Vampires

Reginald Hodder | 1914

IN all parts of the world there has existed from time immemorial a terrible belief to the effect that the dead can prey upon the living. Among the Chaldeans of old, the savage hordes of Africa, the Red Indians, and even in the widely-scattered islands of Polynesia this belief has been firmly adhered to. But, although incubus and succubus have held their places in the world of spirits since the very cradle of the human race, it was not until the eighteenth century that the hideous thing of blood elaborated itself and became a problem difficult to pooh-pooh and still more difficult to explain— the problem of the vampire.

A vampire is the result of a compact voluntary or involuntary between a human being and a preying entity of the darker side of Nature, by the terms of which the latter uses the former as a medium for the provision of the fumes of fresh human blood. A good definition is given by Horst. “ A vampyr,” he says, " is a dead body which continues to live in the grave, which it leaves, however, by night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the living, whereby it is nourished and preserved in good condition, instead of becoming decomposed like other dead bodies.” But I will leave all discussion as to the precise nature of the vampire and whether its body comes forth from the tomb or only its double, or neither, to the conclusion of this article, and will set forward here a brief history of the vampire, with official medical evidence for or against its existence.

In the spring of 1727 Arnod Paole returned from the Levant to his native village near Belgrade, a prosperous, honest and clean-living man. But there was a shadow brooding on him. He confided to one or two a strange tale of how in the East he had been bitten by a phantom, and it seemed to have affected his mind. One day he fell off his hay-cart and was picked up insensible. He never regained consciousness but died, or seemed to die, some few hours afterwards. He was buried. Three or four weeks later several people in the neighbourhood made complaints to the authorities that they had been haunted by Amod, and very soon four of them died.

Then, says the official report, the body of Arnod Paole was disinterred forty days after his burial, and it was discovered that the body was in a perfectly fresh state, with no sign of decomposition. The eyes were wide open and the shroud was stained with fresh blood. His nails had come off, and new nails, talon-shaped, were growing. The wisest men of the place pronounced him to be “ in the vampyr state ” ; accordingly a stake was driven through his heart, " whereupon he gave an audible groan and a quantity of blood flowed from him." The four who had died and were supposed to have been infected by Arnod were treated in the same way, lest they in turn should infect others.

It was not until five years later that the neighbourhood again began to show signs of the evil. Gruesome tales of mysterious midnight visitants began to get about and people began to sicken quickly and die. Again the churchyard was resorted to, and this time a great number of graves were opened. The medical report on the subject, signed by three regimental surgeons, and countersigned by the lieutenant-colonel and a sub-lieutenant, gives a full account of the disinterment of thirteen people, after periods of from eighteen days to ninety days in the grave, most of them being in the " vampyr condition.” This document seems to establish the fact that human bodies have been buried in a state of death-like trance and so remained for months. It also proves that, if these entranced subjects were not vampires, then the medical men who drove stakes into their hearts were butchers and murderers.

In addition to this serious epidemic near Belgrade, there have been other instances innumerable in Eastern Europe, both of a collective and an isolated character. Many of these are very weird and thrilling, and no doubt had been added to by the imagination of one narrator after another. But a short article is scarcely the medium for vampire anecdotes, however weird. Having seen that the existence of long-buried cataleptics in the "vampyr state” is too well attested to deny, and also that the theory that the disembodied soul— or at least the earth aspect of it — can prey upon the living finds wide credence, we must attempt to get a solution of the vampire theory from these two premises. Dr. Pierart, the famous Frenchman of fairly recent years, made an exhaustive study of vampires. 'The fact of a spectre returning to suck human blood,” he says, ”is not so inexplicable as it seems, and here we appeal to the spiritualists who admit the phenomenon of bicorporeity or soul-duplication . . . these prove clearly how much is possible for astral spectres under favourable conditions.” Pierart’s explanation of how a buried cataleptic becomes a vampire is interesting.

He maintains that the more earthbound part of the human soul which forsakes the body at death may be only half-way out at the moment of burial, in which case it becomes terrified and violently re-enters its casket. Then one of two things happens— either the cataleptic will die of suffocation or, if very strong in its lower appetites, will become a vampire. Then the bicorporeal life begins : the more corporeal part remains underground, neither dead nor living; but still, while not dead, a permanent house for the less corporeal part, which is able to keep body and soul together by deriving sustenance from the living and transferring it to the corpse, without the medium of which it would lose its nocturnal freedom and go to its own place. "If," says Pierart," one had never seen appear in the bosom of families of certain countries, beings clothing themselves in the shape of the familiar dead, coming thus to suck the blood of one or of several persons, and if the death of the victims by emaciation had not followed, they would never have gone to disinter the corpses in cemeteries; we should then never have had attested the terrible fact of persons buried for several years being found with the corpse soft, flexible, the eyes open, with rosy complexions, the mouth and nose full of blood, and of the blood running in torrents under blows, from wounds, and when decapitated.”

