Where Do Vampire Legends Come From? Plague, Decay and the Undead of Eastern Europe
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In 1732 an Austrian army surgeon in occupied Serbia filed a report on a village where the dead were being dug up. A man called Arnold Paole had died, several villagers had fallen ill and died after saying he visited them at night, and when the graves were opened the bodies were found undecayed, ruddy, with fresh blood at the mouth, and were staked and burned. The report was printed across Europe, the word vampire entered English and French that year, and a creature of Balkan village belief became the subject of learned treatises, and eventually of a Victorian novel that changed it into something its original believers would not have recognised.
The village vampire
The revenant of Slavic, Greek and Romanian folklore was not a seducer and not a nobleman. It was a recently buried neighbour, usually someone who had died badly, by suicide, violence or excommunication, or who had been a drunkard, a sorcerer or simply unpopular, and who was believed to leave the grave at night to strangle or drain the living, beginning with its own family. The signs were illness and death spreading through a household or a village, and the remedy was to open the grave and look. What the villagers found, and what the Austrian surgeon found, was a body that did not look as they expected a corpse to look, and the exhumation reports, which survive in numbers, describe the same things every time: a swollen body, a dark or ruddy face, blood at the lips and nose, skin that had slipped to reveal what looked like new skin beneath, and hair and nails that seemed to have grown.
What they were seeing
Every one of those signs is ordinary decomposition, unfamiliar to people who buried their dead within a day and never saw a body a month on:
- •Bloating: bacteria in the gut produce gas that swells the abdomen and face, giving a well-fed look, and can push blood-stained fluid out of the mouth and nose, the fresh blood of the reports
- •The ruddy face: the same gases and the settling of blood darken the skin, so a corpse that was pale at burial looks flushed
- •New skin and growing nails: the outer layer of skin sloughs off, exposing the paler layer beneath, and the retreat of drying skin from the nails and hair makes both appear longer
- •The groan when staked: gas escaping from the lungs and gut as the body is pierced makes a sound that witnesses took for a cry
- •Lack of decay: cold ground, clay soil and a quick burial slow decomposition dramatically, and a body a few weeks old in a Serbian winter is not far gone
The disease behind the deaths
The illnesses that the vampire was blamed for were real, and the pattern, a death followed by others in the same household, is what a contagious disease looks like. Tuberculosis, which wastes the sufferer slowly and spreads through families, was the vampire's usual accomplice, and in New England as late as the 1890s families dug up consumptive relatives, burned their hearts and fed the ashes to the survivors; the case of Mercy Brown of Rhode Island in 1892 was reported in the newspapers that Bram Stoker read. Plague, typhus and rabies have all been proposed, rabies with its aversion to light and water, its biting and its transmission by bite, fitting the later literary vampire better than the folk one. Premature burial, in an age without stethoscopes, supplied a few genuine cases of the buried moving. And in every case the logic was sound within its premises: something was killing the family, it began when a neighbour died, and the neighbour's body was not at rest.
The precautions
Because the belief was old, the remedies were elaborate. The suspect dead were buried face down, so that a digging revenant went the wrong way; with a sickle across the throat or a brick in the mouth, examples of which archaeologists have excavated in Poland and Venice; with the tendons cut; with poppy seeds or millet scattered in the grave, since the vampire was compelled to count them; or with a stake through the body to pin it to the ground, which is the origin of the stake through the heart. Garlic, thorns and crosses were protective, and the belief that a vampire cannot enter a house uninvited, cannot cross running water and casts no reflection all come from the villages rather than the novels. Decapitation and burning were the final measures, and the Habsburg authorities, embarrassed by the exhumations, banned them in 1755 after the empress's physician reported that the whole thing was superstition and decay.
From peasant to count
The literary vampire was born in a villa on Lake Geneva in June 1816, when Byron, the Shelleys and Byron's physician John Polidori told ghost stories during a wet summer; Polidori's The Vampyre of 1819 made the creature an aristocratic seducer modelled on Byron himself, and the type was set. Bram Stoker's Dracula of 1897 added the Transylvanian castle, the name borrowed from a fifteenth-century Wallachian prince who impaled his enemies, the fangs, the transformation into a bat and the destruction by sunlight, which no folk vampire ever suffered; the films of the 1920s and 1930s added the cape and the accent. The peasant revenant, a bloated corpse in a village grave, had become the most elegant monster in fiction, and the reversal is complete: the vampire is now the one who is too beautiful to be dead, when the whole point of the original was that it looked exactly as dead as it was.
The takeaway
The vampire of folklore was a recently buried villager blamed for a run of deaths in a family, whose exhumed body appeared undecayed, swollen and bloody at the mouth, all of which are normal signs of decomposition misread by people who never saw a corpse a month old, while the deaths themselves were tuberculosis and other contagions. The stake, garlic, the uninvited threshold and the lack of a reflection come from the villages; the count, the castle, the fangs and the fatal sunlight come from Polidori, Stoker and the cinema.