Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  Nearly a week passed before the shoemaker was reburied—this time in terra damnata, beneath the gallows. Yet the “spectrum,” as More called the apparition, raged all the worse until the widow gave in, and once again the body was unearthed. Now even more swollen and repulsive, it was decapitated and its limbs were cut off. The heart, still appearing fresh and whole, was ripped out and burned to a cinder, whereupon its ashes were cast into the Oder River. The spectrum was never seen again.

  More’s second iconic ghost story related the eerie tale of Johannes Cuntius, a wealthy alderman of Pentsch in Poland, who died after being kicked by a horse. Soon, rumors circulated that, on his deathbed, Alderman Cuntius had admitted forging a pact with Satan to gain his riches. That had led to stories that a tempest had arisen at the moment of his death, and that a black cat had rushed into the room and scratched his face. One sighting triggered another, and soon a revivified Cuntius was being spotted all over town. In More’s recapturing of the sinister events that followed, Cuntius shook houses, turned milk to blood, and defiled the altar cloth with blood stains. He sucked cows dry; he violently assaulted former friends; he ravished his widow. At one time Cuntius was a mere phantom, disappearing when a candle was lit; at other times, he was only too corporeal, with a fetid stink and a touch as cold as ice.

  Not surprisingly, Cuntius, too, was evicted from his grave:

  …they dig up Cuntius his body with several others buried both before and after him. But those both after and before were so putrefied and rotten, their skulls broken, and the sutures of them gaping, that they were not to be known by their shape at all, having become in a manner but a rude mass of earth and dirt; but it was quite otherwise in Cuntius. His skin was tender and florid, his joints not at all stiff but limber and moveable, and a staff being put in his hand, he grasped it with his fingers very fast. His eyes also of themselves would be one time open and another time shut; they opened a vein in his leg and the blood sprang out as fresh as in the living. His nose was entire and full, not sharp as in those that are ghastly sick or quite dead. And yet Cuntius his body had lain in the grave from Feb. 8 to July 20, which is almost half a year.

  The corpse was burned but even that brought no relief, for the carcass seemingly refused to be cremated; only after it was hacked to bits did the flames finally consume it.

  To a modern reader, these stories are all too predictable. A prosperous citizen dies. Rumors of suicide or secret sin begin to circulate and ignite mass hysteria. Finally, the corpse is dug up and discovered to be undecomposed, seeming to substantiate the tittle-tattle. No blood has been sucked; nobody has died.

  Henry More, however, saw it otherwise:

  I look upon it as a special piece of Providence that there are ever and Anon such fresh examples of Apparitions and Witchcraft as may rub up and awaken [the atheists’] benumbed and lethargic Minds into a suspicion at least, if not assurance that there are other intelligent beings besides those that are clad in heavy Earth or Clay.

  More’s ultimate inspiration may have been Plato, but Christianity had long offered a rival vision of a fundamentally spiritual universe. Although the Christian world was fragmenting—Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodoxy had split in 1054, the Protestant Reformation was well under way, and the English had recently beheaded their king, the Anointed of God—that vision would linger well into the 18th century. And the impression of its saints and angels, its miracles and monsters, and above all its witches and demons can be traced in the features of the vampire today.

  THE ART OF DYING

  Ars moriendi—the art of dying—and its popular woodblock illustrations brought that spiritual universe into sharp focus. On a bed lies the dying person, attended on one side by haloed angels and saints, and on the other by a gang of leering, impish demons, all horns and tails. The clear implication is that the forces of heaven and hell have gathered to battle for the soul at the moment of death.

  Those demons were but foot soldiers in the vast hierarchy of hell. With its dominions, principalities, and powers, its thrones and choirs and seraphim, hell was the infernal parody of heaven. Satan was its god, Beelzebub its lord, Carreau its prince of powers, and so on down through all those unpronounceable names: Anticif, Arfaxat, Astaroth, Asmodeus, Behemoth, Calconix, Enepsigos, Grongade, Leontophone, Leviathan, Saphathorael, Sphendonael, and even Shakespeare’s “foul fiend Flibbertigibit,” to name only a demon’s dozen. No complete roster of their legions was ever compiled, and no wonder: If a single satanic prince was said to have 60 billion dukes in his retinue, the foot soldiers of the vasty deep—horned, spiked, scaled, ass-eared, and cloven-footed—must have been numberless indeed.

