German

In 19th century New England, Rhode Island and other parts of the country experienced an outbreak of tuberculosis known as “consumption. There, in the winter of 1892, the Brown family in the quiet town of Exeter fell victim to this merciless disease. It first claimed the life of Mary in 1883, then her daughter Mary Olive in 1888, and then Mercy herself in 1892. As the town mourned the loss of yet another person to this insidious disease, rumors of a more sinister nature began to circulate. Desperate for answers and to save their community from further suffering, the villagers turned to a belief deeply rooted in folklore – the existence of vampires.

In the midst of their grief and fear, the townspeople turned their attention to Mercy Brown’s grave. Rumours circulated that she had become undead, a vampire haunting the living. Unwilling to allow this supposed evil to continue, they sought to end the curse upon their community. Under cover of darkness, a group of men exhumed Mercy’s body from its resting place. There was no decomposition and her body was not in the position in which it had been buried. They found fresh blood in her heart, which was immediately removed from her chest and burned on a nearby rock. The ashes of her heart were mixed with water and given to Mercy’s brother Edwin to drink. His father hoped that the ashes of a “vampire heart” would cure him. The ritual failed and Edwin died within two months, probably also of tuberculosis.

The exhumation of Mercy Brown may sound exaggerated and dramatic today, but the people of Exeter are among those who have long feared vampires. For centuries, these bloodthirsty and snarling supernatural creatures have wreaked havoc in the darkest corners of the human imagination. So where does the idea of vampires come from? How has it evolved over the years? And have there ever been real vampires in history?

A few years ago, the corpse of a 500-year-old “vampire” was exhibited in an old cemetery in Kamien Pomorski in Poland. The vampire’s body, discovered in 2015, was described in detail in the world press. Archaeologists confirmed that there was a stake in her leg (presumably to prevent her getting out of the coffin) and a stone in her mouth (to prevent her sucking blood). Even older burials of this type have been found in Bulgarian villages.

Vampires have always embodied the human fear of death. The traces that this mythical figure has left in our collective imagination can be traced back centuries to the Middle East and South Asia. The Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, or more precisely the sixth tablet dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, describes a creature “capable of taking the lives of others in order to save its own”. There are also ancient Greek peasant legends about men and women who drink blood to stay young, and about wandering spirits who drink large quantities of blood from the living to regain their human form.

Ancient Egyptian mythology describes Sekhmet, the daughter of the sun god Ra, as having an unquenchable thirst for human blood. And Jewish folklore describes how Lilith, believed by some to be Adam’s first wife, feeds on her victims. Some stories say that Lilith is responsible for men’s erotic dreams and “makes them ejaculate semen”.

Creatures like these had one thing in common: they drained something vital from humans. Whether it was life force, blood, or “seed,” these ancient spirits were vampiric in the way they interacted with the living. But our modern concept of vampires as fanged bloodsuckers who avoid sunlight came much later.

It is clear that some form of vampire was believed to exist in much of Europe long before the Middle Ages. But it was not until 1819, when the first fictional vampire, the satanic Lord Ruthven, appeared in a story by John Polidori, that the seductive, romantic vampire made its mark on high society in London. How did our idea of the vampire change from the unkempt peasant to the seductive aristocrat? To fully understand the history of the vampire, we must trace it back to its beginnings in early folklore.

The first written mention of vampires dates back to an Old Russian text from 1047, which describes monsters called “upir”. However, the term “vampire” did not appear until centuries later, in 1725. In that year, frightened villagers in Kisiljevo (in present-day Serbia) asked a provost – a health and safety officer named Frombald – for help. They believed that a dead man named Petar Blagojević was responsible for spreading disease and death in their village. Not only had his widow claimed to have seen him, but nine other villagers also claimed that he “lay on top of her and strangled her” during the night.

About 24 hours later, they were all dead. The provost wrote to his superiors that the villagers knew exactly what they were dealing with: a “vampyri,” the Serbian word for “back from the dead. Frombald himself performed the autopsy and found that Blagojević’s body looked “quite fresh” and even had fresh blood around the mouth. When the determined villagers drove a stake through Blagojević’s body, Frombald reported that “a lot of fresh blood” flowed from the dead man’s body.

News of Frombald’s investigation and other similar reports spread quickly. Today we know that the Serbs were not the only ones who took their crusade against a “vampire” into their own hands. In recent years, archaeologists have discovered other “vampire cemeteries” in Poland, where they found, among other things, a woman with a sickle in her neck and a child with a padlock around his ankle, both from the 17th century, as well as a mass grave with decapitated corpses from the 18th and 19th centuries.

As in the case of Mercy Brown, the villagers of Kisiljevo “killed” the “undead” Blagojević to prevent him from spreading disease in his village. Villagers in Poland probably did something similar (although it is possible that some “vampires” in these cases were merely social outcasts). In fact, scientists suspect that many of our current ideas about vampires are based on a misunderstanding of disease and its spread.

In the cases of Blagojević and Brown, vampires were used to explain the spread of disease. But vampires have also been used to explain the symptoms of disease, which in turn have become “signs” of vampirism in the eyes of many people. Take rabies, for example. One of these rabies outbreaks in 18th century Europe coincided with the emergence of vampire stories. The symptoms of rabies – including insomnia and aversion to light – fit well with our modern ideas of vampires as sleeping during the day and prowling at night. Furthermore, rabies is caused by animal bites, and vampires have been known to bite their victims.

