In 1897, the quintessential treatment of the vampire legend was published: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an epistolary novel that owed much to John Polidori’s and Lord Byron’s first vampire tale, in that again, the vampire is depicted as an aristocrat, living in a castle, who once more preys upon women with a dark charm and sensual allure. However, Stoker’s vampire is an entirely new creation, a bringing forth of the modern legend in its entirety, fully formed, while at the same time acknowledging much of the folklore from which it sprang. Four years after the publication of the novel, an Icelandic translation of the book appeared, entitled Makt Myrkranna, or Powers of Darkness. This edition was adapted from a Swedish version that had been anonymously translated, and whose publisher remains unknown. Interestingly, Powers of Darkness appears to have been translated from some early draft of the novel, with significant differences from the book as the rest of the world has come to know it. Nor was it unauthorized, as Stoker himself wrote a preface, in which, surprisingly, he appears to state that the story is true, or based on true events. He indicates that the characters are real people, stating that he “let the people involved relate their experiences in their own way,” but changed their names. According to Stoker, “I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight.” More recently, the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker, revealed that, according to his research, Bram Stoker had always intended his book to be read as a work of non-fiction, as a warning of a very real supernatural evil that he had discovered. He describes how his publisher refused to print the book as it was, saying that such claims of a blood-letting monster on the loose in London would only cause a panic of the kind they were still recovering from following the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper. He forced Stoker to excise the first hundred pages and reframe the book as a work of fiction. This is a truly intriguing story, which even a hundred years later has led some to believe that maybe, just maybe, there really is such a thing as vampires. However, the fact of the matter is that all of these claims appear to have been made to sell novels. Dacre Stoker has made a name for himself off of his great-granduncle’s work, writing a sequel called Dracula: The Undead, and later a prequel, Dracul. These claims were made by Dacre and his co-author as part of that prequel, suggesting that the completely fictional story that followed, about Bram Stoker himself struggling against vampires, was a believable filling in of the missing story. However, the novel he co-wrote is far longer than the supposed missing 100 pages he claims were censored, and if the Icelandic version were adapted from a complete draft, it too omits everything that Dacre Stoker and his co-author imagined. Furthermore, the claim that a publisher would refuse to print anything on the grounds that it might enflame public fear like Jack the Ripper, whose murders occurred a decade earlier, is somewhat preposterous. An entire cottage industry had sprung up for publishing books about Jack the Ripper, including The Whitechapel Murders Or, The Mysteries of the East End and The History of the Whitechapel Murders, both in 1888, then The Whitechapel Murders, Or, An American Detective in London and The Whitechapel Mystery, both in 1889, not to mention a bevy of journal articles in the intervening years. To suggest that writing about Jack the Ripper was not done, especially a decade later, is patently false. As for the Powers of Darkness, there is suspicion among scholars that, though it may have been adapted from an early draft of the novel, its translator took great liberties with the story that Stoker may not have even known about. And Bram Stoker’s own preface can easily be explained as another publicity stunt, an attempt to drum up interest among a new audience by falsely claiming that the story had some basis in reality, when in fact, it was entirely fictional. It must be remembered, after all, that Bram Stoker, who had long worked in the theater, as an actor’s assistant and as a critic, was nothing if not a showman.

