The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Twenty years later, after the Turks were driven out of eastern Europe, western Europe was astonished by these gruesome tales of disinterments – of which the one quoted above is so typical. And now it was no longer possible to take an attitude of amused superiority, since many of the accounts were firsthand. An account of what happened when a man named Peter Plogojowitz was exhumed dates from 1725, seven years before the story of the vampires of Medvegia. It is recounted by another official:

  After a subject by the name of Peter Plogojowitz had died, ten weeks past – he lived in the village of Kisilova, in the Rahm district [of Serbia] – and had been buried according to the Raetzian custom, it was revealed that in this same village of Kisilova, within a week, nine people, both young and old, died also, after suffering a twenty-four-hour illness. And they said publicly, while they were yet alive, but on their deathbed, that the above-mentioned Peter Plogojowitz, who had died ten weeks earlier, had come to them in their sleep, laid himself on them, and throttled them, so that they would have to give up the ghost. The other subjects were very distressed and strengthened even more in such beliefs by the fact that the dead Peter Plogojowitz’s wife, after saying that her husband had come to her and demanded his opanki, or shoes, had left the village of Kisilova and gone to another. And since with such people (which they call vampires) various signs are to be seen – that is, the body undecomposed, the skin, hair, beard, and nails growing – the subjects resolved unanimously to open the grave of Peter Plogojowitz and see whether any such above-mentioned signs were to be found on him. To this end they came here to me, and, telling of these events, asked me and the local pope, or parish priest, to be present at the viewing. And although I at first disapproved, telling them that first the praiseworthy administration should be dutifully and humbly informed, and its exalted opinion about this should be heard, they did not want to accommodate themselves to this at all but rather gave this short answer: I could do what I wanted, but if I did not accord them the viewing and the legal recognition to deal with the body according to their custom, they would have to leave house and home, because by the time a gracious resolution was received from Belgrade, perhaps the entire village – and this was supposed to have happened once before when it was under the Turks – could be destroyed by such an evil spirit, and they did not want to wait for this.

  Since I could not hold such people from the resolution they had made, either with good words or threats, I went to the village of Kisilova, taking along the Gradisk pope, and viewed the body of Peter Plogojowitz, just exhumed, finding it, in accordance with thorough truthfulness, that first of all I did not detect the slightest odor that is otherwise characteristic of the dead, and the body – except for the nose, which was somehow sunken – was completely fresh. The hair and the beard – even the nails, of which the old ones had fallen away – had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat whitish, had peeled away, and a new fresh one had emerged under it. The face, hands, and feet, and the whole body, were so constituted, that they could not have been more complete in his lifetime. Not without astonishment, I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him. In short, all the indications were present (as remarked above) as such people are supposed to have. After both the pope and I had seen this spectacle, while the people grew more outraged than distressed, all the subjects, with great speed, sharpened a stake – in order to pierce the corpse of the deceased with it – and put this at his heart, whereupon, as he was pierced, not only did much blood, completely fresh, flow also through his ears and mouth, but still other wild signs (which I pass by out of high respect) took place. [He means that the corpse had an erection.] Finally, according to their usual practice, they burned the aforementioned body, in hoc casu, to ashes, of which I (now) inform the most laudable administration, and at the same time would like to request, obediently and humbly, that if a mistake was made in this matter, such as is to be attributed not to me but to the rabble, who were beside themselves with fear.

  Imperial Provisor, Gradisk District

  Here again we have a respectable official vouching for the fact that the corpse looked remarkably fresh and had fresh blood in the mouth.

  Let us consider these accounts in more detail. To begin with, it seems clear that the vampire is not a physical body that clambers out of its grave – as in Dracula – but some sort of ghost or spectral “projection”. In the long account of the Medvegia vampires signed by Dr. Fluchinger et al., we find that the vampire lies down beside its victim and throttles her; a mark on the girl’s throat seems to indicate that this is what happened. There is nothing here of the Draculalike vampire who sinks his pointed fangs into the victim’s flesh. What the villagers allege is that the body has been taken over by a demonic entity, which attacks the living and somehow drains their vitality. The corpse that is the home of the demonic entity then flourishes in the grave and even continues to grow new skin and nails. The detail of blood in the chest seems a little puzzling, until, we look again at the account and see that the blood is found in the breast cavity (cavitate pectoris) of the woman named Stana, while the lungs are mentioned separately later in the same sentence; in other words, when the breast was opened up, exposing the heart, fresh blood was found. There is no reason, in this particular instance, to suppose that this is the blood of the victim; it is presumably the vampire’s own.

  The many skeptics who have written on the subject of vampires usually produce the same rationalizations. These are typified by the long article on vampirism in Rossell Hope Robbins’s Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959). He points out that there must have been many premature burials and that when the grave of such an unfortunate was opened, the corpse would be found in a contorted position that suggested that it had come to life. He also points out that “the existence of maniacs who crave for blood” could have given rise to the legend of the vampire. The sudden deaths of a large number of people in a space of weeks is explained by plague or other unknown forms of illness. Paul Barber, in Vampires, Burial and Death (from which the above translations have been quoted), takes much the same line, although he admits that the premature burial theory fails to explain the Medvegia “outbreak”. But he goes on to point out that different bodies decay at different rates and that therefore, there is nothing surprising in the description of a two-month-old body that remains as fresh as when it was buried.

