by Brian Righi
An alternative method included restraining the corpse with the branches of particular trees thought to have extraordinary powers. The aspen, for example, protected people from numerous types of evil because it was thought by some to be the same wood used to make the cross Christ was crucified upon, and so when laid over a grave it bound the vampire within. The Wallachians laid the thorny branches of the wild rose over the body during burial so that if it tried to rise it would become entangled. The Russians, however, preferred to place corpses suspected of vampirism in strong coffins bound with heavy iron bands, which they placed in a special chamber of the church and set a guard upon for a period of time.
Some cultural conventions even espoused ritualistically killing the corpse for a second time. Sharp needles, spikes, or swords were thrust into the ground above the grave in order to impale the body of the vampire should it attempt to dig its way out again. Similarly, in Serbia, after a person died and was taken from the house for burial, the women of the village would gather that night and stick five hawthorn pegs or old kitchen knives in the ground above the body corresponding to the chest, arms, and legs. Another example of the practice can be found among the Morlacks (of modern Croatia), among whom a body suspected of vampirism would be dug up and pricked all over with needles, after which the hamstrings were cut to prevent the corpse from walking again. Other forms of corpse mutilation appeared in places like Transylvania, where exhumed bodies had iron forks thrust into their eyes and heart before reburial upside down.
Even up to the nineteenth century, grisly customs such as these popped up from time to time in places like Romania, where at the conclusion of the funeral rites the coffin was shot with a gun. In fact, to this very day acts such as these continue to surface in the more remote districts of Eastern Europe. On November 24, 1998, for example, a curious article appeared in the Romanian newspaper Ziua under a headline translated as “A Gorjean Stuck a Nail through the Heart of Her Dead Lover.” The piece went on to explain that Romanian police in the region of Gorj were currently looking for a thirty-five-year-old woman named Vasilica Popescu, who was suspected of desecrating the corpse of her former lover by driving a six-inch nail through his heart. She told reporters that it was an ancient custom in her village and ensured that the heart of the deceased did not start beating again. She continued by stating that while he was alive, her lover routinely performed the same service for many others buried in the village cemetery.
Weapons of War
Yet even if all the necessary precautions were taken, an isolated community could still find itself in the deadly grip of a vampire infestation, towards which they had no choice but to take a more direct approach. In circumstances such as these, it was first necessary to identify the source of the vampirism. In most cases this was a simple affair, as the creature could through a little deduction be traced back through the family and friends it chose to make a meal of. All that remained was to follow the body trail back to the grave of the monster and in the full light of day dispatch it with ease. Unfortunately, in the real world, where things are not as easy as they sound, it wasn’t always clear who the vampire might be. If it was an invisible spirit or an unrecognized stranger in the community, or if family members were afraid to come forward and admit its identity, other means of identification had to be relied upon.
One method popular in Eastern Europe was as elaborate as it was dramatic. It involved placing a young, virginal boy atop a stallion that had never mated or stumbled and was without blemish. In some versions, the stallion had to be pure white while in others it needed to be completely black. Either way, the horse was set to wander the graveyard of the probable vampire until it reached a grave it refused to cross over even after repeated blows across its flanks. This, then, according to the logic of the times, marked the daylight resting place of the revenant. Other signs included graves that were disturbed by wolves or dogs, who were the natural enemy of the creature, as well as holes the size of a person’s finger from which the vampire came and went from the grave. Disturbed coffins, vandalized tombstones, strange mist, and hovering blue flames also pointed to the presence of the vampire.
Wooden Stakes
Once the location of the revenant was rooted out, the average villager had a number of means by which to end the creature’s reign of terror. The first included driving a wooden stake through the heart or body of the vampire. While commonly used among the Slavic countries, the origins of the practice may have its roots in Egyptian theology, in which the heart was seen as the seat of the soul, emotions, and intelligence.
The type of wood from which the stake was carved was very important and normally depended on the region where it was being employed. In Russia and the Baltic lands, ash was the popular choice, in Serbia it was hawthorn, while in Poland it was oak. Blackthorn was another wood frequently used in other Christian countries because of its close ties to the crown of thorns Jesus wore at his crucifixion. In some cases the stake could even be made of metal, as was common among the Bulgarians of the medieval period, who heated iron spikes until they were red hot, or the Albanians, who used daggers blessed by a priest.
Commonly, the prescribed approach was to drive the stake through the heart or chest cavity of the corpse, but in some customs it was thrust into the mouth or stomach instead. According to Russian beliefs, it was necessary that the act be committed with a single blow—otherwise a second might reawaken the vampire. This one-blow theory was a constant motif throughout the heroic sagas of Slavic lore, where the hero of the tale could only strike the monster but once.
The act itself served several purposes, including deflating the bloated corpse and releasing the blood trapped within as well as stopping the heart of the vampire from continuing to beat. Underlying this was the even older belief that a stake could pin the corpse to the earth, both so that it could not physically rise and also to create a supernatural link with the earth that would allow the body to finally decompose. Burials during these periods were often conducted without the luxury of a coffin and in a shallow grave scraped out of the hard earth with the simplest of tools. The stake therefore was perhaps the only thing holding the vampire down.
