by Aaron Mahnke
THAT WHICH WAS BURIED
While it might be a surprise to some people, graves like the one in Griswold are actually quite common. Today we live in the Bram Stoker era of vampires, so our expectations and imagery are highly influenced by his novel and the world it evokes. Victorian gentlemen in dark cloaks. Mysterious castles. Sharp fangs protruding over blood-red lips.
But the white face with red lips started life as nothing more than stage makeup, an artifact from a 1924 theatrical production of the novel, called Count Dracula. Another feature we associate with Dracula, the high collar, also started there. With wires attached to the points of the collar, the actor playing Dracula could turn his back on the audience and drop through a trap door, leaving an empty cape behind to fall to the floor moments later.
The true myth of the vampire, though, is far older than Stoker. It’s an ancient tree with deep and twisted roots. As hard as it is for popular culture to fathom, the legend of the vampire—and of the people who hunt it—actually predates Dracula by centuries.
Just a little further into the past from Bram Stoker, in the cradle of what would one day become the United States, the people of New England were identifying vampire activity in their towns and villages, and then assembling teams of people to deal with what they perceived as a threat.
It turns out that Griswold was one of those communities. According to the archaeologists who studied the twenty-nine graves, a vast majority of them were contemporary to the vampire’s burial, and most of those showed signs of an illness. Tuberculosis is the most likely guess. Which goes a long way toward explaining why the people did what they did.
The folklore was clear: the first to die from an illness was usually the cause of the outbreak that followed. Patient Zero might be in the grave, sure, but they were still at work, slowly draining the lives of the others. Because of this belief, bodies all across the Northeast were routinely exhumed and destroyed in one way or another. In many ways, it was as if old superstitions were clawing their way out of the depths of the past to haunt the living.
The details of another case, from Stafford, Connecticut, in the late 1870s, illustrate the ritual perfectly. After a family there lost five of their six daughters to illness, the first to have passed away was dug up and examined. This is what was recorded about the event:
Exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs, still fresh and living, encased in rotten and slimy integuments, and in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastening to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered.
This sort of macabre community event happened frequently in Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Hampshire, Ontario, and—of course—Rhode Island, where the family of Mercy Brown exhumed her body after others died.
Mercy Brown wasn’t really the first American vampire, though. As far as we can tell, that honor goes to the wife of Isaac Burton of Manchester, Vermont, all the way back in 1793. And for as chilling and dark as the exhumation of Mercy Brown might have been, the Burton incident puts that story to shame.
Captain Isaac Burton married Rachel Harris in 1789, but their marriage was brief. Within months of the wedding, Rachel took sick with tuberculosis and soon died, leaving her husband a young widower. Burton married again in April 1791, this time to a woman named Hulda Powell. But again, within just two years of their marriage, Burton’s new bride also became ill. Friends and neighbors started to whisper, and as people are prone to do, they began to try and draw conclusions. Unanswered questions bother us, so we tend to look for reasons. And the people of Manchester thought they knew why Hulda was sick.
Although Isaac’s first wife, Rachel, had been dead for nearly three years, the people of Manchester suggested that she was the cause. Clearly, from her new home in the graveyard, she was draining the life from her husband’s new bride. With Burton’s permission, the town prepared to exhume her and end the curse.
The town blacksmith brought a portable forge to the gravesite, and nearly a thousand people gathered there to watch the grim ceremony unfold. Rachel’s heart, liver, and lungs were all removed from her corpse and then reduced to ashes. Sadly, though, Hulda Burton never recovered, and she died a few months later.
This ancient ritual, at least as far as the people of Manchester, Vermont, were concerned, had somehow failed them. They did what they had been taught to do, as unpleasant as it must have been, and yet it hadn’t worked.
Which was odd, because that hadn’t always been the case.
IF THE SHOE FITS
As we’ve seen, a lot of what we think we know about the vampire legend is thanks to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is set in Romania. But Stoker never traveled there, and the castle that he describes as the home of Dracula was based on an illustration of Bran Castle he found in a book. The image of this Romanian castle may have captured the mood he was aiming for, but as far as historians can tell, the castle has no connection to the historical Vlad III, or Vlad Draculea.
The notion of a vampire, or at least of an undead creature that feeds on the living, does have roots in the area, though. Stoker was close, but he missed the mark by a little more than three hundred miles. The real roots of the legend, according to most historians, can be found in modern-day Serbia.
The Serbia of today sits at the southwestern corner of Romania, just south of Hungary. Between 1718 and 1739, the country passed briefly from the hands of the Ottoman Empire to the control of the Austrians. Because of its place between these two empires, the land was devastated by war and destruction, and people were frequently moved around in service to the military. And, as is often the case, when people cross borders, so do ideas.
Petar Blagojevich was a Serbian peasant in the village of Kisilova in the early 1700s. Not much is known about his life, but we do know that he was married and had at least one son. And Petar died in 1725, at the age of sixty-two, of unknown causes. In most stories, that’s the end. But not here. You probably knew that, though, didn’t you?
