It was a dark and stormy night when in late spring of 1816 the travelers arrived in Geneva, but more than that, it was a dark and stormy season all around, for that was the “Year Without a Summer,” when the volcanic ash clouds spewed out by Indonesian volcano Mount Tamboro resulted in darkness and unseasonable rainfall. The poet Percy Shelley, his lover and the mother of his son, Mary Godwin, their boy William, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont were in the midst of a tour of France and Switzerland that May, having just traveled through an unseasonably bleak and wintry country to reach Lake Geneva, where they stayed in a small chalet. During a particularly dark and stormy time of their stay, they abandoned their lodgings to stay in the far more lavish Villa Diodati that had been leased by Percy’s poet friend, the famous playboy, Lord Byron. Sexual tension abounded in the Villa during their stay, as Claire Clairmont, whom Lord Byron had previously taken as a lover, sought once again to draw the poet’s attentions, and Byron’s personal physician and companion, John Polidori, tried to draw the eye of Mary Godwin, but she remained devoted to the father of her child, whom she soon would wed, becoming Mary Shelley, though she already referred to herself as Mrs. Shelley. With some among them frustrated in their romantic interests, and all of them frustrated in their recreations, unable to go sailing on the lake because of the foul weather, they stayed indoors, read German ghost stories, and with thunder rumbling and lightning flashing outside, they spoke about the life-giving power of electricity, the then-popular notion of galvanism. This spooky atmosphere eventually led to a friendly contest among the writers, to compose the most frightening story. Lord Byron struggled, starting a story about a man who promised to return from the grave to visit his friend, but in the end abandoning it and working instead on his poem, The Darkness, which reads, in part, “I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” Meanwhile, Mary Shelley too was troubled by a dark dream or nightmare, inspired by all their talk of galvanism. The result was her masterpiece, Frankenstein, the story of a monster raised from the dead. Her tale easily won the day, and today remains a classic of gothic horror literature. But it is Byron’s fragment of a story, which would later be taken up by his physician, John Polidori, and completed as a story called The Vampyre, which would eventually inspire an entire genre of horror storytelling and reinvent an ancient legend as a modern nightmare. Both were stories of things that came back from the dead, but Byron’s fragment was more clearly a representation of the old European notion of a revenant, a person that becomes resurrected and calls on people he knew in life. Polidori used the old Slavic word for a revenant, vampir, but the similarity ends there. In his story, the vampire is a nocturnal aristocrat named Lord Ruthven who preys on women. Clearly, Polidori rewrote the story as a parody of his friend, Lord Byron, but in the process, he single-handedly invented the vampire archetype, a well-dressed and mysterious gentleman with a dark, sexual charisma. In ensuing years, after his story was adapted into plays and an opera, his version of the vampire stood as the model for many imitators, and it reached an even wider audience later that century when a penny dreadful rip-off called Varney the Vampire serialized a similar tale on the cheap for a far broader readership. But today we easily forget that the basis of this fictional trope is a creature from European folklore that many cultures believed was utterly real.

I often try to create some throughline in episode topics. For example, I had a solid run this summer, from my episode about the Tartaria urban myth to my series on giants, and my examination of the Book of Enoch, and my study of the Flood myth and Noah’s Ark. Often there is no clear transition between my topics, though, like from JFK’s assassination to Tartaria, or from Noah’s Ark to gun violence, or gun violence to MK-Ultra, or Montauk to demagogues. However, if I were to attempt some tenuous connection here, I suppose that demagogues could be seen as a kind of vampire on a democratic society. Vampires are commonly used as metaphors or symbols, signifying greed and misuse. In fact, Merriam-Webster lists these metaphorical uses of the term as valid definitions, including “one who lives by preying on others” as one meaning, and even the disarmingly misogynist definition that a vampire might refer to “a woman who exploits and ruins her lover.” To suggest that the vampire is only present today in fiction or metaphor, however, disregards the continued belief among some that vampires are real. Such modern belief can be traced back to Christian apologism, or more specifically, the work of Montague Summers, the colorful clergyman and popular writer who styled himself as a kind of modern witch-hunter and demonologist in the early 20th century. I have spoken at some length about Montague Summers in my 2-part series Shadow of the Werewolf, as well as in my 2-part series A Rediscovery of Witches, both of which, if you haven’t listened, would make for a great podcast binge this Halloween season. Suffice to say that Montague Summer, who was undeniably erudite and whose work cannot be faulted for lack of scholarship, differentiated himself from any contemporary academic writers on the occult with his apparent absolute belief in his subject matter. He argued that witches really had made pacts with the devil, and that werewolves were real, having also made pacts with the devil. He made similar arguments that vampirism was and remained a real phenomenon. His claim can be clearly discerned in his second volume on the subject, The Vampire in Europe, when he writes of “the fundamental truth, which, however exaggerated in expression and communication, essentially informs the vampire-tradition.” Likewise, he states in no uncertain terms, “That a large number of cases of vampirism must be accounted certain only the most prejudiced will deny. Even in many other relations which cannot be pressed in detail it seems beyond doubt that the main facts are true.” Nor is this an obsolete view that cannot be entertained even by the bright light of modern science, as there exist today various subcultures that believe in vampirism, members of which even consume blood and believe it sustains them. So, in examining the folkloric origins of the vampire, we are not only examining the source material for a literary invention. Rather ridiculously, it seems we are obliged to refute the notion that vampires, as such, ever really existed.

Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where one dark and stormy night, much of modern horror was born.

First, we will examine some of the most widely cited reports of supposed real vampirism, looking at the primary source material to determine the real basis for the legend. One of the earliest firm accounts of such a revenant is preserved in a book of Prussian folklore. In this report, we are told of an affluent shoemaker of Breslau, in what was then Silesia, who committed suicide in 1591, cutting his own throat with a knife. The remains of people who had committed suicide were traditionally buried using alternative funerary rites and were not buried in the churchyard. It was, therefore, not uncommon for the bereaved loved ones to hide the true cause of death. Such was the case of the Silesian shoemaker, whose widow claimed he had died from a stroke and went to great lengths to hide the truth of the matter, not accepting visitors to view the corpse, and having it wrapped tightly so that its wound would not be perceived. Her efforts paid off, and the shoemaker was buried with traditional ceremony. However, rumors soon surfaced about his suicide and became such a scandalous gossip that the town council confronted the widow, who continually changed her story, saying first that he had actually fallen on a rock, then that he had fallen on his own awl and she had thrown it away to prevent others from injuring themselves. However, her neighbors continued to distrust her because they said they had begun to receive visits by the shoemaker. In the tradition of the revenant, the dead man was seen walking the city and visiting people he knew after his death. The text does not call him a revenant, or a vampire, or even a Nachzehrer, a northern German word for the same sort of creature, but rather a Gespenst, or ghost. As is common in revenant folklore, the shoemaker frightened those it visited, waking some up from slumber and in some cases entering their houses and assaulting them in their beds. People left their homes and spent the night in the company of others, keeping their lanterns burning the whole night through, but still they reported seeing the shoemaker making his nightly visit to oppress them. The troubles were so great, that the council determined to open the shoemaker’s grave and see for themselves that he truly was dead. What they found was a great swollen corpse, but they found him complete and undamaged by decay, and the fact that he was not stiff as they expected him to be caused them to believe that his was no normal corpse. Moreover, his skin had peeled away, revealing fresh skin beneath, and it was said not to stink as other corpses stank. They set a guard on the corpse and allowed the townspeople to come and view it for themselves, but regardless, the revenant continued to visit and trouble the people. Finally, the shoemaker’s widow admitted that he had killed himself and urged the council to end the troubles by killing him a second time. In order to utterly destroy the revenant, they cut off his head, hands and feet, removed his heart, and cremated the remains.

