The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (106 page)

Again, in the case of Loizo, we can see that the shepherd had entered the girl’s body and taken possession of her mind so that he could 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. (Joe Fisher seems to hint at something similar when he describes his relationship with Filipa.)

All of this has interesting implications. The act of lovemaking seems to involve a paradox, since it is an attempt at the mingling of two bodies, an attempt that is doomed to failure by their separateness. In the
Symposium
, 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 plain 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, for example, 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, union of minds.

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 person who commits 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. In all probability, he is unaware that he is dead. (The wife of Peter Plogojowitz declared that he came to her asking for his shoes; since shoes would obviously be of no use to a ghost, we must conclude that he was unaware that his feet had “dematerialized”.) Under normal circumstances, the spirit would be incapable of influencing his involuntary host or of making his presence felt; only if the host happens to vibrate with the same desires, to be “on the same wavelength”, can true “possession” occur.

It also seems clear that some human beings have a greater ability than others to sense the presence of these entities; we call such people “psychic”. They may be totally unaware that they are psychic unless some chance event happens to reveal it. In a book entitled
The Paranormal
, the psychologist Stan Gooch has described how, at the age of twenty-six, he attended a séance in Coventry with a friend and spontaneously fell into a trance condition. When he awoke, he learned that several “spirits” had spoken through him.

It was during this period, Gooch reveals in a later book entitled
Creatures from Inner Space
, that he had his first experience of a “psychic
invasion”. He was lying in bed one Saturday morning with his eyes closed when he felt a movement on the pillow beside his head, as if someone had gently pressed a hand against it. The movement continued for some time; but when he opened his eyes, he was alone.

Twenty years later, lying half awake in the early morning, he became aware that someone else was in bed with him. He felt that it was a composite of various girls he had known: “On this first occasion my conscious interest in the situation got the better of me, and the succubus [female demon] gradually faded away. On subsequent occasions, however, the presence of the entity was maintained, until finally we actually made love”. He notes that “from some points of view the sex is actually more satisfying than that with a real woman, because in the paranormal encounter archetypal elements are both involved and invoked”.

Oddly enough, Gooch does not believe that his succubus was real; he thinks such entities are creations of the human mind. He cites cases of hypnotized subjects who have been able to see and touch hallucinations suggested by the hypnotist, and a book entitled
The Story of Ruth
, by Dr Morton Schatzman, which describes how a girl whose father had tried to rape her as a child began to hallucinate her father and believe that he was in the room with her. He seems to believe that his succubus was a similar hallucination. Yet this view seems to be contradicted by other cases he cites in the book.

The first of these concerns a policeman, Martin Pryer, who had always been “psychic”. At one point he decided to try practicing the control of hypnagogic imagery – the imagery we experience on the verge of sleep – and soon began having alarming experiences. On one occasion, a strange entity began to cling to his back like a limpet and held on until he staggered across the room and switched on the light. On another occasion, he thought that a former girlfriend was outside the window, and when he asked what she was doing, she replied, “You sent for me”. Then a female entity seemed to seize him from behind, clinging to his back; he sensed that it wanted him to make love to her “in a crude and violent manner”. After some minutes it faded away.

Gooch goes on to describe the experiences of an actress friend named Sandy, who was also “psychic”. One night, she woke up and felt that the spotlight in the corner of her ceiling had changed into an eye that was watching her. Then she felt an entity – she felt it was male – lying on top of her and trying to make love to her. “One part of her was quite willing for the lovemaking to proceed, but another part of her knew that she wanted it to stop.” The entity became heavier, and another force seemed to be dragging her down through the mattress. She made an
effort to imagine that she was pulling herself up through the mattress, and the pressure suddenly vanished. But when she went into the bathroom, she discovered that her mouth was rimmed with dark streaks, and when she opened it, it proved to be full of dried blood. There was no sign of a nosebleed or any other injury that could account for the blood.

Guy Playfair has described a similar case in
The Flying Cow
. A girl named Marcia, who had a master’s degree in psychology, was on the beach at São Paolo when she picked up a plaster image of the sea goddess Yemanja, which had obviously been thrown into the sea as an offering. Against the advice of her aunt, she took it home. After this, she experienced a series of disasters. She began to feel exhausted and lose weight. Her pressure cooker blew up, burning her hands and face, and her oven exploded. She began to experience suicidal impulses. Then one night, an “entity” entered her bed, and she felt a penis entering her. It happened on several subsequent occasions. In desperation, she went to consult an
umbanda
specialist, who urged her to return the statue to the beach. As soon as she did this, the run of bad luck – and the psychic rapes – ceased.

