Realm of the Vampire

Realm of the
Vampire

History and the Undead

Daniel J. Wood

2009
Galde Press, Inc.
Lakeville, Minnesota, U.S.A.
 Realm of the Vampire
© Copyright 2009 by Daniel J. Wood
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission from the publishers except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Edition
First Printing, 2009

Galde Press, Inc.

PO Box 460
Lakeville, Minnesota 55044–0460
www.galdepress.com
 For Fritz
Spring 1998-Autum 2007
Dan’s Best Friend
Let Light Perpetual Shine upon him!
 Contents
Foreword, by David A. Sattman

Preface

Chapter 1: Vampires and Disease

The Bloodsucking Corpse of English Tradition

Chapter 2: The White Death of New England

Chapter 3: The Vampire Cult in Poland

Beginnings

Chapter 4: Zmory, the Night Hag, and Some Commonalities

Chapter 5: Upiory
Back to the Ordinary Vampire

Chapter 6: Topielec, Poludnica, and Death as a Maiden

Taking Stock Before Moving On

Chapter 7: Suspicious Corpses and the Accusing Hand

Chapter 8: The Nobleman as Vampire

Chapter 9: Poland as a Corpse

The Saxon Era, 1697–1763

Chapter 10: Keeping Up with the Hapsburgs

Chapter 11: Czeching Our Sources

Necromancy as a Source of Vampirism

Sources for Realm of the Vampire

 Foreword

On a cold night in autumn 1969 I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula while

alone on my parents’ farm in central Minnesota. Discovering his host’s
vampiric nature, Jonathan Harker froze with horror. There lay the count in
his undead state with eyes fixed in death, yet revealing the knowledge that
his privacy had been invaded. His eyes, filled with rage and contempt,
expressed a murderous desire to attack the intruder, but daylight was not
his time to dominate. Stoker depicts his vampire as a bloated, monstrous
wraith—something detested by the natural world. The blood trickling from
Dracula’s mouth testifies to a horrible repast. This scene, recounted in
Jonathan Harker’s journal, describes the monster vividly as human, yet
demon, dead yet living. The reader should understand that what Harker
saw in that ruined crypt had been observed numerous times before by
people in real life.
In the first third of the eighteenth century several plagues were
followed by attacks of such bizarre and eerie natures that they seem like
the stuff of fiction. According to Jean Marigny’s Vampires: Restless
Creatures of the Night, there took place in Serbia in the 1720s an outbreak
of bovine plague, often fatal to humans. Deaths of those who survived the
initial plague and later succumbed to anemia and wasting health confused
the greatest medical minds of the time. Reports of the dead issuing forth
from their graves and attacking loved ones were commonly circulated in
Eastern Europe from the 1720s through the 1740s. It was recorded that
monsters would torment loved ones at night, leaving the unfortunate
victims in states of confusion as from nightmares, after which they awoke
noticeably weakened. After several nightly visitations from the undead
wraiths, these poor people died.
These attacks caught the attention of important people like the
Austrian Emperor Charles VI (1685–1740), who ordered an inquiry into
the matter surrounding a revenant named Peter Plogojowitz in the town of
Kisilova in 1725, and who reportedly attacked eight people before being
destroyed. King Louis XV of France ordered his ambassador to Austria,
the Duc de Richelieu, to undertake an official investigation. Within a short
time Le Glaneur published details of this case as well as that of Arnold
Paole (see below). The London Journal translated material from Le
Glaneur, and, on March 11, 1732, the word vampire first entered the
English language.
In Book IV of the second edition of De Servorum Dei Beatificatione
et de Beatorom Canonozatione, Prospero Lambertini (1675–1758), as
Pope Benedict XIV, devoted several pages refuting the existence of
vampires. The most serious inquirer was Dom Augustin Calmet, who
published a two volume work in 1746, Dissertations sur les apparitions
des anges, des démons et des esprits. Et sur les revenants et vampires de
Hongrie, de Boheme, de Moravie et de Silésie, later published in English
in 1850 as The Phantom World. In volume two Calmet examined the
theological and scientific definitions of vampires.
Perhaps the most notorious case of vampirism at this time took
place in a village near Beograd named Medveja or Meduegna. There, a
local farmer, Arnold Paole, fell off a hay wagon and died. Before the
accident he had told his wife that he was afraid of becoming a vampire
after his death. According to an official report sent to the Austrian
Emperor by army physician Johann Flückinger (Visum et Repertum), many
in Medveja suffered vampire attacks by the recently deceased Paole. Upon
reaching Paole’s grave, Dr. Flückinger and his assistants opened the
coffin. The corpse had shifted to one side, the mouth was agape with fresh
blood. It was apparent that what lay before them was that which they most
feared, the vampire. After removing the cerements covering the hands they
noticed newly grown nails and fresh skin. They sprinkled garlic over the
remains and staked it in the chest. The revenant gave a piercing shriek as
warm blood spewed out in a hideous crimson jet.
This was the Age of Reason, yet talk of vampirism was rampant.
Diderot and Voltaire suggested taking the matter seriously even if they
could not bring themselves to accept the vampire as reality. Doubters like
Archbishop Giuseppe Davanzanti, in Dissertatione sopra i Vampiri, 1744,
still saw the necessity of publishing an article about the phenomenon.
This part of European history is rarely discussed even in academic
circles. It is left to those who seek it out in tomes like Montague
Summers” The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in
Europe (1929) to find anything at all about the historic vampire.
The vampire is most accurately described as a possessed corpse. A
demonic entity enters the dead shell of a human being and reanimates it.
This does not mean that the shell is alive but rather that it is kept in a state
similar to both death and life by the demon. So long as the empty shell is
not physically damaged in a manner that endangers continued possession,
the demonic element can and does remain alive and well within the dead
frame of a former human being. The destruction of the body will render it
incapable of housing a possessing spirit, forcing the demon to depart into
the outer darkness while the shell crumbles into corruption.
I want to turn this over now to my friend Dan Wood, who has his
own discussion on vampires. He exposes the history of vampirism in
Poland, a nation previously overlooked in the literature of the undead.
Poland is often ignored when it comes to vampire lore. Transylvania and
Romania, along with Greece, are most frequently associated with vampire
tradition. What makes vampirism in Poland so interesting is the
completeness of the original sources. While vampirism is a universal
phenomenon, there are regional variations which are unique to their
specific locales. This is especially true in Poland. Dan Wood illuminates
what has been a dark corner of European vampire history. What is most
important is that Wood is devoted to this subject. It is my opinion that his
writing will be seen by future generations of vampirologists as a seminal
and groundbreaking work into a whole new arena of investigation.
—David A. Sattman
July 26, 2007
(The Feast of St. Joachim and St. Anne,
parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
 Preface

Gracious Lord! Can such things be? It makes my flesh creep to think
of them.
—Wladyslaw Reymont (1867–1925)

This book cannot answer the question: Do vampires exist? It can,

instead, say that our ancestors certainly believed they did. And isn’t belief
just that—a personal choice? A faith issue? Are there any grounds for
belief in vampires? Yes. Can anyone definitively prove that the dead have
returned from the grave and sucked the blood of the living? Not any more
than they can establish the existence of ghosts. We are forced to rely on
ancient records and eyewitness testimony. Absolute proof remains in the
shadows, just out of reach. As with belief in God or other spiritual forces,
belief will always have a subjective element and cannot be proved or
disproved. No matter how nuanced the philosophical debate, we are
ultimately faced with the universe. Why does it exist rather than not exist?
Either some divine force animates it or it just is. Can anyone truly claim
either choice more rational? Is either choice any less mysterious?
Unfortunately, vampire research has become mired in the debate:
Do vampires exist? After two monumental works by a believer, Montague
Summers (1880-1948), in the early twentieth century, The Vampire: His
Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929), vampire research
basically fell into a pattern of debunking, with academic writers chasing
after trendy theories from Freudianism to porphyria to explain away the
vampire. Somewhere along the way, the Western world lost sight of the
traditional folkloric vampire, and authors ended up writing treatments of
the cinema’s modern variants of the monster rather than on the creature
itself. At the end of the 1980s Paul Barber returned the folkloric vampire
to us in several studies, most notably Vampires, Burial, and Death (1988).
Barber argued that pre-modern Europeans incorrectly attributed natural
human decomposition to vampirism. Michael Bell (Food for the Dead,
2001) confirmed and amplified Bell’s thesis, adding that many traditional
symptoms of vampirism could be explained by epidemics of tuberculosis.
Did these excellent studies finally impale the vampire with stake
and hammer? If the reader doesn’t want to believe in vampires, then yes.
Our ancestors, though, understood and treated disease, but they also
admitted the possibility of a spiritual dimension. They recognized the
physical nature of contagious illness, as demonstrated by the Milanese,
who, during the Black Death, employed quarantine around their city. If
they thought the situation merited additional supernatural intervention,
then they applied it. Pre-modern people were not fools, and maybe they
should sometimes be taken at their word. So much of modern scholarship
amounts to second-guessing the meaning behind ancient texts; it makes
one wonder whether any of these writers actually meant what they said.
This study will do just that: assume that the ancient writers meant what
they said when they wrote about vampires. Whether we choose to believe
them or not should not prevent us from hearing their voices.
Throughout Realm of the Vampire I endeavored to place accounts of
vampirism within a cultural and historical context. It is important to
remember that these cases happened to a definite people at a definite point
in history. These facts have traditionally been ignored in the
historiography of the undead. The brief outlines of Polish, Austrian, and
Czech history will not only help the reader digest the tales included in
Realm of the Vampire, but it will immeasurably make the older
compendiums by Calmet and Summers more useful and accessible. It is
hoped that this volume will both supplement and build upon the
foundation established by Calmet and Summers.