Of course we see the bare bones of a vampire story here: a creature that has risen from the dead to attack the living who is finally dealt with by attacking his heart, beheading him, and setting him on fire. As we look closely at the story, however, we see already how different the traditional stories of revenants are from the later vampire tradition. First and foremost, there is no drinking of blood. Instead there is only some noisy bothering of neighbors and perhaps some mild throttling. This is essentially a ghost story, complete with unfinished business. It is not the body itself which rises from the grave to vex his neighbors; the grave appears to have been undisturbed and the visits continued even when the body was watched. Rather, the story seems to indicate that the spirit of the shoemaker set about bothering and even physically attacking people until the truth about his death came out. As we shall see later, there is ample reason to doubt the reports of the revenant’s victims, as many may have imagined the visits, encouraged by the mass panic, or made false reports in an effort to further encourage the widow to come clean about the rumored true nature of the shoemaker’s death, or someone may even have been disguising himself as the shoemaker and going around bothering the people for any number of reasons. But the story of the shoemaker from Breslau does clearly introduce some elements of European folklore surrounding revenants: that when they are exhumed, they appear not to have properly decomposed. Indeed, it is claimed that the corpse of the shoemaker does not even smell bad, although, it should be noted that immediately after stating that there was no stench, the text concedes that “the cloths in which he was wrapped had a repulsive smell.” It seems unrealistic to believe that those who dug up the shoemaker, upon smelling a repulsive stench, then went about sniffing things more closely to determine whether it was the cloth or the corpse itself that stank. So the reliability of the report is called into question. Likewise, we read that the body was “undamaged by decay” but in the same breath it’s stated that it was “blown up like a drum,” as if those who examined it did not recognize swelling as a part of the decomposition process. Thus we must consider that they may not have been the best judges of whether or not the corpse should have been stiff at this stage in its decomposition, or whether the fresh skin they saw beneath the peeling skin was or was not an aspect of normal decay. To these strange features of the revenant in his grave we will add a few more before essaying to provide some rational explanation other than that they represent signs of the undead.

The next historical account of a supposedly real revenant, and one who can more accurately be called a vampire since he was Serbian, and that is the Serbian word for the phenomenon, comes to us from the 18th century, when Serbia and Walachia were occupied by Austria, and it was noticed that the locals had the strange practice of digging up corpses to “kill” them. In a village called Kisilova, after a man named Peter Plogojowitz died and had been buried, nine different people took ill and died swiftly, after only a day of symptoms. These people, as they lay dying, supposedly claimed that Plogojowitz had visited them in their sleep and attacked them. The villagers knew just what this meant—they had a vampire on their hands. So they opened Plogojowitz’s grave, in which they noticed that his hair and beard and even his fingernails had continued to grow after death, that his dead skin had peeled away to show healthy looking skin beneath, that his body did not stink, and that it was entirely intact after more than three months. More than this, fresh blood could be seen on his mouth, which the villagers believed he had sucked from his victims. To destroy the fiend, they drove a sharp wooden stake through his heart, whereupon great quantities of fresh blood erupted from the wound as well as from his eyes and mouth. Afterward, they burned his remains. This report adds features of the revenant in his grave that we will address in due course: the fresh blood seen in his mouth and flowing after being staked and the growth of hair and nails. Notable is the mention of blood sucking, and the staking of the heart. Here we find the vampire tale more complete but still not fully formed. Some vampire tales make claims about a disturbance of the grave, but more often, as in this tale, there is no indication that the corpse has left the grave or even that the villagers believe he had physically done so and then somehow reburied himself. Rather, again, it appears the revenant is seen as a kind of spirit, whose nocturnal attacks seem to create some effect on the corpse lying still undisturbed back in its grave. It is interesting that the report indicates the corpse is perfectly intact and “fresh,” yet admits an exception, saying, “except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away.” Once again the reliability of the report is questionable based on its own claims and logic. But perhaps most interesting here is the indication that the vampire is being blamed for an illness that is spreading through the village. Vampirism in folklore and fiction has since been portrayed as a kind of plague in its own right. It spreads like a disease when one vampire turns two victims into vampires, who in short order then each turn victims of their own, and so on. We don’t see vampirism spreading like an infection here, but it does appear to be a vector of some other infection in this tale, as we see his victims dying after a brief illness. But these sick villagers only essentially said that they had had nightmares about Plogojowitz. Again, if they even really made these claims, this could very well have been the result of some rumors that Plogojowitz had turned into a vampire. One wonders how many others who weren’t sick might have had similar nightmares with such rumors going around. Viewing the scenario in this more rationalist light, it becomes a case of scapegoating. We know nothing about Plogojowitz’s character in life or how he was viewed by villagers, but for whatever reason, when three months after his death a disease began spreading among the villagers, some chose to explain the mysterious illness by blaming it on the dead man, and the claim took on a life of its own, as it were. Who knows how many cases of vampires can be similarly explained as an attempt to find some comforting explanation for a frightening danger. The village of Kisilova knew of nothing they could do to defeat this communicable disease, but they knew just what to do about a vampire.

