Rabid (11 page)

During witch trials, the accused often were found to have had canine “familiars” (that word again), demons who accompanied them in the form of dogs. Elizabeth Clarke, who during the seventeenth century admitted to having slept with the devil himself thrice weekly, was kept company during her sexploits by Jarmara, a white spaniel with spots, as well as by an ox-headed greyhound named Vinegar Tom. When the Devices—Alison, James, and Elizabeth—were convicted of witchcraft in 1612, all three of them claimed to have murderous dog familiars, with names like Dandy and Ball. In Alison’s account of her dog’s attack on a peddler, it is she who summons the dog to act but the dog who explains her options.

“What wouldst thou have me to do with yonder man?” the dog is alleged to have asked, as the peddler fled what he could tell would be an imminent attack.

“What canst thou do at him?” Alison replied.

“I can lame him.”

“Lame him,” replied the girl; and within forty yards the deed was done.

Notice the balancing act that is struck by this last tale, of the witch’s canine accomplice. The dog must be possessed bodily by the most fearsome rage in order to carry out his bloodthirsty attacks, for example,
to lame the peddler. And yet he must also be possessed spiritually of an almost human reason and capacity for understanding in order to present to the audience as properly and chillingly evil. It is the ancient dichotomy of the dog—between the intuitive, loyal companion and the savage, potentially rabid beast—with each pole of the dualism merely ratcheted out a notch. The uncanniness of the demon dog lies in his being simultaneously more familiar and more prone to insensate frenzy than the typical four-footed friend.

A similar formula undergirded the werewolf tales of the sixteenth century. Unlike the dog-headed men of maps, these were real people, often known to their alleged victims, who would testify with apparent sincerity that their neighbors had taken the form of vicious wolves. One oft-repeated tally, though perhaps apocryphal, puts the number of recorded cases in France at thirty thousand between 1520 and 1630. Regardless of the specific figure, history has bequeathed us enough specific cases to make clear that something like an epidemic was afoot. A sample:

1521
. Two admitted werewolves, Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun, stand trial in Poligny for many murders: of a four-year-old girl, of a woman gathering peas, and more still. Along with another lycanthrope confederate the two are convicted, burned.

1530
. Near Poitiers, three enormous wolves set upon three young men, one of whom slices off a wolf ear in the melee. The following day, a known harlot in the town is observed to have lost an ear.

1541
. A farmer in Pavia takes the form of a wolf and murders multiple victims. Upon his confession, the magistrates order the severing of his arms and legs, from which separations he dies.

1558
. Near Apchon a huntsman, asked by a local gentleman to bring him some game, falls under attack by a wolf and severs its paw. Later, as he reaches into his bag to deliver this paw to his noble friend, he finds it has been transformed into a feminine hand—the hand, indeed, of the gentleman’s own wife, who, when found to be missing it, confesses to being a werewolf. She is burned to ashes.

1573
. The town of Dole, in the Franche-Comté region of western France, formally enjoins its peasantry to hunt down a marauding werewolf, authorizing the use of “pikes, halberts, arquebuses, and sticks.”

1598
. An entire family near Dole, the Gandillons, is executed for lycanthropy. The first to go, Pernette, had allegedly set upon two children, intending to devour them, but managed to slay only one of them, a four-year-old boy, with the pocketknife the child had brandished to defend his sister. Pernette is torn limb from limb by the citizenry.

Her crime draws the authorities’ attention to her brother, Pierre, and to his son, Georges, both of whom confess (after what one suspects is rather insistent questioning) to having taken the form of wolves through the application of a salve. Pierre also has a daughter, Antoinette, who admits to starting hailstorms. All three are hanged, their bodies burned.

Meanwhile, two departments south, in the town of Châlons, a tailor is sentenced for having apparently lured, murdered, and eaten a numberless throng of small children. His alleged crimes are so terrible that the court orders the incineration of all the case records—and, naturally, of the tailor.

That same year, near Angers, a fifteen-year-old boy is murdered and a half-naked man, with long hair and beard, is taken into custody. This man, Jacques Roulet, admits to using a salve to transform himself into a wolf. He, too, is sentenced to death, though—in a sign the werewolf hunters of France have perhaps lost some of their moxie—the parliament in Paris later commutes his sentence to two years’ incarceration.

