ANOMALOUS CASE.—THE HUMAN HYÆNA.
Ghouls—Story from Fornari—Quotation from Apuleius—Incident mentioned by
Marcassus—Cemeteries of Paris violated—Discovery of Violator—Confession
of M. Bertrand.
It is well known that Oriental romance is full of stories of violators
of graves. Eastern superstition attributes to certain individuals a
passion for unearthing corpses and mangling them. Of a moonlight night
weird forms are seen stealing among the tombs, and burrowing into them
with their long nails, desiring to reach the bodies of the dead ere the
first streak of dawn compels them to retire. These ghouls, as they are
called, are supposed generally to require the flesh of the dead for
incantations or magical compositions, but very often they are actuated
by the sole desire of rending the sleeping corpse, and disturbing its
repose. There is every probability that these ghouls were no mere
creations of the imagination, but were actual resurrectionists. Human
fat and the hair of a corpse which has grown in the grave, form
ingredients in many a necromantic receipt, and the witches who
compounded these diabolical mixtures, would unearth corpses in order to
obtain the requisite ingredients. It was the same in the middle ages,
and to such an extent did the fear of ghouls extend, that it was common
in Brittany for churchyards to be provided with lamps, kept burning
during the night, that witches might be deterred from venturing under
cover of darkness to open the graves.
Fornari gives the following story of a ghoul in his _History of
Sorcerers_:—
In the beginning of the 15th century, there lived at Bagdad an aged
merchant who had grown wealthy in his business, and who had an only son
to whom he was tenderly attached. He resolved to marry him to the
daughter of another merchant, a girl of considerable fortune, but
without any personal attractions. Abul-Hassan, the merchant’s son, on
being shown the portrait of the lady, requested his father to delay the
marriage till he could reconcile his mind to it. Instead, however, of
doing this, he fell in love with another girl, the daughter of a sage,
and he gave his father no peace till he consented to the marriage with
the object of his affections. The old man stood out as long as he
could, but finding that his son was bent on acquiring the hand of the
fair Nadilla, and was equally resolute not to accept the rich and ugly
lady, he did what most fathers, under such circumstances, are
constrained to do, he acquiesced.
The wedding took place with great pomp and ceremony, and a happy
honeymoon ensued, which might have been happier but for one little
circumstance which led to very serious consequences.
Abul-Hassan noticed that his bride quitted the nuptial couch as soon as
she thought her husband was asleep, and did not return to it, till an
boar before dawn.
Filled with curiosity, Hassan one night feigned sleep, and saw his wife
rise and leave the room as usual. He followed cautiously, and saw her
enter a cemetery. By the straggling moonbeams he beheld her go into a
tomb; he stepped in after her.
The scene within was horrible. A party of ghouls were assembled with
the spoils of the graves they had violated., and were feasting on the
flesh of the long-buried corpses. His own wife, who, by the way, never
touched supper at home, played no inconsiderable part in the hideous
banquet.
As soon as he could safely escape, Abul-Hassan stole back to his bed.
He said nothing to his bride till next evening when supper was laid,
and she declined to eat; then he insisted on her partaking, and when
she positively refused, he exclaimed wrathfully,—“Yes, you keep your
appetite for your feast with the ghouls!” Nadilla was silent; she
turned pale and trembled, and without a word sought her bed. At
midnight she rose, fell on her husband with her nails and teeth, tore
his throat, and having opened a vein, attempted to suck his blood; but
Abul-Hassan springing to his feet threw her down, and with a blow
killed her. She was buried next day.
Three days after, at midnight, she re-appeared, attacked her husband
again, and again attempted to suck his blood. He fled from her, and on
the morrow opened her tomb, burned her to ashes, and cast them into the
Tigris.
This story connects the ghoul with the vampire. As will be seen by a
former chapter, the were-wolf and the vampire are closely related.
That the ancients held the same belief that the witches violate
corpses, is evident from the third episode in the _Golden Ass_ of
Apuleius. I will only quote the words of the crier:—
“I pray thee, tell me,” replied I, “of what kind are the duties
attached to this funeral guardianship?” “Duties!” quoth the crier;
“why, keep wide awake all night, with thine eyes fixed steadily upon
the corpse, neither winking nor blinking, nor looking to the right nor
looking to the left, either to one side or the other, be it even
little; for the witches, infamous wretches that they are! can slip out
of their skins in an instant and change themselves into the form of any
animal they have a mind; and then they crawl along so slyly, that the
eyes of justice, nay, the eyes of the sun himself, are not keen enough
to perceive them. At all events, their wicked devices are infinite in
number and variety; and whether it be in the shape of a bird, or a dog,
or a mouse, or even of a common house-fly, that they exercise their
dire incantations, if thou art not vigilant in the extreme, they will
deceive thee one way or other, and overwhelm thee with sleep;
nevertheless, as regards the reward, ’twill be from four to six aurei;
nor, although ’tis a perilous service, wilt thou receive more. Nay,
hold! I had almost forgotten to give thee a necessary caution. Clearly
understand, that it the corpse be not restored to the relatives entire,
the deficient pieces of flesh torn off by the teeth of the witches must
be replaced from the face of the sleepy guardian.”
Here we have the rending of corpses connected with change of form.