***

The text at hand began as a conversation with a co-worker about

vampirism in the English-speaking tradition. The co-worker, Arlene B.
Thompson, has been an avocational genealogist for several years, and she
ferreted out a great deal of information for chapter two, “The White Death
of New England,” which, believe it or not, was pretty-much researched
and written before either of us read Bell’s superb work. I submitted the
first two chapters as articles for Fate magazine, thinking that would be the
end of the project. Phyllis Galde, of Galde Press, Inc., suggested that the
subject be developed further into a monograph. Phyllis graciously
provided wide latitude in subject matter, and I jumped at the chance to
write a few chapters on my first love, Poland.
To those not acquainted with the country, this might seem an odd
choice, but, as the reader will find out, Poland is a sleeping giant in the
realms of the undead. For several centuries Poland basked as a preeminent
European power, and this proud nation’s archives bulge with both
historical and folkloric sources on vampirism. Folkloric sources should not
be ignored because—though they cannot answer the question of Did
vampires exist?—they can eloquently relate to us what people believed
about them. This is a far more important topic. As with Russia, Poland’s
ablest artists have also essayed on the vampire in some of the nation’s
most renowned pieces of literature and artwork. How many other countries
can claim multiple Nobel Prize-winning authors who wrote about
vampires? These works are called upon as witnesses to the tradition. This
study can only trace the lineaments of a vast and rich legacy.
My own interest in this subject may be traced to both nature and
nurture. In 1897 Bram Stoker wrote: “I find that the district he [Dracula]
named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three
states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the
Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known parts of
Europe.” A decade later, in 1908, Rudolph Anthony Górski, my
grandfather, was born in Bukovina, “one of the wildest and least-known
parts of Europe.” His family settled in Detroit, where I listened to many
tales of the supernatural on his knee. On weekend visits, I would ask him
to tell me ‘what men saw when they went up into the mountains and at
crossroads’—my childhood name for spooky stories. His own tastes ran
more in the direction of Eliot Ness, but, like a good peasant, he worked
with his hands and loved with his heart. So he obliged me with the lore of
the Old Country.
The Detroit of my childhood also enjoyed the services of one of the
best independent television stations in the country, WKBD (Channel 50).
WKBD screened quality prints of Hammer, Universal, and Mexican
vampire films on Saturdays, and my mother, whose tastes ran in the
direction of English mysteries, would intermittently peek in and watch a
scene or to with me in between her household chores. She would say, “I
like that Cushing and Lee,” offering me pointers on Cushing’s nuanced
performances. Channel 50’s unique programming evidently influenced
other Detroiters of my generation, as both Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell
have spent disproportionate amounts of their careers in fantasy and horror.
In college I began a more academic interest in the topic as an
undergraduate in history with a minor in Polish studies. My parents
dutifully warned me away from such nonsense, and I can still hear my
father’s voice advising me to learn a trade and “earn a living.”
Subsequently I discovered he was right. The vampire nevertheless held me
in his gaze, and I continued to do his bidding from time to time. Besides
my parents who, like my dog Fritz, have always been there—suspicious
yet supporting—I must also thank my wife, Nancy. Despite her
embarrassment and better judgment, she has gone beyond support and
actively nurtured my research into evil supernaturalism.

Certificate of Naturalization for the author’s grandfather, Ralph Gorski, 1957

Finally, I would like to thank those who took the time to read my
manuscript and offer their comments. Rob Brautigam should be familiar to
anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject. His site,
shroudeater.com, remains one of the Internet’s best sources on historical
vampirism. “Big Al” Otterson is an artist and keen student of the
paranormal. I am fortunate to also call him a friend. David Sattman, a
gentle scholar and life-long researcher into vampirism, has made erudite
contributions to many websites over the years. Maybe one day we’ll read
his magnum opus on the disturbances at Highgate Cemetery. Leszek
Urban of Lublin, Poland, offered many helpful suggestions and helped
clarify some obscure passages in Polish. Thanks also to Andy Honigman, a
theremin-playing editor at Fate. Thanks, all!
 ***
Which brings us back to vampirism. Since the tenth century, Poland
has been an overwhelmingly Christian nation, and the Poles understood
evil supernaturalism within the context of Catholic Christian demonology.
None of the large Catholic denominations—Roman, Orthodox, or
Anglican—has ever plainly stated a belief in vampires as an article of
faith. Individual clerics from all these groups have of course ascribed to
such beliefs. Dom Augustin Calmet (1672–1757), despite claims to the
contrary, did not believe in the actual existence of reanimated vampiric
corpses; however, members of Old Catholic orders, including Montague
Summers and Seán Manchester, have taught the existence of the evil dead.
In the past few decades exorcists for the major denominations have put
past secrecy behind them and published numerous memoirs of their
experiences. One of these, Fr. Christopher Neil-Smith (1920–), an exorcist
for the Church of England, has admitted to encountering several traditional
vampires in the 1970s. One South American man complained that that his
recently-deceased brother returned to him in the night and sucked his
lifeblood. Fr. Neil-Smith noted that:

He was a perfectly normal person before, but after his brother’s

death he felt his life was being sucked away from him as if the spirit
of his brother was feeding on him. When the exorcism was
performed he felt a release and new life, as if new blood ran in his
veins.

The belief that these creatures existed only in the minds of their
percipients Fr. Neil-Smith described as “a very naïve interpretation.” “All
the evidence points to the contrary.” Like his English ancestors and their
Polish neighbors, Fr. Neil-Smith viewed the vampire as a “half animal,
half human” byproduct of devil worship. Do vampires exist? Fr.
Christopher Neil-Smith and his ancestors thought so, as did their New
England scions. Among the traditional society of Poland there was no
doubt. And you, do you believe in vampires? The choice is yours alone.
But don’t make it without first listening to the ancient voices of those who
wanted to tell you what they found within the realms of the undead.
 Chapter 1

Vampires and Disease

The Bloodsucking Corpse of English Tradition

“A deadly thing,” they say, “has fastened on him;

He has taken to his bed and will never get up again.”
—Psalm 41:8, Book of Common Prayer

Of all the monsters that haunted our traditional folklore, none has so
fascinated the modern mind as the vampire. Man, demon, or some
combination of both, the vampire stepped to center stage in our popular
culture with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, and his
influence shows no sign of waning at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. But as the image of the fictional vampire lives on, we gradually
lose sight of the traditional vampire, the vampire of folklore and history, a
creature more ancient and more terrible than a thousand Wallachian
princes. This monster did not keep a polite distance before the kill like
some aristocratic stranger; instead, he was a friend, a neighbor—even the
husband that once shared your bed. He was a corpse who returned from the
grave to kill.
All historical sources defined vampires as preternatural killers who
drained victims of their life essence in order to perpetuate their own
unnatural existence. If the vampire sucked blood to achieve this end, as
many did, he normally bit his human or animal victims on the chest or
thorax rather than the throat. Some throttled their victims, killing them
quickly; others spread disease that decimated towns or villages over the
space of weeks. Though the manner or method of destruction may have
differed, the agent remained the same—a deceased human body
reanimated by some devilish agency. This diversity and unity of the
malignant undead moved Dr. J. Scoffern, Professor of Chemistry and
Forensic Medicine at the Aldersgate College of Medicine, to pen one of
the classic definitions of the vampire. In 1870 he wrote:

A vampire, then, is—well, what shall we say? Not a ghost, certainly;

except we alter most of our existing notions of a ghost. The best
definition I can give of a vampire is a living, mischievous, and
murderous dead body. A living dead body! The words are wild,
contradictory, incomprehensible; but so are vampires.

Budding vampirologists will frequently encounter the assertion that

the figure of the vampire only recently entered English supernaturalism.
This statement would be true only if we search for the fictional image of
the vampire as it emerged from Gothic literature, but the vampire of
tradition lurked within Britannia’s dark corners since Anglo-Saxon times,
and he attained celebrity status in the plumes of medieval chroniclers who
inscribed his name upon twelfth-century parchments as the cadaver
sanguisugis—or, “bloodsucking corpse.” As a revivified corpse, the
vampire held no romantic or erotic fascination for the medieval mind;
instead, they regarded these monstrous shells with disgust, and they feared
that the miasma of their fetid breath would pollute the atmosphere and
bring disease. The vampire was, in reality, walking death.
William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum anglicarum, written in the
late twelfth century, remains the best source for English bloodsuckers and
other revenants. As an historian, William wins high marks from scholars,
who praise his impartial treatment of the conflict between King Henry II
and the Archbishop of Canterbury, immortalized in the Academy Award
winner Beckett (1964), starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole.
William had us in mind when he decided to include instances of the
undead in his history “as a warning to posterity.” He added that:

It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should
sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander
about to the terror or the destruction of the living, and again return to the
tomb…did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to
establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony…

