THE stories must have sent a chill through Paris’s elegant society. Beginning in March 1693, a genteel literary journal called Mercure Galant published a series of macabre articles documenting a plague of undead corpses in Poland and Russia. “This reviving being… comes out of his grave, or a demon in his likeness, [and] goes by night to embrace his near relations or his friends,” Pierre Des Noyers, a scholar and former secretary to Queen Marie-Louise of Poland, reported in their May issue. It then “sucks their blood so much as to weaken and attenuate them, and at last cause their death”.
The only solution was to behead the corpse and drive a stake through its heart, Des Noyers wrote. These creatures, so filled with stolen blood that it poured out of their ears and eyes, went by a name that sounds strangely familiar today: oupires.
Long before vampires became the dashing stars of Victorian fiction, these creatures were a serious concern for scholars like Des Noyers. If their theories seem senseless in the light of modern science, it is important to remember just how eerie a decaying body can appear. A corpse’s lips can be specked with blood, for example, and the torso can appear bloated, as if they have just eaten (see “Diary of death and decay”). Thanks to modern forensic science, we now know that this is caused by a build-up of gas in the bowels, which pushes blood up through the lungs and out of the mouth. In medieval and early modern Europe, however, these processes were far from obvious.
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“Belief in vampires at the time was not necessarily ‘irrational’ or ‘superstitious’,” says , a historian at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France. “The scientific and religious background beliefs were very different from today.”
Vermeir first chanced upon the Mercure Galant articles while researching the peculiar claims of a mystic “able to find criminals with his divining rod”. Intrigued that serious scholars had entertained the subject of vampirism, he has since combed through their work to see when and why they abandoned their supernatural beliefs for a more modern understanding of the reports ().
Vampire-like phenomena were already deeply embedded in folklore by the time of the Mercure Galant stories. William of Newburgh, a 12th-century English historian and canon, was one of the first to chronicle the belief, with an account of an apparent rampage near Anantis Castle (possibly in Dumfriesshire, Scotland). Villagers, he wrote, were “beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster”. Searching for the source of the attacks, they exhumed a corpse “suffused with blood… It might have been taken for a leech”. A brave villager, William records, then “laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart”.
The creatures portrayed in these early reports weren’t yet the bloodsuckers of Des Noyers’s article, though. The blood around the corpse’s lips was instead believed to be a consequence of their tendency to feed on bodies in the neighbouring graves. Terrified locals sometimes took drastic action to quell this habit; recent excavations near Venice, Italy, found a 16th-century female corpse with a brick jammed between her teeth, apparently to prevent her from snacking on neighbours. When it came to their living victims, however, these creatures were thought to be more likely to hit people than to bite them.
Even the later reports, beginning with the Mercure Galant stories, describe very different creatures from the glamorous vampires that grace modern films. For one thing, they weren’t mysterious nobility like Dracula, but an undead version of the fellow down the block you never got on with. They could also enjoy the midday sun without turning into ash, and, in a blow to their modern reputation as meticulous preeners, they smelled awful.
“We almost perished from the stench,” wrote 17th-century French naturalist Joseph Pitton De Tournefort after witnessing an exhumation of a suspected vampire. He was unconvinced by the claims of paranormal activity, however, though he admitted that the superstitious fear surrounding the attacks was tangible among the locals, with many families fleeing their homes to escape the menace.
Sacramental protection
Elsewhere, people resorted to curiously sacramental measures to protect themselves from the vampire threat. Des Noyers noted that after opening a suspected vampire’s grave, “there proceeds from his body a great quantity of blood, which some mix up flour to make a bread of; and that bread eaten in the usual manner protects them”.
Following the appearance of the Mercure Galant articles, reports of vampires multiplied, peaking in Hungary in the early 18th century. At the same time, Enlightenment scholars, in their search for the rational truth, were beginning to look for verifiable explanations of the phenomena behind the stories. “In the 18th century there was a willingness to examine this belief,” says , a historian of science at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.
