The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  There are, Daskalos claims, three kinds of possession: by ill-disposed human spirits; by demonic entities; and by elementals (the latter being human thoughts and desires that have taken on a life of their own). He goes on to describe a case of spirit possession of the first type. Daskalos was approached by the parents of a girl who claimed that she was being haunted by the spirit of her dead fiancé. Although they had lived together, she had refused to allow him to possess her until they were married. He died of tuberculosis, haunted by unfulfilled cravings. “Each night before she would go to bed he would semi-hypnotise her and induce her to keep the window of her room open. He would then enter inside a bat and would come to her. The bat would wedge itself on her neck and draw blood and etheric [energy]”. The local priest told Daskalos how to deal with the situation. He must wait in the next room, and when he heard the bat entering, should go in and quickly shut the window; then, since the bat would attack him, he must stun it with a broom. Then he must wrap the bat in a towel and burn it in a brazier [stove]. Daskalos did this, and as the bat burned, the girl screamed and groaned. Then she calmed down and asked, “Why were you trying to burn me?” The “haunting” ceased thereafter.

  Daskalos told another story that has elements of vampirism. On a journey in southern Greece he had encountered another girl who was being haunted by a former lover, a shepherd who had been in love with her and had died in a motor accident. Five years later, when looking for some goats, the girl saw the shepherd – whose name was Loizo – and he followed her, finally making her feel so sleepy that she felt obliged to sit down. He then “hypnotized” her and caused her to experience intense sexual pleasure. When she reported the incident, she was medically examined and found to be a virgin. But three days later the shepherd came to her bed and made love to her. Medical examination revealed that she was no longer a virgin. Daskalos noticed two reddish spots on her neck. The girl told him: “He kisses me there, but his kisses are strange. They are like sucking, and I like them”.

  The doctor who examined the girl believed that she had torn the hymen with her own fingers; Daskalos seems to accept this but believes that Loizo made her do this.

  Daskalos claimed that two days later, he saw the shepherd coming into the house and greeted him. Loizo explained that he had wanted the girl for many years and had never had sexual relations with a woman – only with animals like donkeys and goats. Now that he was possessing her, he had no intention of letting her go. He refused to believe it when Daskalos told him he was dead. Daskalos warned him that if he persisted in possessing the girl, he would remain “in a narcotised state like a vampire”. His arguments finally convinced the shepherd, who agreed to go away.

  These two cases, taken in conjunction with the others we have considered, offer some interesting clues about the nature of the vampire. According to Daskalos, the “earthbound spirit” of the dead fiancé was able to enter an ordinary bat and then to suck her blood. This was an expression of his sexual desire, his desire to possess her. There have been many cases of so-called Vampirism in the history of sex crimes. In the early 1870s an Italian youth named Vincent Verzeni murdered three women and attempted to strangle several more. Verzeni was possessed by a powerful desire to throttle women (and even birds and animals). After throttling a fourteen-year-old girl named Johanna Motta, he disemboweled her and drank her blood. Verzeni admitted that it gave him keen pleasure to sniff women’s clothing, and “it satisfied me to seize women by the neck and suck their blood”. So it is easy to imagine that the earthbound fiancé mentioned by Daskalos should enjoy drinking the girl’s blood. But we can also see that his desire to “possess” her was also satisfied in another way – by somehow taking control of her imagination.

  Again, in the case of Loizo, we can see that the shepherd had entered the girl’s body and taken possession of her mind so that he could cause her to tear her own hymen with her fingers. This implies – as we would expect – that the lovemaking was not on the physical level, since Loizo possessed no body. (Joe Fisher seems to hint at something similar when he describes his relationship with Filipa.)

  All of this has interesting implications. The act of lovemaking seems to involve a paradox, since it is an attempt at the mingling of two bodies, an attempt that is doomed to failure by their separateness. In the Symposium, Plato expresses the paradox in an amusing myth. Human beings were originally spherical beings who possessed the characteristics of both sexes. Because their sheer vitality made them a challenge to the gods, Zeus decided that they had to be enfeebled. So he sliced them all down the centre, “as you and I might slice an apple”, and turned their faces back to front. And now the separated parts spent their lives in a desperate search for their other half, and they ceased to constitute a challenge to the gods.

  It is plain that, in its crudest form, the male sexual urge is basically a desire for “possession” and that the act of physical penetration is an act of aggression. (Most writers on Dracula, for example, have noted that it is basically a rape fantasy.) As a man holds a woman in his arms, he experiences a desire to absorb her, to blend with her, and the actual penetration is only a token union. So we might say that a “vampire” like Loizo is able to achieve what every lover dreams about: a possession that involves total interpenetration, union of minds.