The explanation that vampirism was simply a way to cast blame for a plague when there was no one really to blame does much to explain every instance when a village chose to dig up and desecrate a corpse in this way. It was an established belief, which would of course encourage further claims of visitation by a recently deceased revenant whenever an illness was sweeping through a village. According to the account of the vampire Peter Plogojowitz, the people of Kisilova had heard of entire villages being wiped out by such a vampire. Of course, by this explanation, they were actually wiped out by diseases they did not understand, which they only explained by claiming a vampire was attacking them. As the notion that vampires cause disease transformed into the notion that vampirism spread like a disease, the act of digging up and destroying corpses itself sometimes became epidemic. According to a report published in Nuremberg in 1732, it sometimes resulted in villagers digging up entire cemeteries in the belief that they were full of vampires. In the village of Medvegia, a belief that vampires were visiting people and sucking their blood had arisen. The villagers claimed that their troubles could all be traced back to a soldier named Arnod Paole, who had died falling off a haywagon. While still alive, Paole had told people that a vampire used to attack him. He claimed to have finally rid himself of the vampire by eating soil from its grave and smearing its blood on himself. When Paole died, there were further claims that he had turned into a vampire and begun to bother villagers, and that he had even posthumously killed four people. One assumes they probably died from some illness, but regardless, the village dug him up, claimed he was not decayed, and that fresh blood flowed from him and that new skin and fingernails had grown on him. As was their custom with vampires, they staked him, whereupon he groaned and bled profusely, and thereafter they burned his remains. However, in Medvegia we see that whatever plague had been troubling them did not fade, so they needed further scapegoats and therefore claimed that all of Paole’s victims must likewise have been transformed into vampires. Thus they began digging up every corpse that had supposedly been killed by a vampire, which had probably actually expired from some disease, and each of these they decided had also not properly decomposed and showed the signs of vampirism, perhaps because they seem to have exhumed them in the winter, when cold weather slowed their decay. And when they ran out of dead people to blame for the disease and the disease continued to rage, they claimed that vampires had attacked their cattle too, and therefore anyone who had eaten of their meat must also have been transformed into a vampire upon dying. And when they dug these up—these people who hadn’t claimed to have been troubled by vampires but had likely died from the same illness nonetheless—they found that they too showed the signs of vampirism. It makes you wonder how many corpses they would have to observe before they started to suspect that the features they were so certain indicated vampirism might actually have been typical of a corpse in certain stages of decomposition.

An image depicting the rising of the dead from their graves.

Perhaps the best and most revealing report on such peasant superstitions comes to us from a French botanist named Pitton de Tournefort in early 18th century Mykonos, where the Greeks called such revenants vrykolakas. De Tournefort viewed the peasant superstitions more critically, and his skeptical account offers a rarer look at what was actually going on. He described a certain man on Mykonos who was unliked because of his quarrelsome nature, who had been murdered, with the culprit never having been discovered. Afterward, he was said to have been seen walking the island at night, or even entering homes and playing pranks like snuffing out lanterns, overturning furniture, or seizing people from behind and scaring them half to death. After ten days of this, they said a mass, exhumed his corpse, and cut out his heart. De Tournefort observed the practice, remarking on how inexpertly the butcher who completed the task performed it. Rather than observing a lack of stench, de Tournefort describes how the men who examined the corpse burned incense to cover the smell, which causes one to wonder whether that might be the case in other reported instances as well, but that the practice went unrecorded. Nevertheless, de Tournefort asserted that it did not decrease the stench at all, but rather magnified it. In fact, de Tournefort states that he suspects the men would have claimed the body did not stink at all if he had not been present to contradict their claims, giving the sense that a skeptic’s presence was all that prevented them from exaggerating their claims such that they would better match those of other accounts. Instead, some of the men began to cry out that smoke was coming from the body of the supposed vampire after it had been opened, proving it was a vrykolakas, though the botanist was certain that the smoke was obviously just from the incense. Likewise, he described the crowd of people proclaiming that the corpse was not stiff and that its blood was still red and warm, although de Tournefort seemed to express skepticism on the matter. He suggested that some warmth was to be expected when “rummaging about in entrails, which were putrefying,” and he further states, “as for the pretended red blood, …this was nothing but a stinking mess.” After the people thought they had rid themselves of this supposed vampire, the pranks continued, such that townsfolk left their homes and congregated together at night, finding their houses further ransacked and rummaged through upon their return. The believers argued over the proper way to dispense with the vrykolakas, suggesting they should have said mass after cutting out the heart rather than before, etc. Meanwhile de Tournefort had a different idea, suggesting that a number of vagabonds had run wild in the town, vandalizing homes and eating and drinking their fill at night when the villagers left their houses vacant and unguarded. Here we see a further explanation, other than scapegoating for a disease. We see that the supposed vrykolakas or vampire was hated for his behavior and character, and even killed for it. So perhaps others, like Peter Plogojowitz, were likewise disliked, making them a more likely target of blame when a disease came around, or in this case, on Mykonos, a crime wave. In the dark of night, as unknown figures are seen striding outside the home, or when some brute bursts into your house and knocks over your lamp, making it impossible to properly identify him, and goes on to break your things and assault you, who can you blame? Well if the folklore of revenants is common in your culture, you may be more likely to blame the ghost, or the corpse, of that one guy who was always such a dick.