  All this is plausible enough. But if we read straight through the accounts by Fluchinger and the Gradisk provisor (a steward to a religious house), we see that these rationalizations simply fail to provide an adequate explanation of what has taken place. It is true that the account of Arnod Paole, the soldier who became a vampire, is secondhand, having occurred five years before the officers went to investigate the new outbreak of vampirism. We may therefore doubt whether he gave an “audible groan” as they drove a stake through his heart, and all the other details of the hearsay account. But even if we suppose that some plague was really responsible for the deaths of the seventeen villagers, it is hard to explain why eleven of the corpses were undecayed, while only four corpses were decomposed in the manner one might expect.

  In fact, the real problem with all these debunkers of the vampire theory is that they do their debunking piecemeal; that is, they concentrate on some small point that they feel they can disprove and then behave as if they have produced a total explanation that makes any further discussion unnecessary. Those people who – like myself – find their theories inadequate might well agree that vampires cannot really exist. But they simply cannot agree that the skeptics have proved their point and produced a convincing explanation for the many highly detailed stories.

  Paul Barber also cites an interesting case known as the Shoemaker of Breslau. He takes his version from an 1868 collection of Prussian folklore by J. Grasse, but there is an earlier version of the same story in Henry More’s Antidote Against Atheism (1653). This describes how, on September 21, 1
591, a well-to-do shoemaker of Breslau, in Silesia – one account gives his name as Weinrichius – cut his throat with a knife and soon after died from the wound. Since suicide was regarded as a mortal sin, his wife tried to conceal it and announced that her husband had died of a stroke. An old woman was taken into the secret, and she washed the body and bound up the throat so skillfully that the wound was invisible. A priest who came to comfort the widow was taken to view the corpse and noticed nothing suspicious. The shoemaker was buried on the following day, September 22, 1591.

  Perhaps because of this unseemly haste, and the refusal of the wife to allow neighbours to view the body, a rumor sprang up that the shoemaker had committed suicide. After this, his ghost began to be seen in the town. Soon it was climbing into bed with people and squeezing them so hard that it left the marks of its fingers on their flesh. This finally became such a nuisance that in the year following the burial, on April 18, 1592, the council ordered the grave to be opened. The body was complete and undamaged by decay but “blown up like a drum.” The skin had peeled away from the feet, and another had grown, “much purer and stronger than the first.” He had a “mole like a rose” on his big toe – which was interpreted as a witch’s mark – and there was no smell of decay, except in the shroud itself. Even the wound in the throat was undecayed. The corpse was laid under a gallows, but the ghost continued to appear. By May 7 it had grown “much fuller of flesh.” Finally, the council ordered that the corpse should be beheaded and dismembered. When the body was opened up, the heart was found to be “as good as that of a freshly slaughtered calf.” Finally, the body was burned on a huge bonfire of wood and pitch and the ashes thrown into the river. After this, the ghost ceased to appear.

  Barber agrees that “much in this story is implausible” but points out that so many details – notably the description of the body – are so precise as to leave no doubt “that we are dealing with real events.”

  But what are these “real events”? Before we comment further, let us consider another well-known case from the same year, 1592 (which is, of course, more than a century earlier than the famous vampire outbreak we have been discussing). This case has also been discussed by both More and Grasse and concerns an alderman of Pentsch (or Pentach) in Silesia named Johannes Cuntze (whose name More Latinizes to Cuntius). On his way to dinner with the mayor, Cuntze tried to examine a loose shoe of a mettlesome horse and received a kick, presumably on the head. The blow apparently unsettled his reason; he complained that he was a great sinner and that his body was burning. He also refused to see a priest. This gave rise to all kinds of rumors about him, including that he had made a pact with the Devil.

  As Cuntze was dying, with his son beside the bed, the casement opened and a black cat jumped into the room and leapt onto Cuntze’s face, scratching him badly; he died soon after. At his funeral on February 8, 1592, “a great tempest arose”; it continued to rage as he was buried beside the altar of the local church.

  Before he was buried, there were stories that his ghost had appeared and attempted to rape a woman. After the burial the ghost began to behave like a mischievous hobgoblin, throwing things about, opening doors, and causing banging noises so that “the whole house shaked again.” On the morning after these events animal footprints or hoof marks were found outside in the snow. His widow had the maid sleeping in her bed; the ghost of Cuntze appeared and demanded to be allowed to take his proper place beside his wife. And the parson of the parish (who is mentioned as the chronicler of these events) dreamed that Cuntze was “squeezing” him and woke up feeling utterly exhausted. The spirit was also able to cause a nauseating stench to fill the room.

  The conclusion is much as in the story of the shoemaker of Breslau. Cuntze was finally disinterred on July 20, six months after his burial, and was found to be undecayed, and when a vein in the leg was opened, the blood that ran out was “as fresh as the living.” After having been transported to the bonfire with some difficulty – his body had apparently become as heavy as a stone – he was dismembered (the blood was, again, found to be quite fresh) and burned to ashes.