Such cases make it difficult to accept Gooch’s view that these entities are a kind of hypnotic hallucination. It seems obvious that he arrived at that conclusion because his “succubus” seemed to be a blend of previous girlfriends. But according to the “earthbound spirit” hypothesis, we would assume that the entity simply put these ideas into his mind – that is, into his imagination. He writes: “In short, this entity, though possessing physical and even psychological attributes familiar to me, was none the less essentially its own independent self.” And he agrees that the “archetypal elements” were, to some extent, “invoked” – that is, that he himself was conjuring them up. Sandy was able to free herself from the “psychic invasion” by
imagining
that she was pulling herself back up through the mattress, indicating that the entity was controlling her imagination, not her body.

We also note that these “psychic invasions” occurred when all three subjects – Gooch, Martin Pryer, and Sandy – were either asleep or hovering between sleep and waking, and therefore in a trance condition akin to mediumship.

The evidence, then, all seems to suggest that the vampire, like the poltergeist, is an “earthbound spirit,” a “hungry ghost” that draws vitality from human beings. Daskalos’s remark to Loizo, that “he would remain in a narcotised state like a vampire,” indicates that such spirits become, in effect, drug addicts who are unable to progress to a higher level while in the grip of their addiction.

One of the few contemporary “vampirologists” is a graduate of the State University of New York named Stephen Kaplan. In his book
Vampires Are
. . . (1984) he describes how he became interested in the subject. In the course of his studies in anthropology, he noticed that “many of the customs and rituals of the primitive cultures we were studying showed striking similarities to vampire myths and legends.” This led him to suppose that there might be some basis of truth in vampire legends, and in 1971 he founded the Vampire Research Center on Long Island. As a result of interviews on the radio, he received many calls, most of which were hoaxes. The first real “vampires” he encountered were a couple who liked to taste blood. (In fact, blood is an emetic, so it would be impossible to drink it in quantity.) The woman used to whip her companion until he bled, then lick the cuts. They had formed a small group that would indulge in these practices. Another woman Kaplan interviewed obtained blood by trading sexual favours.

Without exception, the people Kaplan interviewed were “sexually disturbed”. (In
The Sexual Anomalies and Perversions
by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, there is a section devoted to vampirism, in which it becomes clear that it is related to necrophilia; Hirschfeld describes, for example, a gravedigger named Victor Ardisson who drank animal blood and performed various perverted acts on female corpses whom he disinterred.) But Kaplan suggests that genuine vampirism is “the draining of physical energy from one individual to another, often via the blood”. He speaks of “psychic vampires”, people who seem to drain our physical energies. He comments that the process seems to be the reverse of “psychic healing”, whereby the healer is able to transfer energy to the patient.

In an article on sexual occultism in the magazine
The Unexplained
, the occult historian Francis King describes the process by which a “magician” can cause sexual arousal in a selected victim:

He goes on to theorize that vampirism is a way of draining “psycho-sexual energy” from the victim.

What is being suggested is that a man can establish a telepathic link between himself and a woman he desires and use it to influence her desires. In
God Is My Adventure
, Rom Landau tells a story of the philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff, which seems to indicate that he was also able to do this. One man told Landau of an occasion when he was lunching with an attractive female novelist:

It seems likely that the “man with the mole” described in
Phantasms of the Living
possessed the same curious ability and that this explained why the girl had fainted at the Birmingham music festival; it also seems clear that, having established the “psychic link”, he was able to invade her dreams in the manner of a “vampire”.

Let us, then, attempt an outline of a theory of vampirism that is in accordance with the various accounts that have been quoted. The story of Arnod Paole, like so many others, makes it clear that he was not a willing vampire; the
Visum et Repertum
states that he had been
“troubled by a vampire” in Turkey and had eaten earth from the grave to free himself of the affliction. This was not successful, and the earthbound spirit returned after death to vampirize people in Medvegia. If we assume that vampirism is an experience akin to sexual satisfaction, then the implication is that Paole’s unquiet spirit became a vampire, much as many sexually abused children grow up to become child abusers. But this view suggests that sex itself may be regarded as a form of benevolent vampirism; the act of lovemaking, which has to rest content with an interpenetration of bodies, is an attempt at mutual absorption. In that case, the actions of sex criminals must be seen as a form of nonbenevolent vampirism. (The sex murderer Ted Bundy told police interrogators: “Sometimes I feel like a vampire”.) If we can accept this view, then it is not difficult to accept that some “earthbound spirits” or “hungry ghosts” also attempt to maintain their link with the world by a form of psychic vampirism.