Vampire Forensics (12 page)

The evil agent must still lurk in the heart of the recently deceased, where it continues to exhale and to seed itself into the blood and heart of the next person in the house. Burning the dead, infected heart then becomes the only way to root out the malady and destroy it. That belief might underlie this account of an unnamed Connecticut writer in 1888:

A more picturesque way of saying the same thing had appeared just a few years earlier, in an 1884 magazine article, whose author speculated about how galloping consumption could so quickly fell, one after another, the apparently hale and hearty members of a single family:

The word
remedy
might be the crucial clue here. As folklorist Michael Bell has surmised, these gruesome rituals constituted more an experiment in folk medicine than a belief in supernatural horrors. The word
vampire,
in fact, was never used—if indeed it was even known.

Yet, as forensic anthropologist Paul Sledzik and his museum colleagues concluded, the role of tuberculosis is key to understanding these folktales of New England “vampires.” Might epidemiology be fundamental to understanding the vampire wherever he has appeared?

S
KELETONS AND GRINNING SKULLS
in niches and church windows; “Dances of Death” woodcuts in which cadavers take people by the hand and lead them to the grave;
transi
tombs bearing the effigies of their occupants, who—being in transition between body and skeleton—are shown as festering corpses; a church banner depicting a spear-wielding angel fighting a winged demon clad in putrescent flesh.

Images such as these flowered, if that word can be applied to such a ghastly phenomenon, during the late 14th century—a response, some scholars believe, to the greatest pandemic of them all, the Black Death, which swept into Europe and peaked somewhere between 1348 and 1350, killing perhaps half the Continent’s population.

The plague had come from the east and had left 25 million dead in China and Mongolia, where it erupted around 1320. By 1347, it had reached the Crimean Peninsula, where Khan Jani Beg of the Golden Horde—the Mongol conquerors of Central Asia—was laying siege to the Genoese trading city of Kaffa. When the infection descended upon the encircling army, however, the besiegers became the beset. Jani Beg was forced to decamp, but not before he flung a few pestilential souvenirs at his triumphant enemy: He ordered his army to catapult plague-ridden corpses over the walls and into the streets of Kaffa. Many residents died as a result, but some escaped in ships to the west—and carried the epidemic with them.

Once those ships arrived in European ports, the infection metastasized throughout the populace. People broke out in dark spots and swollen lymph glands. They coughed up blood, vomited, writhed in agony, slipped into comas, and died.
La peste
was all they could call it: the plague.

Physicians of the time were baffled. Those at the University of Paris advised consuming no meat, fat, fish, or olive oil; vegetables, they decreed, were to be cooked in rainwater. Others suspected that wool, fabrics, or pelts harbored the source of the strange new scourge. Convinced that the pestilence resided in pets, some authorities killed and skinned domestic cats and dogs.

They were aiming way too high on the food chain. Instead, they should have targeted the grain sitting in the holds of ships, for grain, it seems, was a primary communicator of the plague; where grain resides, there dwell rats as well. And indeed, rats were everywhere in the medieval world: They lived inside thatch roofs and walls, in barns and in markets. Rats battened on filth. In some places, the plague was known as the “Viennese death” because, lacking sewers, that city was a byword for garbage and offal.

The real culprit was not the rat but the rat flea, whose bite might be laced with a virulently toxic bacterium,
Yersinia pestis
(though that crucial fact would not be discovered for another 500 years). Rat fleas can live for months inside clothes and straw mattresses. A bite from an infected flea usually transferred the bacillus to the human lymph system, where it flourished, causing the classic bubonic plague (named for the buboes, or painfully swollen lymph nodes, that erupted on victims). About half its victims died. That percentage soared, however, if the parasite entered the blood, in which case it caused septicemic plague, or the lungs, in which case the result was pneumonic plague. The latter could then be spread by the simple but brutally efficient contagion mechanism of infected droplets expelled by a cough. Both septicemic plague and pneumonic plague were generally death sentences.

People fled, sequestered themselves, or abandoned themselves to the pursuit of lust and hedonism. In Pistoia, Italy, travel was prohibited and guards were posted throughout the town. Coffins became a precious commodity; as fast as carpenters could turn a new one out, a body was placed inside and the lid nailed shut to contain the stench and contagion. Mourners were forbidden any contact with the dead. Traditional burial customs lapsed—a trend accelerated by municipal officials, who mandated, in historian Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s words, “an end to wailing for the dead and the ringing of the cathedral’s bells as a means of avoiding panic in the living when they realized how many had died.”