In the eight days that followed Petar’s death, other people in the village began to pass away. Nine of them, in fact. And all of them made startling claims on their deathbeds—details that seemed impossible to prove but were somehow the same in each case. Each person was adamant that Petar Blagojevich, their recently deceased neighbor, had come to them in the night and attacked them.
Petar’s widow even made the startling claim that her dead husband had actually walked into her home and asked for, of all things, his shoes. She believed so strongly in this visit that she moved to another village to avoid future visits. And the rest of the people of Kisilova took notice. They needed to take action, and that would begin with digging up Petar’s corpse.
Inside the coffin, they found Petar’s body to be remarkably well preserved. Some noticed how the man’s nails and hair had grown. Others remarked at the condition of his skin, which was flush and bright, not pale. It wasn’t natural, they said, and something had to be done.
They turned to a man named Frombald, a local representative of the Austrian government, and with the help of a priest he examined the body for himself. In his written report, he confirmed the earlier findings and added his observation that fresh blood could be seen inside Petar’s mouth.
Frombald described how the people of the village were overcome with fear and outrage, and how they proceeded to drive a wooden stake through the corpse’s heart. Then, still afraid of what the creature might be able to do to them in the future, the people burned the body. Frombald’s report details all of it, but he also makes the disclaimer that he wasn’t responsible for the villagers’ actions. Fear, he said, drove them to it, nothing more.
Petar’s story was powerful, and it created a panic that quickly spread throughout the region. It was the first event of its kind in history to be recorded in official government documents, but there was still no explanation for what had been observed.
Just a year later, though, something happened, and the legend has never been the sa
me.
CARGO IN THE BLOOD
Arnold Paole was a former soldier, one of the many men transplanted by the Austrian government in an effort to defend and police their newly acquired territory. No one is sure where he was born, but his final years were spent in a Serbian village along the Great Morava River, near Paracin.
In his postwar life, Arnold had become a farmer, and he frequently told stories from days gone by. In one such story, Arnold claimed that he had been attacked by a vampire years before, while living in Kosovo. He survived, but the injury continued to plague him until he finally took action. He said that he cured himself by eating soil from the grave of the suspected vampire. And then, after digging up the vampire’s body, he collected some of its blood and smeared it on himself.
And that was it. According to Arnold, and the folklore that drove him to do it, he was cured. After he died in a farming accident in 1726, though, people began to wonder, because within a month of his death, at least four other people in town complained that Arnold had visited them in the night and attacked them.
When those four people died, the villagers began to whisper in fear. They remembered Arnold’s stories of being attacked by a vampire, of taking on the disease himself, of his own attempt to cure himself. But what if that hadn’t worked? Out of suspicion and doubt, they decided to exhume his body and examine it.
Here, for what was most likely the first time in recorded history, the story of the vampire was taking on the form of a communicable disease, transmitted from person to person through biting. This might seem obvious to us now, but we’ve all grown up with the legend fully formed. To the people of this small Serbian village, though, this was something new, and horrific.
What they found seemed like conclusive evidence, too: fresh skin, new nails, longer hair and beard. Arnold even had blood in his mouth. Putting ourselves in their context, it’s easy to see how they might have been chilled with fear. So they drove a stake through his heart.
One witness claimed that as the stake pierced the corpse’s chest, the body groaned and bled. Unsure what else to do, they burned the body. And then they did the same to the bodies of the four who had died after claiming Arnold had attacked them. They covered all their bases, so to speak, and then walked away.
Five years later, however, another outbreak spread through the village. We know this because so many people died that the Austrian government sent a team of military physicians from Belgrade to investigate the situation. These men, led by two officials named Glaser and Flückinger, were special: they were trained in communicable diseases.
Which was a good thing. By January 7, 1731—just eight weeks after the beginning of the outbreak—seventeen people had died. At first, Glaser and Flückinger looked for signs of a contagious disease, but they came up empty-handed. They noted signs of mild malnutrition, but nothing deadly could be found.
The clock was ticking, though. The villagers were living in such fear that they had been gathering together in large groups each night, taking turns keeping watch for the creatures they believed were responsible. They even threatened to pack up and move elsewhere. Something needed to be done, and quickly.
Thankfully, there were suspects. The first was a young woman named Stana, a recent newcomer to the village, who had died during childbirth early in the outbreak. It seemed to have been a sickness that took her life, but there were other clues. Stana had confessed to smearing vampire blood on herself years before, as protection. But that, the villagers claimed now, had backfired, most likely turning her into one instead.
The other suspect was an older woman named Milica. She too was from another part of Serbia and had arrived shortly after Arnold Paole’s death. Like so many others, she had a history. Neighbors claimed she was a good woman who had never done anything intentionally wicked. But she had told them once of how she’d eaten meat from a sheep killed by a vampire.
