Vampire Forensics (8 page)

Walker rightly calculated that such scenes would infuriate people, but he also insisted that they masked a serious menace to public health. It wasn’t simply that graveyards fouled wells, or that rats dragged bones about, or that indescribable insects—“body bugs”—hatched in clouds and settled on passersby. No, graveyards were also “hot-beds of miasmata,” sources of “mephitic vapors” widely believed to be extremely poisonous.

Official reports overflowed with accounts of gravediggers expiring on the spot after sinking their picks into some corrupted corpse and releasing its noxious gases. Such exhalations accumulated so thickly in the vaults of ancient churches that they extinguished lighted candles or, paradoxically, caught fire and burned for days. They were blamed for complaints ranging from headaches and convulsions to asphyxiation. “Although such remarkable effects are not produced upon people in general,” wrote Walker, the same vapors, emanating from thousands of corpses, still mixed with the air and were breathed in by the city’s inhabitants. “Thus the very putrefactions of the dead become part of the fluids of the living.”

What was worse, those putrefactions were believed to carry the seeds of malignant disease. The opening of a single corpse, Walker claimed, had brought an epidemic to a vast area in France. When typhus, smallpox, or cholera struck, graveyards were blamed as the centers of infection. Typhus—actually carried by lice—was widely attributed to cadaverous vapors, while a French physician traced an outbreak of smallpox to emanations from dead bodies. In
Bleak House,
smallpox lurking in graveyard exhalations and deposited as “witch-ointment slimy to the touch” on cemetery gates and walls scars the once-beautiful Esther and kills Lady Dedlock.

As English readers were gulping down the adventures of
Varney the Vampyre
in 1848, a more dreaded monster was again stalking the land. In Dickens’s day, no disease was quite so feared as cholera. “The speed with which cholera killed was profoundly alarming,” declared historian William H. McNeill. A person might be hale and hearty at one moment, but then his bowels emptied without warning and never stopped—even as the diarrhea carried out pieces of intestinal lining.

“[R]adical dehydration,” McNeill continued, “meant that a victim shrank into a wizened caricature of his former self within a few hours, while ruptured capillaries discolored the skin, turning it black and blue. The effect was to make mortality uniquely visible: patterns of bodily decay were exacerbated…as in a time-lapse motion picture….” It was a startling and horrible transformation: You grew old in a day. Your eyes dulled, and you were forced into a fetal position, knees drawn up to your chin. If you died that way, you were buried that way, locked in rigor mortis.

Cholera ravaged town and country indiscriminately. At one point during the 1848–1849 outbreak, the disease was killing a thousand people a day in England. During an earlier outbreak, between 1831 and 1832, more than 50,000 people had died in the British Isles. In some places during that epidemic, cholera victims were buried so soon—sometimes within ten minutes of being declared dead—that premature burial was widely believed to be commonplace. These were the stories that Bram Stoker’s mother had told him about her childhood in cholera-ravaged County Sligo. In his story “Some Terrible Letters from Scotland,” Edinburgh writer James Hogg arranges for one character to escape being buried alive during the 1832 outbreak; another Hogg creation reports horrifying dreams of the cholera dead trailing about the kirkyard “wi’ their white withered faces an’ their glazed een [eyes].” That character’s sisters then die of the illness after being infected by their mother. But they return from the grave to escort their mother on a vengeful “dance of death” back to the churchyard for good, for the “plague of Cholera was a breath of hell, they who died of it got no rest in their graves, so that it behoved all, but parents in particular, to keep out of its influences till the vapour of death passed over.”

Indeed, it was widely assumed to be vapor until an 1854 outbreak in London, when Dr. John Snow proved that cholera came not from air but from water: Water contaminated by human waste carrying a toxic intestinal bacterium had leaked from a faulty cesspool, infecting a Soho water pump.

In some places, however, graveyard effluvium—Dickens’s “witch-ointment slimy to the touch”—might be seen as having curative properties. If there were ever such a thing as grave mold coating the grass and trees in cemeteries, folklore would give it a ritual value. In the north of England, it so happens, a young tuberculosis patient “was at last restored to health by eating butter made from the milk of cows fed in kirkyards, a sovereign remedy for consumption brought on through being witch-ridden.”

Consumption, aka tuberculosis, didn’t kill quickly, as did cholera or bubonic plague. Instead, it was the archetypal “wasting disease,” steadily and remorselessly consuming its victims, draining them of vitality and life. If it was “galloping consumption,” this happened in a matter of months; more often, it was a question of years. Yet, by the time the first rattling coughs appeared, accompanied by bloody sputum, it was almost too late. You lost flesh. You bled energy. You were being eaten from within by an invisible demon, or you were being hag-ridden at night—that is, you had become the prey of witches or vampires. No other explanation sprang readily to hand, especially when a bloody froth might bubble from your lips as you slept.

“The emaciated figure strikes one with terror,” states a 1799 description of a tuberculosis patient, “the forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk; the little fat that raised them in their orbits entirely wasted; the pulse quick and tremulous; the nails long, bending over the ends of the fingers; the palms of the hand dry and painfully hot to the touch; the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his complaints.”

The stubbornly rational blamed tuberculosis on bad air—
mal aria
—or cold, damp climates. Those consumptives who could afford it decamped to the magic mountains, with their thin air, or to the warm south—the Mediterranean, say, or the American Southwest desert, with its dry climate. But among the poor, forced to share beds in stifling rooms in unsanitary houses, tuberculosis—already frightfully contagious—reached epidemic proportions.

