It is easy to imagine how such a victim, able to move about only at night, might be taken for a werewolf. Furthermore, whereas heme injections help alleviate symptoms today, Dr. Dolphin speculated that the afflicted individuals in times past might have been driven by instinct to drink blood. If they ingested enough of it, the heme might be absorbed directly into the bloodstream through the stomach wall. And porphyria as an epidemiological rationale for vampirism offers this bonus: Too much garlic is known to destroy the functioning of heme in the liver. So a porphyria victim, believing himself prey to a vampire and therefore moved to surround himself with garlic, might by that very action inadvertently trigger the latent porphyria in his own loved ones (the disease runs in families). Once he died, and his relatives sickened in turn, it might look to all the world like the handiwork of vampires—the latter being widely supposed to prey on their next of kin.
Porphyria had its day in the sun before giving way to pellagra. First recognized in 1735, pellagra results from a deficiency of niacin and tryptophan, usually caused by a diet overly dependent on maize, or corn. Corn was planted widely across southern and eastern Europe, where the climate was warm enough for it to flourish. And that’s where pellagra became endemic.
One of the disease’s early symptoms is hypersensitivity to sunlight. The skin becomes inflamed, then turns scaly and parchment-thin (pelle agra is Italian for “rough skin”). The breath turns foul, while the tongue thickens and blackens from bleeding sores. Brain neurons degenerate, leading to unpredictable behavior: insomnia, irritability, dementia, and violence. Diarrhea brings on weight loss, refusal of food, and anorexia. Left untreated, pellagra is invariably fatal—and in the few years before dementia leads to death, the anemia caused by gastrointestinal bleeding lends its sufferers an undeniable look of the “living dead.”
Pellagra was thus a wasting disease, and the “main reason for identifying a person as a vampire,” according to Drs. Jeffery and William Hampl, “was a wasting disease.” In a 1997 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the Hampls suggest a link between the incidence of pellagra in eastern Europe and the flourishing of the vampire legend there. Because most peasant families would likely suffer from similar nutritional deficiencies, at the moment one member died from pellagra, others would doubtless be sickening too. As the surviving relatives wasted away, this dynamic might be taken as evidence of the recently dead’s having returned to prey on the living. When corpses were disinterred and examined for signs of vampirism, one telltale sign was said to be a ring of cornmeal around the mouth.
Insightful as they are, such white-jacketed explanations are ultimately unconvincing. Some element seems to have been left out—some aspect that, if not exactly supernatural, still partakes of the terrible.
A STRANGE, BATLIKE FIGURE
Despite the speculations of our scientifically inclined era, few nonfiction works on vampires have had the impact of those written in the 1920s by a medievally minded English reverend—Augustus Montague Summers. In his passages, one can almost hear the thundering cadences of the Inquisition itself:
Throughout the whole vast shadowy world of ghosts and demons there is no figure so terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight [adorned] with such fearful fascination, as the vampire, who is himself neither ghost nor demon, but yet who partakes the dark natures and possesses the mysterious and terrible qualities of both…. Foul are his ravages; gruesome and seemingly barbaric are the ancient and approved methods by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pest….
Summers (1880–1948) looked nowhere near as fierce as he sounded. Plump and pink, he sported gray curls resembling tresses and was not above applying a touch of makeup to accentuate his hazel eyes. Novelist Anthony Powell borrowed those eyes and lent them to his fictional Canon Paul Fenneau in Hearing Secret Harmonies: “They were unusual eyes, not only almost unnaturally small, but vague, moist, dreamy, the eyes of a medium. The cherubic side, increased by a long slightly uptilted nose, was a little too good to be true.”
