Vampire Forensics (13 page)

Born somewhere on the north German and Polish plains, this horrible figure made his appearance all over central Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. In “De Masticatione Mortuorum,” Rohr culled examples from several even more obscure German dissertations, emphasizing that the grunting noise in particular was heard mostly, if not exclusively, during eruptions of the plague. One of his sources, in fact, had concluded that “corpses eat only during the time of plague.” Rohr went on to cite a certain Adam Rother, who claimed that, as pestilence ravaged the German university town of Marburg in 1581, the dead in their graves could be heard uttering ominous noises from all over the town and surrounding countryside.

The same thing happened in Schisselbein, according to another little-known chronicler named Ignatius Hanielus. “Although both the corpses of men and of women are known to have grunted, gibbered, and squeaked,” Rohr reported, for some inexplicable reason “it is more often the bodies of the weaker sex who have thus uttered curious voices.”

Ever the inquiring theologian, Rohr offered an explanation for this postmortem mastication: The devil was using corpses to induce epidemics of plague by the mere act of their chewing. Why? For one thing, the very monstrousness of such an act was guaranteed to sow terror and confusion among the living. For another, every time a body had to be exhumed to stop its gnawing, the unearthed corpse would broadcast its infection and pestilence even farther afield.

Yet, unearthing a Nachzehrer was apparently the only way to stop the damned thing from grinding its teeth during the night: One had to seal its mouth with a handful of soil. Denied the ability to chew, it would then die of starvation. “Some deeming this not altogether sufficient,” Rohr wrote, “before they close the lips of the dead place a stone and a coin in the cold mouth, so that in his grave he may bite on these and refrain from gnawing further.”

When Matteo Borrini read that, he understood why the brick had been thrust into the mouth of ID6: This person was suspected of being a vampire.

T
O
S
CAPEGOAT
I
S
H
UMAN?

For centuries, epidemics had been viewed not in natural terms but rather in supernatural ones, as by-products of the struggle between God and Satan. As late as 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, a desperately cold winter had been followed by a smallpox outbreak; the deadly confluence was viewed as evidence that witches, allied with Satan, were at work. The stage was set for the Salem witchcraft trials.

The Old Testament attributed visitations of pestilence to God. In 1679, the same year that Rohr published “De Masticatione Mortuorum,” an outbreak of plague in Vienna was blamed on a kind of supernatural visitant called a
Pest Jungfrau
, or “Plague Maiden.”

Other scapegoats, tragically, were all too human.

In 1321, Philip V of France made leprosy a treasonable offense. Lepers, it seems, were supposed to be in league with Muslim Moors in Spain and Jews in Europe to poison the wells of Christendom. Lepers were burned at the stake—or locked in their houses while the houses burned down around their ears. Their property confiscated, they were interred without religious blessing. Soon leprosaria were in flames from southern France to Switzerland. Jacques Fournier, bishop of Mirepoix, oversaw the execution of thousands of lepers—shortly before he became Pope. Such was the mentality that reigned over Europe on the eve of the Black Death.

Once that epidemic hit, the scapegoating turned to even older targets. Anti-Jewish pogroms flared in cities all over Europe. In Basel, more than 600 Jews were burned at the stake, and their remains were deliberately left unburied. In Frankfurt, Jews were incinerated in their own houses. In Speyer, the burghers sealed Jewish corpses in wine casks and tossed them into the Rhine River, while Jewish mothers threw their babies into the fires and leaped in after them. And in Strasbourg, 2,000 Jews were rounded up, corralled on a wooden scaffold in the Jewish cemetery, and burned. Finally, in 1348, Pope Clement VI issued two papal bulls condemning such actions and declaring that the perpetrators had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil.”

Witches were also to blame. In the 15th century, Sisteron in France was so beset by plague that its citizens executed suspected witches—a bid to perform a sort of communal pestilential exorcism. In 1545, judges in Geneva accused 62 people, 49 of them women, of being
engraisseurs,
or “plague spreaders” 32 of them were burned at the stake. As the plague devastated Milan as well as Venice in 1576, Jews, beggars, and gypsies were victimized once again, being hunted down and killed. When that failed to end the pestilence, health workers were targeted instead.