One of William’s examples comes down to us from the town of

Berwick-upon-Tweed, at the mouth of the River Tweed, on the southeast
coast of Scotland. There a wealthy but wicked man passed away—but not
peaceably. He left his grave nightly and wandered the area, always
pursued by barking and hateful dogs, even more implacable enemies of the
vampire than garlic. Some of Berwick’s leading citizens feared more than
just a physical encounter with this dreadful monster; they worried, as
William of Newburgh tells us that “the atmosphere, infected and corrupted
by the constant whirlings through it of the pestiferous corpse, would
engender disease and death to a great extent.” The city fathers
consequently appointed a group of young men to exhume the abomination
and cut it into pieces to be burnt. Tragically for Berwick, they acted too
late, and plague still devastated the community.
Another case appearing in William of Newburgh involves a
Yorkshire man who had run foul of the authorities and settled in the Castle
of Anantis, the exact location of which is unknown today. Rather than
make amends and improve his life, the man redoubled his efforts toward
evil gain. He eventually married but soon after fatally injured himself
while attempting to catch his wife in the act of adultery. Although he
received a Christian burial, he died without repentance and in a state of
serious sin. As with the prodigy of Berwick, angry dogs chased the
Anantis Vampire as he rose up from the dust of his grave and set out on his
midnight rambles. In William’s words, “he wandered through the courts
and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not
dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night
until sunrise…But those precautions were of no avail; for the atmosphere
poisoned by the vagaries of this foul carcass, filled every house with
disease and death by its pestiferous breath.” The town stood as a silent
shell of itself, as it was soon racked with plague and depopulated by the
flight of its residents. Class boundaries prevented the locals from dealing
with the baleful pest as they would have with one of their own, and,
consequently, the parish priest convened a council of “wise and religious
men” on Palm Sunday to discuss how to proceed against the fiend.
Two young men who had lost their father to the monster were not
prepared to wait for the action of their betters. While the local elite talked,
they decided to act according to the tried and true method. They made their
way to the cemetery and unearthed the creature from a surprisingly
shallow grave, where they found it bloated and entangled in its own torn
and bloody grave clothes. In a rage, one of the brothers struck the bloated
corpse with a dull spade, and such an enormous quantity of blood flowed
from the wound that the brothers concluded that the bloodsucker had
battened itself on the blood of many: ex quo tantus continuo sanguis
effluxit ut intelligeretur sanguisuga fuisse multorum. The brothers dragged
the vampire to beyond the village limits, removed the heart, which they
chopped into pieces, and burned the lot on a bonfire. They then notified
the Palm Sunday gathering of what they had done. William of Newburgh
recorded no punishment meted out to the brothers for their ghastly deeds.
Perhaps the reason for clemency rests in the efficaciousness of their
actions, for, as William concluded, “the pestilence which was rife among
the people ceased, as if the air, which had been corrupted by the
contagious motions of the dreadful corpse, were already purified by the
fire which had consumed it.”
In his De nugis curialium Walter Map (c.1140–c.1209) described
another roaming corpse from the same period. William Laudun, a soldier
of proven worth, appealed to the Bishop of Hereford for aid in dealing
with the corpse of a former house guest, who nightly returned to his old
lodging and called out the name of an occupant. The person so named
sickened and died within three days. Since the deceased had been noted as
an atheist, the bishop concluded that the devil, by some unknown agency,
had given the corpse the ability to move about, and that the solicitous
soldier should exhume the body and “cut through its neck.” The Bishop
then instructed Laudun to sprinkle holy water in the wound and throughout
the grave. Laudun followed the Bishop’s advice and reburied the corpse—
but to no avail. The wandering spirit continued to torment his former
roommates until William finally heard his own name called out three
times. Not prepared to give up the ghost so easily, the soldier snatched his
sword and chased the living dead thing back to its grave and cut off its
head. Thereafter, its afflictions ceased.
In his The Life and Miracles of St. Modwenna (Oxford University
Press, 2002), Robert Bartlett published a similar tale of the malignant dead
previously hidden for nine hundred years in the monastery archives at
Burton-on-Trent. Events surrounding the Drakelow Vampires unfolded in
1090, in the wake of the Norman Conquest. When Geoffrey, Abbot of
Burton (1114–1150), wrote his version some thirty years later, he framed it
as a conflict between a Norman lord and an Anglo-Saxon saint. From our
vantage point we do not know whether Geoffrey refashioned actual events
in an effort to accentuate the power of his patroness or whether the
narrative amounts to nothing more than a medieval fantasy. At the least,
though, the Drakelow Vampires demonstrate the continuing connection in
the medieval mind between disease and the walking dead.
The innocent decision of two peasants to seek a better life in the
proverbial greener pasture triggered a power struggle between the
powerhouses of the Middle Ages—the Church and the nobility—that
would only end after the wrathful intervention of St. Modwenna. The
peasants left the monastery lands of Stapenhill and crossed the Derbyshire
border to settle in the village of Drakelow, in lands owned by the Norman
Sir Roger. Miffed at having lost two valuable economic assets, the monks
of Burton Abbey requested that Sir Roger have them returned. Sir Roger
refused—and rather impolitely at that. The monks turned to St. Modwenna
for justice, and, shortly after, the enterprising peasants fell dead while
enjoying lunch with their new neighbors. The monks got their way after
all, and the peasants were returned to Stapenhill—for burial. But
Modwenna’s saintly vengeance did not stop there.
A few friends of the deceased peasants had made the trip to
Stapenhill for the funeral, and, while walking back to Drakelow, they saw,
in the rays of the setting sun, their just interred friends carrying their
coffins on their shoulders. Villagers witnessed these nocturnal rambles for
several weeks; then the corpses entered the village proper, banging on
doors and walls, shouting at the terrified occupants. Just as we saw earlier,
the act of the dead calling out led to the plague, and the pestilence soon left
Drakelow decimated. With only a few men remaining, the villagers finally
took action in the traditional manner: they marched on Stapenhill and
exhumed the bodies, which they found to be intact. Blood stained their
burial napkins crimson. The unfortunate bodies of the dead peasants had
their heads cut off and placed between their legs, and the villagers
removed their hearts prior to reburial. They erected a bonfire at a river
crossing, and they tossed the hearts of the walking dead upon the flames.
As the fire consumed these seats of infection, the villagers heard a great
“crack” and saw an evil spirit in the guise of a monstrous black bird fly
away. Geoffrey gives us an epilogue, and we are told that, although the
plague at Drakelow finally ended, the remaining population picked up and
relocated en masse to Castle Gresley. For his part, Sir Roger formally
apologized to St. Modwenna for causing her grief.
The twelfth-century chroniclers and churchmen we have just read
drew not only on experience and anecdote to form their vampire beliefs;
they also took inspiration from sacred scripture, which whispers about the
existence of a variety of monstrous beings, including vampires. Our
medieval authors used the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, and they
most likely borrowed their word for “vampire” (sanguisuga) from
Proverbs 30. There we encounter the Hebrew Alukah, a bloodsucking
demon usually translated as some form of leech. The text itself is difficult
and is part of a series of numerical sayings. The author of Proverbs 30
tried to warn readers that their children would wind up with the bad habits
of their parents. If the parents were greedy, then the children would no
doubt turn out to be even more avaricious, even to the point of devouring
everything set before them, like a fire—or a vampire. Where the King
James renders verse 15, “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give,
give,” the Latin text reads, sanguisugae duae sunt filiae dicentes adfer
adfer.
Our familiar term “vampire” only began creeping into the English
language in the eighteenth century, after the much-publicized Arnold Paole
case. Before the 1730s, a variety of local words were used to denote
revenant bloodsuckers, which is why we do not encounter “vampire”
earlier. In his 1597 work Daemonologie, King James I discussed that, in
times past, demonologists gave malignant spirits a variety of names
according to their actions; that is, their names reflected what they did. A
vampire drinking blood from the throat might be given one name while
one that sucked from the chest another. The Latin scholars who translated
the Hebrew Bible into their own tongue similarly used Latin words to
describe actions and creatures they found in Hebrew; they therefore
rendered the vampire “Lilith” as lamia (Isaiah 34:13) and “Alukah” as
sanguisuga(-ae). The translators of the King James quite sensibly observed
what the Alukah did and translated its actions into corresponding English.
When scholars finally took up the task of overhauling the venerable King
James in the 1880s, they did make use of the linguistic import “vampire.”
When the Old Testament of the Revised Version finally went to press in
1885, it featured a footnote to Proverbs 30:15. It read, “Or vampire.”
Title page to the Daemonologie of King James, 1597
 Text from the Daemonologie of King James, 1597
To King James himself, the various monstrous beings seen by
people were merely separate manifestations emanating from a single
source: the demonic realm. He wrote that:
 Doubtlessly they are in effect, but all one kind of spirit, who for
abusing the more of mankind, takes on these sundry shapes, and
uses diverse forms of outward actions, as if some were of nature
better than other. Now I return to my purpose: As to the first kind of
these spirits, that were called by the ancients by diverse names,
according to their actions . . . And so innumerable styles they got,
according to their actions, as I have said already. As we see by
experience, how many styles they have given them in our language
in the like manner…[Language modernized by author].

King James carefully explained that the devil did not have the
power to resurrect anyone once dead, but that he could “put his own spirite
in a dead bodie.” It logically followed, then, that the dead returning to life
in bodily form were not actually the persons themselves, but only their
shells. King James argued that the demonic can possess both the bodies of
the faithful dead as well as the wicked, even if this concept sounded
distasteful to the reader.
The Bible bearing the name of King James applied its exquisitely
elevated language to the traditional, disease-bearing vampire in Psalm 91,
a text celebrated by vampirologists as the definitive literary treatment of
the subject for the past few hundred years. Verse 3 assures the reader that
God would deliver the believer from the “noisome pestilence”—a perfect
description of the monsters we found in the pages of our twelfth-century
writers. “Noisome” not only denotes an offensive or disgusting odor, it
also carries connotations of maleficence. Verses 5 and 6 adjure the reader:
“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that
flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the
destruction that wasteth at noonday.” These verses hearken back to an
even earlier era—but to similar beliefs. The original Hebrew author may
have drawn on the traditions of people as ancient to him as he is to us. The
Sumerians believed the Seven Udugs prowled the earth at noon as well as
at midnight, shooting victims with arrows that brought sickness and
disease. While the ancients fashioned amulets and recited spells to ward
off their baneful influence, Psalm 91 advises readers to seek refuge under
the wings of the Almighty.
The early eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of vampire-
related research and debunking all across Europe. As Western European
powers assumed greater control of territory in East-Central Europe, they
were confronted by paranormal phenomena that had gone dormant in the
West. Wealthy and educated Polish noblemen told fantastic tales in the
salons of Paris as they fled their homeland following the Partitions of
Poland. “Can these things be?” asked a shocked and wide-eyed public. In
Enlightenment France, minds like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire
weighed in on the issue, and Dom Augustin Calmet authored one of the
true classics of the field in 1746, The Phantom World (Dissertations sur
les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits). By the end of the
eighteenth century the rationalism of the Enlightenment won out, and
superstition was relegated to the so-called dark ages.
But in the land where Enlightenment ideals of democratic revolution
were most successfully implemented, the shadow of the “noisome
pestilence” darkened the lives of prosperous yeoman farmers in a newly-
formed democracy. The English tradition of the walking, malignant dead
had crossed the Atlantic, and, in Rhode Island, Stukely Tillinghast had a
dream….
Stukely Tillinghast in 1790 census [See bottom left-hand side].
 Chapter 2

The White Death of New England

Matter it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else conceivable
by mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic emanation; some
vampirish vapour such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over
certain churchyards.
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shunned House”

Whether the bloodsucking revenant secreted itself within the cargo

of the Mayflower we will never know. We do know that the scythe of the
vampire harvested the flower of New England youth with despairing
regularity. One Rhode Island family in particular seems to have been
cursed by the diseased kiss of the vampire as they watched too many of
their young people gathered up into the fiend’s clammy embrace and
carried off to premature graves. Our record of events begins with a dream
handed down to us in a somewhat legendary form common to the
historical writing of the day.
At the close of the eighteenth century, Stukely Tillinghast could
have been considered an American success story. He and his wife excelled
at all the traditional virtues associated with colonial America: they were
honest, respected, industrious, thrifty, and—consequently—prosperous. As
he approached his sixtieth year, Stukely could look back on his life with
some satisfaction. He had developed the property bequeathed him by his
father, Pardon “Molasses” Tillinghast, and his wife had produced abundant
social security in the form of a dozen children. Then Stukely dreamed
some blight destroyed half the trees in his beautiful orchard—a vision that
imbued his previously happy world with a sense of foreboding. Stukely
struggled to make sense of his dream in the cold light of day, but its
interpretation soon became appallingly clear. In 1799 Sarah, a “comely”
daughter in her early twenties, became ill and died of “quick
consumption,” most likely tuberculosis of the lungs. But disease had only
just begun to ravage his orchard.
Shortly after, a younger daughter, Ruth, fell under the same
symptoms—but with a macabre twist. Ruth complained that her elder
sister visited her nightly and that Sarah sat atop different parts of her body,
painfully crushing them under her weight. Ruth worsened after each
nocturnal visit until, eventually, she, too, succumbed. The pattern repeated
itself until at least three children died. The record is not clear whether a
son, James, perished with the others in 1799 or whether he lived on to
1810. Nevertheless, when Stukely’s wife Honor began to waste away with
the same symptoms, the bereaved parent and husband could take no more.
Like the parish priest in twelfth-century Anantis, Stukely convened a
council of community notables so they could discuss how a remnant of the
Tillinghast family might be spared.
Just as we saw in Merry Old England, the civic leaders resolved to
exhume the bodies of the deceased, each of whom was found to be in a
normal state of decomposition—save for one: Sarah, the initial victim and
the nocturnal visitor of all the others. Sarah’s eyes stared out in a fixed
expression from her coffin. Not only had her hair and nails grown, but
fresh blood filled her heart and arteries. The men knew that the pestilence
stalking the Tillinghasts lay in the coffin before them. Accordingly, they
removed her heart and burned it on a nearby rock. The bodies were retuned
to their respective graves, and consumptive death ceased plaguing
Stukely’s branch of the Tillinghast family. One tradition states that, while
Honor was spared, Stukely lost a seventh child, a son, whose health was
too far compromised to be saved by the destruction of the vampire.
Sources, however, clearly inform us that the family lost three or four
young adults in 1799: Sarah, Ruth, Andris, and, possibly, James. Another
bit of Tillinghast lore adds that an apparition of Sarah appeared to tell
family members that their cremation of her heart liberated her.
The Tillinghasts experienced “the pestilence that walketh in
darkness” (Ps. 91:6) in a slightly different form than their medieval
English ancestors. While both species of vampirism remained corpse-
centered, the New Eng land vampire did not ambulate about in
the same manner as the bloodsucking sanguisuga. George Stetson wrote a
comprehensive definition in an 1896 article for The American
Anthropologist:
 In New England the vampire superstition is unknown by its proper
name. It is there believed that consumption is not a physical but a
spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation; that as long as the body of
a dead consumptive relative has blood in its heart it is proof that an
occult influence steals from it for death and is at work draining the
blood of the living into the heart of the dead and causing his rapid
decline.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula appeared a year after Stetson’s article and