By 1823 the morbid practice of staking suicides became so rampant that the government of Britain was forced to enact laws protecting the bodies of those who died by their own hand, or felo de se. Under one such law, the coroner was to “give directions for the private internment of the remains of such a person felo de se without a stake being driven through the body of such a person” (Blackstone 1836, 190).
Decapitation
Decapitation, the act of separating the head from the body, was another effective, if gruesome, means of bringing an end to the vampire and was used to a large extent in Germany and the western Slavic countries. Unlike stakes, which were required to be carved from the wood of particular trees, anything could be used to cut the head off of a vampire, from rusty kitchen knives and hatchets to farming sickles and shovel blades. In some traditions, the shovel of a gravedigger or sexton had supernatural powers against vampires—the former because it was used in laying bodies to rest, and the latter because it was a tool used by a man of the church.
Although anyone could perform the deed, local executioners were often called upon to do the job, not only for their proficiency and experience in removing the head from the body but also because in the minds of common people the act was a sort of second execution for the crimes committed by the vampire. Once the head was removed, the mouth was frequently stuffed with garlic and either placed at the feet of the corpse, behind the buttocks, or reburied some distance from the body. The idea was that if a vampire could not see, smell, or chew on its victims, then it posed little threat. Beyond this, decapitation opened the corpse in a way that allowed any evil spirits residing within to quickly find their way out.
Fire
A third tactic involved the complete and utter destruction of the corpse
or at least certain key parts, such as the heart and other vital organs, by fire. This usually meant dragging the corpse from its grave and onto a pyre of wood sometimes soaked with pitch or other flammables. Although the type of wood was unimportant, whenever possible the lumber was collected from trees and shrubs bearing thorns, which as seen earlier carried certain biblical connotations. Once the match was struck, it then became necessary to capture and burn any creatures escaping the flames regardless of their size or shape, because they might just be the vampire in disguise. In many areas it was also crucial that no scrap or fragment of the body survive the flames, as the vampire could rejuvenate itself from the smallest portion. Once the cremation was complete, the ashes were collected and tossed into a swiftly flowing river so that they could not be used by sorcerers in the creation of evil magic.
Burning the vampire’s remains not only destroyed the vehicle by which it walked the earth but also purified the essence of the corpse. The flame, as history proved again and again, was one of the favorite tools of the church when it came to defeating evil and was how it often “rehabilitated” those accused of witchcraft or sorcery. Yet even before the church adopted the practice, fire was a magical element used during pagan times as a central theme in rituals of cleansing, warmth, and protection. However, early man learned quickly that cremation was a difficult process, given the density of muscle and bone and the high water content of the body. Today’s crematories use ovens that reach temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and they still require up to a half-hour, depending on the weight and mass of the corpse, to reduce a corpse to ashes. Even then, a quantity of bone remains, which must be ground into dust until all that is left of the human body consists of between four to eight pounds of nondescript material.
To alleviate the problems inherent in such a process, including the vast quantities of wood and manpower necessary to feed the flames for what could amount to days on end, some cultures turned to forms of symbolic cremation instead. In Bulgaria, for instance, a corpse thought to possess the spirit of a vampire was surrounded by a ring of flammable material. Villagers then lined up to take a hot coal, which they cast behind them in a gesture meant to drive the evil spirit away. In Serbia a similar practice existed whereby only the hair of the corpse was singed with a candle.
Sunlight
According to modern moviemakers, sunlight was a powerful weapon used to reduce vampires to a pile of ash, but as we learn so very often, Hollywood rarely gets it right. The truth of the matter is that nowhere in the folklore or the historical texts does this theory actually appear. Instead, the prevailing belief among the Serbians and others was that vampires became helpless when exposed to the rays of the sun, falling into a type of catatonic slumber or quasi-death trance. This helped explain why vampires appeared as simple inanimate corpses when villagers dug them up and ripped them from their coffins.
To help account for the condition, it was surmised that since vampires were primarily night stalkers that derived their infernal powers from the darkness, it only made sense that daylight would prove their weakness. There is no precedent that they turned to dust or exploded into flames, however, and perhaps the first suggestion of this belief didn’t appear until F. W. Murnau’s 1922 German film Nosferatu. On the contrary, in some traditions, like those found among the Russians, vampires could move about on sunny afternoons just like the rest of us.
The Vampire of Breslaw
There were, of course, many other ways in which to slay a vampire, including excision of the heart, dismemberment of the body, burial under a gallows, piercing by sword, and immersion in water—and often more than one method was used in conjunction with others. The exact methodology again depended on the region, religious practices, and resources of the people, and each province or ethnic group seemed to enjoy putting their own little spin on the act. A classic example of just how these methods were used “in the field” can be found in English philosopher Henry More’s 1653 edition of An Antidote against Atheism—or—An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man. In this work appears the tale of a wealthy shoemaker in the town of Breslaw (today known as Wroclaw, a major city, in what is now southwestern Poland), who on September 20, 1591, committed suicide by slitting his own throat with a knife in the garden behind his house.