Or might the fault lie in the stars? During the Black Death, King Philip VI of France convened the medical faculty at the University of Paris to explain what was happening. Following Hippocrates and the Arab physician Avicenna, they ascribed the plague to an evil conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn in the sign of Aquarius that had occurred on the afternoon of March 20, 1345, generating noxious fumes and a putrefaction that rotted the heart.

So, two centuries later, it might not have seemed so improbable to attribute the plague to corpses gnawing away in their graves at the goading of the devil.

H
ARD
D
AYS
’ L
IFE

Back at the University of Florence, as winter turned to spring in 2009, Matteo Borrini was launching an intensive study of that brick-in-mouth skeleton, ID6. It would amount to a literal odyssey, with Borrini driving his suspected vampire from one high-tech lab to another all over Italy. Though he had only a partial skeleton to work with, he was going to subject it to a battery of tests to better understand who this person once was.

Might ID6 have been a Jew? A Levantine merchant? A North African Moor, like Othello? To find out, Borrini sought out any vestiges of hair, fiber, or other materials that might still be clinging to ID6’s bones. Using powerful forensic light source lamps, he fired beams of multispectral light onto the traces of dirt adhering to the skull—and discovered two rosary beads. That was a key clue, for it meant that ID6 had almost certainly been Roman Catholic—as were most Venetians. And its skull fit known European profiles.

Determining its sex was a bit trickier. Judging from what was left of the skeleton, ID6 had once belonged to a small person—someone, Borrini estimated, who stood about one and a half meters tall, or a little over five feet. Yet it was missing the telltale hip bones, which usually revealed gender at a glance. He therefore turned to the skull. The mastoid process—a spurlike projection just behind the ears, where the neck muscles attach—is generally larger in men than in women. On ID6, it seemed quite small. Furthermore, the chin seemed demurely pointed. So this was most likely a woman.

If so, how old was she? Calcification of the ribs is one way to judge age. But the condition of ID6’s skeleton was too fragmented to reveal anything more precise than that it belonged to somebody probably older than 50. High-tech X-ray imaging of the canine teeth (of all things) is notably more precise because their internal cavities age at a known rate. Those tests indicated that ID6 was a chronological standout for her era. She had reached the remarkably advanced age of 61 to 71 years old.

This vampire, if such it was, had been a little old lady—and a not particularly bloodthirsty one at that. Trace element testing of her bones had turned up a high sodium reading, consistent with a largely vegetarian diet, perhaps supplemented with a little fish from time to time. She had also lived a physically demanding life, judging from a ridge that had formed around the head of her right humerus, or upper arm bone, where it fits into the shoulder socket. This indicated constant and repetitive lifting; from this, Borrini deduced that the shoulder might have been causing her pain.

ID6 was an ordinary, working-class Venetian woman—neither poor nor rich, but most decidedly a survivor. Though Borrini divined that she had suffered a skull injury as a young girl, evidently she had recovered from that and had managed to live past 60—no mean feat at the time. A century later in London, an examination of the Bills of Mortality from 1629 to 1660 revealed that “of 100 quick Conceptions about 36 of them die before they be six years old, and that perhaps but one surviveth 76.”

In between those two ends of the age spectrum lay some even more sobering actuarial details: Only one-fourth of all those born were still alive by the age of 26, and only 6 out of every 100 lived to see 56. The main killers were infectious diseases—the grim gauntlet through which the race of life was run. ID6 had gotten pretty far down the course before being tripped up by tiny
Yersinia pestis.
The bacillus landed her in a quarantine hospital, where she may have spent her final few days in agony.