forever after would all sorts of bloodsuckers and energy-drainers be
classified under the heading of “vampires.” But for most of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries the word vampire would be known only to the
literate and literary-minded elite. Many would be tempted to explain the
decline of vampire belief with the concurrent rise of the bio-medical
paradigm, but the close of the nineteenth century witnessed the growth and
acceptance of another modern practice as well: embalming. Embalming
exchanges the body’s fluids with chemicals, and, according to New
England belief, this would render the corpse unsuitable for vampire
activity. The embalmer thus defused the vampire bomb.
New England’s vampire slayers were not ignorant, and they were
well aware that consumption, or tuberculosis of the lungs, was a disease.
In slaying a vampire, the New Englanders attempted to treat disease as a
spiritual as well as a physical problem in a manner similar to practitioners
of traditional medicine around the world. As a corollary, Taoist physicians
in China possessed a detailed knowledge of a multitude of diseases like
tuberculosis, and, while they still recognized their infectious nature, they
nevertheless continued to treat their patients as both physical and spiritual
beings. The well-known benefits of acupuncture developed from such a
traditional practice of medicine. The philosophical system of René
Descartes supposed a false dichotomy which separated the body from the
mind and spirit, and this Cartesian world view took hold of Western
science and medicine from the seventeenth century on.
In this context, vampire belief might be seen as a band in the wider
spectrum of folk medicine. The pragmatic people of New England were no
less practical in their vampire beliefs: they slew vampires because it
worked. In his 1896 essay, Stetson describes “an intelligent man, by trade
a mason, who is a living witness of the superstition and of the efficacy of
the treatment of the dead which it prescribes.” The man, a resident of an
unnamed seaport town in Rhode Island, lost two brothers to consumption.
After the first brother had died and the second had been rendered prostrate
from illness, a friend of the family advised that they “take up the first body
and burn its heart, but the brother attacked objected to the sacrilege and in
consequence subsequently died.” When the third brother sickened as well,
his father followed the friend’s advice and exhumed the body of the most
recently deceased, where he found “living” blood in the heart and arteries.
The father cremated his son’s heart, and, Stetson concluded:

the sufferer began immediately to mend and stood before me a hale,

hearty, and vigorous man of fifty years. When questioned as to his
understanding of the miraculous influence, he could suggest nothing
and did not recognize the superstition even by name. He
remembered that the doctors did not believe in its efficacy, but he
and many others did. His father saw the brother’s body and the
arterial blood. The attitude of several other persons in regard to the
practice was agnostic, either from fear of public opinion or other
reasons, and their replies to my inquiries were in the same temper of
mind as that of the blind man in the Gospel of Saint John (9:25),
who did not dare express his belief, but “answered and said,
Whether he was a sinner or no, I know not; one thing I know, that
whereas I was blind, now I see.”

Michael Bell, who has studied New England vampirism more

closely than any other scholar, argues that vampire slayings were not at all
uncommon in fringe areas outside of Puritan or Anglican strongholds
(Food for the Dead, 2001). In a surprising statistic on Colonial New
England, Bell notes that eighty-five percent of the white population did not
belong to an organized church. Perhaps even more surprising, the figure
jumps to ninety percent at the close of the nineteenth century. New
England’s fearless vampire killers adhered to an independent “Bible”
Christianity which they freely mixed with a variety of magical folk
traditions. Puritans frowned on any folk remedies that appealed to
supernatural powers, and the Church of England similarly looked down on
such superstitions as beneath the dignified worship the creature owed his
Creator. There was no talk of vampirism when George Washington, a
member of the Church of England, watched his beloved brother Lawrence
pass away from consumption in 1752.
 Southern Rhode Island in particular has earned the title of
“America’s Transylvania,” for, as Thomas D’Agostino observed in the
October 2001 issue of Fate, the tiniest state in the Union has hosted the
largest number of known vampire cases. From its foundation, Rhode
Island nurtured a tradition of religious toleration and pluralism
unsurpassed in early America. Pardon Tillinghast came to Rhode Island in
1643 to both create and benefit from the opportunities offered in the New
World as well as to bask in Rhode Island’s spirit of religious freedom. The
energetic Pardon succeeded both in business and in faith. As a merchant,
he built the first commercial wharf in Providence in 1680, and, as a
Christian, he assumed the role of minister at the First Baptist Church in
1687. Pardon’s progeny remained active in civic life, and they developed
Rhode Island as farmers, shippers, and even as privateers. But just as they
shared in the colony’s life, so did they share in its death, even death by
vampire.
Like her great-grandfather Stukely, Mary G. Tillinghast was
involved in a vampire slaying, in Peace Dale, Rhode Island, in 1874.
Michael Bell has wondered whether Mary listened to her grandfather
Amos talk of how, as a man in his thirties, the exhumations of his younger
brothers and sisters stopped the progress of a deadly family epidemic. Did
Mary in turn advise her husband, William Rose, to unearth the corpse of
her teenage stepdaughter, Ruth Ellen, and burn her heart? William Rose
continued to be a prominent citizen in Exeter well into the twentieth
century, and we can well imagine that he may have counseled George
Brown to do as he himself did when faced with unendurable and
inexplicable death. In less than twenty years after the exhumation of Ruth
Ellen Rose, George Brown had the heart of his dead daughter Mercy taken
out of her corpse and burned. The ashes were mixed with water and
consumed by his sick son.
Although not the last known case of vampirism in America, the
slaying of Mercy Brown is perhaps the best known and documented.
Supernatural sightseers and folklore junkies trek to her gravesite behind
Chestnut Hill Baptist Church in Exeter, and local papers rehash old stories
at Halloween. Most likely, fellow Rhode Islander H. P. Lovecraft
referenced the Mercy Brown case in his story “The Shunned House,” as
locals have reported disturbances at or near her plot for more than a
century, and even family descendant and skeptic Lewis Everett Peck saw a
large bluish orb hover a few feet over her grave. Like our other New
England examples, the case of Mercy Lena Brown revolves around
consumption.

Mercy Brown, one of America’s last known vampires, in the 1880 census [top].

The family of George T. Brown, a prosperous farmer, had been

stalked by the wasting disease of consumption before Mercy ever took ill.
In December of 1883 George’s wife, Mary Eliza, died, and she was
followed by twenty-year-old Mary Olive seven months later. In the
autumn of 1891 nineteen-year-old Mercy and her brother Edwin both
sickened from consumption as well. Edwin traveled to Colorado Springs in
search of a cure, while Mercy, remaining home, died in January of 1892.
Edwin returned home in February knowing that he too would die. Feeling
that he had exhausted available medical help, George took counsel from
his friends and neighbors in March and decided to see if the progress of the
disease could be halted by supernatural means. Contemporary accounts
cast doubt on whether George or Edwin really had faith in the vampire
diagnosis, but the two of them discussed the matter before their neighbors
acted. The services of Dr. Harold Metcalf, a medical examiner from
Wickford, were secured to better determine if blood still flowed in the
hearts of any of the deceased, thereby indicating the presence of a
vampiric spirit.
A team of friends and neighbors gathered at the graveyard on March
17, where they first uncovered the bodies of mother and daughter, Mary
Eliza and Mary Olive, both of whom were reduced to a skeletal state.
Mercy Lena, probably interred in a stone crypt to await burial in the
spring, the men found to have the tell-tale sign of vampirism—a heart still
filled with liquid blood. Despite Dr. Metcalf’s insistence that the condition
of Mercy Brown’s corpse suggested nothing startling or unusual, the men
removed her heart and liver, burning them on a nearby rock. The mixture
of ashes and water, intended as an inoculation against vampirism, were
taken too late to be effective, and Edwin finally died two months later.
The tragic story of Mercy Brown has been popular with debunkers
and academics, because it evokes compelling images of the sad plight of
common folk in an era before salvation descended from the bio-medical
establishment. We cannot help but see these unfortunate people as driven
out of their minds with grief and grasping at any thread of hope. The
solution to the centuried lore concerning vampirism must surely be at
hand. In the 1980s Paul Barber argued from European sources that pre-
modern people mistook the normal biology of human decomposition for
vampire activity. Michael Bell took Barber’s thesis one step further and
carried it into the historic era. The age-old vampire belief continued in the
New World and adapted itself to the “White Plague” of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries—tuberculosis. In 1800, for example, tuberculosis
accounted for nearly twenty-five percent of the deaths in the Eastern
United States. Tuberculosis remained virulent, highly communicable,
inexplicable, and seemingly unstoppable until the end of the nineteenth
century. Problem solved?
Not quite. Our forebears accepted medical descriptions of disease;
they also recognized that disease could be spread through extraordinary
means. The vampire, the sanguisuga, spread such disease. Embalming
made the traditional disease-bearing vampire impossible. In 1984 eighty-
seven-year-old Reuben Brown, of George and Mercy’s lineage, gave an
interview to the Providence Journal Bulletin. As probably the last living
witness to those who actually participated in an American vampire slaying,
Reuben’s testimony demands careful attention. Reuben claimed that the
members of George Brown’s family who grew weak and died all “had a
mark on their throats.” He added that, “People figured they’d been bit by a
vampire…they all had that mark on them and nobody knows who made
it.” Both Reuben and Lewis Everett Peck stated that Mercy’s body had
moved since her interment: Peck said that she had turned over in her tomb,
while Reuben only said that, she “had moved in the grave. She wasn’t the
way she was put in there.” Reuben observed that the mysterious deaths by
consumption ended after the cremation, and then he stressed: “My father
believed she was a vampire. He said all those girls had the mark on their
throat when they died.”
Whether modern medicine based on drugs, surgery, and Cartesian
rationalism or simple embalming delivered us from the plague-bearing
vampire might be a moot point. Most of us conduct our lives as if we no
longer need fear “for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the
destruction that wasteth at noonday” (Ps. 91:6). But, then again, vampirism
was always considered extraordinary. It might benefit our discussion to
revisit a germane incident of star-crossed lovers recorded in Fr. Montague
Summers’ classic study, The Vampire in Europe (1929), where the priest
cites an article published in the English Occult Review by Ralph Shirley
(1924). Despite her passionate devotion to a suitor, a young woman is
refused to marry by her parents on the grounds of class differences. The
intransigent situation tragically resolved itself when the beau suddenly
died. The young lady initially became “prostrate with grief” but soon
recovered her spirits, remarking that her lover had begun to visit her in the
night. Shirley concluded that: “The last time I heard of the young lady in
question she was stated to be consumptive.”
Perhaps we should be less sanguine in our assessment of the facts.
Maybe we should visit the graveyards of our own hometowns and look for
those stones that bear physical reminders—names and dates—of families
who vainly struggled against mysterious and inexplicable disease. We
should look…and wonder. What hideous truths await discovery in the
neglected archives of our public libraries? What will we find if we
research local records to examine the circumstances surrounding sudden
depopulations? What lies buried in the ghost towns of our home states?
Might we uncover uncomfortable truths similar to those found in Poland
and Russia?
 Chapter 3
The Vampire Cult in Poland
Beginnings

I laughed hearing these tales told by simple people.

