Vampire Forensics (14 page)

Another charge hurled at the coffined vampire is its lack of rigor mortis (the stiffening of the body after death). True, rigor mortis follows swiftly on the heels of death as chemical changes start to stiffen the muscles—producing those upthrown arms and fiendish grins of the Gettysburg slain—but it starts fading as early as 40 hours after death. In the old days, the corpse would likely be in its grave by the time its limbs settled and flopped into whatever position gravity dictated. That, combined with the shifts occasioned by internal pressures and bloating, might contort the body into a position different from the one in which it was originally buried—with all the alarums that development might engender were it to become known.

The exhumed vampire is often described as ruddy in appearance. Yet, color changes in corpses are transitory—and contingent on innumerable variables. Not long after death, for instance, the settling of blood lends the human face the bluish cast that has become familiar as livor mortis, or death blue. Usually there follows a sequence of changes known as the chromatic stages of decomposition, running from red to green to purple and then to brown. Furthermore, a corpse may actually grow warmer as serious decomposition sets in—heat being a natural by-product of microorganisms hard at work.

And then there were the bloated bodies: Dracula in his coffin swollen “like a filthy leech,” the once-lean Miliza in Medvegia astonishing her former neighbors by the “surprising plumpness” she had gained in the grave. All that, of course, is the result of gas, mostly methane, that accumulates in the body’s tissues as those same microorganisms metabolize a corpse. Though postmortem swelling is most pronounced in the abdomen—home to legions of intestinal bacteria—every part of a corpse may puff up to two or three times its natural size, rendering its features unrecognizable. This ghastly appearance was a familiar enough encounter in war zones. Just a few days before they were discovered on the killing fields of Gettysburg, for example, those bloated and blackened bodies had been lean and hungry young men.

Given the right circumstances, this gas might erupt—often with explosive force. “It is well known to those engaged in burying the dead,” Dr. George Walker writes in his
Gatherings from Grave Yards
, “that when leaden coffins are employed, the expansive force of the gas, and the consequent bulging out of the coffin, compels the workmen frequently to ‘tap’ it, that the gas may escape.” This demanded some skill. After boring a hole with a gimlet—a handheld auger that resembles nothing so much as a corkscrew—a “jet of gas instantly passes through the aperture, and this, when ignited, produces a flame, that lasts from ten minutes to half an hour. The men who perform this operation are perfectly aware of the risk they encounter, and they are extremely careful how they execute it.”

And then there is the disturbing matter of “corpse light.” At Gettysburg, the layer of dirt covering the mass graves was so thin that a strange phosphorescence emanated from the ground at night. For years, understandably, locals shunned such places as haunted. Eerie glows reported near cemeteries, will-o’-the-wisp phenomena, even the blue flames that Slavic folktales describe as appearing over the sites of buried treasure on St. George’s Eve (and used to such chilling effect in the opening pages of
Dracula
) are typically written off as cases of hyperimagination. Yet, they might be actual instances of bioluminescence:
Photobacterium fischeri,
forensic pathologists will tell you, is but one of many luminous bacteria known to settle on a shallowly buried body.

D
ON’T
M
OCK
Y
OUR
O
WN
G
RINNING

Certainly the most dramatic manifestation of suspected vampirism is blood at the mouth. Surely that was the vampire’s most recent meal, now trickling down its chin? Horrifying as they appear, bloody lips on the dead are nothing out of the ordinary. “Decay of the internal organs,” Borrini points out, “creates a dark fluid sometimes known as ‘purge fluid’: it can flow freely from the nose and mouth (or from the corpse, if it is staked) and could easily be confused with the blood sucked by the vampire.”

Exhumed cadavers are likewise frequently reported as wallowing in blood-filled coffins. That was an unfailing sign of vampirism because blood was known to coagulate after death. Well, yes and no: Under certain circumstances—especially if death was abrupt—blood might reliquefy. But though blood will out, as the proverb has it, the liquid that seeps out of a corpse’s orifices into the coffin is almost certainly, Borrini says, purge fluid.