Pellagra, the result of a diet high in maize, can also cause an aversion to sunlight. In the 18th century, Europeans would have eaten more maize than ever before as they finally had widespread access to the North American plant. Similarly, porphyria can cause blisters on the skin and hallucinations when people are exposed to sunlight. And then there was the Black Death. Not only did this disease spread quickly and in seemingly inexplicable ways, leaving people searching for explanations and ways to contain its spread, but its victims sometimes had bleeding mouth lesions. And tuberculosis – which caused so much fear in Mercy Brown’s Exeter – caused victims to lose weight, cough up blood and die a slow death. To some it might seem as if a supernatural force was ‘sucking the life’ out of them.

Disease therefore played an important role in the creation of the early versions of the vampire myth. Not only were “vampires” accused of spreading disease from the grave, but some scientists believe that the symptoms of disease were related to the characteristics of vampires. Of course, all of this might have remained in the realm of obscure legend had vampirism not found its way onto the bestseller lists. As fear of vampires spread, leading figures such as Pope Benedict XIV asserted that the monsters were not real. He declared in the mid-1800s that vampires were “deceptive fictions of the human imagination. But in the realm of fantasy, the vampire legend continued to grow.

In the decades after Blagojevics villagers drove a stake through his non-beating heart, vampires began to appear in poetry and prose. It was a 1746 treatise by the French monk Antoine Augustin Calmet that gave writers access to a series of encounters with vampires. Calmet was inspired by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, a botanist and explorer who claimed to have encountered a plague of blood-sucking vampires on Mykonos in 1702. His account was still widely read in 1741.

Three decades after Tournefort’s encounter, the London Journal in 1732 reported some investigations of “vampires” in Madreyga, Hungary (a story later told by John Polidori). Greece and Hungary feature prominently in these early reports – and this is reflected in Romantic literature: Lord Byron, for example, makes Greece the setting for his unfinished vampire story “A Fragment” (1819). It was Polidori, however, who created the vampire’s genealogy and social status. Before the aristocratic vampire Lord Ruthven of 1819, there seems to have been no urban or educated middle-class bloodsucker. A predatory sexuality is also introduced by the author. For the first time, we see the vampire as a libertine, a true “lady killer” – a tendency that has been refined to the present day.

This was followed by James Malcolm Rymer’s “Varney the Vampyre” (1849) and, at the end of the 19th century, “Dracula” (1897). Although there had been vampires in literature before – for example, the poem “The Vampire” by Heinrich August Ossenfelder in 1748 and Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1816 – none of them attracted as much attention as Stoker’s work, and certainly none of them contributed as much to his image.

Characters in Stoker’s novel described Dracula as a man with sharp teeth and an “extraordinary pallor” who “looks cruel” and “has a smile that Judas in hell would be proud of. He possesses superhuman powers, has no shadow, and turns people into vampires by sucking their blood. He also has the ability to transform into a bat. But Stoker’s vampire also had weaknesses, such as crucifixes and garlic. The portrayal of Count Dracula has changed over the years. In some movies he was gentle and casual, in others he was terrifying and bloodthirsty. And although Stoker was not the first writer to describe vampires, Dracula has shaped many people’s ideas of what a vampire looks and acts like.

However, Dracula is a fictional character. But it is said that art is taken from life. Are there examples of real vampires? The villagers who dug up Mercy Brown and Petar Blagojević would probably answer with a resounding yes. But the answer really depends on how you define the term ‘vampire’. If you’re looking for the undead or people who can turn into bats, then the answer is no. But there have certainly been violent rulers and serial killers with vampiric tendencies in human history. The most famous example is the violent 15th century Wallachian ruler Vlad the Impaler, who is said to have had a taste for blood. Also known as Vlad Dracula, this ruler impaled thousands of his enemies, once wrote a letter boasting that he and his warriors had “killed 23,884 Turks”, and is said to have been responsible for the deaths of over 60,000 people.

Vlad Dracula is also said to have dipped his bread in the blood of his enemies before eating it (this claim is difficult to verify, of course), and some believe that Bram Stoker based his character Dracula on the Wallachian ruler. Scholars have debated the veracity of this claim in recent years, and National Geographic reports that Stoker drew from many different sources. What is known is that Stoker came across the name “Dracula” while reading a history book. He then wrote an important note to himself: “Voivode (Dracula): Dracula means DEVIL in the Walachian language. The Wallachians used to give this name to any person who distinguished himself by courage, cruelty or cunning”.

However, there have been serial killers who clearly had vampiric tendencies. Take Fritz Haarmann, a German serial killer from the early 20th century who became known as the “Vampire of Hanover”. He got his nickname because he killed some of his victims by biting their windpipe (which he called a “love bite”). While vampires may not actually lurk in dark corners, it is true that these creatures have fueled people’s imaginations since time immemorial. Vampiric demons such as Lilith first appeared several centuries ago, and medieval fears of death and disease solidified gruesome myths about how the “undead” could wreak deadly havoc on communities. But it was writers in more recent history who helped define the vampire as we know it today. Poems, Varney the Vampire and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula have shaped the familiar blood-sucking specter that terrifies audiences today.