—Jan Barszczewski (1790–1851)

Scholars of Slavic anthropology and linguistics admit to an

incomprehensible fact: vampire cults once flourished in Poland and
Russia. Kazimierz Moszczy´nski believed the broadest term for vampire in
this region—the Polish upiór and the Russian upyr—originated in the
northwest of European Russia sometime in the misty twilight of
prehistory. In this region we encounter both surnames and, more
alarmingly, place-names based on the vampire root. The cult must have
been widespread because, in the east, Orthodox clerics wrote a
considerable number of encyclicals condemning the practice of sacrificing
to vampires; and, on the other side of the Slavic world, vampiric place-
names claim territory as far west as Great Poland. Hungarian academic
Gábor Klaniczay has observed that our word vampire entered the Western
lexicon of the demonic from Poland. The Hungarians reworked the Polish
upiór into the Hungarian vámpir, and this, in turn, was adopted into the
various Western European tongues.
Polish culture first took root and flowered in the areas around
Gniezno and Pozna´n, which is why this area of western Poland is known
as Great Poland, or Wielkopolska. Here, a field near Pozna´n is called
Wa˛pierz, which is almost identical to the English pronunciation of
“vampire.” Wa˛pierz is also used as a place name on the eastern edge of
Poland, near Lublin. The Vistula River, the riparian lifeline of the country,
sometimes referred to as the Polish Mississippi, has two towns along its
lower reaches with the similar name, Wa˛piersk. Curiously, not too far
from these cities is a town named after another type of vampire—Strzygi.
If one draws a line from the easternmost and westernmost points of
Europe, and then does the same on a north-south axis, one will see that the
lines meet in Poland, the heart of Europe. As the Polish land is central to
the European Continent, so is Poland the core of European vampire belief.
Dom Augustin Calmet understood this when he took it upon himself
to write his classic, The Phantom World (1746). The French title, we will
remember, specified the ethnically Polish territory of Silesia, now
incorporated into Poland, as a subject of his study: Dissertation sur les
apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et
vampires de Hongrie, de Bohème, de Moravie et de Silésie. In his preface,
Calmet remarked that, “I have always been struck with what was related of
the vampires or ghosts of Hungary, Moravia, and Poland.” Later he said,
“In Hungary, Moravia, and Poland, persons who were dead and interred a
long time, have been seen to return, to appear, and torment men and
animals, suck their blood, and cause their death.” In February of 1745,
Calmet received a letter from a Polish priest attesting that, in Poland,
failure to believe in vampires was tantamount to heresy. Another Polish
priest, Gabriel Ra˛czynski, wrote of the vampire in his Historia naturalis
curiosa regni Poloniae (1721), a work credited with introducing vampires
to German audiences. Ra˛czynski told readers that demonic spirits
enlivened corpses at night, and that these monsters assaulted men, women,
and children in their beds, suffocating them. Ra˛czynski added that the
Poles could produce abundant documentation to justify their beliefs.
 Frontispiece of Gabriel Rzaczynski’s Historia naturalis curiosa regni Poloniae (1721)

Despite all this, and despite the reverence held for Calmet, Poland
remains an unknown land for students of the paranormal. Poland should be
front and center in any work on vampirism, but, instead, it is either ignored
or maligned with misinformation. The reasons for this neglect and
ignorance are apparent and obvious. Poland had ceased as an independent
nation during America’s formative century. From 1795 to the end of
World War I, Poles languished as oppressed minorities within the
Austrian, German, and Russian empires. What little Americans learned
about Poles they learned through the lens of oppressors and from a mass of
impoverished peasants seeking hope and a better life. When Poland once
again became a nation, the Soviet Union promptly invaded, starting the
Polish-Soviet War which culminated in Polish victory at the “Miracle on
the Vistula.” After a few years of peace, the Nazi menace made a
concerted and convincing effort to annihilate the Poles. Four decades of
colorless communism followed. This recent history and a difficult
language conspired to create a distorted image of Poland in the American
imagination. Calmet knew an entirely different Poland.
Calmet’s Poland was a vast landed empire. At its height Poland
stretched from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Its natural boundaries extended
to the Carpathians in the south to the Dnieper River in the Ukrainian east.
If we remove its tributary fiefdoms of Mazovia, Moldavia, and East
Prussia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1492 still encompassed
some 435,547 square miles. Poland became a relatively enlightened center
of tolerance, welcoming in Jews and fostering such free-thinkers as the
nascent Unitarians. Culturally, the Poles produced some of the most
popular authors of the day in Maciej Sarbiewski (1595–1640) and Jan
Kochanowski (1530–1584), and, of course, the Pole Copernicus (Miko∂aj
Kopernik, 1473–1543) forever changed the way humanity understood the
universe. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the empire remained
the largest state in Europe—bigger than European Muscovy and twice the
size of France. Militarily, the Poles viewed themselves as the bulwark of
Europe, policing the “wild east” and keeping the Islamic threat at bay. In
perhaps the largest medieval clash of arms, the Poles crushed the Teutonic
Knights at Grunwald-Tannenberg (1410), and, in 1683, the Polish army
under Jan Sobieski ousted the Ottoman Turks from Vienna. By this time, a
Pole named Warnadowicz, better known as Francisco Fernandez, had
already sailed with Columbus, and skilled Polish tradesmen had
contributed to the building of Jamestown in 1608. This was no era for
“Polak” jokes.
Polish six groszy, or szostak, issued in 1683, the year Jan III Sobieski relieved the Turkish siege of
Vienna. Sobeski’s plump visage adorns the coin’s obverse.

Curiously, the very first mention of Poles in Western literature

associated them with lycanthropy. In Book 4:105 of his Histories, the
fifth-century B.C. Greek Herodotus wrote of the “Neuroi,” a mysterious
people some believe to be Poles. At the very least, they were ancestors of
the Poles. Journalist Pawel Jasienica has posited that these “Neuroi,” who
transformed into wolves once a year, originated in Great Poland, near the
River Ner. Herodotus wrote:

These men it would seem are wizards; the Scythians and the
Hellenes who are settled in the Scythian land say about them that
once in every year each of the Neuroi becomes a wolf for a few days
and then returns again to his original form. For my part I do not
believe them when they say this, but they say it nevertheless, and
swear it moreover.

Poland was also central to the rebirth of occult sciences in the

Renaissance, and the prestigious Jagiellonian University of Krakow even
boasted a department of magic that taught astrology, alchemy, and other
hidden knowledge. John Dee (1527–1608), famous magician to Queen
Elizabeth I, journeyed to Poland in 1583. At around the same time, in
1592, Rabbi Judah Loew, the purported creator of the Golem, moved to
Pozna´n and later became the Chief Rabbi of Poland. And legend has it
that alchemist Micha∂ Se˛dziwój, whose ghost is said to haunt Nowy
Sa˛cz, once presented Emperor Rudolph II with a bar of gold he generated
from lead. An unexpected spirit encountered while practicing alchemical
magic prompted King Zygmunt III Waza (1566-1632) to move the capital
of Poland from Krakow to Warsaw, another story goes. The king could no
longer live with the memories of what he called up at Wawel Castle. The
Poles themselves recognize their own Pan Twardowski as the nation’s
greatest practitioner of the black arts. His career is flanked by both the
historical and the legendary, so fleshing out reality amounts to a daunting
challenge. Some think Twardowski and Faust to be one and the same
person, and Goethe himself mounted a fact-finding mission in Krakow to
hunt up clues. Much of the romance and pageantry of this period had been
captured in Eric Kelly’s Newberry-winning The Trumpeter of Krakow
(1928).
This depth of occult heritage has not been lost to the Poles, and the
Polish government rolled out packages of paranormal tours way before
such things became the rage in England and America. The State Sport and
Tourism Administration sponsored something they called “Special Interest
Holidays” which included “Weird and Wonderful” getaways. Prospective
tourists received a map dotted with little ghosts to indicate significant
haunted sites and other icons to signal spots of folkloric significance.
Along with features on haunted castles and chateaux—as well as the
subterranean Demon of La´ncut!—brochures included detailed information
on such attractions as the Museum of the Polish Demon. Really. Go ahead
and call: 48-22-43-55-35. Pan Wiktoryn Gra‘bczewski, proprietor.
 1996 map of ‘Special Interest Holidays’ published by Poland’s State Sport and Tourism
Administration.

But, of course, tourists never flooded the land of the Vistula. When
it came to vampires and vampirism, Americans preferred a steady diet of
incestuous regurgitations of Montague Summers with doses of Freudian
psychobabble tossed in for seasoning. Even Stoker’s Dracula, as
interpreted by Hammer’s Cushing and Lee, lost some appeal as the sexy,
young bloodsuckers of Ann Rice captured America’s imagination. The
following pages were written for those readers more interested in the
vampire of history and folklore than in the vampiroid misfits of the Gothic
underground. This vampire, the authentic vampire, spent a
disproportionate amount of time in Poland, so, if we want to learn
something about the topic of vampires, we must exert some extra energy
and break new ground.
As already mentioned, the Polish language has presented a
formidable barrier to those brave enough to consider studying the vampire
of history and folklore. Polish words, however, are unavoidable. Critical
vocabulary, those words necessary for an intelligent grasp of the topic, will
have phonetic aids. Others are provided for those students who desire to
delve deeper into the subject. If this does not interest you, then please skip.
But, remember, even the word vampire came into English as a loaner,
maybe from Poland, and all areas of human endeavor have specialized
vocabulary. Who doesn’t use work-related jargon that mystifies you and
family? Should the study of vampirism be so different?
For our study we will look at both historic cases as well as folkloric
beliefs. The Poles, like other European nations, collected folkloric material
throughout most of the nineteenth century, and these databases comprise a
massive record of how pre-industrial people made sense of their world.
Through folklore, we can look through the eyes of the pre-industrial
peasant and see the world we have lost. Of course, raconteurs altered the
tales with the telling—sometimes in response to audience reaction.
Nevertheless, if we dig for the root myth, the core beliefs around which
narratives were spun, we can enter the milieu of our ancestors. The
profound similarities in plot structure among diffuse cultures have led
some researchers to suggest that the source of these tales resides
someplace deep within the hard-wiring of the human mind. Or, perhaps,
the folklore reflects a more concrete reality.
Many Polish authors avidly collected folklore and wove their own
fictional works around the structures of the peasant tale. Some will be
mentioned in the course of the following essays as their writing reflects
aspects of Polish or Russian vampirism; others, who didn’t find their way
into the final cut, still deserve honorable mention. They too are available in
English and deserve the reader’s attention. Jan Barszczewski (1790–1851)
collected legends, peasant songs, and folklore, modeling his stories on the
tales he loved. Much the same can be said of Lucjan Siemie´nski (1807–
1877). Jan Potocki (1761–1815), a most remarkable man, accomplished
even more. A scion of one of Poland’s greatest aristocratic families,
Potocki worked as a pioneer archaeologist and ethnologist, published
volumes on his travels—and even experimented in a hot air balloon!
Potocki’s Gothic masterpiece, the phantasmagoric tour de force, Tales
from the Saragossa Manuscript, best represents his genius. Potocki wrote
in French, so the book enjoys a larger Western audience than other Polish
literature, and the novel even inspired one of Jerry García’s favorite films,
The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, 1965). Mystery surrounds the
several manuscripts of the novel, but greater mystery surrounds the author
himself. In 1812, Potocki retired to his castle at Uladówska in Podolia and
restarted work on the manuscript. After penning some of the most chilling
accounts of the undead ever written, he fashioned a silver bullet, had the
bullet blessed by the chaplain, and then blew his brains out.