As we discuss the possible basis for the foundational vampire novel, Dracula, many may object and say that of course Bram Stoker based his monster on a true story, at least to some degree, in that it is common knowledge that he based his Count Dracula on Vlad Drăculea, or Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler, the Voivode, or leader, of Wallachia, the famously ruthless son of Vlad Dracul, the Dragon. Vlad the Impaler is said to have been so bloodthirsty that during his campaign to cement his control of Wallachia, when he captured dissident Transylvanian Saxons, he had them impaled, thus earning his name. However, besides Vlad Țepeș not being a Count or a Transylvanian, there is quite a bit wrong with this notion. First, rather than being a hermit in a castle feared by all the peasants for his evil or cruelty, he was widely celebrated as a just ruler and is remembered in Romania as something of a national hero who established peace. His reputation for cruelty was real, however, from his impalement of enemies to the burning of his own subjects for being lazy and poor, so the surviving view of him as some sort of just tyrant is dubious, at best. However, none of this is really relevant to vampirism. There was never any historical connection between Vlad Țepeș and blood-drinking or revenant folklore. The connection only exists in Bram Stoker’s novel, because he took the name Dracula. In the 1970s, it was argued by two researchers, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, that Stoker based his character on that historical figure, but since then, scholars have argued convincingly that he seems not to have known much about Vlad the Impaler at all. He appears to have found the name Dracula in a book on Wallachian and Moldavian history and decided that it sounded appropriately scary. Among all of his papers, no mention of or evidence of research into the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler has ever been discovered. The working name of the character before he changed it to Dracula had been Count Wampyr. But Vlad the Impaler is not the only real life figure that scholars have argued inspired the novel’s creature. Some suggest he may have been more inspired by Attila the Hun than by Vlad Țepeș, as in the novel, the character claims descent from him. Others suggest that Bram Stoker was inspired by the real-life vampire story of Mercy Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, which I spoke about in substantial detail in a recent patron exclusive. In fact, an 1896 newspaper clipping about the destruction of Mercy Brown’s corpse for fear she had turned revenant was found in Bram Stoker’s papers. He had been touring America with a theater company that year, and certainly seems to have heard of the story. Add to that the fact that Stoker makes mention of an English town called Exeter, from where his character Jonathan Harker leaves for Transylvania, and it makes for a convincing argument. However, whether it helped shape the novel at all, the story of Mercy Brown could not have inspired it, for by the time he acquired the clipping, he was already far along in composing it. In fact, the next year it would be published. More recently, one historian, Louis S. Warren, has even argued, rather convincingly, that Bram Stoker based the character of Count Dracula on Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West show had toured London in 1887, at which time Bram Stoker actually spent time with the American showman. Warren believes that, to Stoker, Dracula’s transformation and decay was a direct result of his living on the frontier among other races, and that the novel stands as a reflection on the American frontier and how the colonizer is changed and eventually was colonized himself by the racial other. Read this way, the novel has decidedly white supremacist themes, and the vampiric plague visited upon England in it comes to represent the fear of racial degeneracy. Is this what Stoker was writing about? Is this what he viewed as the true story behind his novel? God, I hope not. In the end, maybe it’s better that we only read the book as a terrifying yarn rather than as commentary on some real threat.

Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler, the usual suspect for the model of Dracula, though Bram Stoker appears to have studied him little during the composition of his novel.

If we are to compare the vampire of novels and films to reality at all, it must be to the original vision of vampires from European folklore, which I described in nauseous detail in part one of this series. So let us look at the vampire, meaning its appearance. How do the revenants of Central and Southeastern Europe, the vampir of Serbia, the Nachzehrer of Germany, the vrykolakas of Greece, compare with the bloodsuckers of modern horror fiction. As I joked about at the end of Part One, by simple appearance, they are very unlike one another. The modern vampire is thin, and pale, but according to folklore, “real” vampires are bloated, supposedly with the blood of their victims but actually with putrefying gasses, and rather than pale, it was a darkening of the skin, or more accurately, a reddening of the skin that typically indicated to real vampire hunters when a corpse had become undead. It is clear enough how this change came about. Pallor is closely associated with death; when one imagines a dead man, one thinks of the color leaving their cheeks, so that was obvious enough. As for the trim physique, from the very moment the folklore entered the realm of fiction, in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the creature had been reimagined as an attractive figure who might walk among us unnoticed. Stoker’s Count was simply walking in the footsteps of Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, himself a caricature of Byron. The vampire never really had a chance to be its true, shambling, distended self, though I think that might have been even more horrifying. The image of the vampire evolved further from the dashing debonair in the 1920s, with the silent film Nosferatu, in which the vampire was depicted more ratlike, or perhaps batlike, and some scholars have suggested this representation was an anti-Semitic trope, presenting the vampire as the feared foreign-born Jew who was seen as an invader of white society, leeching off of and tainting its populace. So the racist meaning behind vampire fiction can again be clearly seen. By the time of Nosferatu, the teeth of the vampire had become a prominent feature, but where did they come from? It is possible that the notion of fangs derived from the receding of gums from the teeth in corpses, just as the receding of skin made it appear that hair and nails were growing, but there is not clear mention of fangs in any folkloric accounts. Indeed, when blood drinking is mentioned at all in the folklore, the vampire is said to have drunk from the trunk of his victim or some other place on the body, not the neck. Polidori’s story makes early mention of teeth marks left by the vampire on the neck, but not of fangs. It seems that this little detail was invented by Bram Stoker, and it certainly sunk in, if you will. There is some evidence, however, which I will expand on momentarily, that Stoker was greatly influenced by the folklore writing of Sabine Baring-Gould, a priest from Exeter, curiously enough, whose description of werewolf folklore was well known at the time, and which I made heavy use of myself in my own series on werewolves. So it would seem that the fangs of the vampire were borrowed from the werewolf.

