Vampires Bloody History
Vampires are fodder for books, movies, and Halloween
costumes. But for hundreds of years, they were scapegoats for disease.
The traits of modern-day vampires are pretty well
established. They have fangs, drink human blood, and can’t see themselves in
mirrors. They can be warded off with garlic or killed with a stake through the
heart. Some, like Dracula, are aristocrats who live in castles.
But vampires didn’t start out so clearly defined. Scholars
suspect that the modern conception of these Halloween monsters evolved from
various traditional beliefs that were held throughout Europe. These beliefs
centered around the fear that the dead, once buried, could still harm the
living.
Often, these legends arose from a misunderstanding of how
bodies decompose. As a corpse’s skin shrinks, its teeth and fingernails can
appear to have grown longer. And as internal organs break down, a dark “purge
fluid” can leak out of the nose and mouth. People unfamiliar with this process
would interpret this fluid to be blood and suspect that the corpse had been
drinking it from the living.
Vampires of Europe
Because of this, vampire scares tended to coincide with
outbreaks of the plague. In 2006, archaeologists unearthed a 16th-century skull
in Venice, Italy, that had been buried among plague victims with a brick in its
mouth. The brick was likely a burial tactic to prevent strega - Italian vampires
or witches - from leaving the grave to eat people.
Not all vampires were thought to physically leave their
grave. In northern Germany, the Nachzehrer, or “after-devourers,” stayed in the
ground, chewing on their burial shrouds. Again, this belief likely has to do
with purge fluid, which could cause the shroud to sag or tear, creating the
illusion that a corpse had been chewing it.
These stationary masticators were still thought to cause
trouble above ground, and were also believed to be most active during outbreaks
of the plague. In the 1679 tract “On the Chewing Dead,” a Protestant theologian
accused the Nachzehrer of harming their surviving family members through occult
processes. He wrote that people could stop them by exhuming the body and
stuffing its mouth with soil, and maybe a stone and a coin for good measure.
Without the ability to chew, the tract claimed, the corpse would die of
starvation.
Tales of vampires continued to flourish in southern and
eastern European nations in the 17th and 18th centuries, to the chagrin of some
leaders. By the mid-18th century, Pope Benedict XIV declared that vampires were
“fallacious fictions of human fantasy,” and the Hapsburg ruler Maria Theresa
condemned vampire beliefs as “superstition and fraud.”
Still, anti-vampire efforts continued. And, perhaps most
surprisingly of all, one of the last big vampire scares occurred in 19th
century New England, two centuries after the infamous Salem witch trials.
From the Old World to the New
In 1892, 19-year-old Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island,
died of tuberculosis, then known as consumption. Her mother and sister were
already dead, and her brother Edwin was sick. Concerned neighbors worried that
one of the recently deceased Brown women might be harming Edwin from the grave.
When they opened Mercy Brown’s grave, they found blood in
her mouth and her heart and took this to be a sign of vampirism (though they
didn’t call it that). The neighbors burned Mercy’s heart and mixed the ashes
into a potion for Edwin to drink - a common anti-vampire tactic. The potion was
meant to heal him; instead, he died a few months later.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. Folklorist and Food for
the Dead author Michael Bell estimates that there are 60 known examples of
anti-vampire rituals in 18th- and 19th-century New England, and several others
elsewhere in the country. These rituals were most common in eastern Connecticut
and western Rhode Island, says Brian Carroll, a history professor at Central
Washington University who is writing a book on the subject.
Carroll believes these anti-vampire rituals were “introduced
as a medical procedure at the time of the American Revolution” by German
doctors who worked for the Hessian forces. Because of this, he thinks the New
England vampires were based on the German Nachzehrer. Unlike blood-sucking
Romanian vampires, New England’s vampires stayed in their grave, harming the
living through “sympathetic magic” from afar, he argues.
Bell, however, believes anti-vampire practices in New
England came from many places and that the suspected New England vampires were
actually more akin to Romanian vampires than the Nachzehrer. Like Romanians,
New Englanders “were looking for liquid blood in the vital organs, not evidence
of shroud chewing,” he says. The anti-vampire remedy of “cutting the heart out,
burning it to ashes, and giving the ashes to the sick person or sick people”
was also practiced in Romania.
Whatever the source of these beliefs in New England, they
were driven by the same social concerns as those before them: a fear of disease
and a desire to contain it.
Post-Vampire
During the vampire panic in New England, vampires were
finding a new role in European books like The Vampyre (1819), Carmilla
(1871-72), and Dracula (1897), as well as in vampire-themed plays. Though drawn
from folk legends and past vampire scares, these aristocratic, sexual vampires
were more like the vampires we know today.
Vampire panics died down in the 20th century as these
fictional monsters replaced folk beliefs (and as medical knowledge improved);
however, there was a strange resurgence in the late 1960s, when Seán
Manchester, the president of the British Occult Society, said that a vampire
was causing people to see strange things in London’s Highgate Cemetery.
Newspapers had already covered reports of a tall figure with
burning eyes and other spectral sights floating in the cemetery, and
journalists quickly picked up Manchester’s theory that these sightings were the
work of an eastern European vampire. Newspapers even embellished his claims a
bit, calling the figure a “king vampire,” or writing that the vampire had
practiced black magic in Romania before traveling to London in his coffin.
In 1970, Manchester told a TV news team that he planned to
exercise the vampire on Friday the 13th. That night, hundreds of young people
turned up at Highgate Cemetery to see him perform an exorcism (which he ended
up not doing).
The Highgate panic wasn’t a case of vampires being
scapegoated for disease but rather a media sensation and an instance of “legend
tripping” (young people going to a supposedly haunted place to test their
bravery).
In the history of vampire legends, the Highgate incident is
a modern phenomenon. It has less to do with the desire to control a community’s
health and a lot more in common with modern scares, like the creepy clown
sightings that went viral last year - even if people don’t believe it, they’re
still drawn to the hype.
See you tomorrow.
Buh-bye.
Comments
Post a Comment