Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (3 page)

In this book you will find authors not only from Britain but also from the United States, France, Germany, and Russia. As we all know from the books and movies of the twentieth century and of our science fictional new millennium, vampires have a global appeal, but it’s interesting to see that the earliest stories about them are equally widespread. Long before the media whirlwind surrounding new books and movies about them, vampires had been established as international celebrities.

Their star power also attracted some fine writers. The roster of brilliant authors within includes, for example, Lord Byron, Aleksei Tolstoy, and Fitz-James O’Brien. A new anthology in any genre must decide upon a policy toward the usual suspects: How many of the acknowledged classics ought to be included and how many can be omitted to make room for equally deserving but lesser known gems? In
Dracula’s Guest
, you will find a compelling blend of the finest stories in both categories. We can’t explore the great original vampire tales without Byron’s and Polidori’s groundbreaking contributions. But I omit their contemporaries’ early vampire poetry, to make room for less famous but even more powerful works, such as Johann Ludwig Tieck’s and Theophile Gautier’s stories. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella “Carmilla” is brilliant and influential, but its length would be out of proportion to the other stories here—and besides, it has already been endlessly reprinted. Some stories that show up often in vampire anthologies aren’t truly vampire stories (such as Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Fate of Madame Cabanel”) or just barely sneak in under that definition (such as Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”). So I omit these and make room for some of the fascinating nonfictional accounts from over the centuries, including eye-witness reports of seventeenth-century exhumations and on-sight exposure to nineteenth-century superstitions. I have assigned titles to excerpts by choosing a phrase from within the text.

In a number of places throughout this book, you will glimpse the role of dreams in the making of these fictions. As I began writing this introduction, my own teenage nightmares came to mind in part because recently I had been reminded that a number of horror stories have resulted from or been influenced by nightmares. Even Horace Walpole credited a dream with sowing the seed of his melodramatic novel
The Castle of Otranto
—the book generally considered to have launched the Gothic revival of the late eighteenth century. All he could remember of his 1764 dream “was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle…and that on the upper-most banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.” It was enough. “In the evening I sat down to write.” Walpole’s contemporaries, such as the English novelist Ann Radcliffe and the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, deliberately consumed raw meat and other troublesome foods in the hope of provoking interesting nightmares. Byron and Coleridge turned to opium. Shelley liked laudanum. During the famously stormy summer at the Villa Diodati in 1816, with Shelley and Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft—not yet Mary Shelley—woke from a nightmare to begin writing
Frankenstein.

This tradition continues today. One June morning in 2003, a twenty-nine-year-old named Stephenie Meyer, who had never written a book before, woke up to vivid memories of a dream. She dreamed that a young woman and a young man were carrying on an intense conversation in a woodland glade. The woman, really more of a girl, was an ordinary human being. “The other person,” Meyer later recalled, “was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire.” He wasn’t attacking her, but he was talking about his
desire
to attack her, his attraction to the scent of her blood, and his determination to resist because he was in love with her. After feeding and dressing her three children, Meyer postponed as many household tasks as possible in order to type up the dream before it began to fade. The result grew into
Twilight
and its sequels, some of the bestselling fiction of recent memory and the inspiration for the series of blockbuster films. It seems appropriate that the most popular characters in contemporary vampire lore—the latest heirs to Lord Ruthven and Varney and Dracula—appeared in a vision while Stephenie Meyer was asleep. For centuries, the restless undead have crept in and out of our dreams.

“You begin in a very Victorian manner,” I said;
“is this to continue?”

“Remember, if you please,” said my friend, looking at me over his spectacles, “that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that the Victorian tree may not unreasonably
be expected to bear Victorian fruit.”

—M. R. James

I

The Roots

Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens

(1703 –1771)

B
EFORE WE BRING OUR
Victorians onstage, we need a glimpse of certain real-world attitudes toward the undead that were well established before even Byron put quill to paper. These are the stories that were circulating among both peasantry and gentry in the century before the one that mostly concerns us in this anthology; they formed the raw ore from which the Victorian era would refine an entire vampire mythology. The Renaissance rediscovery of classical learning and art had resulted in the period to which historians have since pinned such labels as the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant invoked a line from the Latin poet Horace as the motto of the entire period—
Sapere aude
, “dare to know,” meaning to think for yourself instead of merely trusting authority. But the era doesn’t look enlightened or reasonable in these eyewitness accounts of vampire frenzy.

Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, the Marquis d’Argens, was a French Enlightenment philosopher and writer—a
philosophe
, a public intellectual engaged with the issues of his time. His youth seems to have been one wild carouse even after he joined the military in his midteens, and eventually his father disowned him. As an adult, however, Argens became well-known for his many writings, helping disseminate the ideas of Voltaire and of Pierre Bayle, the advocate of rational religious tolerance, and of Bernard de Fontenelle, who is often considered the first popular-science writer. The thirty-eight volumes of writings Argens left behind include the
Correspondance philosophique
(
Chinese Letters, Jewish Letters, Cabalistic Letters
, and others) and an earlier work that was revised and expanded into fourteen volumes of a
History of the Human Spirit.
Argens spent a quarter of a century in the court of Frederick the Great at Potsdam, beginning when his patron was merely Prince Frederick. While in Berlin, he married a French actress.

His account of “a scene of vampirism” comes from Letter 137 of
Jewish Letters
, first published anonymously between 1738 and 1742. Augustin Calmet, whose work follows this selection, included this excerpt from
Jewish Letters
in his own
Phantom World
, which is why the two have the same translator, an industrious Victorian named Henry Christmas.

They Opened the Graves

W
E HAVE JUST HAD
in this part of Hungary a scene of vampirism, which is duly attested by two officers of the tribunal of Belgrade, who went down to the places specified; and by an officer of the emperor’s troops at Graditz, who was an ocular witness of the proceedings.

In the beginning of September there died in the village of Kivsiloa, three leagues from Graditz, an old man who was sixty-two years of age. Three days after he had been buried, he appeared in the night to his son, and asked him for something to eat; the son having given him something, he ate and disappeared. The next day the son recounted to his neighbors what had happened. That night the father did not appear; but the following night he showed himself, and asked for something to eat. They know not whether the son gave him anything or not; but the next day he was found dead in his bed. On the same day, five or six persons fell suddenly ill in the village, and died one after the other in a few days.

The officer or bailiff of the place, when informed of what had happened, sent an account of it to the tribunal of Belgrade, which dispatched to the village two of these officers and an executioner to examine into this affair. The imperial officer from whom we have this account repaired thither from Graditz, to be witness of a circumstance which he had so often heard spoken of.

They opened the graves of those who had been dead six weeks. When they came to that of the old man, they found him with his eyes open, having a fine color, with natural respiration, nevertheless motionless as the dead; whence they concluded that he was most evidently a vampire. The executioner drove a stake into his heart; they then raised a pile and reduced the corpse to ashes. No mark of vampirism was found either on the corpse of the son or on the others.

Thanks be to God, we are by no means credulous. We avow that all the light which physics can throw on this fact discovers none of the causes of it. Nevertheless, we cannot refuse to believe that to be true which is juridically attested, and by persons of probity.

Antoine Augustin Calmet

(1672–1757)

B
ORN IN 1672, THE
French monk Antoine Augustin Calmet had the scholarly good fortune to live during the frenzy of vampire encounters reported during the early part of the eighteenth century. What we now read as quaint folklore was breaking news to him. Educated by Benedictines in Breuil, he joined their order in 1689 and was ordained a few years later, after which he taught theology and philosophy. Slowly he assembled a massive two-part, forty-nine-volume study of the Bible.

Although that popular anthology’s characters include resurrected corpses, a talking donkey, and demon-haunted pigs, apparently these wonders were not enough to satisfy Dom Augustin’s appetite. He enters our story because, late in life, he wrote a different kind of book that became something of a surprise bestseller when published in 1746. Originally burdened with the exhausting title
Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohme, de Moravie, et de Silesie
, it was translated into English in 1850 by the British scholar Henry Christmas, under the evocative title
The Phantom World.

This fascinating and outrageous volume—basically a compilation of ghost stories and theological commentary upon them—asks such questions as “Can a man really dead appear in his own body?” Calmet ranges from vampires in Moravia to ghosts in Peru. One moment he is cheerfully citing the eyewitness accounts of learned Christians and the next skeptically analyzing the words of peasant or pagan. Calmet solemnly recounts stories of bodies being ejected during the night from their consecrated graves, coughed up by the earth itself, because during life the individuals had been excommunicated. He also narrates in detail several alleged accounts of vampire attacks. Calmet speculated that perhaps a belief in vampires resulted from a lack of nutrition, leading to blood poisoning that prompts the imagination to turn morbid.

