American Vampires
Page 7
In these gloomy marshlands where the Louisiana vampires were born, all of these ideas came together in a kind of supernatural gumbo and gave such creatures their shape and form. Rural vampires in Louisiana, therefore, tend to be a combination of many of the nightmares of each culture rolled into one. These creatures prowled the lonely bayous, almost like wild animals manifesting themselves to lonely settlers or travelers at will, sometimes during the day, as well as at night. But, just to complicate matters, there were other, more conventional, types of vampire as well.
In districts within cities such as New Orleans, where arguably some of the more traditional cultural ideas manifested themselves, vampires seem to be slightly more recognizable in their appearance and customs. Thus, perhaps Anne Rice is right to portray her vampires as the dissolute scions of old Louisiana families or as members of the Undead who had traveled to the city from parts of Europe. Indeed, in areas of such cities, European traditions were still paramount and the inhabitants still viewed the vampire as the walking corpse of medieval folklore. Old European practices still continued. For example, there was a custom of “sitting with the dead” for several days before burial and roughly seven days afterward. Such custom seems to have been common in a number of European countries and was done for a variety of reasons. In a time when there were no real doctors to pronounce a person dead, the actual instance of death might be problematical. A person might fall into a “deep swoon” or experience a cataleptic episode and be taken for dead. During times of widespread disease and plague in both towns and cities, such “deaths” appear to have occurred with fair regularity. Those who had apparently succumbed to illness were interred as quickly as possible to prevent the plague from spreading, although they may not have been clinically dead at all. And of course, even in times of no disease, people might be pronounced dead under the most spurious of circumstances. In both England and Ireland (and in parts of France and Germany as well), the tombs of some great local families had bells connected between the living rooms of their houses and the nearby tombs of family members. Should the person who was mistakenly interred come to in the tomb, he or she could summon help by pulling on a bell rope and alerting those within the house. Many of these devices still exist in large houses; I was in a house in the Irish Republic that had a large and ornate bell hanging in its front drawing room, which was connected to a family mausoleum within the building itself. I was told that the bell had, in fact, rung twice—once it was answered and a woman was saved, but on the second instance, members of the family had been too fearful to answer it. This has, of course, given us our common expressions, “saved by the bell” and “dead ringer.” However, not all families had such devices and the custom of “sitting with the dead” took place to ensure the person did not return to life.
Of course, the idea of a corpse suddenly rising up before being placed in the grave or ringing a bell from an otherwise silent tomb has eerie connotations and could have fed into the idea of a vampire lurking among the graveyard shadows. Old, common European beliefs were often called into play to explain such returns from the grave: a corpse not properly buried according to the rites of the Church; a dog barking at the coffin (a German belief); being the seventh son of a seventh son (which was believed to leave one open to becoming a vampire in some parts of Europe); or a horse shying away from the gravesite of someone. These were all the conventional marks of a possible vampire, and the methods to alleviate them dated back to medieval Europe: decapitation of the corpse, burial face down, the placing of a sickle on the neck, and so on. Also, certain funerary articles can be placed on the graves of suspected vampires to prevent them from rising (wreaths of garlic, wolfsbane, and crucifixes). Some of these can be seen adorning the fronts of the famous “oven tombs” in places such as St. Louis Cemetery No. 1—which gained some notoriety through Anne Rice’s books, and the fact that it houses the grave of Marie Laveau, the famous “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans. As the cemetery name suggest, these were largely European burial sites (although a number of Creoles are also buried there), and these apostrophics reflect such tradition and belief. The vampires that might lurk there are of the conventional kind, and ones that we would readily recognize.
There is an extremely curious story concerning the Ursuline Convent on Chartres Street in the French Quarter of the city. The Convent was founded in 1727 and nuns arrived from France to assume their duties in New Orleans. However, it is said that they arrived with some very special items. For some reason, they brought with them several coffins that they kept in the convent and transferred to a second building built in 1745. The coffins were rumored to contain vampires, through how they had come into the possession of the nuns is unknown. In some accounts, they were the bodies of former Sisters who had been bitten by vampires and for whom the others were seeking a cure. Other legends cite different reasons. The new convent was designed by Ignace Francois Broutin, who had designed the original convent. As with the first, he designed a secret room in which the coffins could be stored. And there they lie to this very day. It is said that from time to time, the nuns permitted the vampire ladies to rise and walk about. This could be done during the day as well as at night-time—in Europe it was believed that some vampires could exist in daylight—and the vampires might often mingle with ordinary people who are going about their business in the city. However, after a certain time, they had to return to their caskets, which the nuns kept for them in the secret room. Other versions of the story say that these beings were women who had become vampires within the city and whom the Ursuline nuns had taken in and cared for. According to some versions of the legend, some of these women even married and lived for part of the time with their husbands in various areas of New Orleans. Nonetheless, they still had to return to their caskets at certain times, perhaps without the knowledge of their husbands. The convent is no longer in use (in 1912 the nuns moved to a new building uptown) and part of the building remains as an archive for the Diocese. However, it is still a persistent legend in the neighborhood that somewhere in an attic or in a secret room, there are still coffins in which the vampires lie. Of course, the story may be no more than a fable without any real substance—some commentators have argued that it was no more than a tale spread by Protestants in the city in order to cast a slur on the convent and on the Catholic Church—although its proponents argue that there is at least some grain of truth in it.
