Vampires (7 page)

As people went about their daily routines, they would be careful to observe certain practices designed to keep vampires away. Children might be warned to take a long route home rather than pass a graveyard where vampires might lurk. In some cases, if people had to travel into areas that might be haunted by vampires, they would disguise themselves so that the vampire would not recognize them.

As the vampire myth developed, more and more signs of vampirism found their way into popular culture. Ancient superstitions were remembered, and became part of the vampire cult, beginning with the timing of the baby’s birth.

According to Southern Slavic folklore, a child born between Christmas and Epiphany had a high chance of becoming a vampire. In Romania, the seventh child in a family was also suspect, especially if his or her older siblings were all the same sex. Moreover, illegitimate babies, and premature babies, even those born in wedlock, were regarded with suspicion as potential vampires.

Once born, the child continued to be under intense scrutiny for signs of evil intent. If a baby was weaned early, or was suckled after it had already been weaned, it could suddenly turn into a vampire. And a baby who died before being baptized was almost certain to become a vampire and haunt the family after it was buried.

If the child survived into adulthood – and many did not – its path continued to be fraught with danger. A person who happened to eat the remains of a sheep killed by a wolf, either by accident or on purpose, could turn into a vampire; thus ‘wolf kill’ was generally avoided by villagers and townspeople alike. It was also believed that a person who had been attacked seven times without dying must have supernatural powers, and therefore was a vampire. If a person sustained an open wound, it had to be treated with boiling water immediately, otherwise this could lead to becoming a vampire. Being excommunicated from the established church could also be a trigger to vampirism, since people who rebelled against religion were greatly feared. And a pregnant woman who was attacked by a vampire would be bound to give birth to a vampire baby.

The superstitions did not end there. People who had small and insignificant physical abnormalities, such as sharp, pointed tongues and long incisors, were routinely classed as vampires, and at best, given a wide berth; at worst, they were mercilessly persecuted, and in some cases, even killed. Low-life members of society such as prostitutes, alcoholics, murderers and rapists were also shunned, not only for the way they had decided to live their lives, but also because it was believed that they would become vampires after they had been buried. This was also true of people that committed suicide or had died a violent death. Not surprisingly, the offspring of a supposed witch and a werewolf was also to be avoided, since he or she would almost certainly be a vampire.

If living people were a target for superstitions about vampirism, the dead were even more so. Once a person died, it seemed that the vampire myth went into overdrive.

As mentioned above, the Slavic ‘old religion’ was full of beliefs about the spirits of the dead, who were considered to thrive, side by side, with the living, watching to see how their former families, friends, and neighbours behaved now that they had gone. Underlying these beliefs was a sense that the dead were jealous of the living, and might take their revenge in any way. The Christian church’s teaching on immortality was twisted so that, instead of life after death being a reward for having lived a decent, honest life, it became a form of eternal damnation, with the vampire emerging from its lonely grave to wreak its evil revenge on the living.

For this reason, a number of quite horrific mutilations were performed on the dead body before it was buried. As we all know, piercing the heart of the body with a wooden stake was thought to kill a vampire, preventing it from rising up from the grave and stalking its prey at night. If the stake was made of rosewood or ash, it was considered to be doubly effective.

But there were many other ‘precautions’ taken, too. For example, the head might be cut off, and the feet, so as to stop the vampire from walking into the village from the churchyard. The head would then be buried under the buttocks, so that it would not be able to get out from underneath the body when it came to life. In other cases, the heart might be taken out and put on top of the head. Bodies were often mutilated, and the body parts tied together in a bundle before being placed in the grave. Occasionally, nails would be driven into the head.

Other, slightly less gruesome, but equally superstitious ‘precautions’ were taken to prevent dead bodies from becoming vampires. The eyes might be weighted down with coins, to prevent the vampire from seeing when it woke up. The mouth might be tied closed, so that it could not go on to bite its victims, or stuffed with garlic, which was considered a powerful apotropaic, or deterrent. There is a parallel with this among the Ancient Greeks, who used to place a silver coin in the deceased’s mouth. In the past, historians believed this was done so that the dead person could pay the toll to the ferryman on the River Styx and pass through to the underworld, but more recently, it has been interpreted as a means of preventing evil spirits entering the body. This would accord with the Greek folkloric figure of the ‘vrykolas’, a harmful undead creature very similar, and possibly related to, the Slavic vampire.

Sometimes, a thorn might be placed under the dead body’s tongue. The corpse might be buried with a sickle around its neck, or a needle inserted into the navel. It was also common practice to break the legs of the corpse and to cut the knee ligaments. Further precautions included burying the corpse face down, or burning it to ashes, and then scattering the ashes over a nearby river.

Once the body was safely in the grave, the anxiety still did not cease. Any number of elaborate rituals were performed to keep it there, and to determine whether or not the burial rites had succeeded in stopping the body from transforming into a vampire. One rather bizarre method was to lead a virgin boy sitting on a virgin stallion through the churchyard. In Albania, the stallion in question had to be black, while in other countries it had to be white. If a vampire was lurking in one of the graves, the stallion would refuse to walk past it. Needless to say, this method did not prove foolproof, and often bodies would be disinterred only to find that they were peacefully rotting away with no sign of vampirism upon them.

Again, connected to the Slavic ‘old religion’ was the belief that the corpse must be carefully guarded in case it suddenly came alive after death. Until it was buried, a corpse could never be left alone. The guardian also had to keep a sharp eye out for dogs and cats, because if one jumped over the corpse, it might become a vampire. This is a superstition that, strangely enough, occurs in China as well as the Slavic countries.

Much of what we know today about medieval superstitions concerning vampires comes from archaeologists, who have found remains of mutilated skeletons buried for hundreds of years. For example, in 2009, the body of a woman was unearthed from a mass grave on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nouvo, Italy. Her skull had a large brick shoved into its mouth, leading archaeologists to believe that she had been suspected of being a vampire. The brick was there to weigh her down and prevent her from leaving the grave. It was particularly important that she remained where she was because, along with the others in the grave, she was a victim of the bubonic plague that swept through Venice in 1576, killing up to 50,000 people.

The archaeologists thought that the corpse of the woman had been seen by gravediggers, who noticed that she had decomposed in an alarming way, and therefore decided to put the brick into her skull. At that time, it was uncommon for a grave to be opened soon after burial; graves were only opened after hundreds of years, by which time all that would have remained of the body was the skeleton, or parts of it. Thus, most ordinary people did not know what a recently decomposing body looked like. The gravediggers, who during the plague, had to frequently open the graves to add further corpses, may have mistaken the ‘purge fluid’ of the woman’s body – that is, a dark fluid from the gastrointestinal tract that can flow out of the nose and mouth after death – for fresh blood, and assumed that she had been eating live flesh.