VAMPIRES AND VAMPIRISM
VAMPIRES AND
VAMPIRISM
BY
DUDLEY WRIGHT
LONDON
WILLIAM RIDER AND SON, LIMITED
1914
PREFACE
The awakened interest in supernormal phenomena which has taken place in
recent years has included in its wake the absorbing subject of Vampirism.
Yet there has not been any collection published of vampire stories which
are common to all the five continents of the globe. The subject of
vampirism is regarded more seriously to-day than it was even a decade
since, and an attempt has been made in this volume to supply as far as
possible all the instances which could be collected from the various
countries. How far a certain amount of scientific truth may underlie even
what may be regarded as the most extravagant stories must necessarily be,
for the present, at any rate, an open question; but he would indeed be a
bold man who would permit his scepticism as to the objective existence
of vampires in the past or the possibility of vampirism in the future to
extend to a categorical denial. If this collection of stories helps, even
in a slight degree, to the elucidation of the problem, the book will not
have been written in vain.
DUDLEY WRIGHT.
AUTHORS’ CLUB, 2 WHITEHALL COURT, S.W., _1st September, 1914_.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. EXCOMMUNICATION AND ITS POWER 20
III. THE VAMPIRE IN BABYLONIA, ASSYRIA, AND GREECE 35
IV. VAMPIRISM IN GREAT AND GREATER BRITAIN 48
V. VAMPIRISM IN GERMANY AND SURROUNDING COUNTRIES 66
VI. VAMPIRISM IN HUNGARY, BAVARIA, AND SILESIA 79
VII. VAMPIRISM IN SERVIA AND BULGARIA 95
VIII. VAMPIRE BELIEF IN RUSSIA 109
IX. MISCELLANEA 130
X. LIVING VAMPIRES 142
XI. THE VAMPIRE IN LITERATURE 150
XII. FACT OR FICTION? 161
BIBLIOGRAPHY 175
VAMPIRES AND VAMPIRISM
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
What is a vampire? The definition given in Webster’s _International
Dictionary_ is: “A blood-sucking ghost or re-animated body of a dead
person; a soul or re-animated body of a dead person believed to come from
the grave and wander about by night sucking the blood of persons asleep,
causing their death.”
Whitney’s _Century Dictionary_ says that a vampire is: “A kind of
spectral body which, according to a superstition existing among the
Slavic and other races on the Lower Danube, leaves the grave during the
night and maintains a semblance of life by sucking the warm blood of
living men and women while they are asleep. Dead wizards, werwolves,
heretics, and other outcasts become vampires, as do also the illegitimate
offspring of parents themselves illegitimate, and anyone killed by a
vampire.”
According to the _Encyclopædia Britannica_: “The persons who turn
vampires are generally wizards, suicides, and those who come to a violent
end or have been cursed by their parents or by the Church. But anyone may
become a vampire if an animal (especially a cat) leaps over the corpse or
a bird flies over it.”
Among the specialists, the writers upon vampire lore and legend, two
definitions may be quoted:—Hurst, who says that: “A vampyr is a dead
body which continues to live in the grave; which it leaves, however, by
night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the living, whereby it is
nourished and preserved in good condition, instead of becoming decomposed
like other dead bodies”; and Scoffern, who wrote: “The best definition I
can give of a vampire is a living mischievous and murderous dead body. A
living dead body! The words are idle, contradictory, incomprehensible,
but so are vampires.”
“Vampires,” says the learned Zopfius, “come out of their graves in the
night time, rush upon people sleeping in their beds, suck out all their
blood and destroy them. They attack men, women, and children, sparing
neither age nor sex. Those who are under the malignity of their influence
complain of suffocation and a total deficiency of spirits, after which
they soon expire. Some of them being asked at the point of death what is
the matter with them, their answer is that such persons lately dead rise
to torment them.”
Not all vampires, however, are, or were, suckers of blood. Some,
according to the records, despatched their victims by inflicting upon
them contagious diseases, or strangling them without drawing blood, or
causing their speedy or retarded death by various other means.
Messrs Skeat and Blagden, in _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_ (vol.
i. p. 473), state that “a vampire, according to the view of Sakai of
Perak, is not a demon—even though it is incidentally so-called—but a
being of flesh and blood,” and support this view by the statement that
the vampire cannot pass through walls and hedges.
