Vampire Forensics (11 page)

Under
V,
of course, was an article on vampires. “What!” mocked Voltaire. “Is it in our eighteenth century that vampires exist? We never heard speak of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess, that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces….”

As for the vampire epidemics:

Nor did Voltaire spare his friend Dom Augustin Calmet: “Calmet became their historian,” he concluded, “and treated vampires as he treated the Old and New Testament, by relating faithfully all that has been said before him.”

If he intended to instruct and amuse in portable format, Voltaire was vindicated: The
Dictionnaire philosophique
sold out its first edition, brought down the wrath of the Catholic Church, and was banned and burned in France and Geneva.

Meanwhile, that other lion of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was likewise invoking vampires. In 1762, the apostle of the “natural man” had been called upon to defend himself against ecclesiastical attacks, too. The archbishop of Paris had taken great offense at
Émile
, Rousseau’s antiestablishment treatise promoting educational reform and “natural religion.” Both author and book were banned from France; there, thankfully, only the book could be burned, for the author took to his heels. Protesting this treatment, Rousseau wrote an open letter to the archbishop in which he sought to drive home a point about the interpretation of evidence:

The answer was seemingly no one—at least no one in Enlightenment France.

Voltaire and Rousseau died within weeks of each other in the summer of 1778. Because Voltaire was an excommunicate and Rousseau was rumored to have shot himself, they should both, by the rules of folklore, have risked becoming vampires. But during the French Revolution, their bodies—or at least their coffins—were removed from their lonely graves and installed in the Panthéon in Paris, the former church that was supposed to become the sacred space for a new secular state.

By the 1830s, the Panthéon had become a church again, and it was whispered that the remains of Voltaire and Rousseau had been clandestinely dumped in a sewer. As one newspaper reporter put it, the “faithful and pious couldn’t worship over the heads of two such infidels.” Or was it the other way around? As a waggish King Louis XVIII was said to have put it, had those two heads simply grown annoyed at having Mass celebrated above them? Perhaps they had risen from the crypt and trooped out of the church, like Dom Calmet’s excommunicates in the Middle Ages.

In December 1897, an official delegation tiptoed down into the vaults of the Panthéon and had the tombs opened. The great men were indeed still there, although no signs of vampirism despoiled their bodies. A
New York Times
article reported that “A viscous matter, apparently coagulated sawdust” coated Voltaire’s remains. Although his skull had been sawed in half when his brain was removed soon after death, he was still eerily recognizable. Voltaire, who had looked mummified even in life, was now a dead ringer for the famous bust of him by the sculptor Pigalle: “…even the sardonic smirk was recognizable in the thin skin drawn tightly over the cheek bones and frontal.”

Rousseau’s hands were still clasped over his chest, and though the “thread of the shroud enveloped the skeleton; the body had evidently been imperfectly embalmed.” A few teeth were still visible, as were a few hairs on the skull—a skull, it was observed, that showed no signs of a self-inflicted gunshot wound: Jean-Jacques Rousseau had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

T
HE
D
EATH
V
INE

Though far removed from the European world of Medvegia, New England, with its rock-ribbed hills and once-dense forests of chestnut and white pine, originally bore a striking resemblance to parts of the Balkans.

Among headstones carved with skulls and destroying angels in the Old Burying Point in Salem, Massachusetts, lie the graves of the judges who presided over the notorious witchcraft trials of 1692. Nearby is Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the final resting place of Emerson, Thoreau, and other leaders of 19th-century transcendentalism. New England would seem to have come a long way between those two milestones.

Or maybe not. On September 29, 1859, three years before he died of tuberculosis, Thoreau noted in his journal, “I have just read of a family in Vermont who, several of the members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs, heart and liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.”

Thoreau was still alive and writing when a small family graveyard, set on a sandy knoll outside Griswold, Connecticut, was abandoned. Gradually it was overgrown, then forgotten—until November 1990, that is, when a sand- and gravel-mining operation began biting into it. As three boys played among the fresh cuts one day, they rolled down the hill and discovered two human skulls bouncing after them.

By the time Connecticut State archaeologist Nick Bellantoni arrived, any headstones that might have remained had been lost to mining machinery. So a grid was set up, and the site was mapped, photographed, and excavated. Like so many others, the site was small—about 17 yards by 25 yards—and apparently marked out by stakes surrounded by heaps of stones. That was not much to go on, but some determined sleuthing uncovered the site’s history: In 1757, a farmer named Walton had purchased the knoll from his sea-captain neighbor for 12 shillings. It was used as a cemetery by several generations—and by several families—until about 1840. Then it was abandoned to the rhythms of seedtime and harvest, summer and winter.

In the end, Bellantoni recovered from the Walton Cemetery the remains of 27 individuals: 5 adult males, 8 adult females, and, in a touching reminder of the appalling rate of infant mortality in previous eras, 14 children and adolescents.

Each corpse was carefully removed from what remained of its pine or oak coffin and was wrapped in acid-free paper. Bits of debris—artifacts, hair, wood, soil samples, or straight pins that once held a shroud in place—were painstakingly plotted, labeled, and collected. The site’s lack of machine-cut nails suggested that most burials predated the 1830s. Two of the bodies had been laid in crypts of stone and unmortared brick; spelled out in brass tacks on their coffins were the designations “NB-13” and “JB-55.” We may never know what names those initials stand for, but the numerals suggest their age at death.

All in all, it seemed to be a representative graveyard for its time and place, distressingly full of infants, perhaps—a quarter of the burials were infants under two years old—but otherwise indicative of a typically hardscrabble, physically demanding rural life. That was the story that Paul Sledzik was reading in the bones. As curator of the anatomical collections at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., Sledzik knew his bones, having the better part of 2,000 Civil War soldiers under his supervision.