Some of Calmet’s accounts appear here, following excerpts from his preface and his introduction to Part Two, “Dissertation on the Ghosts Who Return to Earth Bodily, the Excommunicated, the Oupires or Vampires, Vroucolacas, Etc.” (The latter word is the Greek name for vampires and related to the Russian word
vourdalak
, both of which we will encounter later.)

In the following montage of excerpts, line spaces indicate more sizable deletions than those noted by the standard ellipsis.

Dead Persons in Hungary

Preface

M
Y AIM IS NOT
to foment superstition, nor to feed the vain curiosity of visionaries, and those who believe without examination everything that is related to them as soon as they find therein anything marvelous and supernatural. I write only for reasonable and unprejudiced minds, which examine things seriously and coolly; I speak only for those who assent even to known truth but after mature reflection, who know how to doubt of what is uncertain, to suspend their judgment on what is doubtful, and to deny what is manifestly false.

I
HAVE ALWAYS BEEN
much struck with what was related of the vampires or ghosts of Hungary, Moravia, and Poland; of the vroucolacas of Greece; and of the excommunicated, who are said not to rot. I thought I ought to bestow on it all the attention in my power; and I have deemed it right to treat on this subject in a particular dissertation…The subject of the return of vampires is worthy the attention of the curious and the learned, and deserves to be seriously studied, to have the facts related of it examined, and the causes, circumstances, and means sounded deeply…I have been reproached for having related several false histories, several doubtful facts, and several fabulous events. This is true; but I give them for what they are.

Dissertation on the Ghosts Who Return to Earth Bodily, the Excommunicated, the Oupires or Vampires, Vroucolacas, Etc.

E
VERY AGE, EVERY NATION
, every country has its prejudices, its maladies, its customs, its inclinations, which characterize them, and which pass away, and succeed to one another; often that which has appeared admirable at one time, becomes pitiful and ridiculous at another…Towards the end of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century, nothing was talked of in Lorraine but wizards and witches. For a long time we have heard nothing of them. When the philosophy of M. Descartes appeared, what a vogue it had! The ancient philosophy was despised; nothing was talked of but experiments in physics, new systems, new discoveries. M. Newton appears; all minds turn to him. The system of M. Law, bank notes, the rage of the Rue Quinquampoix, what movements did they not cause in the kingdom? A sort of convulsion had seized on the French.

In this age, a new scene presents itself to our eyes, and has done for about sixty years in Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland: they see, it is said, men who have been dead for several months, come back to earth, talk, walk, infest villages, ill use both men and beasts, suck the blood of their near relations, make them ill, and finally cause their death; so that people can only save themselves from their dangerous visits and their hauntings by exhuming them, impaling them, cutting off their heads, tearing out the heart, or burning them. These
revenans
are called by the name of oupires or vampires, that is to say, leeches; and such particulars are related of them, so singular, so detailed, and invested with such probable circumstances and such judicial information, that one can hardly refuse to credit the belief which is held in those countries, that these
revenans
come out of their tombs and produce those effects which are proclaimed of them.

I
T IS TRUE THAT
we remark in history, though rarely, that certain persons after having been some time in their tombs and considered as dead, have returned to life. We shall see even that the ancients believed that magic could cause death and evoke the souls of the dead. Several passages are cited, which prove that at certain times they fancied that sorcerers sucked the blood of men and children, and caused their death. They saw also in the twelfth century in England and Denmark, some
revenans
similar to those of Hungary. But in no history do we read anything so usual or so pronounced, as what is related to us of the vampires of Poland, Hungary, and Moravia.

T
HE VROUCOLACAS OF
G
REECE
and the Archipelago are again
revenans
of a new kind. We can hardly persuade ourselves that a nation so witty as the Greeks could fall into so extraordinary an opinion. Ignorance or prejudice, must be extreme among them since neither an ecclesiastic nor any other writer has undertaken to undeceive them.

T
HE IMAGINATION OF THOSE
who believe that the dead chew in their graves, with a noise similar to that made by hogs when they eat, is so ridiculous that it does not deserve to be seriously refuted.

