Vampire Forensics (3 page)

What we are told next comes entirely from Manchester. Later that summer, as Highgate hysteria reached a fever pitch, “Lusia” in a trance led him to one of the grand if crumbling mausoleums in the cemetery. Inside, he found a great coffin and, removing its heavy lid, discovered that it held a vampire, “gorged and stinking with the life blood of others,” its “glazed eyes [staring] horribly, almost mocking me.” A companion dissuaded Manchester from staking the corpse, however, so he contented himself with pronouncing an exorcism and resealing the vault with garlic-impregnated cement. But the vampire’s sleep must have been disturbed, for it decamped for the basement of a nearby mansion—the “House of Dracula,” the press gleefully nicknamed it—where, in 1977, the intrepid vampire hunter tracked it down and staked it, reducing it to slime.

This saga, believe it or not, continued until 1982, when Manchester claimed to have driven the final stake through the heart of the last remaining Highgate vampire. “Lusia,” it seems, had died in the interim and was buried in a graveyard nearby. Encountering her in a dream, however, Manchester had realized that “Lusia,” having been bitten by the vampire, was thereby infected herself—and destined to return from the dead. Visiting her grave site one autumn evening, Manchester was not at all surprised to confront what he described as a large, spiderlike creature about the size of a cat. After being dispatched in the time-honored fashion, the spider reverted to the form and figure of “Lusia.” Manchester returned her to her grave.

What you make of this astonishing story may depend on how high your eyebrow is cocked. It has been recounted in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, providing grist for a shelf load of books. It has appeared regularly in television documentaries and soon will be dramatized in a feature film. And in a sign that even vampires are now online, the harrowing happenings of Highgate are frequently—and vigorously—debated on the Web.

The truly mind-boggling thing is that so many of the story’s details could have been lifted straight from the pages of
Dracula
: the eastern European nobleman arriving in London by coffin, the vampire trying to enter the bedroom window, the sleepwalking “Lusia” (like the sleepwalking Lucy of the novel), and finally the vampire hunters breaking in to tombs (as Van Helsing did with his assistants). Whatever else it might be, this is life imitating art on an epic scale.

P
REY
I
S
P
REY

It’s but a step from playing at vampires to believing you really are one. One night in 1959, when 16-year-old Salvatore Agron went on a killing spree while dressed like Béla Lugosi, he was actually the leader of a Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, gang called the Vampires; the stabbings, though of innocent people, were motivated by gang warfare. In 1996, however, when 16-year-old Roderick Ferrell and four accomplices killed the parents of his girlfriend, it was a vampire fantasy run amok. These devotees of the role-playing game
Vampire: The Masquerade
had convened what the press later called a “cult,” cemented by cutting themselves with razor blades and drinking one another’s blood.

When Ferrell and his fellow “vampires” were arrested, a copy of Anne Rice’s
Queen of the Damned
was found in their car. The film version of that book was later implicated in a murder in Scotland, where Allan Menzies, 22, so lost himself in its fictional world that he convinced himself he was a vampire. Menzies killed his best friend, ate part of his skull, and drank some of his blood. In 1998, Joshua Rudiger, 22, certain that he was a 2,000-year-old vampire, slashed the throats of homeless people in San Francisco because, he said, he needed a drink of blood. “Prey is prey,” he supposedly told investigators.

Role-playing is one thing, compulsion something else. In 1886, German psychiatrist Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his pioneering
Psychopathia Sexualis,
the first compendium of case studies to illustrate the wide range of paraphilias, or what were once called sexual perversities. Case number 32 described a 26-year-old man who experienced an erotic charge from the taste of blood, stemming from a childhood incident in which he had impulsively sucked the blood from a housemaid’s cut finger:

Case number 48 described a young man with scars covering his arms who had sought out Dr. von Krafft-Ebing. It turned out they were incidental to his wife’s lovemaking technique: “[H]e first had to make a cut in his arm,” Krafft-Ebing reported, and “she would suck the wound and during the act become violently excited sexually.” In the good doctor’s opinion, this case recalled the “widespread legend of the vampires, the origin of which may perhaps be referred to such sadistic facts.”

