Vampires (3 page)

The etymology, or derivation, of the word ‘vampire’ mirrors the rise of superstitious beliefs in Europe from the Dark Ages onwards. Some of these beliefs date back to pagan times, and to ancient folklore in remote rural regions of the north; others are rooted in the most lurid kinds of medieval Christian imagery, particularly descriptions of hell, the devil, and all kinds of monstrous, evil demons. As is outlined below, such folkloric stories, superstitions and taboos often arose as a way of explaining everyday phenomena that peasants would have witnessed at close hand. These would have included the behaviour of blood-drinking animals such as bats and wolves; the strange and often highly alarming way that human bodies decompose after death; and blood-related features of communicable diseases, ranging from plagues to tuberculosis to porphyria. Such superstitions were based in ignorance and fear; they were, for the most part, stories told by uneducated peasant communities about the frightening, cruel, and brutal conditions of life around them, and which they had little scientific knowledge about. However, these stories also expressed some deep-rooted, and understandable, anxieties about a world in which their needs, their individual circumstances, and their common humanity was often ignored. For that reason, these stories are still powerful today.

The word ‘vampire’, in its written form, first appeared in the eleventh century as a scribbled note in a manuscript of the Book of Psalms. This was translated by a humble priest for a Novgorodian prince, Vladimir Yaroslavovich. In the note, the priest addresses the prince as ‘upir lichyj’ (a ‘wicked vampire’). Whether this was a joke, a nickname, or a serious criticism (which is unlikely, given the power of the prince and the lowly position of the priest), is unknown. We next find the word in a treatise called
The Word of Saint Grigoriy
, which reported the existence of pagan rituals in Russia, and fulminated against them in no uncertain terms. No one knows exactly when this evangelical Christian treatise was written, but it seems to have been prior to the fourteenth century, when the church was keen to stamp out the pagan beliefs and rituals of ordinary working people, especially in remote rural areas of northern Europe.

Pagan worship of non-Christian deities and devils was known to be rife in the Slavic countries of Europe throughout the medieval period, but the word ‘vampire’ does not actually appear in print in England until the mid-eighteenth century. We first come across it when it is mentioned in a travelogue entitled,
The Travels of Three English Gentlemen from Venice to Hamburg, being the Grand Tour of Germany, in the Year 1734
. Little is said in the text about the actual vampire in question itself, but the fact that it is alluded to makes it clear that belief in such evil demons was becoming more widespread across the countries of Europe during this time.

We know for a fact from historical records that after Austria gained control of parts of Serbia and Romania in 1918, officials complained about the local practice of exhuming corpses to kill off ‘vampire’ spirits. The officials prepared detailed reports on these gruesome rituals, which were widely publicized at the time and enthusiastically received – as they are today – by a public with a seemingly insatiable appetite for horror and gore.

Theories about the derivation of the word ‘vampire’ in English vary, but it appears to have been borrowed from the German word ‘vampir’, which in turn came from the Polish ‘vaper’. There are parallel words for vampire, ranging from ‘vapir’ to ‘upir’, in almost all the Slavic languages, including Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. The general etymology of the word is somewhat controversial and uncertain, but it is thought to have links to the word for bat in Russian (netopyr), witch in Turkic (ubyr), and from various Indo-European words for the verb to fly.

Today, the word vampire is defined variously as ‘a corpse that rises nightly from its grave to drink the blood of the living’ and ‘a mythical creature which overcomes death by sucking the blood from living humans’. Some dictionaries and reference works note that portraying the vampire as a corpse in a grave who comes out at night to seek victims, especially those sleeping in their beds, is only one variation of the myth. Other features of vampire lore, such as the creature’s ability to fly, its fear of Christian symbols like the cross, and its susceptibility to sunlight, have been added over the years. The myth has also been elaborated on in other ways, for example in numerous apotropaics – that is, items (such as garlic) or methods (such as driving a stake through the heart) designed to kill the vampire.

It is hard to understand why the myth of the vampire arose in Western culture, until we look at the context in which these stories and beliefs came to be. When we do, we find that the idea of the vampire came about largely as a result of fears and misunderstandings about the nature of death and the decomposition of the human corpse. In medieval times, it was common for ordinary people to see human bodies after they had died; partly, because poor peasants had to bury their own dead, but also because religious rituals often involved leaving an open coffin in the house for relatives and friends to pay their respects. Some modern-day commentators believe that this tradition, odd as it may seem to us today, was in fact psychologically quite healthy; in order to accept that a loved one has truly departed, the family need to see the dead body and acknowledge that the person is no longer a living being.

However, there were also negative aspects to this natural cycle. Human corpses sometimes decompose in a particularly horrifying way, according to the cause of death (liver complaints, for instance, might turn a body green), and the particular conditions in which the body is being stored (excess heat, excess cold, damp, and so on). In societies where little was known about medicine or science, and where irrational beliefs in demons, evil spirits, and so on were rife, it was easy for onlookers to imagine that a dead body had been taken over by such spirits, and that consequently it was a source of danger.

