Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (2 page)

Like most of public Victorian Europe, vampire stories take place against a Christian worldview, so vampires respond to a crucifix as Superman does to kryptonite. This image of the repelled fiend backing away from the symbol of Christianity is so prevalent that the Lutheran Church once ran a magazine ad showing Bela Lugosi’s Dracula approaching a victim with a cruciform shadow behind them and this caption underneath: “Are your kids learning about the power of the cross from the late, late show?” The crucifix symbolizes the magical value of blood sacrifice, the core tenet of Christianity. Many commentators have pointed out that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the belief that during a Communion mass the wine and wafer literally become the blood and flesh of Christ (“Drink ye all of this, for this is my blood”), makes Communion a form of cannibalism if not vampirism.

“In this writer’s own informal but extensive observation,” writes horror scholar David J. Skal, “the vampire myth resonates with a particular strength with lapsed and ex-Catholics—scratch a vampire buff, and it’s more than a little likely you’ll find a Catholic school uniform bunched beneath the cape.” Joyce Carol Oates wrote an essay that examines Bela Lugosi’s Dracula as a dark priest in black vestments, the evil twin of the priests of her childhood. Needless to say, there are countless vampire fans who did not grow up Catholic, including myself, but the Church’s influence remains throughout the genre.

A
S IS REVEALED IN
Part I, especially from the supposedly nonfictional accounts of eighteenth-century vampires, the predecessors of the Victorian stories emerged from all over the map of Europe—urban France, rural Russia, the islands of Greece, the mountains of Romania. Many sources inspired these ideas. Nowadays, for example, most of us never see a dead body; in the industrialized world, death is sanitized and hidden offstage. But during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, dead bodies were a common sight. Plague and countless other illnesses ravaged every community. Corpses of the executed and tortured were publicly displayed. Once buried, few bodies seemed to rest peacefully in the ground. With a frequency that we would find unbelievable, people in the eighteenth century had an opportunity not only to see corpses but also to glimpse them again
after
they had been buried. Cemeteries in urban areas were densely overcrowded, with the dead stacked several graves deep in some places. More corpses than the ground could assimilate resulted in the stench of decay and the ever-present risk of disease.

Desecration of graves was common for many reasons, including the growing need for illicit cadavers in medical dissection, but primarily inspired by religious rivalry. For example, after Louis XIV abolished the monastery at Port-Royal des Champs as a hotbed of Jansenist heresy, drunken locals were caught disinterring nuns’ bodies from the cemetery and permitting dogs to devour them. Bodies of executed heretics were dragged through the streets, then reburied in too-small graves by breaking the body into small pieces. French Protestants were not legally assured of a consecrated burial until the revolution in 1789.

In his 1746 compendium,
The Phantom World
, excerpts of which appear in Part I, Dom Augustin Calmet writes at length about “the vampires or ghosts of Hungary, Moravia, and Poland; of the vroucolacas of Greece.” In a section headed “Do the excommunicated rot in the earth?” he explores the common fear that the body of a heretic does not decompose but instead lingers in the earth, profaning the laws of God in death as it did in life, polluting the ground with its sinfulness and disease. Unlikely comrades, such as Academy scientists and village priests, found themselves allied in the antipollution movement, fighting for the segregation of cemeteries to rural areas beyond dense centers of population—where their decomposing inhabitants could inflict less harm on the living. Scholar Marie-Hélène Huet sums up the subtext of many early vampire accounts: “All the dead are vampires, poisoning the air, the blood, the life of the living, contaminating their body and their soul, robbing them of their sanity.”

Not surprisingly, decay within a subterranean chamber was little understood at the time; no forensic Body Farm to graph a corpse’s fade from stink to bones to a mere stain in the dirt. Any variation from a presumed norm in decay provoked fear. Yet what people were unable to comprehend within their limited frame of reference is that there are innumerable ways a body may change after death. Graves in different climes and latitudes vary enormously, depending upon air temperature and humidity, soil composition, insects and other subterranean animals, and the microscopic sanitation workers who turn us all back into the dust from which we came. (About these latter creatures, of course, the vampire-fearing were completely ignorant.) Lime helps preserve a body, as do clay soils and low humidity. Some coffins defend their inhabitant better than others.

Yet all sorts of natural bodily changes were revealed to posthumously convict someone of vampirism. Fingernails, of course, don’t actually continue to grow after death, any more than hair does, but as fingers decompose, the skin shrinks, making the nails look abnormally long and clawlike. After sloughing off its top layer, skin appears flushed as if with fresh blood. Damp soil’s chemicals can produce in the skin a waxy secretion, sometimes brownish or even white, from fat and protein—adipocere, “grave wax.” In one eyewitness account from the eighteenth century, a vampire is even found—further proof of his vile nature—to have an erection. Yet the genitals often inflate during decomposition.

And what about the blood reported around the mouths of resurrected corpses? This phenomenon, too, has a surprisingly natural explanation. Without the heart’s pump to keep it moving, blood, like other liquids, follows the path of least resistance and pools at the lowest point available. Many bodies were buried face-down, resulting in pooled blood in the face. Blood also gets lifted up toward the mouth by the gases of decomposition. Life is messy, but death is messier, even without invoking the supernatural undead.

We can learn even more about the origins of vampire stories by looking at the reasons why someone might turn into a vampire after death. Much of the original folklore does not include our familiar theme nowadays, that the undead recruit their own next generation by infecting victims when they drink their blood. Peasant superstitions were saturated with the fear that a corpse might spontaneously transform into a monster even without its having made any unwilling blood donation during life. Suicides were considered a high risk for posthumous transformation, as were murderers, their victims, felons of every stripe, the battlefield dead, stroke victims, the drowned, the first person to fall in an epidemic, heretics, wizards, redheads, curmudgeons, women of ill repute, and people who talk to themselves. Alcoholics were considered especially likely to return as vampires.