There are up-to-date medical explanations of vampirism, but these to my mind do not seem to cover all the facts. A writer in Blackwood’s Magazine says: "Supposing that at any time chance had brought to light a body interred alive and lying still in this (cataleptic) fit, the whole yarn of superstition might again have been spun from that clue. . . . The violence used would have forced blood from the corpse and that would be construed into the blood of a victim.” Yes, but a constant point in all the evidence is the fact that the opening of any particular grave was brought about by the appearance of that particular dead among the living. In short, the authorities have not opened graves for pastime, but because the counterpart of the un-dead had been terrifying the neighbourhood. Again, sceptics will contend that it is quite natural for a living thing in a deep trance to remain in that state indefinitely, and in support of this, they adduce the instances of toads and frogs which have been discovered in rocks where they must have been encased for centuries. This state, they say, is one in which the vitality is simply dormant, and need not diminish— hence the freshness of the bodies after a long period of internment. Yes ; but here again the explanation does not cover all the facts. In many well-authenticated cases the body has been found to be full of fresh blood, and better nourished than at the time of burial. Where does this increase come from ? Not from the air, for the body does not breathe. Perhaps from an absorption of its own nervous atmosphere or aura and equally, perhaps, by magnetic attraction, from the auras of living people.

In any case whatever the method of the increase it involves the principle of vampirism which is the absorption of the vitality of living beings. Still further, those who try to explain away vampirism, elect to ignore the well-attested fact that in many cases the un-dead body sheds its nails and grows fresh ones, curved and pointed like talons. The post-mortem growth of both hair and nails is well known, but that an entranced subject should shed its nails and grow fresh ones of a different shape is too strange to overlook.

In these days when scientists are, with good reason, growing more and more tentative in their disbelief in the possibilities that lie beyond the veil which as yet they have penetrated only in places; when it is beginning to be realized that what once were termed old wives' fables are now frequently styled scientific facts; when the mysteries of the invisible worlds are gradually unfolding to the vision of a few whose opinion and word cannot be readily doubted; then, I say, we are entitled to take into account, in regard to the vampire, the consideration of unlikely possibilities. The majority of mankind will admit that there is something in one person which can influence another at a distance. Suppose now that this something becomes enormously enhanced during the “ vampyr state ” ; in that case it could influence others at a distance more strongly— even to the extent of creating an apparition capable of inducing the same abnormal condition in the victim, a condition accompanied by strange manifestations, chief of which might be the setting up of a mysterious and invisible channel of connection between vampire and vampirized, so that what the former's thirst demanded the latter’s submissive acquiescence would supply.

The sceptic will say : “Why, then, are vampires not found to-day?" I reply : “They are found to-day!” Lacking the necessary soil of ignorance and superstition, weakness and fear in which to take easy root and flourish on the physical plane, the vampire of to-day finds it convenient to shift its plane in order to find a crevice through which to manifest. The elusive, crafty, protean thing hides its true nature behind a show of natural causes— I mean such simple causes as any doctor will readily give you. For instance, they will say it is bad for a young and healthy person to sleep in the same bed with an aged, decrepit one. Why? Oh! the old one vampirizes the young one. Well, what is the process? They cannot tell you that: they can only point to results. But what else can the process be than a drinking in by the decrepit one of something emanating from the young one? It is the same principle as that under which the mysterious midnight visitant in the form of a long, lithe, black animal with eyes of fire, that glides round the foot of your bed, lulls you into deep slumber and then pierces your jugular with its sharp incisors and drains your life blood. The two things are the same, the only difference being that the latter is a striking and vivid piece of stagecraft on the part of the vampire requiring ignorance, superstition and fear for its audience. The thing is there and can act in a thousand different ways. Among those to whom knowledge is power it may act entirely through the intellect; with others whose weak moral constitution lays them open to attack it may act through the emotions; while there are still others who seem to have brought into this world with them a peculiar psychic gift— or, more properly, curse— of vampirism, which they exercise unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, upon those around them. Of this last kind examples may frequently be found in savage races. Instances have come to my notice in Polynesia. Well do I remember visiting an old man by the Lake of Fire in Hawaii— an old savage with a coal black eye, a sinister expression and a very uncanny reputation. It was said of him that he had the power to visit his victims in the form of a devil-fish and so suck their blood ; and there was certainly at times a strange epidemic in the vicinity of Kilauea which left its victims covered with round red marks on the skin which had the appearance of having been made by suckers. This old man is now dead, and perhaps the fact that his body was thrown into Hale Mau Mau as a sacrifice to Pele, the fire goddess, may account for the cessation of these grim epidemics among the natives. In Fiji, Samoa, New Zealand and various other parts of Polynesia there are numerous signs of this kind of black magic, but they seem to be mostly confined to the action of the living upon the living.