  The notion of vampirism that begins to emerge from all this is simple and (provided one can accept the notion of “earthbound spirits”) plausible. Daskalos told Markides that those who commit suicide may become trapped in the “etheric of the gross material world”, unable to move to the higher psychic planes. A person who commits suicide dies in “a state of despair and confusion” and “may vibrate too close to the material world, which will not allow him to find rest”. He becomes a “hungry ghost”, wandering in and out of the minds of human beings like a man wandering through a deserted city. In all probability, he is unaware that he is dead. (The wife of Peter Plogojowitz declared that he came to her asking for his shoes; since shoes would obviously be of no use to a ghost, we must conclude that he was unaware that his feet had “dematerialized”.) Under normal circumstances, the spirit would be incapable of influencing his involuntary host or of making his presence felt; only if the host happens to vibrate with the same desires, to be “on the same wavelength”, can true “possession” occur.

  It also seems clear that some human beings have a greater ability than others to sense the presence of these entities; we call such people “psychic”. They may be totally unaware that they are psychic unless some chance event happens to reveal it. In a book entitled The Paranormal, the psychologist Stan Gooch has described how, at the age of twenty-six, he attended a séance in Coventry with a friend and spontaneously fell into a trance condition. When he awoke, he learned that several “spirits” had spoken through him.

  It was during this period, Gooch reveals in a later book entitled Creatures from Inner Space, that he had his first experience of a “psychic invasion”. He was lying in bed one Saturday morning with his eyes closed when he felt a movement on the pillow beside his head, as if someone had gently pressed a hand against it. The movement continued for some time; but when he opened his eyes, he was alone.

  Twenty years later, lying half awake in the early morning, he became aware that someone else was in bed with him. He felt that it was a composite of various girls he had known: “On this first occasion my conscious interest in the situation got the better of me, and the succubus [female demon] gradually faded away. On subsequent occasions, however, the presence of the entity was maintained, until finally we actually made love”. He notes that “from some points of view the sex is actually more satisfying than that with a real woman, because in the paranormal encounter archetypal elements are both involved and invoked”.

  Oddly enough, Gooch does not believe that his succubus was real; he thinks such entities are creations of the human mind. He cites cases of hypnotized subjects who have been able to see and touch hallucinations suggested by the hypnotist, and a
book entitled The Story of Ruth, by Dr Morton Schatzman, which describes how a girl whose father had tried to rape her as a child began to hallucinate her father and believe that he was in the room with her. He seems to believe that his succubus was a similar hallucination. Yet this view seems to be contradicted by other cases he cites in the book.

  The first of these concerns a policeman, Martin Pryer, who had always been “psychic”. At one point he decided to try practicing the control of hypnagogic imagery – the imagery we experience on the verge of sleep – and soon began having alarming experiences. On one occasion, a strange entity began to cling to his back like a limpet and held on until he staggered across the room and switched on the light. On another occasion, he thought that a former girlfriend was outside the window, and when he asked what she was doing, she replied, “You sent for me”. Then a female entity seemed to seize him from behind, clinging to his back; he sensed that it wanted him to make love to her “in a crude and violent manner”. After some minutes it faded away.

  Gooch goes on to describe the experiences of an actress friend named Sandy, who was also “psychic”. One night, she woke up and felt that the spotlight in the corner of her ceiling had changed into an eye that was watching her. Then she felt an entity – she felt it was male – lying on top of her and trying to make love to her. “One part of her was quite willing for the lovemaking to proceed, but another part of her knew that she wanted it to stop.” The entity became heavier, and another force seemed to be dragging her down through the mattress. She made an effort to imagine that she was pulling herself up through the mattress, and the pressure suddenly vanished. But when she went into the bathroom, she discovered that her mouth was rimmed with dark streaks, and when she opened it, it proved to be full of dried blood. There was no sign of a nosebleed or any other injury that could account for the blood.

  Guy Playfair has described a similar case in The Flying Cow. A girl named Marcia, who had a master’s degree in psychology, was on the beach at São Paolo when she picked up a plaster image of the sea goddess Yemanja, which had obviously been thrown into the sea as an offering. Against the advice of her aunt, she took it home. After this, she experienced a series of disasters. She began to feel exhausted and lose weight. Her pressure cooker blew up, burning her hands and face, and her oven exploded. She began to experience suicidal impulses. Then one night, an “entity” entered her bed, and she felt a penis entering her. It happened on several subsequent occasions. In desperation, she went to consult an umbanda specialist, who urged her to return the statue to the beach. As soon as she did this, the run of bad luck – and the psychic rapes – ceased.

  Such cases make it difficult to accept Gooch’s view that these entities are a kind of hypnotic hallucination. It seems obvious that he arrived at that conclusion because his “succubus” seemed to be a blend of previous girlfriends. But according to the “earthbound spirit” hypothesis, we would assume that the entity simply put these ideas into his mind – that is, into his imagination. He writes: “In short, this entity, though possessing physical and even psychological attributes familiar to me, was none the less essentially its own independent self.” And he agrees that the “archetypal elements” were, to some extent, “invoked” – that is, that he himself was conjuring them up. Sandy was able to free herself from the “psychic invasion” by imagining that she was pulling herself back up through the mattress, indicating that the entity was controlling her imagination, not her body.

  We also note that these “psychic invasions” occurred when all three subjects – Gooch, Martin Pryer, and Sandy – were either asleep or hovering between sleep and waking, and therefore in a trance condition akin to mediumship.