With these signals of potential unease in the grave to warn them, grieving survivors tended to emphasize prophylactic strictures in the hours and days following death to reduce the likelihood of such a tragedy. In fact, as Paul Barber and other commentators have pointed out, one reason that suicides, murder victims, and those slain in war made it onto this list of vampire nominees may be that, dying unattended, they were not properly escorted from this world into the next. Every culture has its venerable funerary procedures, comprised half of primordial custom and half of imaginative response to natural history. With communicable disease rampant, for example, it was a sound idea to dispose of the deceased’s belongings in the grave alongside the corpse—a habit for which archaeologists are always grateful. Other notions seem less reasonable to us now, such as keeping mirrors away from the dead, so that doubling the corpse’s image won’t result either in its living on after death or in the death of another.

The risk of trouble at the end of life might even be signaled at its beginning. Some children were thought to arrive in this world marked with a warning that they would have trouble leaving it. Those at risk included babies born tailed, furry, split-lipped, with an extra nipple, out of wedlock, or with a red birthmark. Anything blood-red is a helpful badge of vampirism. Those born with a red caul, instead of the normal grayish white, were prime candidates. The amniotic sac that protects a fetus in the womb remains intact through only about one tenth of 1 percent of births, or even fewer now with prenatal medical interference. Throughout history this rarity has contributed to the idea that such a birth betokens good luck in childhood and the rest of life; this belief, too, is medically sound, because the sac protects the infant from infection. (David Copperfield is born with a caul, which is later, to his discomfiture, raffled off.) But a red sac, resulting from prenatal bleeding, naturally wound up on the list of warning signs for vampirism. Worried parents tackled this risk head-on by preserving a red caul, drying it, and sprinkling it into the child’s food as a form of inoculation. In myth and superstition, the line between natural and supernatural has always been blurry.

O
NE REASON TO KEEP
a corpse indoors until burial was that outdoors it ran the risk of a bat flying over it. Such proximity alone might communicate vampirism. Any animate creature passing over the corpse however, might have the same effect. Bats—despite their crepuscular habits and their refusal to fit snugly into a single category with either birds or beasts—were not considered particularly important in early vampire folklore. Europe has no indigenous blood-imbibing bats, so these animals could not join vampire folklore until after Europeans learned of their existence elsewhere in the world. This meeting of myth and reality took place in the eighteenth century, just in time for the Romantic revolution, with the discovery of the bloodsucking Central and South American bats that the legendary taxonomist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, soon dubbed “vampire” bats. Blood is a distilled, nutrient-rich fluid. Many creatures—including lampreys, leeches, one species of catfish and one finch, as well as vampire bats—have evolved clever methods to tap into its stored nourishment, a survival mechanism that scientists call hematophagy. Even the imagination of horror writers rarely surpasses nature’s reckless creativity.

The discovery that bloodsucking is not an imaginary form of predation added new cachet to vampire stories, but in turn such fiction seemed to taint real-life exploration. Many naturalists faced incredulity as they returned from foreign lands with exotic animals or their remains. When Charles Waterton, the nineteenth-century English naturalist and explorer, described his experiences with vampire bats, his account sounded to many like peasant folklore:

At the close of the day, the vampires leave the hollow trees, whither they fled at the morning’s dawn, and scour along the river’s banks in quest of prey. On waking from sleep, the astonished traveler finds his hammock all stained with blood. It is the vampire that hath sucked him. Not man alone, but every unprotected animal, is exposed to his depredations: and so gently does this nocturnal surgeon draw the blood, that instead of being roused, the patient is lulled into a still profounder sleep.

It didn’t help Waterton’s reputation that he did indeed perpetrate a hoax or two, employing his extraordinary skill at taxidermy, but his account of the vampire bat was accurate. The three known species—
white-legged, hairy-winged
, and the more common one cleverly dubbed
common
—are all native to Central and South America. (These three are the only known blood-feeding bats among eleven hundred species; most are highly beneficial to humans, feeding on countless millions of insects every night.) Two of these species feed primarily on birds or small mammals, but the common vampire bat finds human blood the tastiest of meals. It facilitates its bloodthirst with heat-seeking thermoreceptors worthy of the Pentagon. While dining, the bats inject their victims with an anticoagulant enzyme to keep the nutrients flowing smoothly. And what might this glycoprotein be called? Draculin, of course. You may consume it yourself one day. Draculin’s four-hundred-plus amino acids are many times stronger than any other known anticoagulant; as a consequence, a drug derived from it, desmoteplase, has been approved for victims of stroke or heart attack.

A vampire bat’s saliva even produces a compound that prevents the edges of its victim’s wound from constricting. Lacking fat in their diet to bind protein, the vampire bats possess a curious trait familiar to fans of their human counterparts: they must feed every single night to quench their steady thirst for blood. As a further example of Bram Stoker’s outrageous legacy in the modern world, scientists have also identified fossils of a prehistoric giant vampire bat, which they inevitably named
Desmodus draculae.

L
IKE MOST PEOPLE
I know who aren’t historians, I tend to casually say “the Victorian era” as if referring to a brief period characterized by definite commonalities. Yet Victoria ruled Britain and its empire from 1837 to 1901—and besides, this book includes authors from several other countries. So I use Victoria’s reign as the time span of Part II, with Part I devoted to Victorian authors’ recent ancestors and Part III to their immediate descendants, leading up through World War I, or roughly a generation after Victoria’s death. The borders of a time period are as porous as those of a nation, and the calendar itself is arbitrary.