Also like the werewolf, and likely borrowed from Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves, are the vampire’s shapeshifting abilities in the novel Dracula, as the Count is depicted as transforming himself not only into a bat, as is commonly thought of when one thinks of vampiric transformations, but also into a large dog and a wolf. In fact, though this is pretty accurate to the folklore of revenants as well. “Real” vampires, or revenants, which were not always actually believed to physically leave their graves, appeared on their nightly perambulations as their old self but also were said to appear as dogs and as wolves, but also as cats, goats, horses, donkeys, frogs, chickens, owls, mice, and even butterflies. Strangely, bats are one of the rare animals not named as a form taken by the vampire. This wide variety of forms should cause one pause. If in many cases the dead person who was rumored to have returned from the grave to trouble the living was said to take so many different forms, then it casts even more doubt on eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen revenants. If one believed that a disease was being caused by a revenant, and one was on the lookout for a revenant, especially one that others in town had been claiming they had seen, one might see that revenant in every innocent creature that crossed their path. Or, they might not have seen anything at all, for it was even said that revenants might be invisible. Perhaps this is the folkloric origin of Dracula’s ability to travel by moonbeam or appear as a mist. In reality, though, we must consider that this means any tragedy or hardship or annoyance might have been blamed on a revenant, whether accusers really believed they had seen them or not. If an animal was within view, that was the tricky vampire, and if no animal was around to blame it on, one could just say that the revenant must have been invisible. According to the folklore, only twins who were born on a Saturday and had reversed their clothing could see an invisible revenant, so obviously that would make it hard to spot them. In this way, the vampire was quite similar not only to the werewolf, but also to the witch, who it was thought could appear as an animal and could even make herself invisible through her use of the Devil’s salve. And the similarities do not end there. As we know, witches were women, often outsiders, accused of dealing with the Devil, and so too were werewolves believed to have made deals with Satan. Well, as it turns out, vampires also were often said to have been reanimated through a diabolical power. Indeed, sharing the same pool of potential suspects with witches and werewolves, it was often outsiders or criminals or people believed to be practitioners of sorcery who were expected to turn into revenants after death.

Sabine Baring-Gould, the priest whose folklore writings about werewolves appear to have greatly inspired the novel *Dracula*.

In fiction, there is some disagreement about how one becomes a vampire. According to Stoker, one only has to be the victim of a vampire to become one, and this reflects some folkloric traditions well, when it was feared that any who died of the disease being blamed on a revenant would themselves become revenants. However, the strange customs behind the vampire myth do not always agree. In later fiction, it is said that a vampire must make a victim must drink the vampire’s blood to become a vampire, but in the original folklore, the vampire’s blood was something of a cure for vampirism. Just as we saw in the story of Mercy Brown with the ashes of the supposed revenant, the blood from the alleged vampire, as well as soil from its grave were often used to cure a victim or to ward off further attacks. And in many cultures and traditions, one did not need to be attacked at all to become a vampire. As previously stated, just as it was common for anyone considered an outsider or who was not well-liked to be accused of witchcraft, the same might easily be claimed to have been reanimated by the devil after their death. Take, for example, the vrykolakas of Mykonos discussed in Part One. De Tournefort specifically mentioned that he was unliked. Another category of person thought likely to turn revenant upon their passing was a person thought to have committed suicide, such as the shoemaker of Breslau. This supposed predisposition toward vampirism meant that there was probably always a handy scapegoat when a disease began to trouble a village, for any person who had killed themselves or who was suspected of sorcery or even who was not well-liked could be the culprit. Consider this list of the types of people most likely to be accused of becoming revenants, compiled by Dagmar Burkhart, expert on Slavic folklore: “the godless…evildoers, suicides, in addition sorcerors, witches, and werewolves; …robbers, highwaymen, arsonists, prostitutes, deceitful and treacherous barmaids and other dishonorable people.” Indeed, it appears that alcoholics were often prime candidates, and they, like suicides, were sometimes exhumed and dealt with as revenants before anyone had reported their supposed return from the grave. The act of suicide itself was not always believed to have opened the deceased to the influence of the Devil, though. Rather, it was the fact that they had died before their time. We see this also among those taken suddenly by some disease or in some other way suffering an untimely demise. In Psalm 90, it is stated, “Our days may come to seventy years,/ or eighty, if our strength endures,” and this line of scripture led some to interpret that God had appointed at least that number of years to all of us. Therefore, if one is taken early, by accident, or disease, or by their own hand, or even by the hand of another, they may rise from the grave a revenant. Murder victims and those who meet untimely ends in the wilderness especially are at risk of vampirism because if their remains are left undiscovered, they do not have the benefit of a proper burial. But none of this may matter, according to some traditions. One may be well-liked, and god-fearing, and live out all their appointed days on earth, but if they were born a certain way, they may be damned from the start to become a vampire. Babies born with teeth, it was said would become a revenant, or those born with a red caul, or with a split lip, or a supernumerary nipple or vestigial tail or red birthmark. Again, the folklore of the vampire is reminiscent of that of the witch, who was said to have been marked by the Devil with some of the very same bodily signs.