Let Us Now Examine the Fact of the
Revenans
or Vampires of Moravia

I
HAVE BEEN TOLD
…that it was common enough in that country to see men who had died some time before, present themselves in a party, and sit down to table with persons of their acquaintance without saying anything; but that nodding to one of the party, he would infallibly die some days afterwards. This fact was confirmed by several persons, and amongst others by an old curé, who said he had seen more than one instance of it.

[
C
HARLES
F
ERDINAND DE
S
CHERTZ
, author of
Magia Posthuma
, tells the story] of a shepherd of the village of Blow, near the town of Kadam, in Bohemia, who appeared during some time, and called certain persons, who never failed to die within eight days after. The peasants of Blow took up the body of this shepherd, and fixed it in the ground with a stake which they drove through it.

This man, when in that condition, derided them for what they made him suffer, and told them they were very good to give him thus a stick to defend himself from the dogs. The same night he got up again, and by his presence alarmed several persons, and strangled more amongst them than he had hitherto done. Afterwards, they delivered him into the hands of the executioner, who put him in a cart to carry him beyond the village and there burn him. This corpse howled like a madman, and moved his feet and hands as if alive. And when they again pierced him through with stakes he uttered very loud cries, and a great quantity of bright vermilion blood flowed from him. At last he was consumed, and this execution put an end to the appearance and hauntings of this spectre.

Dead Persons in Hungary Who Suck the Blood of the Living

About fifteen years ago, a soldier who was billeted at the house of a Haidamaque peasant, on the frontiers of Hungary, as he was one day sitting at table near his host, the master of the house saw a person he did not know come in and sit down to table also with them. The master of the house was strangely frightened at this, as were the rest of the company. The soldier knew not what to think of it, being ignorant of the matter in question. But the master of the house being dead the very next day, the soldier inquired what it meant. They told him that it was the body of the father of his host, who had been dead and buried for ten years, which had thus come to sit down next to him, and had announced and caused his death.

The soldier informed the regiment of it in the first place, and the regiment gave notice of it to the general officers, who commissioned the Count de Cabreras, captain of the regiment of Alandetti infantry, to make information concerning this circumstance. Having gone to the place, with some other officers, a surgeon and an auditor, they heard the depositions of all the people belonging to the house, who attested unanimously that the ghost was the father of the master of the house, and that all the soldier had said and reported was the exact truth, which was confirmed by all the inhabitants of the village.

In consequence of this, the corpse of this spectre was exhumed, and found to be like that of a man who has just expired, and his blood like that of a living man. The Count de Cabreras had his head cut off, and caused him to be laid again in his tomb. He also took information concerning other similar ghosts, amongst others, of a man dead more than thirty years, who had come back three times to his house at meal time. The first time he had sucked the blood from the neck of his own brother, the second time from one of his sons, and the third from one of the servants in the house; and all three died of it instantly and on the spot. Upon this deposition the commissary had this man taken out of his grave, and finding that, like the first, his blood was in a fluid state, like that of a living person, he ordered them to run a large nail into his temple, and then to lay him again in the grave.

He caused a third to be burnt, who had been buried more than sixteen years, and had sucked the blood and caused the death of two of his sons. The commissary having made his report to the general officers, was deputed to the court of the emperor, who commanded that some officers, both of war and justice, some physicians and surgeons, and some learned men, should be sent to examine the causes of these extraordinary events. The person who related these particulars to us had heard them from Monsieur the Count de Cabreras, at Fribourg en Brigau, in 1730.

Here is a letter which has been written to one of my friends, to be communicated to me.

In reply to the questions of the Abbé dom Calmet concerning vampires, the undersigned has the honor to assure him that nothing is more true or more certain than what he will doubtless have read about it in the deeds or attestations which have been made public, and printed in all the Gazettes in Europe. But amongst all these public attestations which have appeared, the Abbé must fix his attention as a true and notorious fact on that of the deputation from Belgrade, ordered by his late Majesty Charles VI, of glorious memory, and executed by his Serene Highness the late Duke Charles Alexander of Wirtemberg, then Viceroy or Governor of the kingdom of Servia; but I cannot at present cite the year or the day, for want of papers which I have not now by me.