Might “clinical vampirism,” as the compulsion to drink another person’s blood has been diagnosed, really explain the origin of the vampire legend? Certainly it describes a syndrome of pathological behaviors easily correlated to that legend.
Vampirism
was once rather widely used to describe activities ranging from the ingestion of blood to cannibalism. These would have to be irresistibly compulsive behaviors, almost ritualized, the discharge of which would afford only temporary relief. That spelled trouble if such compulsions manifested themselves in psychopathic personalities—especially in people who appeared to be functioning perfectly normally.

In 1931, as Americans packed movie palaces to watch Béla Lugosi play Dracula, German audiences were treated to a far darker tale. Fritz Lang’s
M
is a film about a serial killer of children, purportedly inspired by a series of horrible crimes that had plagued the dark days of postwar Germany.

In the mid-1920s, after police in Hanover began dredging human bones from the nearby Leine River, a hunt was undertaken for what the press called the “Vampire of Hanover” or the “Werewolf of Hanover.” Eventually police arrested a petty crook, stool pigeon, and sexual predator named Fritz Haarmann (1879–1925). Under the impulse of what his accomplice called his “wild, sick urges,” Haarmann had picked up at least 27 young men—homosexual prostitutes, runaways, and street urchins—had taken them to his squalid room, and had gnawed through their throats during sex to kill them. He then butchered their remains, cast the offal and bones into the river, and sold the meat and clothes in the city’s various markets. Not surprisingly, after a sensational two-week trial, Haarmann was beheaded in April 1925.

Five years later, it was the turn of the “Vampire of Düsseldorf” to make headlines. In late 1929, numerous bodies of women and girls—slashed and sometimes decapitated by knives and scissors, or bludgeoned by hammers—surfaced with sickening frequency in and around Düsseldorf. Eventually, a lifelong criminal named Peter Kürten (1883–1931) was arrested and charged with the murders. A neat man not devoid of feeling, he seemed unable to resist the compulsion toward sexual gratification that he found in the spurting blood of his victims. As he was led to the guillotine, Kürten supposedly asked the prison psychiatrist whether, “after my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck?” He hoped that might be “the pleasure to end all pleasures.”

On the other hand, the story of John Haigh (1909–1949), dubbed the “Acid Bath Murderer,” is a bad B movie, complete with drums of sulfuric acid—Haigh’s means of concealing the perfect crime. Haigh killed at least six people (he claimed nine) in or around London and dumped each body into an acid bath. After a day or two, the ghastly concoction had reduced each victim to a sludge that could easily be poured down a manhole. Eventually the police caught him, and found the remains of three human gall bladders and a partial set of dentures in one of the drums. At his trial, the nation was horrified to witness the offhand, even affable manner with which Haigh confessed to having cut his victims’ throats in order to enjoy a revivifying glass of blood. His testimony earned him the inevitable sobriquet of “Vampire of London.” If it was an attempt to cop an insanity plea, the prosecutor saw through it: Haigh, whose primary motive seems to have been the petty one of theft, was hanged in August 1949.

Then there was a deaf-mute laborer named Kuno Hoffman who, in 1972, gained notoriety as the “Vampire of Nuremberg” after he shot a kissing couple one night and lapped up their blood—blood that was much fresher than the blend he habitually imbibed from buried corpses, several dozen of which he had disinterred expressly for that purpose.

An even more stomach-churning case was that of Richard Trenton Chase. The “Vampire of Sacramento,” as he was branded, was a classic paranoid schizophrenic. He not only believed that his pulmonary artery had been stolen, but also was convinced that either UFOs or Nazis were poisoning his soap dish. Chase also showed a compulsion for drinking blood, which precipitated a killing spree. He murdered two infants and two adults—accompanied by disembowelments, the eating of brains, and the quaffing of blood from used yogurt cups—before the police finally caught up with him. Rather than face the electric chair, Chase poisoned himself.

This litany of latter-day vampirism seems inexhaustible indeed. But it may have reached its grisly apogee in 1980, when 23-year-old James Riva, using gold-plated bullets, shot and killed his 74-year-old disabled grandmother. Riva then drank her blood as it spurted from the wounds. He had attacked her, Riva later claimed, because the voice of a vampire had instructed him to do so. Riva further declared that he himself was a 700-year-old vampire who required his grandmother’s blood to survive, only to discover that she was too old and dried up to serve that purpose. In 2009, he came up for parole. It was denied.