“It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth,” scrawled one Sienese chronicler, who had buried his five children and feared the end of the world was nigh. “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another…. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug…with the multitude of dead.” In Paris, 500 corpses a day were stacked awaiting burial at Les Innocents Cemetery. In Vienna, one mass grave was said to hold as many as 40,000 corpses. And in Avignon—seat of the papacy from 1305 to 1378—it took only six weeks to bury 11,000 people in a single cemetery. As graveyards overflowed, Pope Clement VI consecrated the Rhone River so that the bodies of Christians might be dumped into its waters.

Whereas the plague ravaged lands from Armenia to India—it is known as “the Great Destruction in the Year of Annihilation” in Muslim annals—it utterly desolated Europe. Abandoned ships drifted at their moorings. Farm animals became feral, while people died in droves in the fields. Nearly 200,000 villages are said to have disappeared from the medieval map. In Scotland, a standing stone commemorates a hamlet where everyone but an older woman perished; she collected the corpses on a donkey cart and buried them herself in a nearby field. Near Ragusa (today’s Dubrovnik, in Croatia), weakened plague victims were eaten alive by wolves.

Ragusa at that time belonged to the Venetian empire. Venice itself, despite stringent health measures—vessel quarantines, the use of barren islands as burial grounds, and the enforcement of burials at five feet deep—suffered one of the worst outbreaks, with close to 75 percent fatalities. Entire noble families vanished, while every morning, cries of
“Corpi morti!”
(“Dead bodies! [Bring out your] Dead bodies!”) echoed from the building fronts and along the canals.

Eventually, the plague dissipated. Venice not only recovered but also entered its golden age. “Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee / And was the safeguard of the West,” wrote Wordsworth in a panegyric to Venetian glories. At the city’s height in the 15th and 16th centuries, much of the commerce of central Europe flowed across the Alps to Venice—whence, transferred to galleys, it was carried down the Adriatic to far-off Constantinople and the Levant.

As a maritime empire trading with lands to the east, where plague always smoldered, Venice may have been the European city best prepared to fight its eventual return. Venetian public health measures became second to none. The first lazaretto in the lagoon had been established as early as 1423; the second one, Lazzaretto Nuovo, or “new lazaretto,” came into operation in 1468, primarily as a quarantine station. Its hospital, surrounded by high walls, ensured its being used during times of pandemic as a place where people went to die.

These and other bulwarks were breached all too often, but at least they helped confine outbreaks to flare-ups. An example of how seriously the plague was taken can be found today in the sacristy of Santa Maria della Salute on the Grand Canal: There, Titian’s
St. Mark Triumphant,
probably painted during or after a plague outbreak in 1510, depicts an enthroned St. Mark, the patron saint of Venice, flanked by Cosmas, Damian, Roch, and Sebastian—the saintly foursome traditionally invoked to ward off the affliction.

Despite such prophylaxis, la peste returned to Venice with a vengeance in the autumn of 1576. The usual strict ordinances were imposed, with severe penalties for breaking them: New cases should be promptly reported, the sick immediately isolated, the clothes and bedding of the dead swiftly burned. The contagion only spread. Officials imposed a weeklong quarantine on the entire city. It had no effect.

On the Rialto, life came to a standstill. The Piazza San Marco stood empty. Innkeepers locked their doors, and shopkeepers shuttered their stalls. Those who could afford it headed for the hills inland. Too often, though, they were felled before they could flee. Most senators departed, but not the Republic’s courageous leader, Doge Alvise Mocenigo I, who steadfastly remained in office as the epidemic burned through his city month after month, eventually infecting half of its 180,000 citizens.

Anyone who fell sick or showed even the slightest symptom was exiled to the lazarettos until they recovered or died. When those outposts reached (and exceeded) capacity, two ancient galleons were towed into the lagoon and used as isolation wards. Even that did not suffice. Soon both Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo were ringed with ships, giving them the appearance of beleaguered island fortresses.

Within the walls and aboard the vessels, doctors sheathed in protective garments, their face masks packed with aromatic herbs, used hooked sticks to examine patients from a safe remove. With thousands of people falling sick, however, hundreds died each day. “It looked like hell…. The sick lay three or four in a bed,” wrote the 16th-century Venetian chronicler Rocco Benedetti. “Workers collected the dead and threw them in the graves all day without a break. Often the dying ones and the ones too sick to move or talk were taken for dead and thrown on the piled corpses.”

