Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  Where Lord Ruthven had been entirely unsympathetic, Varney becomes the first literary vampire to betray the stirrings of conscience. “I thought that I had steeled my heart against all gentle impulses,” he laments after turning a young girl into a vampire, “that I had crushed—aye, completely crushed dove-eyed pity in my heart, but it is not so, and still sufficient of my once human feelings clings to me to make me grieve for thee, Clara Crofton, thou victim.”

  Finally—mercifully—Varney commits suicide. “You will say that you accompanied Varney the Vampyre to the crater of Mount Vesuvius,” he tells his Italian guide, “and that, tired and disgusted with a life of horror, he flung himself in to prevent the possibility of a reanimation of his remains.”

  At one point before his final immolation, the narrator muses on this “strange gift of renewable existence,” fed by blood and moonlight (and food, for Varney can eat regular meals, and sunlight, for he is often abroad by day). “Who shall say that, walking the streets of giant London at this day, there may not be some such existences? Horrible thought that…”—and there we might have the seed of Dracula.

  Bram Stoker clearly copied a thing or two from Varney the Vampyre, though in his hands, the story elements became less melodramatic and more chilling. Varney in Feast of Blood has fangs, crawls down castle walls, transforms himself into a bat, and possesses mesmerizing serpent eyes. He turns young Clara Crofton into a vampire, after which she must be staked and destroyed for preying on children. Unlike Béla Lugosi’s Dracula, however, who claims, “I never drink—wine,” Varney enjoys a good glass of claret, “for it looks like blood and may not be it.”

  Stoker, a man of the theater, glimpsed the dramatic potential in such details. But he probably never saw a performance of The Vampire (1852), yet another play loosely based on Polidori’s work, because the production fared not so well with some highly placed critics: No less an arbiter than Queen Victoria described it in her diary as “very trashy.”

  Meanwhile, vampirism had been slipping its moorings in literature and drama. Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), had described the “vampire middle classes” who bled the workers dry. In 1849, when Karl Marx moved to London, he began working on Das Kapital, in which he would proclaim that “capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

  And then there was Emily Brontë’s moody masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, while Varney was still on the lam from vindictive mobs. This tale of the tempestuous but doomed love affair between Catherine and Heathcliff, set against the wild, windy splendor of the Yorkshire moors, plays tantalizingly with the vampire motif. Is Catherine, who died of childbirth before the story opens, a ghost or a vampire? She apparently haunts Lockwood, the narrator, as he sleeps in her former bedroom. But when Lockwood rubs the specter’s wrist against some broken window glass, he draws very real blood.

  Or does Catherine turn Heathcliff into a vampire? At one point she tells him, “I’ll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won’t rest till you are with me. I never will.” And as he lies dying, Heathcliff turns a bloodless hue, “his teeth visible, now and then, in a kind of smile.”

  After Heathcliff ’s death, the nurse, Nelly Dean, speaks with Lockwood:

  “Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?” I mused. I had read of such hideous, incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy; and watched him grow to youth; and followed him almost through his whole course; and what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror.

  The locals, for their part, do yield to that horror: “But the country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house.”

  Emily Brontë knew about vampires, but in many ways, her tale is more effective for not being a vampire tale. What might have happened if Bram Stoker had not been a man of the theater, and had preferred the eerie figures of Wuthering Heights instead?

  GATHERINGS FROM GRAVEYARDS

  As the Victorians were reading their ghost and vampire stories, many doctors were convinced that the dead were literally killing the living.

  In a scene from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, a burial takes place in an ancient London churchyard, one “pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed…here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.” Gazing at this cemetery, Lady Dedlock, a character in the story, can only exclaim, “Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?”

  In the century from 1741 to 1839, when crusading doctor George Alfred Walker published his Gatherings from Grave Yards, more than two million people died and were buried in London alone. Walker’s book is a compendium of mortuary horrors: The ancient graveyards were so saturated with the dead that coffins were piled on generations of coffins. In 1845, one gravedigger reported that he unavoidably “severed heads, arms, legs, or whatever came in my way” whenever he had to dig a new grave. “I have been up to my knees in human flesh by jumping on the bodies so as to cram them into the least possible space,” he continued. He dug as many as 45 graves in one day, burying “2,017 bodies, besides stillborns” in a single year.

  A visitor to another cemetery described its hideous “bone house,” into which had been dumped the partially decayed remains from such smashed coffins:

  [Y]ou may see human heads, covered with hair; and here, in this “consecrated ground,” are human bones with flesh still adhering to them. On the north side, a man was digging a grave; he was quite drunk, so indeed were all the grave diggers we saw. We looked into this grave, but the stench was abominable. We remained, however, long enough to see that a child’s coffin, which had stopped the man’s progress, had been cut, longitudinally, right in half; and there lay the child, which had been buried in it, wrapped in its shroud….