Perhaps so, for Summers was nothing if not a man of contradictions. Growing up in comfortable surroundings near Bristol, he was baptized in the Church of England but was already drifting toward Roman Catholicism by the time he graduated from Trinity College, Oxford. Yet, his earliest poetry was openly and very erotically gay. What’s more, around the age of 20, he quite probably officiated at a black mass—a blasphemous ceremony mocking the Christian mass. He was a member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. And in 1920, Summers published the first treatise in English on the Marquis de Sade—noting, in his defense, that it was exclusively “for Adult Students of Social Questions.”
Although Summers wore the attire of a Catholic priest, it is unlikely he was ever ordained one. While he was serving a curacy near Bristol, questions had arisen about inappropriate behavior with choirboys. But Summers had been ordained a deacon in the Church of England, giving him every right to be addressed as “Reverend”—however irreverent he usually chose to be.
Montague Summers made his first big literary contributions in the study of English Restoration drama—an irreverent corpus if ever there was one, given that late 17th-century plays abounded with naughty situations and double entendres. Summers was an outstanding editor, issuing multivolume editions replete with scholarly appurtenances. He also turned out to be a superb producer and a leading light of London’s Phoenix Theatre. From 1918 to 1923, according to one friend, this “strange, bat-like figure,” dressed like a medieval cleric, cloak and all, was the talk of the London theatergoing world.
Besides the stage, Summers cherished another love: the Gothic novel, that hoary 18th-century genre featuring brave young ladies, evil European noblemen, ghosts, and spooky old castles. He had even written about Jane Austen by the day in the mid-1920s when London publishing company Kegan Paul asked him to produce two volumes on witchcraft to round out its History of Civilization series. Summers quickly churned out The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and The Geography of Witchcraft (1928). “I have endeavoured to show the witch as she really was,” he wrote in the first of those works, “an evil liver, a social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed; an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes; a member of a powerful secret organization inimicable to Church and State; a blasphemer in word and deed…battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.”
His juvenile dabblings in the occult may have rattled Summers, but here he found his voice. Soon he was translating the notorious Malleus Maleficarum, or the “Hammer of Witches”—the 15th-century witch hunters’ handbook that was the bible of the Inquisition. When all these outpourings proved remarkably successful, his publisher approached him with another idea: Might he perform encores with tomes on vampires and werewolves? Summers accepted.
“During the year 1927,” recalled his colleague, Father Brocard Sewell, “the striking and sombre figure of the Reverend Montague Summers, in black soutane and cloak, with buckled shoes—à la Louis Quatorze—and shovel hat, could often have been seen entering or leaving the reading room of the British Museum, carrying a large black portfolio bearing on its side a white label showing, in blood-red capitals, the legend, ‘VAMPIRES.’”
The fruits of heaving his portly carcass up and down those august steps were The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929), two of the most frequently quoted and referenced books in the literature of vampire studies. Even a casual perusal of their pages exhibits the breadth of Summers’s learning and the depth of his scholarship—that is, if paragraph after paragraph of untranslated Latin, German, or French does not prove too annoying. That might be Summers in a mischievous mood; quite likely, however, they betray his haste. Like many authors making a living from their pens, he was a tad overbooked in the 1920s. At times, his vampire chronicles have the feel of anthologies in the making, with his portentous pen bridging the gaps between great chunks of text plucked strai
ght from his sources. And the reverend’s professed antipathy to undue color in his narrative—“If a yarn is to be told for the shudder and the thrill, well and good; let the ruddle be thick and slab. But write the rubric without ambiguity that this is high romance to follow”—was a stricture honored more in the breach than in the observance.
What is the modern reader to make of the reverend’s conclusion that such things not only were but still are? That vampires remain an incarnate evil, as real as the buckle on his shoe? “To the feather-fool and lobcock, the pseudo-scientist and materialist,” he thundered, “these deeper and obscurer things must, of course, appear a grandam’s tale.” On the contrary, wrote Summers, they emblematize a “fundamental truth, which, however exaggerated in expression and communication, essentially informs the vampire-tradition.” Summers went so far as to suggest that vampires were as active in his day as they had been in the past, and that the public would have occasion to share his view had their attacks not been “carefully hushed up and stifled” by the authorities.
