Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters

by Matt Kaplan

  For Homer, blood is clearly a link between the dead and the living, even if it has to be spilled from an animal’s body onto the ground to have this effect. However, while the spirits in the Odyssey are a tantalizing ancestor to the modern vampire, they are still very different, and it is not until nearly two thousand years after Homer, during the late 1100s, that creatures more like the vampires of modern fiction appear in Europe. The person who documents these monsters is William of Newburgh, an English historian who is widely thought to have had a network of trustworthy informants who helped him report on historic events that took place between the days of William the Conqueror in 1066 and those of Richard the Lionheart in 1198. In his Historia rerum Anglicarum, amid information about royalty and political events, he tells the tale of an evil man who dies from a fall shortly after discovering his wife is having an affair:

  A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster. But those precautions were of no avail; for the atmosphere, poisoned by the vagaries of this foul carcass, filled every house with disease and death by its pestiferous breath.

  Death comes to many people after the evil man’s burial, and desperate to bring the monster’s curse to an end, two brothers take action:

  Two young men, who had lost their father by this plague, mutually encouraging one another, said, “This monster has already destroyed our father, and will speedily destroy us also, unless we take steps to prevent it. Let us, therefore, do some bold action which will at once ensure our own safety and revenge our father’s death. There is no one to hinder us; for in the priest’s house a feast is in progress, and the whole town is as silent as if deserted. Let us dig up this baneful pest, and burn it with fire.” Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames, it was announced to the guests what was going on, who, running thither, enabled themselves to testify henceforth to the circumstances. When that infernal hell-hound had thus been destroyed, the pestilence which was rife among the people ceased, as if the air, which had been corrupted by the contagious motions of the dreadful corpse, were already purified by the fire which had consumed it.

  The monster is never called “vampire,” but the connections to the creatures we know as vampires today are strong. He was “issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time” and responsible for the deaths of many people in the surrounding area. Then, when the brothers attack him, William states that they “inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons.” A leech is a bloodsucking creature, but this passage steers clear of actually saying this was a bloodsucking monster.

  However, a return to the original Latin hints that there is more: “Nec territi juvenes, quos ira stimulabat, vulnus exanimi corpori intulerunt: ex quo tantus continuo sanguis effluxit ut intelligeretur sanguisuga fuisse multorum.” This can be translated as, “The brave young men, excited by wrath, struck a wound on the lifeless corpse, from which so much blood then flowed that it was understood that he had been the bloodsucker of many.”59

  Like Homer’s ghosts, we again find a connection between the undead and a thirst for blood. The difference this time is that the undead creature in this story is definitely malevolent and bringing harm to people in the real world, whereas the ghosts in the Odyssey are not harming anyone.

  William of Newburgh told many similar stories of the dead rising from the grave, and he had much company. In 1591, in the town of Breslau (now the Polish city of Wrocław), a shoemaker who killed himself by putting a knife through his neck, came back to haunt those around him by pressing against their necks in the night. He was ultimately found in his grave with the wound in his neck just as fresh and red as it had been when he died. In 1746, the French abbot Augustin Calmet reported, “A new scene is offered to our eyes. People who have been dead for several years, or at least several months, have been seen to return, to talk, to walk, to infest the villages, to maltreat people and animals, to suck the blood of their close ones, making them become ill and eventually die.”

  The solution to the undead threat that locals turned to was exactly what William of Newburgh described. They dug up the graves of the offending monsters to destroy them and found that recently buried corpses often had blood on their lips, bloated stomachs that looked as if they had just fed, blood still flowing inside their bodies, fresh-looking organs, clawlike fingernails, and elongated canine teeth. Terrified by these sights, people chopped off heads, drove stakes through hearts, and jammed bricks into decaying mouths to keep the monsters from biting anything more. It must have been dreadful business, but there are no reports of the monsters ever fighting back. They are always just corpses in graves taking a beating.

  Finally, after hundreds of years of terrorizing Europe, all these walking corpses and ghosts earn the name “vampire” in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1745. It was described as “a preternatural being of a malignant nature (in the original and usual form of the belief, a reanimated corpse), supposed to seek nourishment, or do harm, by sucking the blood of sleeping persons.” People must have been scared out of their socks.

  Mortifying misunderstanding

  With so many traits and behaviors being associated with these early vampires, it is likely there were several fears merging together to form these monsters. As such, it seems best to start with the most concrete details being described: Vampires had bloody mouths, bloated stomachs, fresh blood in their bodies, and, sometimes, claws and fangs.