The word _vampire_ (Dutch, _vampyr_; Polish, _wampior_ or _upior_;
Slownik, _upir_; Ukraine, _upeer_) is held by Skeat to be derived from
the Servian _wampira_. The Russians, Morlacchians, inhabitants of
Montenegro, Bohemians, Servians, Arnauts, both of Hydra and Albania, know
the vampire under the name of _wukodalak_, _vurkulaka_, or _vrykolaka_,
a word which means “wolf-fairy,” and is thought by some to be derived
from the Greek. In Crete, where Slavonic influence has not been felt, the
vampire is known by the name of _katakhaná_. Vampire lore is, in general,
confined to stories of resuscitated corpses of male human beings, though
amongst the Malays a _penangglan_, or vampire, is a living witch, who can
be killed if she can be caught in the act of witchery. She is especially
feared in houses where a birth has taken place, and it is the custom to
hang up a bunch of thistle in order to catch her. She is said to keep
vinegar at home to aid her in re-entering her own body. In the Malay
Peninsula, parts of Polynesia and the neighbouring districts, the vampire
is conceived as a head with entrails attached, which comes forth to suck
the blood of living human beings. In Transylvania, the belief prevails
that every person killed by a _nosferatu_ (vampire) becomes in turn a
vampire, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent people
until the evil spirit has been exorcised, either by opening the grave of
the suspected person and driving a stake through the corpse, or firing
a pistol-shot into the coffin. In very obstinate cases it is further
recommended to cut off the head, fill the mouth with garlic, and then
replace the head in its proper place in the coffin; or else to extract
the heart and burn it, and strew the ashes over the grave.
The _murony_ of the Wallachians not only sucks blood, but also possesses
the power of assuming a variety of shapes, as, for instance, those of a
cat, dog, flea, or spider; in consequence of which the ordinary evidence
of death caused by the attack of a vampire, viz. the mark of a bite in
the back of the neck, is not considered indispensable. The Wallachians
have a very great fear of sudden death, greater perhaps than any other
people, for they attribute sudden death to the attack of a vampire, and
believe that anyone destroyed by a vampire must become a vampire, and
that no power can save him from this fate. A similar belief obtains in
Northern Albania, where it is also held that a wandering spirit has power
to enter the body of any individual guilty of undetected crime, and that
such obsession forms part of his punishment.
Some writers have ascribed the origin of the belief in vampires to Greek
Christianity, but there are traces of the superstition and belief at a
considerably earlier date than this. In the opinion of the anthropologist
Tylor, “the shortest way of treating the belief is to refer it directly
to the principles of savage animism. We shall see that most of its
details fall into their places at once, and that vampires are not mere
creations of groundless fancy, but causes conceived in spiritual form
to account for specific facts of wasting disease.” It is more than
probable that the practice of offering up living animals as sacrifices to
satisfy the thirst of departed human beings, combined with the ideas of
the Platonist and the teachings of the learned Jew, Isaac Arbanel, who
maintained that before the soul can be loosed from the fetters of the
flesh it must lie some months with it in the grave, may have influenced
the belief and assisted its development. Vampirism found a place in
Babylonian belief and in the folk-lore and traditions of many countries
of the Near East. The belief was quite common in Arabia, although there
is no trace of it there in pre-Christian times. The earliest references
to vampires are found in Chaldean and Assyrian tablets. Later, the pagan
Romans gave their adherence to the belief that the dead bodies of certain
people could be allured from their graves by sorcerers, unless the
bodies had actually undergone decomposition, and that the only means of
effectually preventing such “resurrections” was by cremating the remains.
In Grecian lore there are many wonderful stories of the dead rising from
their graves and feasting upon the blood of the young and beautiful. From
Greece and Rome the superstition spread throughout Austria, Hungary,
Lorraine, Poland, Roumania, Iceland, and even to the British Isles,
reaching its height in the period from 1723 to 1735, when a vampire
fever or epidemic broke out in the south-east of Europe, particularly in
Hungary and Servia. The belief in vampires even spread to Africa, where
the Kaffirs held that bad men alone live a second time and try to kill
the living by night. According to a local superstition of the Lesbians,
the unquiet ghost of the Virgin Gello used to haunt their island, and was
supposed to cause the deaths of young children.
Various devices have been resorted to in different countries at the time
of burial, in the belief that the dead could thus be prevented from
returning to earth-life. In some instances, _e.g._ among the Wallachians,
a long nail was driven through the skull of the corpse, and the thorny
stem of a wild rose-bush laid upon the body, in order that its shroud
might become entangled with it, should it attempt to rise. The Kroats
and Slavonians burned the straw upon which the suspected body lay. They
then locked up all the cats and dogs, for if these animals stepped over
the corpse it would assuredly return as a vampire and suck the blood of
the village folk. Many held that to drive a white thorn stake through the
dead body rendered the vampire harmless, and the peasants of Bukowina
still retain the practice of driving an ash stake through the breasts
of suicides and supposed vampires—a practice common in England, so far
as suicides were concerned, until 1823, when there was passed “An Act
to alter and amend the law relating to the interment of the remains of
any person found _felo de se_,” in which it was enacted that the coroner
or other officer “shall give directions for the private interment of
the remains of such person _felo de se_ without any stake being driven
through the body of such person.” It was also ordained that the burial
was only to take place between nine and twelve o’clock at night.