  That’s why last rites were administered to that person expiring on his deathbed: They helped purify his soul so that it might be received by the hands of ministering angels, not lurking demons. Confession, absolution, extreme unction, and the final Eucharist, or viaticum, was the prescribed order for Roman Catholics, but Eastern Orthodoxy observed a similar ritual. Then, as now, Catholics dreaded the prospect of sudden death because no one wanted to die without benefit of confession and absolution. Life had to be ebbing rapidly before the oil of extreme unction could be applied; those lucky enough to return from the brink after that potent touch were dismayed to find themselves deemed ritually dead—living corpses on the order of “stinking Lazarus,” whom Christ had brought back from the tomb. There was also the option of exorcism, the expelling of “evil” or “unclean” spirits from diseased bodies. Finally, there was viaticum, or “provision for the journey” this last Eucharist or communion might be the final experience the flickering consciousness perceived before departing.

  That was about all that could be done for the soul. The body, still supernaturally charged, had to be attended to soon thereafter. Funeral and burial rites were performed so that the body might be wrapped, not merely in its shroud, but also in a protective cocoon of sanctity, within which it might await the last trump and the resurrection. That’s why cremation was so abhorrent to the medieval Christian: It not only smacked of paganism but also destroyed the “temple of the Holy Ghost,” denying the soul any vehicle for restoration. (Despite Saint Paul’s pronouncement that we are sown a natural body but raised a spiritual one, most people in the Middle Ages believed that resurrection meant a reawakening in their familiar flesh.)

  By the time the corpse arrived at the graveyard—whether borne in a closed coffin by bearers, as in England, or carried in an open casket trailing long black streamers, as in Greece—it had already been washed, sprinkled, censed, purified, enshrouded, prayed for, chanted over, and blessed for days, almost without surcease. Although the grave site already lay in consecrated ground, the priest would sanctify it again by making the sign of the cross over it and sprinkling it with holy water. The body, too, would be blessed, censed, and sprinkled one final time—and, once the appropriate words had been read over it, lowered into the grave. Finally, before the grave was closed, a handful of dirt would be strewn over the coffin in the shape of a cross.

  Yet, even then, the ritual wasn’t over: Obsequies would be made at certain times—typically the 3rd, 9th, and 40th days after burial, as in the Orthodox Church, and then yearly on the anniversary of the death.

  If all went well, the decedent—both body and soul—would be not just protected but integrated into the larger community of the faithful existing in eternity. The Catholic notion of purgatory, with its cult of intercession—well-paid priests in chantry chapels praying to saints to speed a given soul’s progress through the purging fires—greatly enriched this overall sense of community. So much money flowed into the upkeep and beautification of churches in order to propitiate the saints that purgatory wound up having a positive economic impact, making medieval Catholicism, as one historian put it, a “cult of the living in the service of the dead.”

  In Eastern Orthodoxy, by contrast, there was no purgatory; the 40-day period after burial was its rough equivalent. By the end of that period, the soul
should have completed its journey, and the physical decomposition of the body would be under way. Occasionally, the dead were exhumed at that time to allow the priests a peek. Apparently they didn’t always relish what they saw, for three years became the standard in most places. The grave was then opened and the body examined. If the priest seemed relieved, all was well; the bones would be collected and, after due observances, either reinterred or sent to the charnel house.

  But if doubt flickered over the pastor’s features, things might be looking ominous. An undecomposed body, as we have seen, was typically interpreted as a sign of vampirism. In the absence of any vampire complaints, however, the priest might simply seal the grave. The ritual might be repeated three years later—by that time, surely, the worms would have done their work.