And that seemed like enough evidence to push the investigators to go deeper—literally. With permission from Belgrade, Glaser and the villagers exhumed all of the recently deceased, opening their coffins for a full examination. And while logic and science should have prevailed in a situation like that, what they found only deepened their belief in the supernatural.
Of the seventeen bodies, only five appeared normal, in that they had begun to decay in the expected manner. These five were reburied and considered safe. But it was the other twelve that alarmed the villagers and government men alike, because these bodies were still fresh.
In the report filed in Belgrade on January 26, 1732, signed by all five of the government physicians who witnessed the exhumations, the witnesses claimed that these twelve bodies were completely untouched by decay. Their organs still held what seemed to be fresh blood, their skin appeared healthy and firm, and their nails and hair apparently had grown since burial.
We understand decomposition much better today and recognize that these are not uncommon findings, but three centuries ago it was less about science and more about superstition. This didn’t seem normal to them. And so when the physicians wrote their report, they used a term that, until that very moment, had never before appeared in any historical account of such a case: they described finding the twelve bodies in a “vampiric” condition. In the face of so many unanswered questions, this was the only conclusion they could commit to.
With that, the villagers did what their tradition demanded: they removed the heads from each corpse, gathered all of the remains into a pile, and then burned the whole thing. The threat to their village was finally dead and gone.
But something new had been born. Something more powerful than a monster, something that lives centuries and spreads like fire.
A legend.
THE IMMORTAL ONE
Many aspects of folklore haven’t fared too well under the critical eye of science. Today we have a much deeper understanding of how disease really works and what happens to the body after people die. And while experts are still careful to explain that every corpse decomposes in a slightly different way, we have a better grasp of the entire process now than at any previous time in history.
Answers, when we find them, can be a relief. It’s safe to say that today we don’t have to fear a vampiric infection when the people around us get sick. But still, at the center of these old stories were people, normal folk like you and me, who simply wanted to do what was right. We might handle things differently today, but it’s hard to fault them for trying.
Answers don’t kill every myth, though. Vampire stories, like their immortal subjects, have simply refused to die. In fact, they can still be found if you know where to look for them.
In the small Romanian village of Marotinu de Sus, near the southwestern corner that borders Bulgaria and Serbia, authorities were called in to investigate an illegal exhumation. But this wasn’t in 1704, or even 1804. No, this happened just a decade ago.
Petre Toma had been the clan leader there in the village, but after a lifetime of illness and hard drinking, his accidental death in the field came almost as a relief to his family and friends. That’s how they put it, at least. So when he was buried in December 2003, the community moved on.
But then individuals from Petre’s family began to get sick. First it was his niece, Mirela Marinescu. She complained that her uncle had attacked her in her dreams. Her husband made the same claim, and both offered their illness as proof. Even their infant child was not well. Luckily, the elders of the village immediately knew why.
In response, six men gathered together one evening in early 2004. They entered the local graveyard close to midnight and made their way to the burial site of Petre Toma. Using hammers and chisels, they broke through the stone slab that covered the grave and then moved the pieces aside.
They drank as they worked. Can you blame them? They were opening the grave of a recently deceased member of their community, but I think it was more than that. In their minds, they were putting their lives in danger. Because there, inside the grave they had jus
t uncovered, lay the stuff of nightmares: a vampire.
What these men did next will sound strangely familiar, but to them it was simply the continuation of centuries of tradition. They cut open the body using a knife and a saw. They pried the ribs apart with a pitchfork and then cut out the heart.
According to one of the men who were there, when the heart was removed, they found it full of fresh blood—proof, to them at least, that Petre had been feeding on the village. When they pulled it free, the witnesses said that the body audibly sighed and then went limp. It’s hard to prove something that six incredibly superstitious men—men who had been drinking all night, mind you—claimed they witnessed in a dark cemetery. But to them it was pure, unadulterated truth.
They then used the pitchfork to carry the heart out of the cemetery and across the road to a field, where they set it on fire. Once it was burned completely, they collected the ashes and funneled them into a bottle of water. They offered this tonic to the sick family, who willingly drank it. It was, after all, what they had been taught to do.
Amazingly, everyone recovered. No one died of whatever illness they were suffering from, and no one reported visits from Petre Toma after that. In their mind, the nightmare was over. These men had saved their lives.
Maybe something evil and contagious has survived for centuries, spreading across borders and oceans. It’s certainly left a trail of horrific events in its wake, and it’s influenced countless tales and superstitions, all of which seem to point to a real-life cause. Far from being unique to Serbia or Romania, this thing is global.
And as if that weren’t enough, this horrible, ageless monster is—and always has been—right inside each of us. Like a vampiric curse, we carry it in our blood. But it’s probably not what you’d expect.
It’s fear.
THE VAMPIRE FOLKLORE of our ancestors is as varied and textured as the countless modern versions that Hollywood presents us with each year. Most, however, still focus on some aspect of Bram Stoker’s famous novel. It’s fair to say that our love for the story of Dracula is just as undying as the monster himself.