Image of Dom Augustin Calmet (1672-1757), author of The Phantom World.

 Chapter 4

Zmory, the Night Hag,

and Some Commonalities

I reflected much and long over this inexplicable, almost

unintelligible phenomenon; and I am convinced that not only
science cannot explain it, but that even in fairy tales and legends
nothing like it can be met with.
—Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883)

Le Mercure Gallant, popular reading at the court of Louis XIV,

dedicated its October 1694 issue to the topic of vampires. In Poland and
Russia, they wrote, vampires sucked such quantities of blood from both
man and beast that crimson streaks ran from the ears and noses of the
fiends. Corpses found in the “vampire condition”—i.e., intact—were said
to be literally awash in blood. Nobel Prize-winner Henryk Sienkiewicz
(1846–1916) beautifully evoked the atmosphere of this period in the
opening chapter of With Fire and Sword (1884), effectively rendered by
W. S. Kuniczak:

The soldiers of the Steppe stannitzas [isolated border outposts] told

stories about murdered men who rose from their graves and stalked
through the Wild Lands [a.k.a., Wild East, Poland’s southeastern
Ukrainian frontier] after the sun went down, and muttered prayers
for lost souls when the tallow candles burned down in the
guardhouse to show the midnight hour. They spoke of ghostly riders
who’d block the path of travelers and beg for the sign of the cross
that might give them rest, and of vampires and werewolves leaping
from their lairs. It took an experienced ear to tell the difference
between ordinary baying of the wolves and the howls of vampires.
 Sometimes entire regiments of tormented souls were seento drift
across the moonlit Steppe so that sentries sounded the alarm and the
garrisons stood to arms.

In these few lines, Sienkiewicz [shen-kye-vich] described several

denizens of the Hour of the Spirits (godzina duchów). He used duch for
ghost and cienie for shades, but, more importantly, Sienkiewicz employed
the catch-all upiory [plural oop-your-y] for vampires. Some translators
have here rendered upiory as apparitions and even werewolves. Our point
is that Polish terms for the undead overlap and sometimes contradict one
another. Some names are popular in one region but almost unknown in
another. There are no hard and fixed rules. However, we can still speak in
generalities about what William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki called “the
ordinary vampire.” In their classic study, The Polish Peasant in Europe
and America (1918–20), they defined the ordinary vampire as “scarcely a
spirit at all.”

It is a living body, even if less alive than before death and devoid of
some of the human ideas and feelings. It can be touched, even
grappled with, and killed for a second time, after which it does not
appear again…The only spiritual characters of the vampire are
relative independence of physical conditions (ability to pass through
the smallest opening, to disappear and to appear suddenly, etc.)
which was acquired only after death, and the possibility of being
influenced to a certain extent by religious magic—sign of the cross,
prayer, amulets—again a character not possessed by the man during
his life.

We may be tempted to latch onto Thomas and Znaniecki’s “living

body” definition too exclusively. This would be a mistake. Although the
overwhelming majority of Polish vampire disturbances might be termed as
“corpse-centered,” Poles also admitted to living vampires, often called
zmory [zmor-y]. Such people lived out their vampiric existence while still
alive—sometimes without their conscious knowledge. While they slept,
their spirits issued forth from their bodies to suck blood or drain energy
from other people. Some were even said to lap up tree sap. Though set on
a Greek island during the Balkan Wars, Val Lewton’s Isle of the Dead
(1946) magnificently captured the mood which must have surrounded
those thought to be zmory. In Isle of the Dead, an outbreak of plague
forces an assortment of people to be quarantined on a Greek island. Is the
young peasant girl really an unwitting plague-bearing vampire, or is she
merely the victim of ancient superstition? A must see.
With the zmory, the Poles enjoy a great deal of commonality with
the rest of the globe, because the zmory largely functioned as the Polish
equivalent of the worldwide Night Hag phenomenon—a regular cycle of
demonic assault that has been well-documented throughout human history.
Linguistic evidence establishes that the biblical “terror by night” (Ps. 91:5)
has visited men since before the advent of written language; yet,
throughout the millennia, accounts of these nocturnal assaults remain
virtually identical despite enormous distances in time, place, and culture.
The Old Hag assault breaks down to a specific sequence of experiences:
victims, usually alone and on their backs, awaken to a feeling of stark
terror; they are paralyzed but can hear and smell (usually something foul);
victims sense a malicious presence in the room; some report a shuffling
sound like that made by slippered feet approaching the bed; victims feel
themselves smothered, or pressed into their beds; many feel a particular
compression in their chests; breathing may be labored; vocalization is
impossible; even if unable to open their eyes victims can nevertheless
“see” a palpable hatred staring into their faces as if inches away; those
unlucky enough to retain their vision speak of a hideous old crone, filled
with malice and spite, straddling them across their chests or riding them
sexually. If victims can finally break their paralysis and move—even if
slightly—the attack instantly ceases. Other victims fall back into
unconsciousness. A large number report that the “hagging” experience
drains them of energy for as long as several days.
 Boleslaus Biegas, Kiss of the Vampire (1916).

One advantage to being a Pole is that the Polish zmora tended to be

a young and beautiful girl more often than the succubi of the rest of the
globe. Another distinction is that some zmory went about their lives
seemingly unaware of their evil character. Their vampiric souls would
issue from their bodies while they were asleep and then turn their
malevolent tricks. The Polish zmory also tended to engage in more actual
blood-drinking than the Old Hags and succubi of the rest of the world.
Like other Polish vampiric beings, the zmory have been the subjects of
several notable artistic treatments. Boleslaw Biegas captured all aspects of
a zmora assault—the horrific, the erotic, and the draining—in his painting
Vampire in the Form of an Explosion. Director Wojciech Marczewski
produced the award-winning, though controversial, Zmory in 1979, but the
folkloric zmora received more accurate treatment in Zygmunt Lech’s Dom
Sary in 1984. Some zmory—though not many—were male. These incubi
could be recognized in their human guise by their thick, bushy eyebrows,
which met above the bridge of their nose. To ward off attacks by the
zmory, Poles would place garlic on or near their beds or sleep on their
sides. The zmory only attacked those who slept on their backs.
The similarities between the Polish zmory and the worldwide
“hagging” phenomenon, however, are far more compelling than any local
differences. Some modern researchers, for example, have estimated that as
many as fifteen percent of North Americans suffer a “hagging” at one time
in their lives. Further, some scientists have connected the Night Hag to
Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS), an epidemic
that plagued Laotian Hmong immigrants in the United States from 1977 to
1981. An astounding fifty to sixty percent of American Hmong
experienced classic Old Hag assaults, with some resulting in death.
Clearly, we are dealing with a relatively common supernatural encounter
that transcends culture and continues to afflict modern society. Perhaps the
old-fashioned vampire, who cannot exist after embalming, continues to
live on in another guise.
To date scholars credit the Babylonians with the earliest written
accounts of the Night Hag; the Jews, however, created the largest and
richest sources from antiquity. Lilith, derived from lilah, the Hebrew word
for night, was believed to rule as Queen of Darkness. The Talmud and
other extra-biblical literature taught that Lilith was Adam’s first wife.
Refusing to submit herself to her husband, Lilith left Adam and became
mistress to dark powers. Along with her offspring, the lilim, Lilith swore
eternal enmity toward the children of Adam and Eve. They strangled
infants in their cribs and seduced men who slept alone, draining them of
their vitality. To this day, some Orthodox Jews enlist the aid of talismans
and amulets as safeguards against Lilith and her daughters of darkness.
Latin-speaking Christians, like the Poles, had no difficulty rendering
the Hebrew Lilith into their own tongue with the name “Lamia,” a word
already pregnant with malice. According to legend, Lamia was the
beautiful daughter of Belus. Lusty Zeus initiated an affair that ended in
tragedy as Hera, wife of Zeus, flew into a jealous rage and murdered all
but one of the children born from the illicit coupling. Hera’s murderous fit
twisted the nature of Lamia, who then turned her anger on the children of
others. Lamia’s visage also transformed—from one of sublime beauty to
one of hideous ugliness. The ancients identified Lamia with the Empusae,
children of Hecate, filthy demons who transformed themselves into lovely
maidens in order to carry out their bloodthirsty designs on sleeping young
men. The seventeenth-century Douay-Rheims continued the tradition of
the Latin Vulgate and rendered Isaiah as follows: “And demons and
monsters shall meet…there hath the lamia lain down and found rest for
herself.”
Strangely, with all the peculiarities of the Polish language brought
out in this book, a linguistic affinity with English exists when we speak of
the Night Hag. Linguistic scholars have long recognized that cognates
throughout the Indo-European family of languages reflect those things and
concepts most basic to the human condition. The word for mother, for
example, is similar throughout this massive language group which
stretches from India to Ireland. In Sanskrit, the most ancient Indo-
European language, the name “Mara” appeared as the god of death and
was considered an aspect of karma or erotic desire. Mara is also the Polish
word for nightmare. Zmora, the Polish succubus, derives from mara.
Among the Germanic peoples we find the Old German Mahre and the Old
Norse mara. These Germanic terms came down to our English as mare,
which was still used to describe the Old Hag as late as the seventeenth
century. Eventually “night” was prefixed to “mare” to create our
contemporary “nightmare.”
Thus before we dismiss the Old Hag and her myriad of cognate
titles we must, literally, come to terms. The phenomenon of being
“hagged” is both ancient and common to human experience. Humanity
developed words to describe experiences. The night terrors inflicted upon
our earliest ancestors predated their labeling the attacks. If the Night Hag
grew out of local cultural traditions, the literature surrounding her would
not be nearly so uniform. Only biographical and personal details vary in
the legends surrounding the Night Hag. Rather, the terminology continued
virtually unaltered throughout the millennia, becoming imbedded in our
linguistic bedrock. For example, we still refer to a worn-out, tired-looking
face as “haggard.” Similarly, an individual who comes to work Monday
morning appearing fatigued and listless we describe as “hagridden.”
“Hagridden” literally calls attention to the fact that our co-worker looks as
though he were ridden by the Old Hag sometime over the weekend. For
their part, the Poles express the exact same sentiment with the verb
zmordowa´c.
 The fact that all these terms entered our languages in preliterate
times and remained fixed in form establishes two things: first, the reality
of the zmory or Night Hag assaults must have been common; and, second,
the sequence of events that comprised the experience must have been more
or less consistent. Otherwise, the folklore would have been much more
diverse. As an example, a researcher investigating Polish upiory will
encounter regional variations within Poland itself in both lexicon and
habit; further, these variations continue as one widens the research to
include Poland’s neighbors, like the Russian upyr. In contrast, the zmory
presents us with a case where the folklore reflects a more exact reality.
Readers must decide for themselves whether the evidence leads them to an
actual or metaphorical truth. Regardless of one’s decision, the wings of the
Night Hag have been heard flapping throughout human history, and
accounts of her existence are perhaps as universal and uniform as those of
ghosts.
 Chapter 5

Upiory
Back to the Ordinary Vampire

Rob, I could take you to a castle not ten miles from Cracow in
Poland where there are—certain relics, which would forever settle
your doubts respecting the existence of vampires.
—Sax Rohmer (1918)

As mentioned in the last chapter, upiory is a pretty loose term.