  Vampire symptoms were often attributed to mishaps along the ritual trail. A cat jumping over the corpse, to cite a well-known folklore example, might allow a demon to exploit an opportunity. It was much easier to suspect demonic possession, however, if the corpse was that of an excommunicate. There were many reasons for excommunication—heresy, chiefly, but also smaller infractions such as a refusal to confess—and to die in an excommunicated state meant, quite literally, permanent exile from the community of the faithful. Buried in unconsecrated ground, the bodies of excommunicates—as well as those of witches, sorcerers, suicides, criminals, or any other anathematized people—were bereft of God’s holy protection. Demons could then possess their corpses, using them as instruments to sow evil and destruction. The unmistakable sign that demonic possession had occurred, to many village priests in the Slavic world, was a corpse found bloated, ruddy, and undecomposed in its grave.

  So often and so insistently was demonic possession used as an explanation for vampirism that the vampire came to be seen as the typological inverse of the saint: One was a blessed soul with the power to heal and protect, while the other was a wandering corpse strewing death, disease, and pestilence in its wake. The vampire’s very existence was an infernal parody of the resurrection, and its chief means of sustenance was a diabolical twist on Christ’s words: “Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life.”

  WITCHES AND WEREWOLVES

  In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull making witchcraft a heresy in Catholic Europe. Yet, the hysteria that overtook Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, when 30,000 to 60,000 people were burned at the stake, never really ignited in the Slavic east. There the witch was, more often than not, the village “wise woman.” The horseshoes, hares’ heads, and boars’ tusks nailed on walls and barns, or the garlic cloves, blue beads, and bloodstones that decorated houses, horses, and caps were as much a defense against the evil eye—the intense gaze, the unblinking stare, the envious glance—as they were charms against witches or vampires. Anyhow, in folklore, witches and vampires were often the same thing.

  In Romania, strigoi are vampires, while strigele are the spirits of witches. In Italy, strega are witches or vampires, as the occasion demands. Both shared the same attributes: Witches were said to have long teeth, their bodies might be possessed by demons, and they could leave the grave to eat people. Witches could enter a house through a keyhole; many had to disappear by cockcrow. The hexing action of a witch could dry up cattle’s milk, blast the crops, and unleash the plague among people. All of these activities are likewise imputed to vampires. Little wonder, then, that a Slavic proverb holds that the “vampire and the devil are blood relatives of all witches.”

  Many folklorists would include the werewolf in that list. The Serbs, for instance, conflate vampire and werewolf in a single word —vukodlak— as do the Greeks in vrykolakas. Ukrainians believe a vampire to be the offspring of a witch who mated with either a werewolf or a demon. And in Russia, all three became one: According to 19th-century dictionaries, a vampire was “a sorcerer who turns into a wolf.” You could tell one by its tail.

  Werewolves were depicted as particularly savage. Were-wolf madness existed alongside witchcraft hysteria. From 1520 to 1630, there were 30,000 reported cases of lycanthropy—men becoming wolves—in central France alone.

  The most notorious werewolf, however, was German. Under torture in 1589, a Westphalian farmer named Peter Stubbe, or Stumpf, confessed to having made a pact with Satan. In return, Stubbe claimed, he had received a magical wolfskin belt that allowed him to rampage in the guise of a wolf for the next 25 years. According to Stubbe’s confession, he had indulged in every act of bestiality that the depraved imaginations of his inquisitors could dream up. This included killing and eating children, pregnant women, and even his own son. Rounding out this litany of horrors was incest with his daughter.

  Or so Stubbe said—as might anyone who had been broken on the wheel. His demise was especially grisly. First, Stubbe was flayed alive, his skin peeled off with red-hot pincers. Next, all of his bones were broken with the blunt end of an axe. Finally, he was decapitated. As Stubbe’s carcass went up in flames (alongside those of his daughter and mistress), his severed head was placed on a spike and mounted atop the ghastly agent of his martyrdom, the wheel.