  Walker rightly calculated that such scenes would infuriate people, but he also insisted that they masked a serious menace to public health. It wasn’t simply that graveyards fouled wells, or that rats dragged bones about, or that indescribable insects—“body bugs”—hatched in clouds and settled on passersby. No, graveyards were also “hot-beds of miasmata,” sources of “mephitic vapors” widely believed to be extremely poisonous.

  Official reports overflowed with accounts of gravediggers expiring on the spot after sinking their picks into some corrupted corpse and releasing its noxious gases. Such exhalations accumulated so thickly in the vaults of ancient churches that they extinguished lighted candles or, paradoxically, caught fire and burned for days. They were blamed for complaints ranging from headaches and convulsions to asphyxiation. “Although such remarkable effects are not produced upon people in general,” wrote Walker, the same vapors, emanating from thousands of corpses, still mixed with the air and were breathed in by the city’s inhabitants. “Thus the very putrefactions of the dead become part of the fluids of the living.”

  What was worse, those putrefactions were believed to carry the seeds of malignant disease. The opening of a single corpse, Walker claimed, had brought an epidemic to a vast area in France. When typhus, smallpox, or cholera struck, graveyards were blamed as the centers of infection. Typhus—actually carried by lice—was widely attributed to cadaverous vapors, while a French physician traced an outbreak of smallpox to emanations from dead bodies. In Bleak House, smallpox lurking in graveyard exhalations and deposited as “witch-ointment slimy to the touch” on cemetery gates and walls scars the once-beautiful Esther and kills Lady Dedlock.

  As English readers were gulping down the adventures of Varney the Vampyre in 1848, a mo
re dreaded monster was again stalking the land. In Dickens’s day, no disease was quite so feared as cholera. “The speed with which cholera killed was profoundly alarming,” declared historian William H. McNeill. A person might be hale and hearty at one moment, but then his bowels emptied without warning and never stopped—even as the diarrhea carried out pieces of intestinal lining.

  “[R]adical dehydration,” McNeill continued, “meant that a victim shrank into a wizened caricature of his former self within a few hours, while ruptured capillaries discolored the skin, turning it black and blue. The effect was to make mortality uniquely visible: patterns of bodily decay were exacerbated…as in a time-lapse motion picture….” It was a startling and horrible transformation: You grew old in a day. Your eyes dulled, and you were forced into a fetal position, knees drawn up to your chin. If you died that way, you were buried that way, locked in rigor mortis.

  Cholera ravaged town and country indiscriminately. At one point during the 1848–1849 outbreak, the disease was killing a thousand people a day in England. During an earlier outbreak, between 1831 and 1832, more than 50,000 people had died in the British Isles. In some places during that epidemic, cholera victims were buried so soon—sometimes within ten minutes of being declared dead—that premature burial was widely believed to be commonplace. These were the stories that Bram Stoker’s mother had told him about her childhood in cholera-ravaged County Sligo. In his story “Some Terrible Letters from Scotland,” Edinburgh writer James Hogg arranges for one character to escape being buried alive during the 1832 outbreak; another Hogg creation reports horrifying dreams of the cholera dead trailing about the kirkyard “wi’ their white withered faces an’ their glazed een [eyes].” That character’s sisters then die of the illness after being infected by their mother. But they return from the grave to escort their mother on a vengeful “dance of death” back to the churchyard for good, for the “plague of Cholera was a breath of hell, they who died of it got no rest in their graves, so that it behoved all, but parents in particular, to keep out of its influences till the vapour of death passed over.”

  Indeed, it was widely assumed to be vapor until an 1854 outbreak in London, when Dr. John Snow proved that cholera came not from air but from water: Water contaminated by human waste carrying a toxic intestinal bacterium had leaked from a faulty cesspool, infecting a Soho water pump.

  In some places, however, graveyard effluvium—Dickens’s “witch-ointment slimy to the touch”—might be seen as having curative properties. If there were ever such a thing as grave mold coating the grass and trees in cemeteries, folklore would give it a ritual value. In the north of England, it so happens, a young tuberculosis patient “was at last restored to health by eating butter made from the milk of cows fed in kirkyards, a sovereign remedy for consumption brought on through being witch-ridden.”

  Consumption, aka tuberculosis, didn’t kill quickly, as did cholera or bubonic plague. Instead, it was the archetypal “wasting disease,” steadily and remorselessly consuming its victims, draining them of vitality and life. If it was “galloping consumption,” this happened in a matter of months; more often, it was a question of years. Yet, by the time the first rattling coughs appeared, accompanied by bloody sputum, it was almost too late. You lost flesh. You bled energy. You were being eaten from within by an invisible demon, or you were being hag-ridden at night—that is, you had become the prey of witches or vampires. No other explanation sprang readily to hand, especially when a bloody froth might bubble from your lips as you slept.