One prominent feature of the fictional vampire is its sexual magnetism. From Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula to Anne Rice’s Lestat, vampires are depicted as darkly alluring or even rapacious. They enter the bed chambers of their victims and take them in an intimate embrace, pressing a their red mouths to their victim’s necks, and exchanging fluids. Whether one sees this as a metaphor for sex, or in a more horrifying sense, as a representation of violation, the subtext is there. Surprisingly, this too can be viewed as deriving from some aspects of vampire folklore. For example, the revenant was thought to be a sexual creature. This may be the result of the so-called “wild signs” observed in corpses exhumed on suspicion of being vampires, which is believed to be a euphemism for an erection. Such anatomical reactions are an apparent common thing in decomposing bodies, as a result of the bloating that I spoke about in great uncomfortable detail in Part One. These signs of what must have seemed to be arousal likely then led to further claims about the sexual activity of revenants. It has been claimed, for example, that the revenant was apt to visit his widow and wear her out with his lovemaking. Beyond these reports, though, many were the claims that the revenant entered the bedchambers of his victims and lay down on top of them. This was not necessarily said to be a sexual act, however, or a rape, but rather a physical assault in the sense that the revenant was trying to smother them. But, if we really think about these incidents, we come away with an entirely different explanation. If a person today were to describe seeing a shadowy figure enter their room, and said they were unable to do anything as this figure got on top of them and pressed down, smothering them, we might more likely attribute this to not only a nightmare but the terrifyingly real phenomenon of sleep paralysis with hypnopompic hallucination. Those who suffer from this well-known sleep disorder feel that they cannot move while in a state between sleeping and waking, and the hallucinations that accompany this sensation are often terrifying, involving shadowy figures and creatures entering their room, sitting on their thorax, creating the feeling of pressure there, and sometimes carrying out some sexual act on them. This has been called “the incubus phenomenon,” relating to folkloric demons like the incubus and succubus that were said to seduce and have intercourse with sleeping men and women. Statistical analysis has shown that this incubus phenomenon may be experienced by as much as 11% of the general population, and up to 41% of those who experience sleep paralysis. Rather than a demonic figure, this creature that sits atop a sleeping person is viewed as an old hag in many traditions, also called the Night Hag, and is more of a witch-like figure. In fact, this hallucinated entity is actually where we get our word for nightmare. A mare in Scandinavian folklore was a damned woman who visits villagers in their sleep to sit on their chests and bring them terrifying dreams. Clearly this known sleep disorder serves as a sound rational explanation for many reports of nightmarish revenant visitations.

*The Nightmare*, by Henry Fuseli (1781), a classic depiction of sleep paralysis and the incubus phenomenon.

All that remains to consider when it comes to the vampire myth are the odds and ends, things like the origin of driving a wooden stake through their hearts, their lack of reflection in a mirror, their aversion to silver and garlic, and their reaction to crosses and to sunlight. The staking of a vampire is clear enough; we have observed that because of the folklore of the revenant, many original vampire hunters drove stakes of wood through supposed vampires. The truth of the matter, however, is that this may have originated not as a means of destroying the vampire. For that, beheading and burning served their purposes far better. The stake, it seems, was actually a means of keeping them immobile, driving the stake through their bodies and into the earth beneath so that they could no longer rise to trouble the living. Among the Finns, for example, the staking of a vampire was only to pin it in place. Other folklore indicates that the stake may have been a kind of apotropaic, or charm to ward off the vampire, as it was believed that revenants could be driven away by the mere presence of sharp things generally, not only stakes, but even thorns and knives, which were placed under pillows to ward off vampires. This may have been the origin of the belief that silver could kill a vampire, since the knives kept under mattresses and pillows were often silver. The folklore says little about the effect of crosses on vampires, though we may presume that this Christian element of the myth was incorporated later, with the spread of Christianity, in conjunction with the notion that the Devil was responsible for raising the revenant. Indeed, early accounts indicate the opposite effect of crosses, though. My principal source, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber, describes an incident in which a sword is driven into a suspected vampire, and then it is worried that, because the cross guard of the sword made a cross shape, it would prevent the Devil from leaving the corpse. Garlic, though, it seems, was indeed a recognized apotropaic against vampires, for the sole reason that it was stinky, and it was believed that revenants would be repelled by the stink. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that it was claimed the revenant did not stink as it should have, but the fact is that garlic was not unique. Any stinky thing was thought to repel the vampire, and villagers were known to spread feces on cloth as revenant repellant. As for the absence of a vampire’s reflection, there is speculation that this relates to the notion that vampires had no soul, and mirrors were thought to show or capture the soul. In fact, according to some folklore, it was actually believed that vampires had two souls, and even two hearts, thereby allowing them to survive death. It was thought that vampires talked to themselves because of their dual souls, and I would imagine this led to numerous mentally ill persons being posthumously accused of vampirism. Others have thought that the vampire’s issue with mirrors is that most used to be backed with silver, but the truth of the matter is that the element of vampire lore having to do with mirror images never appeared until Bram Stoker invented it. Likewise, the vampire’s inflammable reaction to sunlight is nowhere to be found in the folklore or early vampire fiction and appears to have been invented in 1922 by F. W. Murnau in his Dracula ripoff, Nosferatu.