  The Europeans who were initially digging up corpses were probably not exaggerating. After people die, bacteria living within the body often continue to be productive and generate gases that collect inside. The gas production leads to an effect that morticians refer to as “postmortem bloat,” and while it has nothing to do with diet or recent feeding, it can make the belly look swollen and lead people to conclude that the corpse has recently eaten.

  In addition, gas buildup inside the body can cause blood to get pushed up from the lungs, passed through the trachea, and out of the mouth so that it stains the teeth and lips. This likely created the illusion that the bloated stomach was not simply full, but full of blood that the corpse had recently consumed, logically leading to the idea that the monster fed on blood.

  Furthering the idea of the animated corpse, under certain circumstances bacteria-created gases can move past the vocal cords and create sound. This often occurs when bodies are handled or meddled with after death, causing corpses to make noises as if they are groaning or, in rare cases, speaking.60

  As for elongated canines and clawlike fingernails, there is a medical explanation for this too. A
fter death, tissues die and waste away; the skin begins to shrink, and this leads it to be pulled back along both the nail beds and the gum line. As a result, the nails and teeth become more prominently exposed than they were at the time of burial. Of course, this is an illusion, but to early vampire hunters who had worked themselves into a lather over the perceived plague of the undead, these were fangs and claws indicative of a vampiric transformation.

  All of these natural processes can explain the descriptions of early vampires and can even account for why Homer, way back in ancient Greece, suggested that the dead liked to feed on blood. But one thing that is not immediately clear is why the belief of the dead leaving their graves to attack the living gained such popularity during the 1100s when William of Newburgh was writing but not during the days of Homer. One possibility worth considering is that people being buried during William’s time were not actually dead.

  Today there are a lot of tools available, like blood pressure cuffs, stethoscopes, and heart monitors, that help doctors determine whether someone is alive or dead. Yet even with these devices, patients with very weak or infrequent heartbeats can easily be declared dead by mistake. As an example, in Jan Bondeson’s book Buried Alive, which goes into great detail on how accidental burials happened (and still do), the tale is told of a Frenchman named Angelo Hays who suffered a brutal motorcycle accident in 1937. At the hospital he was not breathing, had no detectable pulse, and had a serious head injury. The doctor, using a stethoscope, could not hear anything, and Hays was sent to the morgue. Three days later, as he was buried, an insurance company realized Hays had been covered by a policy for up to 200,000 francs and sent an inspector out to investigate the accident before paying up. The inspector ordered the body exhumed to look at the injuries and to confirm the cause of death. Remarkably, the doctor in charge found the corpse to still be warm.61 Hays returned to the land of the living and is thought to have survived his near-death ordeal by being buried in loose soil that allowed some flow of oxygen to the coffin and by needing very little oxygen in the first place as the result of his head injury reducing all metabolic activities in the body. Bondeson relates a few more similar stories and argues that if we see such cases now, they probably were taking place somewhat more often in the past when vital sign monitoring tools were not available. Could such events of still-living but “geologically challenged” patients have been feeding into undead mythology?

  Rising from the grave

  In 1938, the author, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, then a student of the noted anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University, proposed there might be some material basis for the stories told in Haiti of individuals being raised from their graves by voodoo masters. These raised people, or zombies, legends said, were robbed of their identities, enslaved, and forced to work indefinitely on plantations. Hurston was not believed. For decades, the wider research community ignored her suggestions and in some cases actively ridiculed her, but this attitude eventually changed.

  In May 1962, a man spitting up blood and sick with fever and body aches sought help at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, a facility operated in Haiti by an American charity. Two doctors, one of whom was an American, did their best to save him, but to no avail. The man’s condition deteriorated and he was declared dead shortly after his arrival. At the time of his death, he was diagnosed as suffering from critically low blood pressure, hypothermia, respiratory failure, and numerous digestive problems. What exactly caused such systemwide problems remained a mystery. The man’s sister was called in to identify his body and stamped her thumbprint to the death certificate to confirm he was her brother and that he was, indeed, dead. Eight hours later he was buried in a small cemetery near his village, and ten days later a large stone memorial slab was laid over his grave.

  In 1981, the sister was approached by a man at her village market who introduced himself to her using the boyhood name of the dead brother. It was a name that only she and a handful of other family members knew, so he seemed real enough. The man explained that he had been made into a zombie and forced to work on a sugar plantation with many other zombies until their master died and the zombies were freed. The media went crazy with the story, particularly in Haiti, and Lamarck Douyon, the director of the Psychiatric Institute in Port-au-Prince, made up his mind to test whether this zombie tale could possibly be true.