Such instances might be multiplied a hundredfold. Yet it is dangerous to ascribe too much to clinical vampirism, if only because the evidence for it gets flimsier the further back in history one searches. On a hilltop near Cachtice in Slovakia, for example, stand the moldering ruins of a castle. We shall never know exactly what happened there, for thick slabs of legend have accreted around an elusive core of fact. But this was once the home of Elizabeth Báthory (1560–1614), whom history has crowned the “Blood Countess.”

The legend is well known: In 1600 or thereabouts, while having her hair combed, Báthory reacted violently to the clumsy brushwork of a maidservant and struck her, bloodying her nose. When a drop of the blood fell on the countess’s hand, the skin beneath it soon turned magically younger. So the 40-year-old widow, anxious to maintain her fabled but fading youth and beauty, instigated a decade of butchery, arranging for upward of 650 virgin girls to be killed and drained to replenish her rejuvenating blood baths.

Much of that may be fabrication, of course. What’s certain is that the King of Hungary presided over the trial of a Countess Báthory, who was convicted on 80 counts of murder. Seventeenth-century rules of evidence being less stringent than those in force today, many of the rumors—of lesbian orgies, of torture, and even of cannibalism—are hard to prove. Crimes occurred, to be sure, yet it is difficult if not impossible to ascertain their true nature and extent (650 victims seems preposterous).

Accusations of witchcraft dominated Báthory’s trial, leading two of her maidservants and her majordomo to be executed in horrific fashion. Báthory was spared their fate because she hailed from a noble family that had long produced rulers of Transylvania; but hers was a Protestant clan in a Catholic kingdom, and her sons-in-law—the ones who brought charges against her in the first place—stood to inherit her estates. Whatever the truth behind the gruesome tales, in 1611, the Blood Countess was walled into a suite of rooms in her castle, never to leave again. Her dark and solitary confinement ended only with her death four years later.

In far too many other instances, by contrast, the sad facts of clinical vampirism are undeniable. Its grisly catalogue of symptoms underscores a point made by Dr. Philip Jaffé, a psychiatrist, and Frank DiCataldo, an expert on juvenile delinquency, in 1994: Clinical vampirism brings together “some of the most shocking pathologic behaviors [ever] observed in humanity.”

But does clinical vampirism help explain the historical origin of vampires, as Dr. von Krafft-Ebing suspected? Or might it be merely a convenient label to affix to the file drawer of case histories? Wherever the truth lies, the dramatic convergence of myth and reality contained in those histories is a sufficient goad to seek a better understanding of vampire origins.

B
ENEATH THE
C
LAY

“Everything must have a beginning,” Mary Shelley writes in her foreword to
Frankenstein,
“and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Anyone seeking the origins of the vampire legend must be prepared to uncover one beginning after another. Because the vampire is found mostly in story—perhaps
only
in story?—he must be tracked, as if down through the levels of an archaeological dig, from one layer of story to another. One must pass from the night world of the present, with its glittering abundance of images, and wend ever downward through the night worlds residing in printed books, or on incunabula, or inscribed on parchment and vellum, or dwelling in generations of folktales whispered in chimney corners, until only the tombs and the bones remain. That might be the ultimate level, the one—as the poet William Butler Yeats put it—where “under heavy loads of trampled clay / Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood; / Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.”

“I
T IS A STORY OF A VAMPIRE,”
begins the note accompanying the leather-bound presentation copy delivered to former prime minister William Gladstone on May 24, 1897:

Because Bram Stoker happily flogged his own books, many people in his wide circle of acquaintance received similar leather-bound volumes—and similar notes. The mystery was how the bluff, burly 50-year-old found time to write his stories and novels while working full-time as manager of the Lyceum Theatre, the toniest stage in London’s West End. No doubt his friends were busy too, for they didn’t acknowledge his gift. Arthur Conan Doyle, however, pulled out his pen and jotted a note: The 38-year-old creator of Sherlock Holmes, already one of Britain’s most popular authors, declared
Dracula
the “very best story of diablerie that I have read in many years.”