She was just one of the tens of thousands the plague swept away. Borrini had seen it in the cemetery: Plague was the great leveler, and in those layers, he could glimpse a cross section of the human condition on a fine day in the Piazza San Marco circa 1575, just before the invader struck. Rich and poor, soldier and diplomat, merchant and laborer, servant and beggar, ladies in oriental silks and gallants in brightly colored hose—all soon to be mowed down by death’s scythe and deposited equally in the boneyard.

“An old woman who lived a long, hard life,” Borrini reflected about ID6, “and was falsely accused after her death of being a vampire.”

As a forensic anthropologist, Borrini knew the reason why. It all had to do with the state of her corpse.

D
EATH
B
E
N
OT
P
ROUD

In the 1980s, the forensic approach to the study of vampires was pioneered not by a pathologist but rather by a folklorist. Paul Barber took the widely accepted notion that a vampire was a reanimated corpse and pursued it to its logical conclusion: “[A] vampire,” wrote Barber in his now-classic
Vampires, Burial, and Death
(1988), “is a body that in all respects appears to be dead except that it does not decay as we expect, its blood does not coagulate, and it may show changes in dimension and in color.”

Barber’s contention was that nearly all the traits associated with the folkloric vampire originated in misunderstandings about decaying bodies. Blood sucking? Just a “folkloric means [for clarifying] two unrelated phenomena: unexplained deaths and the appearance of blood at the mouth of a corpse.” Before the late 19th century, when embalming started to become standard practice in Western nations, dead bodies did strange but perfectly natural things in their graves. The course of physical corruption—and this is not for the weak of stomach—does not always run true.

Bodies exposed to summer heat and air, for instance, tend to decay quickly. At the end of the battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to 3, 1863, a 27-year-old Confederate artilleryman named Robert Stiles encountered the carcasses of those who had been slain only two or three days previously:

The same processes so horribly apparent in those summer fields were equally present in the grave, although burial—again, depending on the circumstances of deposition—might slow them considerably. Bodies decompose most rapidly when exposed to air, most slowly deep in the earth. The more air, insects, moisture, bacteria, and other microorganisms that are present, generally speaking, the faster it happens. The slain soldiers were decomposing before the eyes of stunned survivors; by contrast, the dead in their wintry graves in Medvegia, as we saw in the last chapter, were just getting under way—this despite the fact that some of them had been underground a full three months.

And then there is the mindset of those forced to gaze upon such spectacles: If people are determined to find a vampire, they will find one. Writer Elwood B. Trigg, in
Gypsy Demons and Divinities,
neatly sums up the double bind: “If, after a period of time, [the corpse] remains incorrupt, exactly as it was buried, or if it appears to be swollen and black in color, having undergone some dreadful change in appearance, suspicions of vampirism are confirmed.”

Nevertheless, some telltale signs of bodily decomposition that have often been mistaken as evidence of vampirism include bloodstained liquid flowing from nose or mouth, bloating, changes in skin color, enlargement of the genitals (in both sexes), and the shedding of nails or hair. (With other signs—the liquefaction of eyeballs, the conversion of tissues into a semifluid guck or the presence of maggots—even the hardened vampire hunter must admit defeat.)

The appearance on a corpse of growing hair, nails, or teeth is illusory. They do not grow. Instead, the surrounding skin and gums contract, making them look longer or more prominent. By the same token, reports that a vampire has sloughed off its old skin like a snake, revealing a grisly new reddish one beneath, represent what forensic pathologists call skin slippage, or the loosening of the epidermis from the underlying dermis—again, all perfectly normal.

A body long buried in a deep, cool, moist environment is often subject to saponification, another natural process in which fats are rendered into adipocere—a waxy, soapy substance, sometimes called corpse wax or grave wax, that sheathes the entire carcass like some gruesome body cast. Although rarely correlated with supposed vampirism, saponification may explain why some corpses were seen as being incorruptible. Barber even quotes a former lecturer in “Morbid Anatomy” at the University of London, W. E. D. Evans, as claiming that the reddish color of saponified muscles can “give the impression of muscle freshly dead, even though the death occurred more than 100 years previously.”