  “The emaciated figure strikes one with terror,” states a 1799 description of a tuberculosis patient, “the forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk; the little fat that raised them in their orbits entirely wasted; the pulse quick and tremulous; the nails long, bending over the ends of the fingers; the palms of the hand dry and painfully hot to the touch; the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his complaints.”

  The stubbornly rational blamed tuberculosis on bad air—mal aria—or cold, damp climates. Those consumptives who could afford it decamped to the magic mountains, with their thin air, or to the warm south—the Mediterranean, say, or the American Southwest desert, with its dry climate. But among the poor, forced to share beds in stifling rooms in unsanitary houses, tuberculosis—already frightfully contagious—reached epidemic proportions.

  Yet, as Dickens noted in Nicholas Nickleby, tuberculosis was also a disease “in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightening load.” Languid periods might be followed by an upsurge in energy, a sharpening of appetite, or even an unparalleled sexual ardor. And because consumption was believed to fuel the fire of creativity, making it burn brightest just before the dark, it became the Romantic death par excellence, and spirited away innumerable poets, painters, and musicians—among them Balzac, Keats, Chopin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Brontë sisters. As they were “consumed,” they grew emaciated, their cheeks hollowed, their skin turned pallid and translucent, and their eyes appeared luminous—the “consumptive look” that so impressed itself on the literature of the age.

  Bram Stoker’s depiction of the fading Lucy Westenra in Dracula has often been diagnosed as a description of anemia, but it might also depict a case of tuberculosis: “I do not understand Lucy’s fading away as she is doing,” the character Mina notes. “She eats well and sleeps well, and enjoys fresh air; but all the time the roses in her cheeks are fading, and she gets weaker and more languid day by day; at night I hear her gasping as if for air.” Dr. Seward gazes upon her with equal futility: “There on the bed…lay poor Lucy, more horribly white and wan-looking than ever. Even the lips were white, and the gums seemed to have shrunken back from the teeth, as we sometimes see in a corpse after a prolonged illness.”

  The title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” to take another example, is described as slender, “even emaciated,” with skin like the “purest ivory,” a sensual mouth, raven-black hair, and eyes so extraordinary they were “large and luminous orbs.” She suffers from a wasting disease and broods continually on death and dissolution. She pens a poem, “The Conqueror Worm,” in which even “…the seraphs sob at vermin fangs / In human gore imbued.” After her death, the narrator again marries, only to find that his light-haired, blue-eyed bride also sickens and dies—and is resurrected as the very same emaciated, raven-haired Ligeia he once loved.

  For eons, the affliction was inexplicable. Consumption was contagious, clearly, and it had something to do with the air—that much was known. But not until 1882, when Robert Koch discovered Tuberculosis bacillus (he ultimately won a Nobel Prize for his work), did people recognize that the culprit wasn’t the air but rather the suspended droplets it carried—the effluvia of coughs and sneezes.

  ONE FOREVER

  In Dublin, he became known as the “Invisible Prince,” a glitteringly handsome writer who had once moved through society with such quiet assurance that he nearly stood for Parliament. But that was before his wife’s death under mysterious circumstances, and his virtual disappearance. After that, recalled the poet Alfred Perceval Graves, Sheridan Le Fanu could be glimpsed only “at odd hours of the evening, when he might occasionally be seen stealing, like the ghost of his former self, between his newspaper office and his home in Merrion Square; sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old out-of-the-way bookshop poring over some rare black letter [tome in] Astrology or Demonology.”

  Le Fanu is remembered today as one of the supreme masters of the ghost story. Even the noted M. R. James, his peer in that uncanny art, admired the way the brilliant if reclusive Irishman handled his material. James admitted, however, that if Le Fanu had one flaw, it lay in his predilection for “the Vampire-idea.” Certainly
Carmilla, published in 1872, the year before Le Fanu died at 58, is among the most exquisitely rendered—and influential—vampire stories ever written.

  Laura, its narrator, is a child living with her father in a lonely castle buried deep in the forests of Styria, a province of southern Austria. One night a beautiful lady visits her in her bedroom and seems to bite her on the chest, but this is dismissed as a dream. Years later, however, a carriage full of strange people overturns in the moonlight nearby and leaves one of its occupants, an injured young woman, in the care of the castle. Her name is Carmilla, and Laura recognizes her as the toothsome visitor from her childhood dream.

  The two are about the same age, so they become—seemingly—the best of friends. Yet in breathless, erotically charged passages, Carmilla is clearly making more than a pass at Laura:

  Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You’re mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one forever.”

  Carmilla sleeps most of the day, never needs to eat, and is absent much of the night. Odder still, Laura and her father discover an old family portrait from her Hungarian mother’s side of one “Mircalla, Countess Karnstein,” dated 1698. The woman in the painting is a dead ringer for their guest, down to the mole on her neck.