1603
. Jean Grenier, a teenager near Bordeaux, is arrested after terrorizing a series of local children, allegedly as both a boy and a wolf. Grenier’s story was later recounted at length by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century English parson perhaps best known for composing the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” but also the author of more than 130 books. Baring-Gould’s
Book of Were-Wolves
(1865) to this day remains by far the most readable account of the werewolf phenomenon—so readable, in fact, that we hesitate to dwell upon the
provenance of his elaborate narrative color and instead will simply draw upon it.

On a spring afternoon that year, as some young women are tending sheep (“the brightness of the sky,” Baring-Gould writes, “the freshness of the air puffing up off the blue twinkling Bay of Biscay, the hum or song of the wind as it made rich music among the pines which stood like a green uplifted wave on the East…conspired to fill the peasant maidens with joy, and to make their voices rise in song and laughter, which rung merrily over the hills”), they encounter a redheaded boy of perhaps thirteen, perched on a log. Evidently poor, given his gaunt frame and tattered clothing, the boy nevertheless cuts a menacing figure, his prominent white teeth protruding from a grinning leer.

“I have killed dogs and drunk their blood,” he tells the girls. “But little girls taste better; their flesh is tender and sweet, their blood rich and warm. I have eaten many a maiden, as I have been on my raids together with my nine companions. I am a were-wolf!” he goes on, as if that still needed spelling out. “Ah, ha! if the sun were to set I would soon fall on one of you and make a meal of you!”

The young women flee and tell others of this strange child they have encountered. As it happens, another local girl, Marguerite Poirier, knows the boy even better, having regularly tended sheep with him near their village of St. Antoine de Pizon. His name is Jean Grenier, she reports, and he has frequently terrified her with similar stories. Worse than that, he recently followed through on his threat to her: One day, when Jean was absent from his herding duties, a wolf attacked her and tore her clothes. The creature had red hair, like Jean’s!

Grenier and his case are taken up by the parliament in Bordeaux, in an investigation that, as in other witch and werewolf trials of the era, yields a surprising array of confessions. A certain “black man” named M. de la Forest gave Grenier a salve and a wolf skin, he says, both of which he used to turn himself into a wolf. Besides his attack on Poirier, which he confirms in every particular, Grenier admits to having eaten three children, including an infant snatched from a cradle.

But as with the case of Jacques Roulet five years earlier, the parliament eschews execution, in favor of life imprisonment in a nearby monastery. Pierre de Lancre, a famous witch-hunter who had been involved with Grenier’s trial, would visit the young man there in 1610. Grenier still copped to having once been a werewolf. Moreover, reported de Lancre, he “confessed to me also, in a straightforward manner, that he still wanted to eat the flesh of little children, and that he found the flesh of little girls particularly delicious. I asked him if he would eat it if he had not been prohibited from doing so, and he answered me frankly that yes he would.” But the boy would never get his second helpings; soon after his interview with de Lancre, he would die in confinement, the cause unrecorded.

Richard Mead, one of England’s most influential eighteenth-century physicians, published an account of rabies in 1702 that can only be described as lycanthropic. As with all fine horror tales, the case had been related to Mead secondhand, but (he assures us) by a man who was “very near of kin to the unhappy patient.” In Scotland, the doctor recounts,

The brevity of time between bite and neurological symptoms—less than a day!—dispels any notion that this was actually a case of rabies. The details of the attack, too, seem rather improbable. Rabies can elicit violence in human victims, to be sure, but these generally take the form of maddened outbursts, in which biting is uncommon. The concerted effort required to chomp open a human abdomen, not
to mention dealing with the rush of fresh blood—it’s all a bit more than the typical hydrophobic could handle.