Given the religious prohibitions against such an act, his family conspired to hide the suicide by covering up his wounds with the burial shroud in order to fool the examining priest into thinking that he had suffered a stroke instead. Perhaps the family’s wealth played a part in making a few heads turn the other way also, but regardless of how the deception was carried off the shoemaker was buried in the graveyard with all the solemn rites of the church. If the family thought the matter was laid to rest, however, they quickly found they were mistaken, and rumors began spreading that his death was not the work of natural causes after all.
Talk of the shoemaker’s death continued to circulate in Breslaw until the local authorities stepped in and began questioning family members, who eventually broke down and confessed their duplicity. While the town’s council gathered to discuss the matter, the shoemaker’s widow began complaining to any who might listen that the recent confessors were no more than malicious liars bent on staining her late husband’s reputation. Even worse, she promised to take her case all the way to the Kaiser if necessary to protect her family’s honor. Initially the council was reluctant to have their town overrun with the government officials such a complaint would bring and voted to dismiss any charges of wrongdoing against the shoemaker’s family. Before the smoke cleared, however, new rumors arose that the apparition of the shoemaker was roaming the cobbled streets of Breslaw at night, terrorizing the inhabitants.
Witnesses to the attacks claimed that “those that were asleep it terrified with horrible visions; those that were waking it would strike, pull or press, lying heavy upon them like an Ephialtes: so that there were perpetual complaints every morning of their last night’s rest through the whole town … For this terrible Apparition would sometimes stand by their bed-sides, sometimes cast itself upon the midst of their beds, would lie close to them and pinch them, that not only blue marks, but plain impression of the fingers would be upon sundry parts of their bodies in the morning” (Summers 2003, 134).
At the outset of these bizarre new rumors, friends and family of the shoemaker rallied to stifle the murmurings, but as time went on the claims only became worse—until a thick blanket of fear lay over the town of Breslaw. Each night the people locked and bolted their doors, and it was said that even when groups gathered for protection the vampire appeared, and after assaulting its intended victim vanished back into the night from whence it came.
Eventually, town officials became so distressed by these events that they felt they had no recourse but to exhume the body of the shoemaker and dispatch the vampire that it had become. On April 18, 1592, the grave was uncovered under the supervision of the town magistrate and examined for signs of vampirism. As the growing mob of local curiosity seekers gathered at the scene, many claimed that they noticed a magic mark on the big toe of the corpse and that the “body was found entire, not at all putrid, no ill smell about him saving the mustiness of the Grave-cloaths, his joints limber and flexible, as in those who are alive, his skin only flaccid, but a more fresh grown in the room of it, the wound of his throat gaping, but no gear nor corruption in it …” (Summers 2003, 135).
For an entire week the body was left exposed in the grave, with many coming to see the “Breslaw Vampire.” Finally the body was taken and reburied under the town’s hanging gallows, but the vampire’s attacks only became more frequent and violent. This time it was the widow herself who came to the magistrate and begged that something be done to end the vampire’s attacks upon the town and finally put her poor husband’s soul to rest.
The body was again unearthed, only this time to be found even more bloated with fresh blood. The
local hangman was ordered to decapitate the corpse and dismember the remainder of the body, after which the heart was removed through its back and shown to be full of blood. The various pieces were then burned to ash and collected in a sack to be disposed of in a nearby river. Following these measures the vampire ceased to trouble the town, but other accusations continued to plague the shoemaker’s family, including claims that one of their deceased servants began rising from the dead as well. In the story she appeared to some as a woman and to others as a dog, cat, hen, or goat. In the end she too was treated in much the same manner as her former master, and as the story goes, was never seen again.
The First Vampire Hunters
While frenzied mobs of villagers tore bodies from their graves and hacked them to bits, another colorful character entered the mythology of the vampire, one who bears a resemblance, however slight, to the archetype of the modern vampire hunter many are familiar with in today’s books and movies. Although the professional vampire hunters that surfaced in Europe during this period did not have access to fancy Hollywood props such as steel samurai swords and guns that shoot ultraviolet bullets, they were nonetheless just as flashy and dramatic as anything on the silver screen.
Take, for instance, the dhampir of the Balkans, who were the result of a union between a male vampire and a living woman. Even as children they possessed extraordinary powers against the undead and were noted for their large heads, untamed black hair, and the uncanny fact that they had no shadows. Many dhampir were considered powerful sorcerers and were called upon if villagers suspected a vampire in their midst. Once they arrived in the infested township, they frequently made a great show of hunting the vampire, which they claimed only they could see because it was invisible to all others. First a dhampir took off his shirt, which was of course a magical shirt, and scoured the town looking through one sleeve as if it were a telescope. Many times they punctuated the performance with a description of the invisible bloodsucker, and although the crowd was allowed to ooh and ah and even clap when appropriate, no one was permitted to speak but the dhampir.