Marcassus relates that after a long war in Syria, during the night,
troops of lamias, female evil spirits, appeared upon the field of
battle, unearthing the hastily buried bodies of the soldiers, and
devouring the flesh off their bones. They were pursued and fired upon,
and some young men succeeded in killing a considerable number; but
during the day they had all of them the forms of wolves or hyænas. That
there is a foundation of truth in these horrible stories, and that it
is quite possible for a human being to be possessed of a depraved
appetite for rending corpses, is proved by an extraordinary case
brought before a court-martial in Paris, so late as July 10th, 1849.
The details are given with fulness in the _Annales
Medico-psychologiques_ for that month and year. They are too revolting
for reproduction. I will, however, give an outline of this remarkable
case.
In the autumn of 1848, several of the cemeteries in the neighbourhood
of Paris were found to have been entered during the night, and graves
to have been rifled. The deeds were not those of medical students, for
the bodies had not been carried of, but were found lying about the
tombs in fragments. It was at first supposed that the perpetration of
these outrages must have been a wild beast, but footprints in the soft
earth left no doubt that it was a man. Close watch was kept at Père la
Chaise; but after a few corpses had been mangled there, the outrages
ceased.
In the winter, another cemetery was ravaged, and it was not till March
in 1849, that a spring gun which had been set in the cemetery of S.
Parnasse, went off during the night, and warned the guardians of the
place that the mysterious visitor had fallen into their trap. They
rushed to the spot, only to see a dark figure in a military mantle leap
the wall, and disappear in the gloom. Marks of blood, however, gave
evidence that he had been hit by the gun when it had discharged. At the
same time, a fragment of blue cloth, torn from the mantle, was
obtained, and afforded a clue towards the identification of the
ravisher of the tombs.
On the following day, the police went from barrack to barrack,
inquiring whether officer or man were suffering from a gun-shot wound.
By this means they discovered the person. He was a junior officer in
the 1st Infantry regiment, of the name of Bertrand.
He was taken to the hospital to be cured of his wound, and on his
recovery, he was tried by court-martial.
His history was this.
He had been educated in the theological seminary of Langres, till, at
the age of twenty, he entered the army. He was a young man of retiring
habits, frank and cheerful to his comrades, so as to be greatly beloved
by them, of feminine delicacy and refinement, and subject to fits of
depression and melancholy. In February, 1847, as he was walking with a
friend in the country, he came to a churchyard, the gate of which stood
open. The day before a woman had been buried, but the sexton had not
completed filling in the grave, and he had been engaged upon it on the
present occasion, when a storm of rain had driven him to shelter.
Bertrand noticed the spade and pick lying beside the grave, and—to use
his own words:—“A cette vue des idées noires me vinrent, j’eus comme un
violent mal de tête, mon cœur battait avec force, je no me possédais
plus.” He managed by some excuse to get rid of his companion, and then
returning to the churchyard, he caught up a spade and began to dig into
the grave. “Soon I dragged the corpse out of the earth, and I began to
hash it with the spade, without well knowing what I was about. A
labourer saw me, and I laid myself flat on the ground till he was out
of sight, and then I cast the body back into the grave. I then went
away, bathed in a cold sweat, to a little grove, where I reposed for
several hours, notwithstanding the cold rain which fell, in a condition
of complete exhaustion. When I rose, my limbs were as if broken, and my
head weak. The same prostration and sensation followed each attack.
Two days after, I returned to the cemetery, and opened the grave with
my hands. My hands bled, but I did not feel the pain; I tore the corpse
to shreds, and flung it back into the pit.”
He had no further attack for four months, till his regiment came to
Paris. As he was one day walking in the gloomy, shadowy, alleys of Père
la Chaise, the same feeling came over him like a flood. In the night he
climbed the wall, and dug up a little girl of seven years old. He tore
her in half. A few days later, he opened the grave of a woman who had
died in childbirth, and had lain in the grave for thirteen days. On the
16th November, he dug up an old woman of fifty, and, ripping her to
pieces, rolled among the fragments. He did the same to another corpse
on the 12th December. These are only a few of the numerous cases of
violation of tombs to which he owned. It was on the night of the 15th
March that the spring-gun shot him.
Bertrand declared at his trial, that whilst he was in the hospital he
had not felt any desire to renew his attempts, and that he considered
himself cured of his horrible propensities, for he had seen men dying
in the beds around him, and now: “Je suis guéri, car aujourd’hui j’ai
peur d’un mort.”
The fits of exhaustion which followed his accesses are very remarkable,
as they precisely resemble those which followed the berserkir rages of
the Northmen, and the expeditions of the Lycanthropists.
The case of M. Bertrand is indubitably most singular and anomalous; it
scarcely bears the character of insanity, but seems to point rather to
a species of diabolical possession. At first the accesses chiefly
followed upon his drinking wine, but after a while they came upon him
without exciting cause. The manner in which he mutilated the dead was
different. Some he chopped with the spade, others he tore and ripped
with his teeth and nails. Sometimes he tore the mouth open and rent the
face back to the ears, he opened the stomachs, and pulled off the
limbs. Although he dug up the bodies of several men he felt no
inclination to mutilate them, whereas he delighted in rending female
corpses. He was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.