So we have some notion of why a village might decide that a certain dead person was responsible for their woes, and we understand how social contagions work, that such claims might only grow with each retelling, becoming a mass delusion. But what of the claims about the vampire’s body not rotting as is to be expected. We might presume that the claims of there being no smell are exaggerated, but what of the consistent claims that the bodies are still fresh, with new growth of skin, hair, and nails, fresh, uncoagulated blood, with no stiffness as we might expect from rigor mortis, and even that they groan, or sometimes even cry out, when pierced by a stake? First it must be pointed out that, while accounts of vampire killing often claim that there are no signs of decomposition, they almost always belie an ignorance of what decomposition looks like. The falling away of the nose is a clear sign of decomposition, or the bloating that is described in almost every report. Vampire killers often believed the revenant was bloated because it had been drinking blood, but the bloating of corpses is common, due to the release of methane during putrefaction. The lack of stiffness was also a common sign of vampirism, but the fact is that rigor mortis is a temporary phenomenon. During the course of regular decomposition, the body again becomes flexible. Likewise, what they saw as the sloughing off of old skin and the growth of new skin is also a natural phenomenon, something called skin slippage, in which the outer layers of skin peel away, revealing not fresh skin beneath, but raw layers of the epidermis. What they saw as the hair and fingernails growing was actually the flesh having retracted from them, the beginning of a process of shedding the hair and nails. Much is made of the uncoagulated blood, but this too is common. Blood may coagulate but then liquify again, depending on the conditions of the body during decomposition, and the pressure of the gasses bloating the corpse commonly force the pooling blood past the larynx, explaining the supposedly fresh blood on the vampire’s lips. This liquid blood pools in the torso and especially in the heart, further explaining the copious bleeding when the vampire-killers stake revenants, and the very act of violently piercing the trunk of a corpse that has filled with gasses explains the sounds of groaning or even crying out that were frequently reported. Why would some bodies look different from others, though, as so many of these reports claim? The answer is simple. There are many factors that might hasten or retard decomposition, including moisture, temperature, microorganisms, and the presence of air or insects. Indeed, some bodies may actually be unusually preserved through accidental mummification and other processes. Some cultures in which vampires were believed to be common actually buried their dead in lime, which they believed hastened decay but could actually preserve the corpse. Another process is saponification, when fat is transformed into adipocere, causing a pinkish red discoloration in the muscles which may be mistaken for a robust complexion. But a better question is why European peasants would presume that such seemingly unnatural preservation of the dead was a sign of evil when otherwise, as in the preservation of saints, it would be viewed as a miracle of God denoting sanctity. Simply put, the fears these people faced were not fears of a fiendish monster. It was, instead, a quite natural fear of death, something they could not fully comprehend. For this reason, because of that deep-seated dreadful terror at the heart of vampire lore, I would argue that vampires remain the most horrifying of all monsters.

In Part Two we will further explore how this lore evolved into modern myth.

The Revenants - Part One: VAMPIRES in Reality

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