  Douyon knew that digging up the grave would prove nothing; if the man and his zombie story were fraudulent, it would have been easy for the deceivers to remove remains from a rural village cemetery. Instead, Douyon collaborated with the family to construct the ultimate identity test. He would ask the man a series of questions that only the brother would know all the answers to. The man passed the test, and later, when the sister’s thumbprint and the thumbprint on the death certificate were confirmed by Scotland Yard to be identical, Douyon concluded the man’s story was likely true. There had to be something real about the zombie mythology of the island.

  All of the evidence pointed to the idea that some sort of a poison had been used to make the man appear dead after making him quite ill. Then, after he was buried, he had been exhumed by his poisoner so he could be enslaved. Realizing that this was a matter for a biochemist rather than a psychologist, Douyon and other doctors in Haiti asked the Harvard ethnobiologist Edmund Wade Davis to get involved.

  Davis conducted several expeditions to Haiti and collected five zombie poison recipes from four different locations. All the poisons varied in the number of tarantulas, lizards, millipedes, and nonvenomous snakes added to the brew, but there were a handful of similarities that caught Davis’s attention. All recipes contained a species of ocean-dwelling worm (Hermodice carunculata), a specific tree frog (Osteopilus dominicensis), a certain toad (Bufo marinus), and one of several puffer fish (also known as blowfish in some regions).

  Since these organisms appeared in all the different zombie poisons, Davis focused his attention on them. He found that the worm had bristles on its body that could paralyze people, and the tree frog was closely related to a frog species that released toxins on its body that could cause blindness in those who touched it. Furthermore, the toad, he learned, was a chemical nightmare. Some of the compounds in its body functioned as anesthetics, some as muscle relaxants, and some as hallucinogens. He noted that earlier studies conducted with the toad compounds had discovered they induced a rage similar to the berserker rages found in Norse legends, and these studies suggested that compounds of closely related toads had once been consumed by ancient barbarians as they charged with reckless courage into battle and shrugged off all but the most lethal attacks.62 But by far the most interesting ingredients in the zombie poisons were the puffer fish.

  Puffer fish, which are well known for their deadly nerve toxins, are said to be tasty. Eating them comes with the serious risk of being poisoned, but this doesn’t put off the Japanese. Called fugu in Japan, puffer fish is something of a dining adventure that popularly leaves consumers with feelings of body warmth, euphoria, and mild numbness around the mouth. Of course, if the chef gets fugu preparation wrong, diners end up in the hospital. Because the fish is so popular, hospitalization occurs with relative frequency and, as a result, there is a lot of medical literature on what fugu poisoning looks like.

  Common symptoms include malaise, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, very low blood pressure, headache, and initial numbness around the lips and mouth that spreads to the rest of the body and often becomes severe. Eyes become glassy, and patients who survive the experience say it felt as if their bodies were floating while they could not move. They remained fully aware of their surroundings and alert during the poisoning experience. In one dramatic account, a fourteen-year-old boy in Australia, who accidentally ate puffer fish while on a camping trip with his family, recalled his family talking in the car as he was taken to the hospital, the nurses wishing him good morning and good night, and the doctors speaking their medical mumblings all while entirely paralyzed and feeling “light.
”

  Davis found this intriguing because when he interviewed the man who claimed to have been made a zombie, he learned that he had remained conscious the entire time, heard his sister weeping when she was told that he had died, and had the sensation of floating above the grave. These descriptions, in combination with the medical reports filed when the man had been in the hospital on the night of his “death,” suggested that puffer fish poison had been at work.

  Upon further investigation, Davis learned that zombie makers created their poisons and exposed victims to these toxins by releasing them in the air near where the person lived or by putting them in places where the person was likely to make contact, such as on door handles or window latches. Lacing food with the poison was never done, because zombie makers believed it would kill the victim too completely.

  After burial, zombie makers had their assistants pull victims out of their graves and then beat them fiercely to drive their old spirit away. This was followed by binding the exhumed person to a cross, baptizing them with a new zombie name, and force-feeding them with a paste made from sweet potato, cane syrup, and Datura stramonium, one of the most hallucinogenic plants known.

  Davis suggested in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 1983 that these ghastly experiences, combined with the potent initial poisoning, created a state of psychosis that literally transformed people into zombies who would do anything they were told by their masters. This, he argued, explained why voodoo magic was widely perceived as raising the dead and why Hurston was right. People literally were being buried alive and then dragged back to the living world as zombies.