Bodies can also literally return from the grave. If not buried deep enough, their natural buoyancy might propel them to the surface. This may explain why archaeologists have found so many skeletons deliberately weighted down by rocks or timbers.

And then there is the groaning—sometimes, in literature or cinema, the screaming—of the vampire as it is staked through the heart. One could easily, and justifiably, pass this off as a folkloric embellishment. On the other hand, it might be a legitimate physiological reflex. “Indeed, it would have been odd if his body had
not
let out a sound when a stake was driven into it,” Barber remarked of Arnold Paole, staked in 1725 in Medvegia. Hammering a piece of wood into a chest cavity violently compresses the lungs and forces air past the glottis as if expelled through the pipe of an organ.

That the dead grow slack of jaw is familiar enough through literature. “Not one now, to mock your own grinning?” asks Hamlet of poor Yorick, “quite chap-fallen?” Scrooge gazes in horror when Marley’s ghost loosens its head bandage and “its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast.” As the jaw muscles relax with the dissipation of rigor mortis, the mouth predictably falls open. But if a body is wrapped too tightly in its shroud—as ID6 was, for it bent her left clavicle upward—the shroud will collapse into the gaping cavity. Then, as Borrini puts it, “cadaveric gases and purge fluid flowing from the mouth can moisten the shroud” and rot it as it dries. To the unenlightened observer, the resulting gap in the fabric may suggest the corpse has chewed right through it. If that cadaver also shows fingers lacerated by decomposition or the action of maggots, it can be taken for a Nachzehrer.

In view of all this, we may now at long last be able to glimpse what happened to ID6 in her cemetery at Lazzaretto Nuovo. Imagine the loathsome scene: Its overhanging stench, the pockmarked ground suppurating with putrescent bodies hidden by the barest covering of dirt. Flies swarm over the exposed bodies, which are soon crawling with maggots.

The pit is a fearsome place. Daniel Defoe, describing the Great Plague that punished London in 1665, reconstructed its burial pits in his
Journal of the Plague Year
(1722):

There was also the grimly ironic Holywell Pit, or “Black Ditch,” and the one in Finsbury Fields. “People that were infected, and near their end, and delirious also,” Defoe wrote, “would run to those pits wrapt in blankets, or rugs, and throw themselves in, and as they said, bury themselves…. I have heard, that in a great pit in ‘Finsbury,’ in the parish of ‘Cripplegate,’ it lying open then to the fields; for it was not then wall’d about, [they] came and threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any earth upon them; and that when they came to bury others, and found them there, they were quite dead, tho’ not cold.”

The cemetery at Lazzaretto Nuovo surely had its visible horrors. It may have had audible ones as well. The waxing and waning of chewing sounds said to reflect the coming and going of epidemics might arise in the documentable fact that, during such times, hundreds of hastily buried and rapidly decomposing bodies were generating their own horrid symphony. As Barber memorably captured it, the “disruption of large numbers of bodies bloating and bursting caus[ed] a sound rather like an epidemic stomach-rumbling.”

At some point—perhaps months but probably scant weeks after ID6 had died and been buried—a burial detail, having no choice, opened her grave to add yet another occupant to it. At that point, quite likely, they saw that she had “chewed” a hole in her shroud. Someone, likely one of the gravediggers, knew the superstition associated with this, and knew how to stop it—literally, with a brick. Whether they recoiled in horror at the sight, whether they concluded that this particular corpse was responsible for all the suffering of the plague, or whether that brick was placed in the cadaver’s mouth as a precautionary measure, we will never know. But this much is clear: Utterly unfairly, ID6 was treated as if she were a vampire.

R
EQUIESCANT IN
P
ACE

During the year and a half that it ravaged Venice, la peste carried off 46,000 people—nearly one-third of the city’s population. In due course, however, it abated, and an official proclamation of health was announced on July 21, 1577. In gratitude for the deliverance, the doge and the senate erected the basilica of Il Redentore (The Redeemer) on the island of Giudecca. Over the years since then, every third Sunday in July, bells announce the Feast of the Redeemer with the joy that life has been restored.