Though it frequently denotes the traditional or “ordinary” vampire, it also
encompasses all sorts of malevolent nature spirits as well as poltergeists,
just as the Russian upyr blankets a whole host of negative entities. The
Poles sometimes employ srachy to denote evil spirits as well. Upiór,
nevertheless, remains the most commonly used term for vampire. Le
Mercure Gallant chronicled the activities of these creatures (oupires) in
their October of 1694 issue. Picking up where we left off before the zmory
interrupted, Le Mercure Gallant nicely outlined the activities of the
“ordinary” vampire. A kind of “hunger” possessed the upiory, and some
devoured their shrouds before leaving their graves at night. From there the
upiory visited their loved ones whom they violently embraced and whose
blood they sucked. This action caused the family—one by one—to take ill
and die. Decapitation or removal of the heart proved to be the best ways of
stopping the progress of death. When undertaking this task, the slayers
found the vampire corpse ruddy, swollen, pliant…well, not dead.
Occasionally, the vampire would emit sounds or vocalize when the living
terminated its midnight rambles; frequently, masses of blood cascaded,
squirted, or oozed from the dispatching wound. The living, they said, used
the vampire’s blood to bake bread that delivered them from the creature’s
wrath.
 Some of the material in Le Mercure Gallant matches up well with
the Barber-Bell thesis, and, indeed, a few vampire epidemics in Poland are
coeval with outbreaks of infectious disease. It follows, no doubt, that many
cases of vampirism can be dismissed as peasants digging up dead family
members in a desperate attempt to hault the ravages of an illness. What
they slew as a vampire was, in all reality, a human cadaver undergoing
normal decomposition. Further, the notion that the vampire attacks its own
kin first and then proceeds through the family circle undoubtedly has its
origin in this tragic cycle.
Hermann Schreiber dug out such an incident from the German
archives and included it in his Es spukt in Deutschland (Würzburg: Arena
Verlag, 1975). Rob Brautigam studied this case and made his results
available in English on his website (www.shroudeater.com), from which
the follwing account is taken. On May 15, 1872, one family living in
German-occupied Pomerania (northwest Poland) was acquitted for slaying
a vampire in the fashion of America’s New Englanders. Franz von
Poblocki died of consumption on February 5, 1870, and he was buried in
the family plot in Rozlazino. Soon after, the family suffered horrible
nightmares, several sickened, and, within a fortnight, Poblocki’s son
Anton died. The family took counsel and agreed that their patriarch was a
vampire. They hired a local vampire hunter, named Dzigielski, who
decapitated Anton so he could be buried with his head between his legs.
Trouble began when Dzigielski tried to bribe the undertaker to gain access
to the corpse of Franz von Poblocki. Not only did he turn Dzigielski down,
but he notified the priest for good measure. Fr. Block (perhaps Block)
ordered the family to drop any plans they had of violating the sanctity of a
consecrated Catholic cemetery. The family ignored the priest and exhumed
Franz themselves. Dzigielski dispatched the vampire according to
approved methods. Fr. Block reported the bunch to the authorities, and a
trial en sued. The hapless Dzigielski received four months while the
wealthier Poblocki clan appealed. They argued that they acted only in self-
defense, and the court—either in response to their status or to the logic of
their reasoning—dropped all charges.
Another Polish vampire hiding in German records from centuries
past would seem to confirm the work of Barber and Bell as well;
nevertheless, it still manages to hold the interest of the supernaturalist
today. On September 20, 1591, a well-to-do shoemaker in Wroc ∂ aw
(today’s southwest Poland) retreated to the privacy of his backyard garden
and killed himself. Fearing public scandal, his family decided to conceal
the facts and go ahead with a full Catholic funeral. Their ruse succeeded
for a while—then thingsstarted to happen. Tongues wagged and rumors
circulated until the accumulation of hot air forced the civic authorities to
investigate. Inconsistencies among the witnesses pricked the ears of the
town fathers and the good people of Wroc ∂ aw alike. As the
recriminations bounced back and forth a ghost (Gespenst) resembling the
dead shoemaker started making the rounds of the city. The ghost, as they
called it, began gently enough, with a frightful peek here and a poltergeist
show there. This naturally fueled the war of words between the well-off
family and the terrified burghers. And the ghost? He just got nastier.
Honest workmen complained that the shoemaker appeared beside
their beds and zmory-like smothered them. Groups of witnesses saw the
ghost on several occasions, and the entity physically assaulted a number of
others. Wroc ∂ aw literally became a city under siege. The spouse of the
deceased shoemaker eventually caved in to public pressure, admitted at
least part of her guilt, and gave the authorities rein to deal with the crisis
any way they saw fit. They had already opened the grave and put the poor
fellow on display from April 18 to April 24, 1592. The sixteenth-century
witnesses believed the body to be in the vampire condition eight months
after burial; Barber persuasively argued that the poor man was simply
decomposing the way people decompose. Whatever the truth, Wroc ∂ aw
remained under attack by a spectral foe. They buried him beneath the
gallows, but this did no good. After the spousal assent, the civic leaders
worked quickly: on May 7, 1592, they removed his hands and feet, cut off
his head, and ripped his heart from his back. This, they said, was as fresh
as the heart of a newly-butchered calf. Not content that they had spared
themselves from future molestation, the burghers built-up three cubic
meters of wood into a pyre and there they threw the parts of the
shoemaker. Guards surrounded the bonfire to ensure that no bits or pieces
left the conflagration to be used by sorcerers in black rituals. The ashes
and any leftover scraps they dumped in the Odra River. Finally, the
Gespenst visited them no more.
Polish vampires could be made or born. Zmory, we have seen, were
often born to be vampires. A born vampire could sometimes be recognized
by a rosy complexion, unnatural strength, and unusual teeth. In northwest
Poland, the Cashubians have an idiomatic expression which calls someone
“as red as a vampire”—czerwony jak wieszczy. Another type of vampire,
the strzyga [schy-ga], also assumed the mantle of the undead through no
fault of their own. If a child is born with a full set of teeth, he might very
well be a strzyga. If he goes on to carry two sets in his mouth, then surely
he’s a strzyga. The strzyga, it was believed, had two souls. Only one was
baptized into life in the Church, and only one could then die in the bosom
of the Church. The second soul, beyond God’s grace, returned to its body
and sustained itself by drinking the blood of men and animals. As
members of the predatory undead, the strzyga, in some places called
strzygo´n, were perceived of as quite violent and fearsome, sometimes
howling outside villages in a rage. Some reports claimed that this type of
vampire, when running across humans, sometimes seized them and
breathed vaporous death into their mouths. The best preventative against a
strzyga rising from its grave is to bury the corpse face down with a sickle
around its neck.
One account from central Poland, from the village of Podgaj in the
Lublin region tells us how a young wagon maker dealt with a strzyga
encounter during the Russian occupation a century ago. Our young
tradesman had not yet settled in one fixed location for his career, so he
plied his trade in a variety of small towns, sometimes walking great
distances between jobs. More than once was he forced to make the best of
inclement weather. On one such occasion, having already walked for hours
in a cold rain, he made straight for a light he spied on the edge of a wood.
He hoped for some shelter and maybe a hot meal, but what he found was a
corpse. The cabin, he learned, belonged to the forest ranger, newly
deceased. The ranger’s sister, who met the wagon maker at the door, told
him that her brother was a strzyga, and that they should both clear out. She
said that he was welcome to stay but that, with evening at hand, she
wouldn’t stick around another minute for anything in the world. The
wagon maker took another look at the cold rain and decided to take his
chances.
The ranger’s sister had prepared the corpse as best she could in the
rough cabin and laid him out in a crude coffin surrounded by candles. The
wagon maker stripped off his wet clothes, built up the fire, and soon
drifted off to the visionless sleep of the exhausted. Some hours later, he
awoke with a start and instinctively turned toward the dead ranger—who
was now sitting straight up in his coffin leering back at him. The corpse,
the strzyga, motioned with a finger for the young tradesman to come to
him, but the wagon maker kept his distance. This enraged the strzyga, who
puffed up his face in anger and launched himself at the terrified young
man, who, in a prescient moment, traced a circle on the floor with chalk
blessed by the priest on Christmas Day. The chalk, properly sanctified,
would keep evil spirits at bay, and the wagon maker always wore it around
his neck on a string. The strzyga might howl and threaten, but it could not
break the invisible barrier. Finally, after dawn, the strzyga returned to its
original position in the coffin, and the young wagon maker helped the
ranger’s sister inter the strzyga—this time face down with a sickle around
its neck.
As we read in Sienkiewicz, upiory, like their cousins the strzyga,
wailed and howled, and only an experienced ear could differentiate
between the calls of a wolf and the preternatural shrieking of the vampire
—Wyprawne ucho z daleka juz. rozeznawalo wjcie upiorów od wilczego.
A favorite pastime for upiory in general, and strzyga in particular was to
climb atop a roadside shrine or cross and rock back and forth while
howling. The timbre of the howling itself gathered the rage of the damned
and interwove it with a keen hatred of humanity. The sound today can be
heard in recordings of demonic possession, particularly in Russia. Most
Poles interpreted vampires as half-demonic beings (istota póldemoniczna),
and so they understood the howling to be more than just supernatural
terrorism. The half-demons lamented their separation from God, and they
turned to God’s creation—people and animals—in anger. Jesus told Peter,
“Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat” (NRSV, Luke 22:31).
Peter in turn warned the young Church: “Be sober, be watchful. Your
adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to
devour. Resist him, firm in your faith” (Book of Common Prayer, I Peter 5:
8-9a).
Those Christians who acknowledge the existence of monstrous
beings in the past claim that Satan and his minions lay low at times of
unbelief, since overt acts of hostility would bring the reality of their
presence uncomfortably into the white, hot light. Conversely, at times of
widespread adherence to Christianity, the demonic can engage in “direct
terrorism” (to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis) against the Church. In
The Screwtape Letters (1959), Lewis also observed that moments of
“direct terrorism” coincided with eras of great magicians. Poland, we’ve
seen, produced and attracted some of the best. The besieged Christian
could not rely on the outward trappings of faith for protection. If these
monsters mounted crosses and images of the Blessed Virgin, they were not
going to be put off by a little cross pendant. In fact, assaults occurred in
churches and graveyards as much as they occurred in isolated or remote
areas. If Christianity were to save the victim, then that person’s faith had
more to do with deliverance than symbols. In one Russian story, a priest
was attacked directly in front of his altar, but he raised the blessing cross
in faith and the vampire collapsed in a heap.
Not that sacramentals didn’t help. In Catholic belief, sacramentals
are blessed or positively charged items that ward off evil. The fancy term
is apotropaics. Apotropaics include holy water, rosaries, blessed medals,
candles (especially those blessed on Candlemas, February 2), and chalk
blessed on Christmas Day or on the Feast of the Three Kings. These could
offer varying degrees of protection, depending on the ferocity of the
opponent. In truth, they could handle most vampires. Those upiory able to
circumvent the power of the sacramentals were almost always powerful
sorcerers who reanimated their own corpses after death to avoid the fires
of hell. This type of vampire was rare but very dangerous. Sacramentals
held the lower-level demons (biblical daivmonion) that revivified most
vampires completely in check. Higher-up devils (diaboloı) and wizards
presented more of a threat, but these types of vampires appeared
infrequently, and a good number of these fled sacramentals as well. In the
case of the sorcerer-vampire, the wizard, through a demonic agency,
attempted what might be called a satanic mock resurrection. Just as Christ
rose from the dead and promised his followers eternal bodily resurrection,
so the devil reanimates his disciples as a blasphemous inversion—as
putrescent corpses.
The choice of haunts further reveals the demonic nature of the
vampire, who favors graveyards and remote places. The sorrow, fear, and
confusion accompanying most burials attract negative spirits to
graveyards, where they hope to both bask in and amplify negative
emotions. So hostile are these spirits to the Creator that they actually savor
the rot of decaying flesh. In stalking the graveyard, the vampire merely
stays home. Scripture confirms the teaching of traditional Christian
demonologists that cemeteries house more than just the restless dead.
Jesus’s most famous exorcism, that of the Gerasene demoniac, who called
himself “Legion,” took place in a graveyard (Mark 5:1–20; Luke 8:26–39).
The Gospels tell us that Jesus and his disciples had only just disembarked
on the Galilean shore when “immediately a man out of the tombs with an
unclean spirit” accosted them (NRSV; emphasis added). Mark’s narrative
continued: “He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any
more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles
and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in
pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among
the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising
himself with stones.” This is how the Poles viewed their vampires: as
demonically controlled corpses or as demonic mimics.
In most cases, demons revivified the body of the deceased as kind of
a puppet shell. Normally, these bodies once belonged to people who died
suddenly or under unusual circumstances—murder victims, suicides, and
the like. In particular, anyone who lived a particularly wicked life or
dabbled in the occult was in danger of becoming a vampire after death.
Notice that a person’s moral character opened the doors to vampirism
more frequently than an infectious bite. The proverb Jak z.ycie, taka ´smier
´c, “As you live, so will you die”—rules here. By their manner of life,
these people gave the devil a claim on their souls; in the case of
vampirism, the devil lays claim to their bodies as well. Sometimes the
vampire can control the meaner creatures of the night—the owl, bugs,
winds, various black animals, and other nocturnal monsters. Some
accounts also suggested that the vampire’s strength waxes and wanes with
the moon. Many Polish vampires prefer to strangle their human prey prior
to sucking their blood, a habit we can illustrate with a story found among
Poland’s eastern neighbors as well. The Polish version introduces us to an
impoverished peasant named Jacob.
Poverty and an inability to provide for his daughters moved Jacob to
look for work in a nearby town. On the way, Jacob felt shame and fretted.
What kind of father was he? Could he even call himself a father when, day
after day, he could only fill their dinner table with the pathetic little fish he
hooked in the local pond? Walking in a self-absorbed reverie, Jacob barely
noticed the small church he was passing when a voice coming from the
steps shocked him back into reality. “Maybe I can help,” said an old man.
He explained that the local nobleman would gladly pay a handsome
reward to whoever could deliver his daughter from the evil spell gripping
his dead daughter. Desperate, Jacob said he’d try anything that might bring
a decent meal to his table.
The old man then gave poor Jacob some pointers, warning him that
he’d be dealing with a hungry, new vampire and that the trick to breaking
the curse would be to get through a three-night vigil without the vampire
strangling him and sucking his blood. Assured that Jacob understood the
risks involved, the old man continued instructing Jacob for his first night’s
vigil, telling him to hide in the confessional five minutes before midnight
and watch. He advised Jacob that the vampire princess would rise from her
coffin, sense his presence, and seek him out for her foul sustenance. She
would call out to him three times but that he was not to answer. At the
stroke of midnight, she would be forced to return to her coffin.
Jacob did as he was told. The vampire princess left her coffin for a
short while, just as the old man predicted. Not finding her quarry, she
climbed back into her bier exactly at midnight, shutting the lid with a
frustrated bang! For the second night’s vigil, the old man told him to hide
in the pulpit. When she called out to him the third time, he was to
mockingly answer back. The old man comforted Jacob, telling him that he
wouldn’t be risking his neck by teasing the vampire, since she wouldn’t
have enough time left to reach the pulpit. Once again, everything went
exactly as planned, and Jacob began to feel almost at ease with his duties,
perhaps even a little cocky.
Knowing that things were about to get dicey, the old man warned
Jacob against too much self-confidence. After being thwarted on the first
two nights, the vampire princess would be doubly wary, doubly wrathful…
and doubly hungry. For this his last vigil, Jacob was to procure a vial of
holy water and blessed chalk. The moment the vampire left her coffin,
Jacob was to get in it and write Dominus, pater, filius, et spiritus sanctus
with the blessed chalk. Then he was to sprinkle the coffin with holy water
and get out immediately after he heard the princess cry out to him.
Oh, and did she ever cry. In a keening voice, she cried, she begged,
she implored—finally, she demanded. Jacob, though, resisted, and the
vampire princess once again returned to her coffin without sucking the
life’s blood from anyone. And there she stayed. Everything the old man
had said worked perfectly. The vampire princess was vampire no more.
She returned to being just a princess, the beloved daughter of a Polish
nobleman who kept his word and rewarded poor Jacob with enough wealth
that his daughters never had to live off tiny little fish again. And the old
man? No one in the town had ever seen or heard of the old man Jacob met
on the church steps. Some later surmised that he was nothing less than an
angel sent down to answer the prayers of a poor peasant, a rich noble, and
a poor undead soul in anguish.
Nikolai Gogol (1809–52), one of Russia’s greatest writers, fleshed
out an Ukrainian version of this story and worked it into his “Viy,”
published in the cycle Mirgorod (1835). In an annotation, Gogol told
readers that he closely followed the tale as he heard it, though some
scholars dispute this. Gogol, though, more expressly portrayed the new
vampire as blind, something only implied in the Polish version. In “Viy,”
when the vampire awakes, her eyes remain shut as she gropes about with
her arms, “as though trying to catch someone.” Later, the hero, a young
Ukrainian student, remains invisible to the vampire so long as he stays
within a protective circle surrounding the church lectern. Other artists, in
turn, mined Gogol’s “Viy” in the creation of their own work. Most
notably, Mario Bava, the great Italian horror maestro, took Gogol as
inspiration for his own vampire classic, Black Sunday (1960, Italian title
La Maschera del Demonio), considered by many to be one of the finest
vampire films ever made. Another quality motion picture, Viy, or the Spirit
of Evil, came out of Russia in 1967. It boasts excellent color
cinematography and impressive effects.

