1630 and 1631, it laid another 40,000 bodies on top of ID6 and her fellow victims in cemeteries scattered throughout Venice. That visitation, many historians believe, spelled the beginning of the end for the Queen of the Adriatic. The city slowly declined until 1797, when Napoleon ended its existence as an independent republic.
If ID6 was a vampire, it is only in the sense that Paul Barber defined the term: “a corpse that comes to the attention of the populace in times of crisis and is taken for the cause of that crisis.” According to anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, writing in 1871, “Vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts of wasting disease.” More than a century later, folklorist Michael Bell refined Tylor’s point: “Reduced to its common denominator, the vampire is a classic scapegoat.”
We have now arrived at one very compelling explanation for vampiric origins: The whole mythology grew out of observations of corpses—superstition wrapped around forensic fact. As Barber puts it, “Our descriptions of revenants and vampires match up, detail by detail, with what we know about dead bodies that have been buried for a time.”
“In the end, from a forensic point of view,” Borrini muses, “we can accept the reports about the ‘vampire corpses’ as real descriptions, but we can also realize why those legends spread especially during plagues.” After all, during pandemics, it was standard practice to reopen tombs and mass graves so as to add more victims. “In this way, it was easier to find bodies that were not completely decomposed, thus increasing dread and superstition among people who were already suffering pestilence and massive deaths.”
Nevertheless, stories about vampires have been evolving for centuries, and we must follow that trail. As we close the case of ID6, however, we leave her—and all other “vampires” whose only crime was to die and be buried—with a heartfelt “Requiescant in pace” (“May they rest in peace”) on our lips.
CHAPTER SIX
TERRA DAMNATA
WHEN SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET encounters the ghost of his father on the battlements of Denmark’s Elsinore Castle, he cannot believe his eyes: “Let me not burst in ignorance,” he begs, “but tell why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements.” A moment later he asks why his father’s “dead corse” is making the night hideous.
Bones? Corpse? Is it a ghost or a corpse that Hamlet sees? Today we make a distinction between a ghost, which is an incarnate spirit, and a vampire, which is a walking corpse. But in Shakespeare’s day, that separation wasn’t quite so pronounced. Even Englishman Henry More (1614–1687), a leading authority on the world of spirits, chose to call walking corpses specters.
More had recoiled from the “too sterile” Puritanism of his Lincolnshire youth, embracing instead the Neoplatonist philosophy he had discovered as a Cambridge undergraduate. His lifelong fascination with spirits was said to have led him into many a ruined vault echoing with dismal sighs and groanings and heaped with skulls and bones. His collected ghost stories—“stories sufficiently fresh and very well attested and certain,” he claimed—were published in An Antidote Against Atheism (1653), which More offered as an attempt to prove the metaphysical priority of spirit, and thus the primacy of God.
Two of those tales have since become touchstones in the literature of vampirism. In More’s retelling of the first story, on September 20, 1591, in the Polish city of Breslau (today Wroclaw), a prosperous shoemaker slipped into his back garden and, for reasons unknown, slit his own throat. For more than a thousand years, Christians have viewed suicide as a sin against God and man, so according to doctrine, this unnamed shoemaker never should have been buried in consecrated ground. Yet his family successfully concealed his crime. He had died of disease, they maintained, so as a stalwart member of the community he was interred in terra sancta: the churchyard.
Soon, however, the good burghers of Breslau began to whisper. Rumors of suicide spread. The town council launched an investigation, and the widow confessed the truth.
But by then, in More’s words, the shoemaker had reappeared:
Those that were asleep it terrified with horrible visions, those that were waking it would strike, pull or press, lying heavily upon them like an ephialtes [nightmare] so that there were perpetuall complaints every morning of their last nights rest, through the whole town…. For this terrible apparition would sometimes cast itself upon the midst of their beds, would lie close to them, would miserably suffocate them and would so strike them and pinch them that not only blue marks but plain impressions of his fingers would be upon sundry parts of their bodies in the mornings.
As more and more people reported such visitations, hysteria spread. Soon the authorities, as More continued his tale, had no choice but to disinter the corpse:
He had lain in the ground near eight months, viz. from Sept. 22, 1591 to April 18, 1592, when he was digged up which was in the presence of the magistracy of the town, his body was found entire, not at all putrid, no ill smell about him, save the mustiness of his grave clothes, his joints limber and flexible, as those that are alive, his skin only flaccid but a more fresh grown in the room of it, the wound of his throat gaping but no gear [pus] nor corruption in it….
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