Yet, as Dickens noted in
Nicholas Nickleby,
tuberculosis was also a disease “in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightening load.” Languid periods might be followed by an upsurge in energy, a sharpening of appetite, or even an unparalleled sexual ardor. And because consumption was believed to fuel the fire of creativity, making it burn brightest just before the dark, it became the Romantic death par excellence, and spirited away innumerable poets, painters, and musicians—among them Balzac, Keats, Chopin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Brontë sisters. As they were “consumed,” they grew emaciated, their cheeks hollowed, their skin turned pallid and translucent, and their eyes appeared luminous—the “consumptive look” that so impressed itself on the literature of the age.

Bram Stoker’s depiction of the fading Lucy Westenra in
Dracula
has often been diagnosed as a description of anemia, but it might also depict a case of tuberculosis: “I do not understand Lucy’s fading away as she is doing,” the character Mina notes. “She eats well and sleeps well, and enjoys fresh air; but all the time the roses in her cheeks are fading, and she gets weaker and more languid day by day; at night I hear her gasping as if for air.” Dr. Seward gazes upon her with equal futility: “There on the bed…lay poor Lucy, more horribly white and wan-looking than ever. Even the lips were white, and the gums seemed to have shrunken back from the teeth, as we sometimes see in a corpse after a prolonged illness.”

The title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” to take another example, is described as slender, “even emaciated,” with skin like the “purest ivory,” a sensual mouth, raven-black hair, and eyes so extraordinary they were “large and luminous orbs.” She suffers from a wasting disease and broods continually on death and dissolution. She pens a poem, “The Conqueror Worm,” in which even “…the seraphs sob at vermin fangs / In human gore imbued.” After her death, the narrator again marries, only to find that his light-haired, blue-eyed bride also sickens and dies—and is resurrected as the very same emaciated, raven-haired Ligeia he once loved.

For eons, the affliction was inexplicable. Consumption was contagious, clearly, and it had something to do with the air—that much was known. But not until 1882, when Robert Koch discovered
Tuberculosis bacillus
(he ultimately won a Nobel Prize for his work), did people recognize that the culprit wasn’t the air but rather the suspended droplets it carried—the effluvia of coughs and sneezes.

O
NE
F
OREVER

In Dublin, he became known as the “Invisible Prince,” a glitteringly handsome writer who had once moved through society with such quiet assurance that he nearly stood for Parliament. But that was before his wife’s death under mysterious circumstances, and his virtual disappearance. After that, recalled the poet Alfred Perceval Graves, Sheridan Le Fanu could be glimpsed only “at odd hours of the evening, when he might occasionally be seen stealing, like the ghost of his former self, between his newspaper office and his home in Merrion Square; sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old out-of-the-way bookshop poring over some rare black letter [tome in] Astrology or Demonology.”

Le Fanu is remembered today as one of the supreme masters of the ghost story. Even the noted M. R. James, his peer in that uncanny art, admired the way the brilliant if reclusive Irishman handled his material. James admitted, however, that if Le Fanu had one flaw, it lay in his predilection for “the Vampire-idea.” Certainly
Carmilla,
published in 1872, the year before Le Fanu died at 58, is among the most exquisitely rendered—and influential—vampire stories ever written.

Laura, its narrator, is a child living with her father in a lonely castle buried deep in the forests of Styria, a province of southern Austria. One night a beautiful lady visits her in her bedroom and seems to bite her on the chest, but this is dismissed as a dream. Years later, however, a carriage full of strange people overturns in the moonlight nearby and leaves one of its occupants, an injured young woman, in the care of the castle. Her name is Carmilla, and Laura recognizes her as the toothsome visitor from her childhood dream.

The two are about the same age, so they become—seemingly—the best of friends. Yet in breathless, erotically charged passages, Carmilla is clearly making more than a pass at Laura:

Carmilla sleeps most of the day, never needs to eat, and is absent much of the night. Odder still, Laura and her father discover an old family portrait from her Hungarian mother’s side of one “Mircalla, Countess Karnstein,” dated 1698. The woman in the painting is a dead ringer for their guest, down to the mole on her neck.

Meanwhile, Laura’s midnight visitor has resumed her predations, thus leaving the girl wasting dangerously away. Young ladies everywhere in the forest are falling prey to “the malady,” and the story of one of them, who dies from the disease, bears an eerie resemblance to Laura’s: This girl lives in a distant castle, which likewise has an eldritch visitor, “perfidious and beautiful,” named Millarca. Both Millarca and Mircalla are discovered to be anagrams of Carmilla, now clearly understood to be a vampire. Carmilla disappears but is eventually traced to a ruined crypt in a ruined chapel in the ruined village of Karnstein. When the crypt is opened, there the countess lies:

These are damning proofs of vampirism. Carmilla/Mircalla/Millarca is staked—not without a bloodcurdling scream—and then decapitated.

In its mastery of tone and suspense,
Carmilla
couldn’t be more different from
Varney the Vampyre
. Its influence has been subtler but no less enduring. More 20th-century vampire films, for example, owe something to
Carmilla
than to any other story besides
Dracula
. Bram Stoker, as we have seen, held
Carmilla
in such high regard that he initially planned to set his novel, too, in the forests of Styria—an homage to his fellow countryman.

B
ALKAN
D
REAMS

Only a mountain range away from those forests is what was once called Carniola but is today known as Slovenia. There, in 1734, three Englishmen journeyed through the wintry forest on very bad roads. An hour before sunset they rode into Ljubljana, where at the Black Horse, a garrulous innkeeper regaled them through the long winter’s night with tales of bears and stags and wild boars—and other creatures as well: