Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  Measuring little more than a foot from wingtip to wingtip, Desmodus generally settles on the necks of livestock for a midnight meal. But it is a stalker, too, quietly alighting near slumbering humans and stealing up to an exposed toe or nose. Its bite, at most a slight tingle, rarely disturbs a sleeper, and from the tiny puncture, a long tongue laps up the blood. Although only rarely a killer, Desmodus can weaken horses and cattle by repeated bloodlettings. It can also carry rabies—though that would not be discovered until the 1920s.

  What the bats lacked in size, however, they made up for in conjured ferocity. Probing the same Brazilian highlands that Burton had two decades earlier, British explorer James W. Wells was warned by Indians in the 1880s that “vampire bats…were said to exist in such numbers in a part of the valley of the Sapão, about sixteen miles away, that it is there impossible for any animal to live through the night.”

  Those must have been the fearsome creatures Quincey Morris had in mind. The Vampyrum spectrum of the American tropics hunts only rodents, small birds, and insects. The spectral vampire bat, however, still haunts our nightmares, still beats at our bedroom windowpanes. Before Bram Stoker, cartoonists had occasionally used bats to depict political vampires, and as we shall see in the next chapter, sensationalistic “penny dreadful” novels had likewise employed them as vehicles. But not until Dracula, and that grimly flapping stage prop that dominated its 1931 incarnation in film, did the bat become the symbol it is today: the most widely recognized iconographical emblem of the vampire.

  DRAGON OR DEVIL?

  And finally there is the matter of that name.

  Had Bram Stoker not come across a copy of William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, in which he learned of a 15th-century Romanian prince named Dracula who fought the Ottoman Turks, we might today have a forgotten 19th-century novel about a Count Wampyr—the author’s original choice for his main character’s name. Happily for literary posterity, however, Stoker responded positively to the name Dracula: Drakul is Romanian for “dragon,” but it also means “devil,” as in those distinctive Romanian landscape features Gregynia Drakuluj (Devil’s Garden) and Gania Drakuluj (Devil’s Mountain).

  That may be all there is to it. Stoker might never have known about Dracula’s other Romanian sobriquet, Vlad Tepes, or “Vlad the Impaler.”

  A portrait of Vlad Tepes hangs in Ambras Castle, Austria, alongside one of a man so hirsute he resembles a were-wolf and another of a person who lived with a lance sticking through his head. Vlad won a place in this notorious “Chamber of Curiosities” because he was considered the archetype of the bloodthirsty ruler. This reputation had been fostered by a series of best-selling German pamphlets that depicted him, in one case, dining serenely while severed limbs covered the ground and all around him bodies hung from sharpened stakes.

  Over the past several decades, a fierce debate has erupted about whether Stoker knew of Vlad’s bloodthirsty reputation. If so, did he model his Dracula directly on that historical figure? The debate is not merely academic; many, if not most, tourists visiting Romania today equate Count Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. And many, if not most, Romanians object to this misconception, for Vlad is a national hero as the defender of their country. Celebrated in poems and ballads, his statue gazes over Romanian towns, and his visage has appeared on commemorative stamps. Under no circumstances, therefore, should Vlad be associated with the world’s most famous vampire. Some locals, perceiving a business opportunity, shrug their shoulders and opt not to sweat the distinction; others justifiably resent the Vlad-vampire conflation as a myth imposed on them from outside.

  No doubt both camps are correct. Whatever sins may be attributed to Vlad, however, vampirism cannot be counted among them. True, Vlad was accused in the old German pamphlets of dipping his bread in the blood of his victims. But it’s unlikely that Bram Stoker knew much about him. The general traits of Stoker’s vampire seem to have been settled when he was still known as Count Wampyr; from Vlad, Stoker borrowed only the more dramatic name—and perhaps the hint of a proud military past. Otherwise, the fictional Count Dracula owes more to the traditional villain of Gothic romance than he does to the historical prince of Wallachia.

  That prince—he was actually a voivode, generally translated as “prince” or “duke”—was born in Transylvania in 1431. That was the year when Vlad’s father, in charge of guarding the Carpathian passes against the Ottomans, was summoned to Nuremberg, Germany. There, the Holy Roman Emperor inducted Vlad’s father into the Order of the Dragon, a military fraternity dedicated to defending Christendom against the Muslim Turks. As voivode of Wallachia, he became known as Vlad II Dracul, or “Vlad the Dragon.” When his son eventually succeeded him as voivode, he naturally became Vlad III Dracula — “the Dragon’s Son.”

  Part of southern Romania today, Wallachia is a grassy plain bordered on the east and south by the Danube River and on the north and west by the Carpathians. As the gateway to further Ottoman expansion in Europe, it lay fully exposed to the Turkish forces patrolling the river’s south bank. Therefore, Vlad II, despite his oath to the Order of the Dragon, bought a tenuous security by paying annual tribute to the sultan. He also surrendered his two younger sons as hostages for good behavior.

  By the time Vlad III Dracula became voivode in 1456, he was nursing two long-standing grievances: His years of captivity had imbued in him a deep hatred for the Turks, and the murder of his father and older brother (the brother had been buried alive) had induced a lasting enmity toward their killers, the Wallachian boyars, or nobles.

  This is where the stories of Vlad’s barbarism begin. In 1457, he invited the boyars to Tirgoviste, the Wallachian capital, for an Easter feast. There, Vlad sprang a trap: He impaled those complicit in the murders of his father and brother. The others he marched off to the mountains to build his castle, where he worked them until their clothes fell from their bodies in tatters and they were forced to slave away naked.

  Emboldened by his coup, Vlad terrorized the Transylvanians between 1459 and 1460, impaling 10,000 in the city of Sibiu, and 30,000 boyars and merchants in Brasov—allegedly in a single day. In the midst of these killing fields, a table was laid so that boyars who escaped punishment might join Dracula for an alfresco feast. Unfortunately, one of his guests could not stomach the spectacle; the nauseating odors of the rotting corpses, the Impaler noticed, seemed to overcome the man. The sensitive noble was therefore impaled on a stake higher than all the rest, thus permitting him to die above the stench.

  Two monks passing through Wallachia were accosted by Dracula, who asked them if his actions might be justified in the eyes of God. The first monk more or less told him what he wanted to hear. The second one, however, condemned his actions as reprehensible. In most German pamphlets depicting this episode, the honest monk is hoisted aloft while the cowardly one is rewarded. In most Russian pamphlets, by contrast, the honest monk is spared.

  In another tale of savagery, two ambassadors arrive from a foreign court and decline to remove their hats in the presence of Dracula. Vlad thereupon orders that their hats be nailed to their heads.

  There are dozens of such stories, and most of them are clearly exaggerated. This is not to suggest that executions did not take place—death by impalement was a custom in eastern Europe and among the Turks—but the numbers and incidents are almost certainly inflated. A typical impalement seems to have involved hitching a horse to each of a victim’s legs and by those means pulling him slowly onto the point of a horizontal greased stake, driving it through the rectum and running it up through the bowels. The stake with its gory burden was then hoisted into a vertical position. Done correctly—if that is the word for it—the agony of death might be prolonged for hours. Whatever method was employed, impalement was unquestionably labor- and resource-intensive: It demanded time, men, horses, and wood. Vlad’s forces were never very large, and although he had access to abundant timber in the Carpathians, most of Wallachia was steppe. />
  THE FOREST OF THE SLAIN

  Menaced by the Turks to his front and by rebellious nobles to his rear, bled by German merchants in Transylvania monopolizing trade and ignoring his customs duties, Vlad, cruel though he might have been, had a motive for ruthlessness. On the other side, German pamphleteers, informed by refugees that German merchants were being persecuted, had every reason to depict Vlad as a bloodthirsty sadist. In any event, as owners of newly invented printing presses quickly discovered, sensationalism sold.