The driving of a stake through the body does not seem to have had always
the desired effect. De Schartz, in his _Magia Postuma_, published at
Olmutz in 1706, tells of a shepherd in the village of Blow, near Kadam,
in Bohemia, who made several appearances after his death and called
certain persons, who never failed to die within eight days of such call.
The peasants of Blow took up the body and fixed it to the ground by means
of a stake driven through the corpse. The man, when in that condition,
told them that they were very good to give him a stick with which he
could defend himself against the dogs which worried him. Notwithstanding
the stake, he got up again that same night, alarmed many people, and,
presumably out of revenge, strangled more people in that one night than
he had ever done on a single occasion before. It was decided to hand
over his body to the public executioner, who was ordered to see that the
remains were burned outside the village. When the executioner and his
assistants attempted to move the corpse for that purpose, it howled like
a madman, and moved its feet and hands as though it were alive. They
then pierced the body through with stakes, but he again uttered loud
cries and a great quantity of bright vermilion blood flowed from him.
The cremation, however, put an end to the apparition and haunting of the
spectre. De Schartz says that the only remedy for these apparitions is
to cut off the heads and burn the bodies of those who come back to haunt
their former abodes. It was, however, customary to hold a public inquiry
and examination of witnesses before proceeding to the burning of a body,
and if, upon examination of the body, it was found that the corpse had
begun to decompose, that the limbs were not supple and mobile, and the
blood not fluidic, then burning was not commanded. Even in the case of
suspected persons an interval of six to seven weeks was always allowed
to lapse before the grave was opened in order to ascertain whether the
flesh had decayed and the limbs lost their suppleness and mobility. A
Strigon or Indian vampire, who was transfixed with a sharp thorn cudgel,
near Larbach, in 1672, pulled it out of his body and flung it back
contemptuously.
Bartholin, in _de Causa contemptûs mortis_, tells the story of a man,
named Harpye, who ordered his wife to bury him exactly at the kitchen
door, in order that he might see what went on in the house. The woman
executed her commission, and soon after his death he appeared to several
people in the neighbourhood, killed people while they were engaged
in their occupations, and played so many mischievous pranks that the
inhabitants began to move away from the village. At last a man named
Olaus Pa took courage and ran at the spectre with a lance, which he drove
into the apparition. The spectre instantly vanished, taking the spear
with it. Next morning Olaus had the grave of Harpye opened, when he
found the lance in the dead body, which had not become corrupted. The
corpse was then taken from the grave, burned, and the ashes thrown into
the sea, and the spectre did not afterwards trouble the inhabitants.
To cross the arms of the corpse, or to place a cross or crucifix upon the
grave, or to bury a suspected corpse at the junction of four cross-roads,
was, in some parts, regarded as an efficacious preventive of vampirism.
It will be remembered that it was at one time the practice in England
to bury suicides at the four cross-roads. If a vampire should make its
appearance, it could be prevented from ever appearing again by forcing it
to take the oath not to do so, if the words “by my winding-sheet” were
incorporated in the oath.
One charm employed by the Wallachians to prevent a person becoming a
vampire was to rub the body in certain parts with the lard of a pig
killed on St Ignatius’s Day.
In Poland and Russia, vampires make their appearance from noon to
midnight instead of between nightfall and dawn, the rule that generally
prevails. They come and suck the blood of living men and animals in such
abundance that sometimes it flows from them at the nose and ears, and
occasionally in such profusion that the corpse swims in the blood thus
oozing from it as it lies in the coffin. One may become immune from the
attacks of vampires by mixing this blood with flour and making bread from
the mixture, a portion of which must be eaten; otherwise the charm will
not work. The Californians held that the mere breaking of the spine of
the corpse was sufficient to prevent its return as a vampire. Sometimes
heavy stones were piled on the grave to keep the ghost within, a practice
to which Frazer traces the origin of funeral cairns and tombstones. Two
resolutions of the Sorbonne, passed between 1700 and 1710, prohibited
the cutting off of the heads and the maiming of the bodies of persons
supposed to be vampires.