Many of the reverend’s acquaintances dismissed this as all part of his act—the persona he adopted before the reading public. It is true that, after completing The Were-wolf (1933), Summers turned away from overtly supernatural topics and returned only to cobble together an anthology or two when he needed money. Instead, he concentrated his efforts on his two-volume history of the Gothic novel, The Gothic Quest, his last major literary contribution before his death a decade later.
It’s possible that Summers genuinely believed his every claim about vampires. That might have been how he projected—or exorcised—his own forbidden impulses. We will never know, for he kept the veil tightly closed. As rare-book scholar Timothy d’Arch Smith once observed of Summers, “We are dealing very likely with a deeply divided personality.”
HYSTERICAL HIGHGATE
The long shadow of Montague Summers falls squarely on the incredible story of London’s Highgate Cemetery hauntings—a vivid example of the appeal that “true-life” vampire tales continued to exert on the human imagination in the late 20th century.
Once a favorite Victorian burial ground, Highgate Cemetery, which sprawls across a low rise overlooking north London, is a city of the dead that displays the marvelous funerary architecture of the 19th century: elaborate tombs, aspiring statues, pitying angels, pedimented mausoleums, and fantastic Egyptian avenues. By the 1960s, however, Highgate was ceding its dominion to forces both natural and preternatural. Ivy vines were creeping up the headstones, while foxes and badgers were found denning in the graves. Vandals had pushed over monuments, exposing coffins; coffins had lost their lids, exposing skeletons; weeds and wildflowers disguised dangerous sinkholes. So gloomily picturesque was the place that Hammer Studios used the cemetery as a setting for its Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1969.
This particular story, however, began two years earlier, in 1967, when two teenage girls were walking home one evening from their nearby convent school. Passing the entrance to Highgate, they saw what they afterward described as graves opening and the dead arising therefrom. One of the girls, Elizabeth Wojdyla, soon reported nightmares in which something evil, something with the snarling visage of a beast but the body of a man, was trying to get in through her bedroom window. Soon other people were spying ghostly figures in and around the cemetery: spectral cyclists, a classic woman in white, and a man in a hat. The most common sighting was a tall, floating figure with burning eyes.
Once the local paper got wind of this, all manner of ghost hunters and thrill seekers descended on Highgate. Among them was Seán Manchester, president of the British Occult Society. This self-styled psychic, an admirer of Montague Summers, eventually became the presiding bishop of something called the British Old Catholic Church. Manchester was convinced that a vampire lay behind the plethora of spectral sightings. Granted permission to examine Elizabeth Wojdyla, he detected symptoms of pernicious anemia—and what looked like two small puncture wounds in her neck. He sprinkled her room with holy water, salt, and garlic, after which her condition improved. Eventually—understandably—Wojdyla left the area.
Meanwhile, Manchester had begun talking to the press. He apparently told them his Vampire Research Society had found evidence that, back in the 18th century, one of the people who owned the house that once stood on Highgate’s site was a mysterious gentleman of eastern European extraction who had arrived in London around the time a vampire craze was sweeping the Balkans. Well, perhaps the paper embroidered Manchester’s account somewhat, for by the time it surfaced in the February 27, 1970, edition of the Hampstead and Highgate Express, that 18th-century immigrant had become a King Vampire—a medieval nobleman who once practiced black magic in Romania, was brought to London by coffin, and was buried somewhere in the neighborhood. The activities of modern Satanists, Manchester reportedly claimed, had unintentionally wakened the noble. He must therefore be hunted, staked, beheaded, and burned.