In other parts of the city where the Creole and African cultures dominate, such as the Vieux Carre, Canal Street, and Dumaine Streets, vampires take on a much more exotic form and may have more in common with those in the more outlying bayou areas. Here, the influence of voodoo and African religions have played a part in shaping the perception of the Un-dead. In the Cane River area, and around the Melrose/Yucca Plantation just beyond the city, vampires take on a distinctly more zombie-like “feel” to them. These are not the recognizable figures of European lore, but the shambling rotting dead of African nightmares. These, according to tradition, were creatures that could eat human flesh, as well as drinking blood. They might also change shape at will, often taking on the form of a great reptile such as a snake or lizard—a suggestion of the serpent worship in the Voodoo religion. They might enter a room or a house through a keyhole or a crack, and for this reason many of the keyholes in the houses within the Creole quarters of New Orleans were blocked in order to prevent vampires from entering. Vampires, in the guise of snakes, can sometimes also slither under doors, often resuming their ghastly, rotting zombie-appearance as soon as they enter a building; for this reason, the undersides of doors are also blocked.
Among certain Creole groupings, it is believed that if a person tastes human flesh either deliberately or inadvertently, he or she is bound to become a vampire after death. This may connect vampires and zombies (who are also said to be flesh-eaters) in the Creole mind. And like many of the European vampires, they are associated with disease and dirt.
One of the most notorious New Orleans cemeteries for
these vampiric walking dead was the St. Peter Street Cemetery in the Vieux Carre, bounded by Toulouse, Rampart, Burgundy, and St. Peter Streets. This ancient cemetery had a fearful reputation all across the city. It had been designed as part of the city area by the military architect Adrien de Pauger, who had laid out many of the streets in the Vieux Carre around 1721, and it was the first of the burial grounds on the banks of the Mississippi. Its closeness to the river—and to the residential district—created all kinds of problems. The actual level of the graveyard had to be raised, using dirt from ditches that had been dug all around it. A wooden palisade surrounded the site, but this did not prevent a few of the graves from the balconies and even sometimes from street level. And as the city was hit by various epidemics, the plots soon filled to bursting point. All sorts of people were buried there. By the end of the 1740s, cemetery neighbors complained that they were unable to endure the sight (and the stench) of bodies poking out from under tombstones or half-buried in the graves into which they had been squeezed. Some people claimed that the dead rose up and shambled about and sometimes wandered out of the cemetery after nightfall in order to attack those passing by. A 5-foot high brick wall was built around the graveyard in order to deter these “night walkers.” Built by the money of the rich and the sweat of the poor, it was dedicated and blessed by a bishop on All Saints Day of 1741; this meant that no wandering corpse could cross it and attack anyone in the city beyond. This was probably the first “celebration of the dead” in New Orleans. However, the unquiet dead made their presence felt with regard to the cemetery and its new holy wall. In 1788, a series of catastrophes occurred around the gravesites—the first occurring when the Mississippi River burst its banks and flooded the place as well as a great area of the city itself. This was followed by a serious fire on Good Friday, which burned a large number of houses to the ground. It is said that part of the “holy wall” around St. Peters Street Cemetery collapsed and that the dead wandered out of the graveyard after nightfall and attacked people as they attempted to deal with the calamity. With them came an outbreak of disease, which spread quickly throughout New Orleans. The deaths from the plague added to the number of bodies that were packed into St. Peter Street Cemetery. However, such disease also had the effect of diminishing the population, and over time the number of burials in the overcrowded graveyard gradually decreased. St. Peter Street was unceremoniously covered with lime—ostensibly in the hope that it would strop the spread of any disease, but in reality, some say it was to stop the vampiric, rotting dead from getting up and wandering about during the night.
Today, no tombstone remains to mark the site of any burial in the Cemetery. The place was closed as a burial site in 1788, although burials still continued there for a number of years afterward. Some of the funerary markers were transferred to St. Louis No. 1, which became the new burying ground for the area. Stories concerning shadowy forms still circled the old ground after dark, though. It is also whispered that some of these ghostly shapes have transferred themselves to the St. Louis Cemetery on Basin Street between Conti and St. Louis. Vampires, it would seem, still haunt the French Quarter.