The summer of 1725 provided the perfect opportunity. Reports emerged from Kisiljevo, a village 75 kilometres east of Belgrade in modern-day Serbia, of a rampaging deceased peasant called Peter Plogojowitz. After rising from his grave, he had supposedly strangled nine villagers in one week, and appeared at his house to demand shoes from his terrified wife.
Caving into demands from Plogojowitz’s neighbours, a local functionary, Imperial Provisor Frombald, finally allowed them to exhume the body. They met a chilling sight. “The body, except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away, was completely fresh,” he reported. “I saw some fresh blood in his mouth.” The body also appeared to have newly grown hair and nails, and to have new skin shedding the old.
“The body, except for the nose, which was fallen away, was completely fresh. I saw some blood in the mouth”
Plogojowitz’s case drew the attention of German scholar Michael Ranft, whose subsequent 1728 study De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis ascribed natural causes to the signs of vampirism. That chewing sound from graves? Rats. The apparent growth of hair and nails? Just the natural result of bodily decay. The same goes for the leaking blood and the sloughing of skin. As for the body being swollen with blood, this was familiar post-mortem bloat, and the dramatic “groan” of a staked vampire was the sound of the gas escaping. Even the body’s eerie state of preservation meant little, since most exhumed vampires had only been dead a short while; other corpses buried nearby might be similarly preserved.
It sounds like a model of Enlightenment thinking, except for one thing: Ranft still believed in vampires. “What makes Ranft’s work special,” Vermeir notes, “is that he accepts as true that ‘vampires’, or so-called masticating corpses, have a malignant influence on the living.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Ranft believed in the power of the imagination, which was thought to be the cause of physical diseases like the plague. A pregnant woman’s thoughts could even damage her unborn child, if they were wicked enough. Ranft supposed that this visceral force lingered after death, and could arise as a vapour from the decaying body. He concluded that it was these powerful emanations that allowed Plogojowitz to pursue his vendettas against individuals after his death, somehow inducing such terrifying visions of vampiric attack in his victims that they died as a result.
Ranft’s theory didn’t exactly quell the fear of vampirism, and a new panic erupted in the Serbian village of Medvegia in the late 1720s that lasted for four years. Arnold Paole, a soldier who died after a fall from a hay cart, was the accursed creature at the centre of the scare, having apparently returned from the dead to kill at least 17 of his neighbours, who subsequently became vampires themselves. Unlike the previously reported cases of vampirism, though, Paole did not constrain his attacks to his foes; even innocent bystanders suffered from his fury.
His regimental doctor, Johannes Fluchinger, oversaw the mass exhumations in the midst of the hysteria. The reports of his findings, published in 1732, were sensational. “There was,” Fluchinger reported, “an eight-day-old child which had lain in the grave for ninety days and was similarly in a condition of vampirism.”
Vampires now became an international phenomenon. Paole’s case was reported across Europe, spawning the first known appearance of the English term “vampire” in a 1732 letter to the London Journal, which warned that “certain dead Bodies (call’d here Vampyres) had kill’d several Persons”.
The account was infamous enough to be widely repeated in literature for decades afterwards. By 1755, Hungary’s Queen Maria Theresa had heard enough. She sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate the reports. His findings were similar to Ranft’s, but without a belief in the powers of the imagination. “Gravediggers assured me that it was common for about one of every thirty corpses to be desiccated without putrefaction,” van Swieten wrote. The reaction of villagers to these exhumations, he announced, was down to simple ignorance. A subsequent decree banned exhuming the “undead” without special permission. Finally, the vampire menace began to slowly recede from medicine and into mythology.
But De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis might still have one lesson to offer. “The best way to end such plagues, according to Ranft, is to reconcile oneself with one’s neighbours,” says Vermeir. Even if you don’t believe in vampires, that sounds like reasonable advice.