  The evidence, then, all seems to suggest that the vampire, like the poltergeist, is an “earthbound spirit,” a “hungry ghost” that draws vitality from human beings. Daskalos’s remark to Loizo, that “he would remain in a narcotised state like a vampire,” indicates that such spirits become, in effect, drug addicts who are unable to progress to a higher level while in the grip of their addiction.

  One of the few contemporary “vampirologists” is a graduate of the State University of New York named Stephen Kaplan. In his book Vampires Are . . . (1984) he describes how he became interested in the subject. In the course of his studies in anthropology, he noticed that “many of the customs and rituals of the primitive cultures we were studying showed striking similarities to vampire myths and legends.” This led him to suppose that there might be some basis of truth in vampire legends, and in 1971 he founded the Vampire Research Center on Long Island. As a result of interviews on the radio, he received many calls, most of which were hoaxes. The first real “vampires” he encountered were a couple who liked to taste blood. (In fact, blood is an emetic, so it would be impossible to drink it in quantity.) The woman used to whip her companion until he bled, then lick the cuts. They had formed a small group that would indulge in these practices. Another woman Kaplan interviewed obtained blood by trading sexual favours.

  Without exception, the people Kaplan interviewed were “sexually disturbed”. (In The Sexual Anomalies and Perversions by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, there is a section devoted to vampirism, in which it becomes clear that it is related to necrophilia; Hirschfeld describes, for example, a gravedigger named Victor Ardisson who drank animal blood and performed various perverted acts on female corpses whom he disinterred.) But Kaplan suggests that genuine vampirism is “the draining of physical energy from one individual to another, often via the blood”. He speaks of “psychic vampires”, people who seem to drain our physical energies. He comments that the process seems to be the reverse of “psychic healing”, whereby the healer is able to transfer energy to the patient.

  In an article on sexual occultism in the magazine The Unexplained, the occult historian Francis King describes the process by which a “magician” can cause sexual arousal in a selected victim:

  The would-be lover sits as near as possible to his intended victim. He gauges her breathing by the rise and fall of her breast, and, once he has established the exact rhythm, begins to breathe in precise unison with her. The sorcerer continues this for a period of between three and five minutes, and then contracts the muscles of his anus from five to ten seconds. This, supposedly, establishes an “astral link” between the two people involved, by bringing into action the man’s muladhara chakra, the centre of psychic activity that, according to some occultists, controls the libido. It is situated, they claim, in a part of the “subtle body” roughly corresponding to the area between the anus and the genitals. The magician then gradually increases his rate of breathing until it reaches the rate characteristic of the height of sexual activity. The “astral link” ensures that the emotions normally associated with this rapid breathing are communicated to the woman, and she immediately experiences sexual arousal. The magician then begins a conversation.

  He goes on to theorize that vampirism is a way of draining “psycho-sexual energy” from the victim.

  What is being suggested is that a man can establish a telepathic link between himself and a woman he desires and use it to influence her desires. In God Is My Adventure, Rom Landau tells a story of the philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff, which seems to indicate that he was also able to do this. One man told Landau of an occasion when he was lunching with an attractive female novelist:

  Gurdjieff caught her eye, and we saw distinctly that he began to inhale and to exhale in a peculiar way. I am too old a hand at such tricks not to have known that Gurdjieff was employing one of the methods he must have learned in the East. A few moments later, I noticed that my friend was turning pale; she seemed to be on the verge of fainting. And yet she is anything but highly strung. I was very much surprised to see her in that strange condition, but she recovered after a few moments. I asked her what the matter was, “That man is uncanny”, she whispered. “Something awful happened”, she continued. “I ought to be ashamed . . . I looked at your “friend” a moment ago, and
he caught my eye. He looked at me in such a peculiar way that within a second or so I suddenly felt as though I had been struck right through my sexual centre. It was beastly!”

  It seems likely that the “man with the mole” described in Phantasms of the Living possessed the same curious ability and that this explained why the girl had fainted at the Birmingham music festival; it also seems clear that, having established the “psychic link”, he was able to invade her dreams in the manner of a “vampire”.

  Let us, then, attempt an outline of a theory of vampirism that is in accordance with the various accounts that have been quoted. The story of Arnod Paole, like so many others, makes it clear that he was not a willing vampire; the Visum et Repertum states that he had been “troubled by a vampire” in Turkey and had eaten earth from the grave to free himself of the affliction. This was not successful, and the earthbound spirit returned after death to vampirize people in Medvegia. If we assume that vampirism is an experience akin to sexual satisfaction, then the implication is that Paole’s unquiet spirit became a vampire, much as many sexually abused children grow up to become child abusers. But this view suggests that sex itself may be regarded as a form of benevolent vampirism; the act of lovemaking, which has to rest content with an interpenetration of bodies, is an attempt at mutual absorption. In that case, the actions of sex criminals must be seen as a form of nonbenevolent vampirism. (The sex murderer Ted Bundy told police interrogators: “Sometimes I feel like a vampire”.) If we can accept this view, then it is not difficult to accept that some “earthbound spirits” or “hungry ghosts” also attempt to maintain their link with the world by a form of psychic vampirism.