Nevertheless, the parallels between this medical case report, on the one hand, and the then-popular reports of lycanthropy, on the other, are notable. Mead even goes so far, just a few pages later, as to cite the influence of the moon. “Looking over the histories of the many patients I have attended in this deplorable condition,” he writes, “I observe about one half of the number to have been attacked with the spasms preceding the hydrophobia either upon the full moon, or the day before it.” Like many physicians of his day, Mead attempted to apply to the human body the mechanical insights of Isaac Newton, whose mathematical demonstrations of the properties of physical objects had left a deep imprint on the late seventeenth-century psyche. Mead’s theory was that the moon’s gravity pulled the bodily fluids in various directions at various times, contributing to the patient’s health or lack thereof. But despite this scientific (or at least quasi-scientific) framework, his nods to the moon in practice could seem arbitrary, even superstitious. Epileptic patients, he wrote, suffered spots on the face that resembled the dark patches on the surface of the moon; indeed, these spots “varied both in colour and magnitude, according to the time of the moon,” and so would help the observant physician predict when seizures were imminent. Mead even cited approvingly a case, as related by an earlier author, of a woman whose beauty “depended upon the lunar force, insomuch that at full moon she was plump and very handsome.”

The most striking aspect of Mead’s lurid rabies case, though, is the setting of the scene: the wedding night, in which a young bride is deflowered in a horrifyingly unconventional manner. Domestic attacks, in which the assailed party is a spouse or lover, do sometimes figure in werewolf lore. One such tale is so widespread—having taken root from Transylvania to Uruguay—that folklorists gave it its own name: the “legend of the torn garment.” In the most common version of this story a man, while riding home alongside his wife, unexpectedly
hands the reins over to her and steps off into the bushes. The wife waits; suddenly a furious dog bolts out from the brush and bites down on her savagely. Afterward, alone, she makes her way home and finds her husband waiting there. As he walks to meet her with a smile, she spies scraps of her shredded dress in his teeth.

These sorts of intimate assaults, however, are considerably more common in vampire tales, where the dead spouse or lost love returns to haunt the living partner. Sabine Baring-Gould cites a vampire account from Baghdad, in the early fifteenth century, that bears more than a passing resemblance to the rabies tale of Richard Mead—though in this case it is the young woman who is driven to animal feastings. On the wedding night of one Abul-Hassan, the son of a wealthy merchant, the bride steals away from the marriage bed when she believes her new husband to be asleep. This she continues to do, night after night, until Abul-Hassan resolves to follow her. By moonlight he trails her to a cemetery, where he is faced with a terrifying tableau: a gang of ghoulish creatures, chowing down on corpses. With revulsion he sees his wife—who, Baring-Gould notes, “never touched supper at home”—playing “no inconsiderable part in the hideous banquet.” The following night, Abul-Hassan confronts her with what he has witnessed. She lashes back quite literally with tooth and nail, tearing at his neck, attempting to drink his blood. At this, Abul-Hassan strikes and kills her; but three nights later, at midnight, she returns, again trying to sup at his neck. Only upon opening her tomb and burning her corpse is the vampire finally dispatched.

Before we move along to still more vampiric matters, it is worth reprinting the remedy for dog bite that Richard Mead advocated to forestall any onset of violent lunacy. First, the patient was to be bled from the arm, with nine or ten ounces removed. Second, a medicinal powder—a blend of black pepper and ground liverwort—was to be mixed into a half-pint of warm cow’s milk and drunk by the patient each morning for four consecutive days. Finally, for a full month, the patient must bathe every morning in cold water. This last stage, Mead
felt, was of the utmost importance, as demonstrated by the case of “a lusty young woman” treated by a certain Dr. Willis. Having been “raving mad seven or eight days,” this woman, on Willis’s orders, was “carried abroad at midnight, and thrown naked into a river: where she swam about without help for more than a quarter of an hour.” Soon thereafter, reports Mead, she “recovered without the help of any other remedy.” Presumably, this means the patient was no longer mad; whether she remained lusty, Mead does not say.

If the sixteenth-century werewolf epidemic had been a word-of-mouth hysteria, the vampire boom of the eighteenth century played out as a mass-media phenomenon. It was touched off by a series of published dispatches from eastern Europe, lands where vampirism served as a consistent force in the local folklore, written by Western correspondents, who reported on these strange happenings with horror.
Le Nouveau Mercure Galant,
a French newspaper, ran an account in 1694 of vampires “sucking the blood of people and cattle in great abundance.” It went on: “They sucked through the mouth, the nose but mainly through the ears. They say that the vampires had a sort of hunger that made them chew even their shrouds in the grave.”