There is an explanation given from ancient mythology for many of the elements I just spoke about, however. They originate in the Scriptures of Delphi, the so-called “Vampire Bible.” Said to be passed down from the word of the Oracles at Delphi themselves, it tells the story of Ambrogio in ancient Greece, who was cursed by Apollo, the sun god, to have his skin burned by sunlight, and who thereafter lost his soul to Hades, god of the underworld. The goddess of the moon and the hunt, Artemis, further cursed Ambrogio to be burned at the touch of silver, and grants him immortality but only if he drinks blood to sustain himself. If such a Greek myth were real, it would indeed appear to be the origin of the vampire story. The problem is, the earliest mention of the “Scriptures of Delphi” and the story of Ambrogio that I can find is 2015, and though some vampire enthusiasts claim it was unearthed by archaeologists in Delphi, I’ve seen no evidence of this. It appears to me that this is likely a modern hoax. Thus vampire mythmaking continues today. And fiction writers are not alone in expanding the vampire mythos. Well-meaning scientists and medical professionals too have added misinformation to our understanding of the subject. In 1851, British anatomist Herbert Mayo hypothesized that revenants were merely people in a coma or suffering from catalepsy who had been buried alive and who woke up only when dug up and impaled. This doesn’t account for all the reports of revenants who had no reaction at all when cut open or staked or those who had been in the grave for months and clearly would have been dead regardless of whether they’d been alive when interred. It would also require us to believe that some villages had a habit of burying a great many people alive. Also clearly false is the more recent hypothesis that vampires were actually people suffering from porphyria. This blood disorder, which has also been tried as an explanation of werewolves because of excessive hair growth being one side effect, is raised as an explanation mainly because of the porphyria victim’s sensitivity to sunlight, an aspect of vampires that we know was invented for cinema. However, other aspects lend themselves to this explanation, such as a supposed aversion to garlic because of its sulfur content, which could worsen their condition, and the receding of gums supposedly making fangs (though as we’ve seen, fangs were also never part of vampire folklore). Proponents of this theory claim that the lack of a reflection in mirrors, which we have seen did not originate from folklore, really refers to a porphyria sufferer avoiding mirrors because of how the disorder ravages their faces. And they even go so far as to claim that since the urine of a porphyria sufferer is red, it would have been presumed that they had been drinking blood (which is rather absurd considering blood in the urine is common of many ailments and not some strange condition that would encourage such speculation). The further claim that, since blood infusions would later be used as a treatment, perhaps porphyria sufferers used to try to treat the disorder by drinking blood, is also completely unsupported conjecture. The fact is that as a theory it seems believable, but since the symptoms it attempts to account for were largely fictional, it makes no sense, and furthermore, it makes no effort to account for the fact that those who were accused of vampirism were already dead and buried, and there is not always mention of them having been diseased in life or drinking blood when they supposedly rose from the grave. SO at the end of our examination of vampires, what it boils down to is a superstition, borne from a lack of understanding of disease and death, which has since been embellished by fiction writers and earnest men of science into a wide-ranging legend of an abominable and fiendish monster…who wants to suck your blood!!

Until next time, remember, if there is anything that my Halloween series have shown--from “The Specter of Devil Worship,” to the “Shadow of the Werewolf,” to “A Rediscovery of Witches,” to “The Demoniacs” and “The Revenants”—it’s that monsters, as such, may not be real, but those who claim to hunt, cast out, prosecute, and destroy them certainly have proven themselves monstrous.

The Revenants - Part Two: VAMPIRES in Fantasy

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