  DISENCHANTMENT BY DECAPITATION

  Medieval Christendom may have envisioned the world as a spiritual battleground, but it inflicted horribly real outrages on earthly tabernacles as well. The desecration of dead bodies—the beheading, the dismembering, the burning of them—was a recapitulation of the capital punishments inflicted on living ones. Such abominations were rooted in a primitive desire to destroy the corpse—an action that in turn was designed to deprive the malefactor of the blessings of resurrection, or to deny a vengeful ghost any instrument for retaliation.

  “Disenchantment by decapitation” is a phrase that folklorists have coined to describe those actions in fairy tales where the hero, by cutting off a monster’s head, releases a soul trapped in the fiend’s body by evil enchantment. That motif has deep roots in global culture: The severed head has traditionally constituted the ultimate gory trophy.

  Beheading, in fact, was the execution method of choice for kings and aristocrats of old. Of the many heads lost in England, only one had been crowned, anointed, and hedged about with all the supernatural protection that ritual and ceremony could provide. Yet none of that could shield its owner from his own disenchantment by decapitation. “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown,” declared deposed King Charles I as he stepped out of London’s Banqueting House and onto the scaffold on a dark January day in 1649, when he lost his head in a terrible culmination to the English civil wars. Though Charles I was hastily buried in Windsor Castle’s St. George’s Chapel, it was soon bruited about that he had been denied the burial rites in the Book of Common Prayer. Eleven years later, the son of Charles I was restored to the English throne, and he went looking for his father’s remains. Neither head nor body could be found.

  A century and a half later, in 1813, workmen in the vaults of St. George’s Chapel accidentally broke in to the crypt of King Henry VIII. Although the crypt was supposed to contain just two coffins—King Henry’s and Queen Jane Seymour’s—the workmen found three. The prince regent assembled a small party, which included Sir Henry Halford, future president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and together they climbed into the dark, musty vault to investigate.

  They couldn’t resist peering into the leaden coffin supposed to contain King Henry VIII’s remains. They spied the skeleton within—“some beard remained upon the chin”—but nothing else of note. They chose, however, to leave inviolate the sepulcher containing the queen, as they deemed “mere curiosity” an insufficient motive for disturbing her remains.

  The investigators then turned to the third coffin, likewise made of lead. First they discovered an inscription bearing the name of King Charles. Then, prying the lead back, they peered inside.

  If the martyred king had indeed been refused burial rites, his body would have been vulnerable to demonic possession. And they did see inside a figure, wrapped in cerecloth, “into the folds of which,�
�� Halford later reported, “a quantity of unctuous or greasy matter, mixed with resin, as it seemed, had been melted, so as to exclude, as effectually as possible, the external air.” Carefully removing these cerements, they beheld a remarkably well-preserved face. This was no skeleton; clearly, Charles I had been embalmed. The cartilage of the nose was gone, “but the left eye, in the first moment of exposure, was open and full….”

  A transfixing eye in that dismal place—but instantly it turned to dust. Then, carefully lifting the severed head, the party gazed at the long-dead monarch: The familiar Vandyke beard was perfect, many teeth were still in place, and the left ear was likewise intact. The fourth cervical vertebra had been cleaved in half, “an appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow,” Halford continued, “inflicted by a very sharp instrument….” Before laying the head back in its coffin, where presumably it remains to this day, the men noticed—the passage of 164 years notwithstanding—that it was “quite wet” with what everyone present, including the surgeon, believed to be blood.

  Severed heads. The sultan in his palace supposedly greeted Vlad Dracula’s impaled head with delight. The severed heads of malefactors—especially bandits and rebels—adorned city gates, bridges, and public squares all over the ancient and medieval worlds, and could be found in China as late as the 20th century. Such gruesome mementos made the most explicit of warnings. They were bloody cousins of the “hanging” executions, which encompassed crucifixion and impalement in addition to the rope and gallows commonly denoted by the term. All were abominably exemplary: Corpses were often left to rot where they dangled. Little wonder that gallows and execution grounds were seen as polluted, demon-haunted places—every bit the terra damnata of any heretic’s grave.