The deliverance was short-lived, as we have seen, and when the plague returned between 1630 and 1631, it laid another 40,000 bodies on top of ID6 and her fellow victims in cemeteries scattered throughout Venice. That visitation, many historians believe, spelled the beginning of the end for the Queen of the Adriatic. The city slowly declined until 1797, when Napoleon ended its existence as an independent republic.

If ID6 was a vampire, it is only in the sense that Paul Barber defined the term: “a corpse that comes to the attention of the populace in times of crisis and is taken for the cause of that crisis.” According to anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, writing in 1871, “Vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts of wasting disease.” More than a century later, folklorist Michael Bell refined Tylor’s point: “Reduced to its common denominator, the vampire is a classic scapegoat.”

We have now arrived at one very compelling explanation for vampiric origins: The whole mythology grew out of observations of corpses—superstition wrapped around forensic fact. As Barber puts it, “Our descriptions of revenants and vampires match up, detail by detail, with what we know about dead bodies that have been buried for a time.”

“In the end, from a forensic point of view,” Borrini muses, “we can accept the reports about the ‘vampire corpses’ as real descriptions, but we can also realize why those legends spread especially during plagues.” After all, during pandemics, it was standard practice to reopen tombs and mass graves so as to add more victims. “In this way, it was easier to find bodies that were not completely decomposed, thus increasing dread and superstition among people who were already suffering pestilence and massive deaths.”

Nevertheless, stories about vampires have been evolving for centuries, and we must follow that trail. As we close the case of ID6, however, we leave her—and all other “vampires” whose only crime was to die and be buried—with a heartfelt
“Requiescant in pace”
(“May they rest in peace”) on our lips.

W
HEN
S
HAKESPEARE’S
H
AMLET
encounters the ghost of his father on the battlements of Denmark’s Elsinore Castle, he cannot believe his eyes: “Let me not burst in ignorance,” he begs, “but tell why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements.” A moment later he asks why his father’s “dead corse” is making the night hideous.

Bones? Corpse? Is it a ghost or a corpse that Hamlet sees? Today we make a distinction between a ghost, which is an incarnate spirit, and a vampire, which is a walking corpse. But in Shakespeare’s day, that separation wasn’t quite so pronounced. Even Englishman Henry More (1614–1687), a leading authority on the world of spirits, chose to call walking corpses specters.

More had recoiled from the “too sterile” Puritanism of his Lincolnshire youth, embracing instead the Neoplatonist philosophy he had discovered as a Cambridge undergraduate. His lifelong fascination with spirits was said to have led him into many a ruined vault echoing with dismal sighs and groanings and heaped with skulls and bones. His collected ghost stories—“stories sufficiently fresh and very well attested and certain,” he claimed—were published in
An Antidote Against Atheism
(1653), which More offered as an attempt to prove the metaphysical priority of spirit, and thus the primacy of God.

Two of those tales have since become touchstones in the literature of vampirism. In More’s retelling of the first story, on September 20, 1591, in the Polish city of Breslau (today Wroclaw), a prosperous shoemaker slipped into his back garden and, for reasons unknown, slit his own throat. For more than a thousand years, Christians have viewed suicide as a sin against God and man, so according to doctrine, this unnamed shoemaker never should have been buried in consecrated ground. Yet his family successfully concealed his crime. He had died of disease, they maintained, so as a stalwart member of the community he was interred in terra sancta: the churchyard.

Soon, however, the good burghers of Breslau began to whisper. Rumors of suicide spread. The town council launched an investigation, and the widow confessed the truth.

But by then, in More’s words, the shoemaker had reappeared:

As more and more people reported such visitations, hysteria spread. Soon the authorities, as More continued his tale, had no choice but to disinter the corpse:

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:

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:

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.

T
HE
A
RT OF
D
YING

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.”

W
ITCHES AND
W
EREWOLVES