In the German folk-tale known as _Faithful John_, the statue said to
the king: “If you, with your own hand, cut off the heads of both your
children and sprinkle me with their blood, I shall be brought to life
again.” According to primitive ideas, blood is life, and to receive
blood is to receive life: the soul of the dead wants to live, and,
consequently, loves blood. The shades in Hades are eager to drink the
blood of Odysseus’s sacrifice, that their life may be renewed for a
time. It is of the greatest importance that the soul should get what it
desires, as, if not satisfied, it might come and attack the living. It is
possible that the bodily mutilations which to this day accompany funerals
among some peoples have their origin in the belief that the departed
spirit is refreshed by the blood thus spilt. The Samoans called it an
“offering of blood” for the dead when the mourners beat their heads till
the blood ran.
The Australian native sorcerers are said to acquire their magical
influence by eating human flesh, but this is done once only in a
lifetime. According to Nider’s _Formicarius_, part of the ceremony of
initiation into wizardry and witchcraft consisted in drinking in a
church, before the commencement of Mass, from a flask filled with blood
taken from the corpses of murdered infants.
The methods employed for the detection of vampires have varied according
to the countries in which the belief in their existence was maintained.
In some places it was held that, if there were discovered in a grave two
or three or more holes about the size of a man’s finger, it would almost
certainly follow that a body with all the marks of vampirism would be
discovered within the grave. The Wallachians employed a rather elaborate
method of divination. They were in the habit of choosing a boy young
enough to make it certain that he was innocent of any impurity. He was
then placed on an absolutely black and unmutilated horse which had never
stumbled. The horse was then made to ride about the cemetery and pass
over all the graves. If the horse refused to pass over any grave, even in
spite of repeated blows, that grave was believed to shelter a vampire.
Their records state that when such a grave was opened it was generally
found to contain a corpse as fat and handsome as that of a full-blooded
man quietly sleeping. The finest vermilion blood would flow from the
throat when cut, and this was held to be the blood he had sucked from
the veins of living people. It is said that the attacks of the vampire
generally ceased on this being done.
In the town of Perlepe, between Monastru and Kiuprili, there existed
the extraordinary phenomenon of a number of families who were regarded
as being the offspring of _vrykolakas_, and as possessing the power of
laying the wandering spirits to which they were related. They are said
to have kept their art very dark and to have practised it in secret, but
their fame was so widely spread that persons in need of such deliverance
were accustomed to send for them from other cities. In ordinary life and
intercourse they were avoided by all the inhabitants.
Although some writers have contended that no vampire has yet been caught
in the act of vampirism, and that, as no museum of natural history has
secured a specimen, the whole of the stories concerning vampires may
be regarded as mythical, others have held firmly to a belief in their
existence and inimical power. Dr Pierart, in _La Revue Spiritualiste_
(vol. iv. p. 104), wrote: “After a crowd of facts of vampirism so often
proved, shall we say that there are no more to be had, and that these
never had a foundation? Nothing comes of nothing. Every belief, every
custom, springs from facts and causes which give it birth. If one had
never seen appear in the bosom of their families, in various countries,
beings clothed in the appearance of departed ones known to them, sucking
the blood of one or more persons, and if the deaths of the victims had
not followed after such apparitions, the disinterment of corpses would
not have taken place, and there would never have been the attestation of
the otherwise incredible fact of persons buried for several years being
found with the body soft and flexible, the eyes wide open, the complexion
rosy, the mouth and nose full of blood, and the blood flowing fully when
the body was struck or wounded or the head cut off.”
Bishop d’Avranches Huet wrote: “I will not examine whether the facts of
vampirism, which are constantly being reported, are true, or the fruit of
a popular error; but it is beyond doubt that they are testified to by so
many able and trustworthy authors, and by so many _eye-witnesses_, that
no one ought to decide the question without a good deal of caution.”
Dr Pierart gave the following explanation of their existence: “Poor,
dead cataleptics, buried as if really dead in cold and dry spots where
morbid causes are incapable of effecting the destruction of their bodies,
the astral spirit, enveloping itself with a fluidic ethereal body, is
prompted to quit the precincts of its tomb and to exercise on living
bodies acts peculiar to physical life, especially that of nutrition,
the result of which, by a mysterious link between soul and body which
spiritualistic science will some day explain, is forwarded to the
material body lying still within its tomb, and the latter is thus helped
to perpetuate its vital existence.”
Apart from the spectre vampire there is, of course, the vampire bat in
the world of natural history, which is said to suck blood from a sleeping
person, insinuating its tongue into a vein, but without inflicting
pain. Captain Steadman, during his expedition to Surinam, awoke early
one morning and was alarmed to find his hammock steeped almost through
and himself weltering in blood, although he was without pain. It was
discovered that he had been bitten by a vampire bat. Pennant says that
in some parts of America they destroyed all the cattle introduced by the
missionaries.