In cases where bodies were exhumed because they were suspected of being vampires, there could be changes in its appearance that would cause extreme fear and consternation. In certain conditions, depending on the temperature of the soil and its composition, corpses can release gases as they decompose, and these can sometimes cause the body to swell up. In addition, blood may run to the skin, causing it to look pink, and darkening the complexion. Thus, a person who had been looking extremely ill before he or she died, with gaunt features and pallid skin, might possibly, after being buried and exhumed, appear plump and healthy, with rosy cheeks and a ruddy complexion. Blood might also seep from the mouth and nose (as a result of the pressure from the gases), making the corpse look as though it had been feeding off blood. All these signs would be interpreted as evidence of the fact that the individual had, after death, turned into a vampire.

If it was decided that the body must have a stake run through it, to kill the vampire, there might be more signs that would confirm its status in the eye of the ignorant onlooker. Sometimes, a groan would escape from the body, causing onlookers to think that it was alive, and was now in its final death throes. The truth of the matter was that, as the body was pierced, the gases would escape, causing a noise as they passed by the vocal folds, much as gas comes out of the body with a noise when a person breaks wind. There might also be corpses whose hair, nails, and teeth appeared to have grown longer while buried. This, again, had a rational explanation. As skin begins to decompose, it often falls off, leaving more hair, teeth, and nails exposed, and what looks like fresh skin beneath – but, of course, this is only visible because the main part of the skin has died.

Some commentators have suggested that the myth of the vampire arose in part from the fact that, in certain cases, bodies were buried alive. In an age where people died and were buried without certificates from a doctor, and often without any medical intervention at all, it sometimes happened that a person would show signs of being dead and so be buried, only to revive once underground. In such cases, that person would of course try to raise the alarm, so that sounds of shouting or knocking would be heard emanating from the grave. If this happened, they would perhaps be exhumed, only to be the victim of various gruesome rituals designed to kill off a vampire.

It seems unlikely that this happened very often, if only because it is almost impossible for any human being to survive being buried for any length of time. What appears to be a more credible explanation is that sounds might have been heard coming from a grave, and that these could have been the noise of gas escaping from the cadaver. At this period, with vampire panic at its height, such sounds would have been interpreted as signs of the corpse’s life, and thus the body would have been exhumed and dealt with accordingly.

A famous vampire case of the eighteenth century was that of Arnold Paole. Paole, also called Paule or Pavle, was a Serbian militiaman who moved to the village of Medveda after living in the part of Serbia controlled at the time by Turkey. He reported having been persecuted by a vampire, and having managed to shake the vampire off by smearing himself with blood from a vampire’s grave, and eating the earth around it. In 1726, he died violently in an accident, falling off a haywagon and breaking his neck. About a month after he was buried, several people reported that they were being persecuted by him, and they too died. These deaths were reported to the authorities, who duly investigated, opening up Paole’s grave. They found that the body had not decomposed in the normal way, and that there was fresh blood coming out of the corpse’s eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. The shroud was also covered in blood. As well as this, his nails appeared to have continued growing. Concluding Paole’s corpse to be a vampire, a stake was driven through his heart, and as this happened, a groan was heard to emanate from the body, further terrifying the villagers. Not only was Paole’s corpse disinterred and a stake driven through it, but the alleged victims were also dug up and mutilated in the same way.

These incidents were officially reported and carefully recorded, which is why they are so well documented today. In hindsight, it seems clear that the appearance of Paole’s exhumed corpse was nothing to do with the supernatural, but was due entirely to natural causes, and the particular way his body had decomposed.

Peter Plogojowitz was another renowned vampire case of the period. He was a peasant from a village in a part of Serbia that was under Austrian rule at the time. When Plogojowitz died in 1725, nine other deaths occurred in the area immediately afterwards, within a time span of eight days. All the victims claimed that Plogojowitz had come to their death beds at night and tried to strangle them. There were also rumours that Plogojowitz had visited members of his family, asking them for food and shoes, and that when his son had refused, Plogojowitz had killed him. The villagers demanded that the authorities, in the shape of a man named Frombold, and the local priest, should exhume Plogojowitz’s body in case he had turned into a vampire after burial.

When the body was brought out, it seemed to have grown new skin and nails, as well as more hair and a beard. There was ‘fresh’ blood coming out of its mouth. When the corpse was staked, more apparently fresh blood came out of the ears and mouth. The villagers were extremely frightened, and began to panic, fearing that the vampire could not be killed. Frombold and the priest duly satisfied them that Plogojowitz was indeed dead, and afterwards Frombold filed his report. This became one of the first documented cases about vampires in Eastern Europe, and was widely reported in Germany, England, and France, contributing to the general eighteenth-century panic about vampires.

There were numerous other outbreaks of vampire panic in Serbia in the years that followed. In 1731, an official named Dr Glaser investigated a series of deaths that had been blamed on vampirism. After threats from the villagers, he disinterred several of the dead bodies and found that most of them were not decomposed. Instead, they looked plump and had what looked like fresh blood coming out of their mouths. Glaser reported the details of the case to his superiors and recommended that officials should be sent to ‘kill’ the vampires, so as to satisfy the villagers’ superstitions. A military surgeon, Johann Fluckinger, along with others, duly arrived to inspect the bodies further. They found that most of them were ‘quite complete and undecayed’, that they had new nails growing where the old ones had fallen off, and that their skin was ‘red and vivid’. In the case of one deceased woman, the body looked better than it had in life: apparently, she had been rather ‘dried up’ in appearance before her sojourn in the grave, but now she looked the picture of health.