  We are on firmer ground, thanks to Ottoman chronicles, when war between the Wallachians and the Turks resumed between 1461 and 1462. Here, Dracula proved himself an exceptionally able commander, raiding deep into Ottoman territory and waging daring attacks by night. But his forces were greatly outnumbered, and as he retreated deeper and deeper into Wallachia, he engaged in scorched-earth tactics: burning villages, poisoning wells, and sending plague victims in disguise to sow pestilence in the Turkish camps.

  The harried Janissaries crumpled beneath their crescent banners. The final straw was apparently the sight of the “Forest of the Impaled”—the rotting corpses of thousands of Turkish prisoners that stood outside the city of Tirgoviste. Sultan Mehmed II, never one to quail easily, was so sickened by the sight of ravens nesting inside the putrid carcasses that he abandoned the campaign and returned to Constantinople.

  Savior or psychopath, it seems unjust that Vlad would be arrested soon afterward by the Hungarian king. Preferring a policy of appeasement toward the Ottomans, the king schemed to replace Vlad with his younger, pro-Turkish brother. After that brother died in 1476, Vlad returned to Wallachia and resumed his campaign against the Turks. Forsaken by his allies, however, he was forced to march with fewer than 4,000 men against a far larger Ottoman army. It would be his last fight.

  Yet, even Vlad’s death and burial have their legendary elements. Dracula was most likely assassinated by a Turkish agent in the marshes of the Vlasia Forest near Bucharest in the last days of 1476. By all accounts, his severed head was then sent to the sultan. Whatever further indignities may have been inflicted on his body, it was said that monks eventually claimed it and ferried it across the deep waters of a lake to the island monastery of Snagov (reminiscent of the dying King Arthur’s journey to the Isle of Avalon). There, Vlad was buried in the chapel, at the foot of the altar beneath a stone slab polished smooth by generations of piously shuffling feet.

  Between 1931 and 1932, Romanian archaeologist Dinu Rosetti removed that slab and found a tomb containing nothing but scattered animal bones and a few bits of ceramic. Then another—and nearly identical—stone slab was discovered near the church doors. After removing it, Rosetti beheld a coffin covered by the remains of a gold-embroidered purple pall. Inside the coffin was a headless skeleton. It was clothed in disintegrating silk brocade, and in place of the missing skull were the remains of a crown, worked in cloisonné and studded with turquoise. There was also a ring such as the sort of token a 15th-century noblewoman might have bestowed upon her favorite knight—and indeed one did bestow such a prize on Vlad II Dracul, the father, on the night of his 1431 investiture in the Order of the Dragon, and he is believed to have passed it on to his son.

  Rosetti, understandably, believed he had found Dracula’s remains. Perhaps some abbot, discomfited by the notion of that man so near the altar, had moved the remains from their original crypt? However they got there, they were now transported to the Bucharest History Museum. From there, they disappeared during the chaos of World War II. They have not been seen since.

  And the head? Reportedly, it was taken to Constantinople and displayed high atop a stake before the sultan’s palace, where all might behold the Impaler impaled.

  THE DEAD TRAVEL FAST

  “There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept,” as James Joyce wickedly described the vaults of Dublin’s St. Michan’s Church, where for centuries the morbid and the curious have filed down the narrow corridors to gaze at the bodies. Sprawled and tumbled among the narrow arched galleries are coffins; here and there an arm or a leg protrudes, as if its owner were frozen in the very act of crawling out. Bodies dry and mummified, with taut skin and spidery hair, are everywhere on display. One is said to be a nun who died four centuries ago. Another, six and a half feet tall, is reputedly that of a crusader, cut in half to fit the coffin. Several—hanged, drawn, and quartered—belonged to leaders of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. One, no one knows why, had its hands and feet severed. Everywhere lies a deep and muffling dust—proof, if more were needed, that dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.

  Legend has it that Bram Stoker visited these vaults as a child, or perhaps that his family had a crypt here, and that the vivid impression they made on the young boy found expression in the adult author’s description of the vaults beneath Castle Dracula. Whether that connection is apocryphal or not, Stoker was not interested in letting his remains molder time out of mind in the sterile air of a magnesium limestone vault. When he died in 1912, he chose not dust to dust, but ashes to ashes.