But, although the shadowed streets of New Orleans contain their own dangerous ghosts and each district of the city holds its own dark secrets, it is out in the swamps and bayous, way beyond the city limits, that bizarre vampires truly hold sway. And the brooding landscape does nothing to quell the traveler’s apprehension as he or she journeys through this territory. Driving out of New Orleans along Interstate 10, it is unsettling to know that sections of the road are actually supported by piles driven into the swamp where all manner of beings might lurk. Just outside the city lies the second largest area of swamp and bayou in Louisiana—the Honey Island Swamp, named after the swarms of honeybees that are found there. Only the Atchafalaya Swamp near Lafayette is bigger. The region is an “overflow swamp” fed by the Pearl River, which flows into it and covers an area of 35,000 acres.
The place certainly has slightly sinister overtones. Clumps of cypress, red maple, water elm, and tupelo gum trees rise up out of the watery depths like malignant sentinels, creating a gloomy twilight that stretches all through the swamplands. The near twilight is enhanced by large areas of duckweed floating on the top of the water, creating a blanket of deep green, and the seemingly unending curtains of lacy, pearl-grey Spanish Moss, which hangs from the branches of the trees. Here and there, little creeks run off into the depths and twisting trails lead across navigable land into the very depths of the wilderness. And here and there the roofs of small (and possibly abandoned) cabins can be seen from the roadway and through the trees. These may have been erected to facilitate the fishing camps that are set up along the creeks and swampholes going further into the marshlands. Abandoned fishing camps are scattered through these swamplands, suggesting that humans have been somehow all but overwhelmed by an encroaching nature. And there are stories of small and almost abandoned villages hidden away deep in the swamps. These have been built by runaway slaves and evil-doers from the nearby major slave port of New Orleans, who set up communities in the swamps just beyond the reach of the authorities. There are also a number of former plantations close by, and slaves also ran away from these from time to time, disappearing into what was then trackless waste and seldom being heard of again. If these individuals did form some of these near-abandoned settlements, exactly what lives there now?
There have always been tales about places such as the Honey Island Swamp. As the traveler journeys deeper into the marshes, past the fallen cabins tucked away among the trees, the sense of a brooding presence grows stronger, as does the feeling that one is being watched. Decaying vegetation fills the air with a sweet, rotten smell, often suggestive of old cemeteries and hidden, badly overgrown graveyards. Little wonder then that such regions have become associated with monsters and the Undead. And the creatures that lurk in the swampy depths—part devil, part vampire—are not the beings that are found in the cities, but are rather a wilder, more exotic, mixture of beliefs and perspectives—French, Creole, African—but are nonetheless deadly for that. A number of these beings are a fusion of vampire and werewolves—sometimes referred to as loup garou (from the Latin lupus, meaning “wolf” and possibly the Frankish garulf, meaning a man who is supernaturally more than he seems, perhaps able to transform himself into something else). The term loup garou (also referred to in parts of America as loogaroo) is generally taken to mean a werewolf, but in some cultures it can mean slightly more and in the swamps of Louisiana it is referred to as rougarou, which can sometimes mean a combination of werewolf, vampire, and witch. Such things exist in the swamplands, such as the Honey Island Swamp.
One of the most popular tales concerning these swamps is the legend of “Old Handsome.” The name is ironic and full of black Louisiana humor, for “Old Handsome” is anything but good-looking. Instead, it is a “booger” or a “hant” that lives deep in the swamps. It is both a monster and one of the Undead. It can both drink human blood and eat human flesh, and has lived in the swamplands for several centuries. Some legends suggest that “Old Handsome” is a sort of ghost of a slave who fled from a plantation and became lost in the Honey Island Swamp. He died, but his body was taken over by forces that had dwelt among the trees since the earliest times and turned it into a kind of vampiric monster. Some say that it appears in the guise of a great reptile—like an alligator—other accounts say that it has the guise of a thing made out of tree roots and foliage, which can actually lurk under the surface of the swamp.
In other versions of the story, “Old Handsome” appears as the spectre of a French pirate who operated off the Louisiana coast. In order to avoid capture in New Orleans, he traveled into the swamps and bayous where, like the slave in the previous version, he was somehow possessed by the ancient powers that lurked there and became a ravening monster. In this version, the being resembles a kind of smoke or mist (the swamps are full of fogs and mists that are often associated with “hants,” which foll
ow travelers deep into the wilderness and attack them when they least expect it). In this, he takes the guise of a feufollet, a kind of Will-o-the-Wisp–type entity that can lure travelers into dangerous places and then kill them. In other versions of the tale, this vampire assumes the form of a great reptile that waits just beneath the surface of the waters to trap the unwary. It is said that “Old Handsome” can suddenly rise up out of the water or appear from a dark area among the trees ready to attack and drink blood, and in this way it parallels the provincial French idea of Le Grand Bissetre or some of the German horrors that lived in the gloom and half-light. Certainly the swamps have an almost primal feel to them and they are never really silent or empty—the air is filled with the continuous sound of cicadas and the furtive movements of animal life.