Late Victorian London, in the imagination’s eye, is a sea of jostling hansom cabs, an ocean of bobbing bowler and top hats. It is the largest and most important city in the world, the seat of majesty and the pivot of empire. Yet it cloaks some very real horrors: Jack the Ripper—the midnight stalker who slashes the throats of women and occasionally eviscerates their bodies—is out there somewhere. Nevertheless, the figure standing near Hyde Park Corner one day in the early 1890s, watching the teeming millions passing by, will have a far greater impact on the world’s apprehension of horror, despite the fact that he inhabits only the world of a novel. For Dracula is the original Undead—a name that Bram Stoker coined, and nearly used as the book’s title—personifying the irruption of an archaic, supernatural terror in the complacent heart of civilization. His special diablerie is that, once loosed, he is not easily repressed:

If we are to understand the vampire, Dracula is the wolf in the path. All roads lead to him.

L
ANDS OF
S
UPERSTITION

At the close of the 19th century, anyone in England who aspired to write a vampire story could count on his readers to know something about them, for books had made vampires familiar figures. Hardly a literate household did not possess an old Gothic romance or two, whose stories were set in gloomy castles and featured malevolent noblemen with Italian-sounding names. Most homes would also have a copy of John Keats’s “Lamia” or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Christabel
, poems with ancient or medieval settings that featured exotic, vampirelike beings.

Stoker’s genius did not run to poetry; but for a grimly realistic setting, he might have found inspiration in his own heritage. Bram Stoker was born in Clontarf, Ireland, in 1847, when the seven-year potato famine was at its worst. Eventually, it would kill nearly a million people and send a million Irish emigrants to the New World on overcrowded “coffin ships.” Stoker’s mother could also recount the horrors of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which had ravaged her native Sligo; she recalled its victims’ being buried in mass graves while they were still alive. There were also Celtic tales of bloodsucking
dearg-due
, and English tales (Stoker moved to London in 1879 to work for celebrated actor Henry Irving) such as that of the “vampire” of Croglin Grange in Cumberland: a brown, shriveled, mummified creature—discovered in a vault littered with overturned coffins and spilled corpses—that was said to have terrorized the neighborhood before being burned in the 17th century.

A vampire story, however, cried out for a central or eastern European setting, because that’s where the legend had long been flourishing. That was also the region where four empires had long been grinding against one another. The Ottoman Empire, centered on modern Turkey, still embraced the Near East and most of the Balkans, as it had for four centuries—“the Balkans” being a case of geographic synecdoche, taking a part for the whole, for the Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria were just one in a series of ranges rising above the peninsula between the Adriatic and Aegean seas. The various nationalities that lived in this “Turkish Europe”—Romanians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, and Greeks—had been gradually winning their independence, though not without a fight. Hidden behind that Ottoman veil, however, was one of the most deeply rooted vampire folklores to be found anywhere.

The Russian Empire also harbored deep deposits of
upyr,
or “vampire,” folklore, mined by such writers as Nikolai Gogol and Aleksey Tolstoy, uncle of another and more famous author of the same surname. Germany, too, would make a tempting choice for a vampire-story setting. When Jane Eyre, for instance, in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name, compared the madwoman in the attic to “that foul German spectre—the Vampyre,” she was associating the monster with a tradition in German literature that had begun a century earlier, in 1748, when Heinrich August Ossenfelder wrote his poem “Der Vampir.” The genre included such masterpieces as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth,” in which the eponymous heroine wanders from her grave to seek “the bridegroom I have lost / And the lifeblood of his heart to drink.”

Stoker had certainly read Gottfried Bürger’s
Lenore,
one of the most popular ballads of the late 18th century. It is the tale of a spectral soldier who returns from the wars one moonlit night to claim his bride. Spiriting her away by horseback, then galloping past the ghosts that haunt gallows and graveyards, he leads her to their marriage bed: his coffin, all “plank and bottom and lid” of it, in Hungary. That ballad’s most quoted line,
“Die Toten reiten schnell”—
“The dead travel fast”—not only became proverbial, meaning that the dead are soon forgotten, but also appeared in a deleted early chapter of
Dracula
, where the four words were carved on Countess Dolingen’s tombstone.