  Cremation had been a legal option for only ten years. Yet, public disgust with unhygienic graveyards had become a rising tide in the 19th century, culminating in 1884, when an eccentric physician named William Price, who strutted about from time to time in a druid’s costume, was arrested for incinerating the body of his young son, Jesus Christ Price. His acquittal finally overturned the old Judeo-Christian abhorrence of cremation, and in 1902, it was legalized in Britain. Shortly thereafter, the Italianate doors of Golders Green Crematorium, the first such establishment in London, opened for business. Bram Stoker was among its early customers.

  That way, the dead travel fast indeed. Yet, Dracula went to dust, not ashes, even faster, in the twinkling of an eye—and with a sigh of relief, readers could close the book, the irruption of the supernatural healed over, the imagination cleansed by “pity & terror.” After all, it was only a story of a vampire.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GATHERINGS FROM GRAVEYARDS

  FOR DECADES TO COME, 1816 would be known as the Year Without a Summer. In the previous April, Mount Tambora had erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, filling the atmosphere with ash and blocking enough of the sun’s rays to trigger temporary climate change around the world. In Boston some 15 months later, snow fell in July. In Europe, an incessant cold rain blanketed much of the Continent, confining a small circle of English poets and intellectuals inside the Villa Diodati, their rented lodgings on the shores of Lake Geneva.

  Lord Byron, 28, and Dr. John Polidori, 20, Byron’s personal physician and traveling companion, had been joined by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his lover, 18-year-old Mary Godwin, along with her half sister, Claire Claremont, who was secretly carrying Byron’s child. Throughout the long, storm-swept June nights, they passed the time with conversation and books. By the glow of the hearth and the flicker of candlelight, Mary later recalled, the friends discussed ghosts and vampires and the “nature of the principle of life.” “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated,” she remembered, for “galvanism had given token of such things.” Recent Italian experiments in galvanism, or applied electricity, purportedly showed that supplying current to a corpse could prompt it to behave in strange ways: clenching its fists, for instance, blowing out candles, or sitting up in its coffin.

  On the night of June 16, as violent thunderstorms cracked overhead, Byron read from a volume of ghost stories called Fantasmagoria. One tale in the collection told of a “reanimated” dead girl whose body, when her grave was opened a year after her death, showed no signs of corruption.

  That spooky evening gave rise to the world’s most famous ghost story contest. Perhaps the electricity in the air sparked to life the conceptions that eventually gave birth to the two most influential reanimated corpses in literature: Frankenstein’s monster and the vampire.

  ENTER THE VAMPYRE

  Lord Byron drafted the original sketch for what became “The Vampyre.” It would be the story of a mysteri
ous nobleman who traveled to Greece, where his death would reveal, among other things, that he had been a vampire all along. That was as far as the great poet progressed before setting the tale aside.

  Doctor Polidori then picked it up. He discarded his original idea about a skull-headed lady peeping through a keyhole and fleshed out Byron’s idea instead. As a writer, the doctor was not without talent; as a human being, he was touchy, petulant, envious, quick to take offense—and ultimately self-destructive. He and Lord Byron had quarreled endlessly, so as Polidori continued to create the vampire of his tale, Lord Ruthven, he modeled him on the now-hated figure of the poet. Thus did Polidori’s jaundiced view of a former friend become the prototype of the literary vampire—which, in turn, has given rise to popular depictions of the vampire today.

  The most lionized poet of his time, Lord Byron at first glance made a good model for a vampire. Dark and irresistibly handsome, he was, according to one former lover, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Even his friends, such as the dashing naval officer Edward John Trelawny, acknowledged he was “prouder than Lucifer” and flashed the “smile of a Mephistopheles.” Byron stayed up all night, slept most of the day, and once used a human skull as a drinking bowl. He ate sparingly because he could not exercise; a lame leg, he said, made strenuous activity extremely painful. After Trelawny eventually saw the poet’s corpse, he noticed that, beneath the magnificent torso, “both his feet were clubbed, and his legs withered to the knee—the form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr.”