  In fact, there are even earlier accounts of the walking dead. The French expert on vampires, Jean Marigny, remarks:

  Well before the eighteenth century, the epoch when the word “vampire” first appeared, people believed in Europe that the dead were able to rise from their graves to suck the blood of the living. The oldest chronicles in Latin mention manifestations of this type, and their authors, instead of employing the word “vampire” (which did not yet exist) utilized a term just as explicit, the word sanguisugae (Latin for “leech,” or “bloodsucker”). The oldest of these chronicles date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and, contrary to what one might expect, are not set in remote parts of Europe, but in England and Scotland.26

  Marigny goes on to cite four cases described by the twelfth-century chronicler, William of Newburgh, author of Historia rerum Anglicarum. These are too long to cite here (although they can be found in full in Montague Summers’s The Vampire in Europe). The first, “of the extraordinary happenings when a dead man wandered abroad out of his grave,” describes a case in Buckinghamshire, recounted to the chronicler by the local archdeacon. It describes how a man returned from the grave the night after his burial and attacked his wife. When this happened again the following night, the wife asked various neighbours to spend the night with her, and their shouts drove the ghost away. Then, like Cuntze and Weinrichius, the ghost began to create a general disturbance in town, attacking animals and alarming people. That he was a ghost, and not a physical body, is proved by the comment that some people could see him while others could not (although they “perceptibly felt his horrible presence”). The archdeacon consulted the bishop, Hugh of Lincoln, whose learned advisers suggested that the body should be dug up and burned to ashes. Hugh of Lincoln felt this would be “undesirable” and instead wrote out a charter of absolution. When the tomb was opened, the body proved to be “uncorrupt,” just as on the day it was buried. The absolution was placed on his chest and the grave closed again; after that, the ghost ceased to wander abroad.

  William of Newburgh’s other account sounds slightly more like the traditional vampire in that the ghost – of a wealthy man who had died at Berwick on Tweed – had an odor of decomposition that affected the air and caused plague. The body was exhumed (it is not recorded whether it was undecayed) and burned.

  The third story concerns a priest, chaplain of a lady of rank, at Melrose Abbey, whose life had been far from blameless; after death, his ghost haunted the cloister and appeared in the bed-chamber of the lady of rank. The body was exhumed and burned.

  In the fourth story, a dissolute lord of Alnwick Castle, in Northumberland, spied on his wife’s adultery by lying on top of the “roof” that covered her four-poster bed. The sight of his wife and her lover “clipping at clicket” so incensed him that he fell down and injured himself, dying a few days later without absolution. He also returned as a ghost to haunt the district, his stench causing a plague that killed many people. When the corpse was exhumed, it proved to be “gorged and swollen with a frightful corpulence”; when attacked with a spade, there gushed out such a stream of blood “that they realized that this leech had battened on the blood of many poor folk.” The body was cremated and the haunting ceased.

  These stories have the touches of absurdity that might be expected from an ecclesiastical chronicler of that period; yet their similarity to the other chronicles cited suggests that they have some common basis. The same applies to another work, De nugis curialum by Walter Map (1193), also cited at length by Summers.

  All these cases took place long before western Europe heard tales of vampires from former Turkish dominions, and, except in the case of the “leech” of Alnwick, there is no suggestion of blood drinking. But in most ways, the revenants behave very much like Peter Plogojowitz and the vampires of Medvegia. They haunt the living, climb into bed with people when they are asleep, and then throttl
e them, leaving them drained of energy. And when the bodies are disinterred, they are found to be undecayed. It seems very clear that there is no basic difference between the vampires of 1732 and the revenants of 1592. And when we look more closely into the accounts of the vampires, we discover that they are energy suckers rather than blood suckers. Peter Plogojowitz has fresh blood in his mouth, but it is merely a matter of hearsay that he sucked the blood of his victims – the account mentions only throttling. Otherwise, these earlier revenants behave very much like the paranormal phenomena known as poltergeists – they throw things and create disturbances.

  One of the earliest accounts of poltergeist activity can be found in a document known as Sigebert’s Chronicle, by one Sigebert of Gembloux (Belgium), which dates from the ninth century. One passage runs as follows:

  There appeared this year [858] in the diocese of Mentz [near Bingen, on the Rhine] a spirit which revealed himself at first by throwing stones, and beating against the walls of houses as if with a great mallet. He then proceeded to speak and reveal secrets, and discovered the authors of several thefts and other matters likely to breed disturbances in the neighbourhood. At last he vented his malice upon one particular person, whom he was industrious in persecuting and making odious to all the neighbours by representing him as the cause of God’s anger against the whole village. The spirit never forsook the poor man but tormented him without intermission, burnt all the corn in the barns, and set every place on fire where he came. The priests attempted to frighten him away be exorcisms, prayers, and holy water, but the spectre answered them with a volley of stones which wounded several of them. When the priests were gone he was heard to bemoan himself and say that he was forced to take refuge in the cowl of one of the priests, who had injured the daughter of a man of consequence in the village. He continued in this manner to infest the village for three years together, and never gave up until he had set every house on fire.