It had seemed like just another day among the skeletons when Sledzik’s telephone rang. It was an old classmate of his, Nick Bellantoni, saying he had found something that Sledzik might find interesting.

Back on the knoll near Griswold, when the archaeologists had opened the coffin labeled “JB-55,” Bellantoni was momentarily taken aback. The skeleton looked like no other he had seen: These bones had been rearranged in a classic skull-and-crossbones pattern. This grave had been desecrated, apparently many decades earlier.

Though the University of Connecticut initially processed the remains from the Walton Cemetery, they were then sent to Sledzik and his colleagues for more extensive analysis. As soon as Sledzik received the bones, he laid them out and ran his trained eyes over them. JB-55, a male, showed signs of chronic dental disease, as did most of the adults from the graveyard. Its owner also showed signs of arthritis, especially in the left knee, which meant he had almost certainly limped at times. He had signs of healed fractures, too, especially on the right clavicle, or collarbone, which must have been “insulted”—broken—by some kind of direct blow. It had never been properly set.

What’s more, JB-55 had probably been coughing up blood, if the lesions on the upper left ribs told Sledzik anything. Scattered across the visceral rib surface adjacent to the lung, the pitted, whitish-gray lesions were telltale signs of primary pulmonary tuberculosis. They might have been the residue of typhoid, syphilis, or pleuritis, but tuberculosis was the logical candidate. In any event, they marked a chronic pulmonary infection that would have produced the coughing and expectoration others regarded as tuberculosis, or consumption.

Though not widely known in New England, vampire epidemics are not exactly unknown there, either. Indeed, they have provided consistent fodder for local news stories over the years. Around a dozen incidents have now been documented—mostly from rural Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont—from the late 18th century until the 1890s. Eleven of them involved tuberculosis.

In Foster, Rhode Island, for example, Captain Levi Young and his family settled on a farm—and all too soon provided an occupant for the plot of land they had set aside as a burial ground. Young’s daughter Nancy, 19, succumbed to consumption in April 1827. Then Nancy’s younger sister, Almira, started showing symptoms—as, inevitably, did the other children in the neighborhood. Those neighbors apparently persuaded Captain Young to dig up Nancy’s casket. As the story goes, her disinterred coffin was placed on a funeral pyre and the villagers gathered around it, inhaling the fumes in the belief that this “sympathetic magic” would not only cure those infected with the disease, but also confer immunity on everyone else.

The most sorrowful tale of all, however, is that of Mercy Brown. In the late 19th century, George and Mary Eliza Brown and their seven children lived in Exeter, Rhode Island—“Deserted Exeter,” as it came to be called. In December 1883, Mary Eliza died of consumption and was buried in Chestnut Hill Cemetery. But the chain of contagion had already set in: Mary Olive followed her mother six months later. Several years passed before son Edwin fell ill as well. Edwin fled west to the dry mountain air of the Rockies, widely believed to be curative. It seemed to work.

Then, on a cold January day in 1892, Edwin’s sister Mercy Lenna died of tuberculosis. But the ground was frozen, so her coffin was laid in a mausoleum to await the spring thaw. Meanwhile, Edwin had returned home, but he immediately fell ill again. Apparently he was told—by whom we do not know—that one of his deceased relatives must be preying upon him. The only remedy anyone could suggest was to exhume his mother and sisters; if any of the bodies was still undecomposed, Edwin was to rip out the heart and burn it.

Mary Eliza and Mary Olive were exhumed and found to have decomposed into skeletons. But Mercy, her body preserved by the freezing cold of the mausoleum, was found to be in something approaching Flückinger’s “vampiric state.” Blood was in her heart, and blood was at her mouth. A victim rather than a fiend, Mercy was ripped apart so that her heart and liver could be removed and burned on a nearby rock. Edwin apparently mixed the ashes into a potion and quaffed the grisly antidote. “Not surprisingly,” reported a subsequent newspaper article, “he died four months later.”

Might the tragedies of the Young and Brown families be correlated with a forgotten cemetery near Griswold, Connecticut? Surprisingly, yes, in Griswold itself, only two miles from the cemetery and only a few years after JB-55 was likely buried.

The May 20, 1854, issue of the
Norwich Courier
tells the story of Griswold’s Ray family. Horace Ray died of tuberculosis around 1846. Within the next eight years, two of his sons likewise succumbed. After a third one fell ill, the now-familiar remedy was invoked: In early May, the dead brothers were exhumed and burned.

That tale had been told in books, but Sledzik’s lab contained a version of it written on bones. We may never learn anything more about JB-55, but his skeleton tells us that he probably limped about with a hacking, rattling cough that produced bloody sputum. When consumption flared up again in the community after JB-55 died, did someone remember—and blame—his limping figure? Somebody desecrated JB-55’s grave only a few years after he was laid to rest inside it. The evidence tells us, however, that whoever defiled his grave would have found only a skeleton there, with no heart left to burn. Did the invaders then improvise on the spot and rearrange the bones in a time-honored symbol of death? Were they, in effect, using the dead to ward off death itself?

Griswold had been settled just after 1812 by farmers—probably uneducated, and almost certainly considered crude. Life was hard, and the threat of starvation was a wolf at the door. Several generations of a single family often lived together in crowded, unsanitary conditions—perfect breeding grounds for such epidemic diseases as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis. This family dynamic, writ large, was projected into the grave.

With justifiable exaggeration, the tuberculosis bacillum might be said to consume the life force of its victim, thus overwhelming the victim’s will to live. Yet the pathogen has also evolved to spread via contagion, feeding off a new host before its old one dies, and so on down the line. Take away the understanding of microscopic pathogens, however, and what is left? A mysterious life force consuming one person after another, and believed powerful enough to act from afar—even from the grave.