That was just what hip, youthful “swinging London” needed. On Friday the 13th of March 1970, Manchester told a television news team that he intended to perform an exorcism later that night in Highgate. Shortly thereafter, hundreds of revelers looking to make a night of it poured over the cemetery walls and swarmed among the darkened gravestones. Police officers were recalled from leave to stem the influx. Meanwhile, Manchester had managed to enter a tomb to which he had been led by “Lusia”—a sleepwalking young psychic with bite marks on her neck. There he found only empty coffins, which he seeded with garlic. No exorcism that night.
What we are told next comes entirely from Manchester. Later that summer, as Highgate hysteria reached a fever pitch, “Lusia” in a trance led him to one of the grand if crumbling mausoleums in the cemetery. Inside, he found a great coffin and, removing its heavy lid, discovered that it held a vampire, “gorged and stinking with the life blood of others,” its “glazed eyes [staring] horribly, almost mocking me.” A companion dissuaded Manchester from staking the corpse, however, so he contented himself with pronouncing an exorcism and resealing the vault with garlic-impregnated cement. But the vampire’s sleep must have been disturbed, for it decamped for the basement of a nearby mansion—the “House of Dracula,” the press gleefully nicknamed it—where, in 1977, the intrepid vampire hunter tracked it down and staked it, reducing it to slime.
This saga, believe it or not, continued until 1982, when Manchester claimed to have driven the final stake through the heart of the last remaining Highgate vampire. “Lusia,” it seems, had died in the interim and was buried in a graveyard nearby. Encountering her in a dream, however, Manchester had realized that “Lusia,” having been bitten by the vampire, was thereby infected herself—and destined to return from the dead. Visiting her grave site one autumn evening, Manchester was not at all surprised to confront what he described as a large, spiderlike creature about the size of a cat. After being dispatched in the time-honored fashion, the spider reverted to the form and figure of “Lusia.” Manchester returned her to her grave.
What you make of this astonishing story may depend on how high your eyebrow is cocked. It has been recounted in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, providing grist for a shelf load of books. It has appeared regularly in television documentaries and soon will be dramatized in a feature film. And in a sign that even vampires are now online, the harrowing happenings of Highgate are frequently—and vigorously—debated on the Web.
The truly mind-boggling thing is that so many of the story’s details could have been lifted straight from the pages of Dracula: the eastern European nobleman arriving in London by coffin, the vampire trying to enter the bedroom window, the sleepwalking “Lusia” (like the sleepwalking Lucy of the novel), and finally the vampire hunters breaking in to tombs (as Van Helsing did with his assistants). Whatever else it might be, this is life imitating art on an epic scale.
PREY IS PREY
It’s but a step from playing at vampires to believing you really are one. One night in 1959, when 16-year-old Salvat
ore Agron went on a killing spree while dressed like Béla Lugosi, he was actually the leader of a Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, gang called the Vampires; the stabbings, though of innocent people, were motivated by gang warfare. In 1996, however, when 16-year-old Roderick Ferrell and four accomplices killed the parents of his girlfriend, it was a vampire fantasy run amok. These devotees of the role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade had convened what the press later called a “cult,” cemented by cutting themselves with razor blades and drinking one another’s blood.
When Ferrell and his fellow “vampires” were arrested, a copy of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned was found in their car. The film version of that book was later implicated in a murder in Scotland, where Allan Menzies, 22, so lost himself in its fictional world that he convinced himself he was a vampire. Menzies killed his best friend, ate part of his skull, and drank some of his blood. In 1998, Joshua Rudiger, 22, certain that he was a 2,000-year-old vampire, slashed the throats of homeless people in San Francisco because, he said, he needed a drink of blood. “Prey is prey,” he supposedly told investigators.
Role-playing is one thing, compulsion something else. In 1886, German psychiatrist Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his pioneering Psychopathia Sexualis, the first compendium of case studies to illustrate the wide range of paraphilias, or what were once called sexual perversities. Case number 32 described a 26-year-old man who experienced an erotic charge from the taste of blood, stemming from a childhood incident in which he had impulsively sucked the blood from a housemaid’s cut finger:
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