Thus did the burial grounds quickly fill up, becoming so saturated that gravediggers had to lay each new shrouded corpse on top of the one below. Constantly being opened and reopened, the cemeteries took on the appearance of festering mass graves.

D
R
. B
ORRINI
D
IGS
B
ONES

Nearly 400 years later, the Archaeological Superintendence of Veneto decided to excavate the remains. Across the sparkling waters of the lagoon from the old city, members of La Spezia Archaeological Group assembled to undertake a dig on Lazzaretto Nuovo.

In August 2006, with Venice given over to tourists for the summer season, this small band of archaeologists was carefully spading away under the watchful eye of their supervisor, Dr. Matteo Borrini. A forensic anthropologist associated with the University of Florence, Dr. Borrini had logged countless hours helping the Italian police investigate various crime scenes. He was using this dig, in fact, as an opportunity to refine some old methods—and to test out some promising new ones on how best to recover bodies from clandestine graves.

The plot they were excavating, though only 17 yards (16 meters) square, abounded with skeletons. Borrini was using what he called “taphonomic know-how” (from Greek
taphos
, “grave”) to make sense of this jumble of bones by tracing their layers of deposition. Because this was not a conventional cemetery—rather a burial ground crammed with bodies every which way—the anthropologist’s task was a little trickier. It soon became clear, however, that Borrini was dealing with at least two “stratigraphic macro-units,” or two layers of bodies buried at different times. The topmost layer showed no postburial disturbance. Judging from medallions found among these remains from the Venice Jubilee of 1600, it represented the dead of the 1630–1631 plague epidemic, which had killed some 40,000 people.

Underlying and interpenetrating that layer of dead, however, was an older one composed of more fragmented skeletons, broken and shattered as if by the spades of gravediggers. The bodies in this layer had been skeletons for several decades when the victims of the 1630–1631 plague were laid on top of them. Borrini’s team was able to establish that they almost certainly represented the dead from an earlier outbreak, this one the 1576–1577 plague.

August 11, 2006, promised to be as tediously exacting as any other day at the site. Borrini was making his usual rounds when a voice summoned him to a corner of the site where his sister had begun coaxing yet another skull from the dirt.

But not just any skull.

As was his habit when it came to unusual finds, the director took over and painstakingly removed the accretion from around the skull. It seemed that a brick, lodged between its jaws, was propping its mandible wide open.

That was odd. No other bricks or stones had been found in the backfill of that grave. Otherwise, the skeleton—or what was left of it, for the only portion not shattered by later gravediggers extended from the rib cage to the skull—seemed normal enough. It had been interred supine (on its back), its arms apparently at its sides, although the left clavicle, or collarbone, was pushed up at an angle—probably the result of a shroud wound too tightly about it. Quite likely from the older, or 1576, layer, it was catalogued as “ID6.”

That brick bedeviled Borrini. He had enough experience as a forensic anthropologist to recognize an artifact of intentional action when he saw it. His first thought, in fact, was that this signaled some kind of bizarre, ritualized murder carried out at the height of a raging epidemic. Because there was no damage to the teeth, however, and because the jawbones were still perfectly aligned, the brick had probably not been rammed into the mouth of a violently struggling person. Instead, it had been inserted between the jaws of a corpse, when soft tissue was still present.

So far, so good. But
why?

Throughout that autumn and into the winter, Borrini—now back at his academic office in Florence—puzzled over the find. Eventually, he was drawn to the university library, where he read up on the history of the plague and researched funerary practices common during pandemics. One book led to another, until finally Borrini came across a tract published in 1679 by Philip Rohr, a Protestant theologian at the University of Leipzig. It was called “De Masticatione Mortuorum”: “On the Chewing Dead.”

This volume described the
Nachzehrer—
German for “after-devourer”—a kind of mindless, vampirelike corpse that chews its shroud in the grave before consuming its own fingers. As it nibbles away, by some occult process, it also slowly kills the surviving members of its family. It may then begin gobbling corpses in neighboring graves.

As if all that were not grisly enough, the Nachzehrer’s appalling dietary habits can be heard aboveground, where they come through loud and clear as a grunting, smacking sound like that of a pig snarfing garbage (dignified in Latin as
sonus porcinus
).