Nevertheless, Stoker chose to set his vampire story in the sprawling, polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty from the fin de siècle Vienna of Strauss waltzes and Freudian psychoanalysis. He initially placed his castle in the mountainous Duchy of Styria, the setting for
Carmilla,
an 1872 vampire story he admired whose author, Sheridan le Fanu, was a Dublin writer and newspaper editor who had once employed Stoker. In
Carmilla,
Styria was a Gothic landscape of limitless forests, lonely castles, and ruined chapels. And there Stoker’s own fictitious castle might yet be standing had he not come across an article written by the English-born wife of an Austrian cavalry officer; her account described an even more remote corner of the empire, one tucked away in the isolation of the Carpathian Mountains: “Transylvania might well be termed the land of superstition,” Emily Gerard had written in a July 1885 article for
The Nineteenth Century,
“for nowhere else does this curious crooked plant of delusion flourish as persistently and in such bewildering variety.

“It would almost seem,” Gerard continued, “as though the whole species of demons, pixies, witches, and hobgoblins, driven from the rest of Europe by the wand of science, had taken refuge within this mountain rampart, well aware that here they would find secure lurking places, whence they might defy their persecutors yet awhile.”

Bristling with caves and strange rock formations—Gregynia Drakuluj (Devil’s Garden), Gania Drakuluj (Devil’s Mountain), and Yadu Drakuluj (Devil’s Abyss)—the landscape and superstitions that Gerard described must have appealed to Stoker, because he soon moved his castle to Transylvania. That decision would place the “land beyond the forest” (the literal translation of
Transylvania)
squarely on the imaginative map of Europe. Even though its paper position would change after World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and Transylvania was ceded to Romania, it was thanks to
Dracula
that Transylvania, not the Balkans, came to be identified in most people’s minds as the vampire’s true native land.

“…
THE
M
ASTER IS AT
H
AND.”

Dracula
is an epistolary novel, told through letters, journal entries, and even telegrams—all of which should warn astute readers to be alert to the phenomenon of the unreliable narrator. It is also a sprawling novel, overflowing with characters and incidents. But we might glance anyway at how Count Dracula is portrayed throughout the course of the narrative.

The story opens with the journey of Jonathan Harker, a young English attorney, to Count Dracula’s castle, situated in a remote reach of Transylvania. There, Harker is to help the count buy some property in London, where the nobleman hopes to move. As the castle door swings open, Harker beholds a seemingly courteous, if slightly creepy, figure:

Despite his unsettling appearance, Dracula seems at times almost cozily domestic—playing coachman and maid and cook, making the bed and setting the table, chatting all night about different subjects, eager to practice his English. In his library—apparently the only cheery room in a long-disused castle—he reclines on a couch, studying English travel guides or the London Directory,
Whitaker’s Almanack,
and other reference books that must have been hard to obtain in that faraway place. He is a proud old dragon, proud of his Szekely origins, believed at the time to be descendants of Attila the Hun:

But this Transylvanian
Gemütlichkeit
doesn’t last. Dracula, who has coarse hands with hairy palms and long nails “cut to a sharp point,” is simply repulsive. “As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me,” Harker writes, “I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.” Harker is trapped in the castle.

One moonlit night Harker looks out the window and sees the count crawling down the castle wall like a human fly. On another night, wandering about in the warren of dust-shrouded rooms, he lapses into a trance and nearly falls prey to three horrifying female figures. Harker is saved by the timely entrance of Dracula, who tosses the harridans a sack containing a human infant for them to feed upon. Eventually, Harker finds his way into the crypt; it is daytime, and all the castle’s vampires are at rest in their coffins:

Once Dracula arrives in England, the diablerie begins in earnest. Most of the action takes place in Whitby, a Yorkshire resort on the North Sea, and London, where it centers on a lunatic asylum that happens to be next door to the old abbey that Dracula has succeeded in purchasing. The count is rarely seen, and when Harker chances to glimpse him standing among the teeming crowds near Hyde Park Corner one day, seemingly unaffected by sunlight, he looks much younger.

For the most part, however, Count Dracula is an ominous, even insidious presence, taking the form of mist or a bat. Clearly, he has become demonic; to cover his arrival at Whitby by sea, for example, he raises a storm that hurls not only giant waves against the sands but also the Russian schooner on which he traveled—a derelict, because he left all the crew dead behind him.

Stoker must have read in the pages of Emily Gerard about the Scholomance
—
the iniquitous school, said to exist in the Carpathians, where the devil himself taught magic spells, the language of animals, and all the secrets of nature. One in ten students, Gerard had written, were “detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon an
Ismeju
(dragon) he becomes henceforward the devil’s aide-de-camp, and assists him in ‘making the weather,’ that is, in preparing the thunderbolts.”