Polish prayerbook from the early 20th century.Bound in crocodile skin. Note the invocations of the
Trinity: “ ” Bóg † Ojciec, † Syn i † Duch ´swie˛ty.” Our peasant hero Jacob used the same formula
 to exorcize the spirit of the vampire princess.

Differences in other Russian redactions provide details that reflect

how traditional Slavic societies interpreted the undead. In one story, the
vampire-witch turned over in her coffin just as the lad completed his three-
night vigil. When her father learned of her magical past and saw her face-
down corpse, he drove an aspen stake through her heart. Another variation
of the vampire princess from Tula Province and collected in the late
nineteenth century closely resembles the Polish tale in that a young man
must keep a three-night vigil over a new vampire. The danger, however,
isn’t that the vampire will awake and suck his blood but rather that she will
devour his flesh. This brings up two important features about how the
Russians experienced vampirism. First, the old term for vampire,
transliterated as upyr, fell out of common usage with the passing of the
Middle Ages; in its place Russians increasingly favored variations on
sorcerer, witch, or heretic—especially in the north. The idea here is that
those practicing occult arts were forbidden to enjoy eternal rest as God’s
own dead and were instead condemned to wander the earth as the undead.
Sometimes researchers run across accounts of magicians preparing for
their own rebirth into the world of vampirism rather than face the
inevitable condemnation to hell.
Second, only rarely does one encounter Russian tales involving the
vampire’s consumption of blood. Russian vampires are just as apt to cause
wasting sickness or corruption as they are to drink blood. They also have a
pronounced ghoulishness about them. They eat human flesh. They like it.
Perhaps we can blame the confusion of terms, but these ghoulish
symptoms occasionally extend to living people suffering under a curse. Far
in the north of Russia, in Arkhangel’sk Province, where the label of heretic
and vampire became synonymous, we hear of a young man who
inadvertently took a sorceress as his wife. After their wedding, the young
man couldn’t help but notice that his bride ate virtually nothing. At first he
dismissed her lack of appetite by crediting her with a shy demureness. On
the third evening of their marriage, however, he awoke at midnight to find
her dressing and leaving the house. He followed and at first thought his
worst suspicions would be confirmed: he saw her walk to a cemetery and
meet another man. His initial outrage soon turned to pure horror when he
realized that they weren’t meeting for a moonlight tryst; instead, they
unearthed a freshly buried corpse and ate it. After the couple finished their
midnight snack, they carefully set everything aright and went their
separate ways.
In this instance, the young man eventually delivered his wife from
her hideous condition, and our ghoul went back to being an ordinary girl.
An earlier tale collected by the great Aleksandr Afanas’ev (1865–1869)
tells of how another ordinary Russian lass dealt with a more traditional
Russian vampire. One evening a handsome and wealthy stranger crashed a
rural party and began romancing the beautiful and graceful Marusia. She
contrived to find out where her new suitor lived, and so tracked him back
to a churchyard where she saw him greedily devouring a corpse. Later,
when the handsome stranger pressed her to reveal whether she had seen
him at the churchyard the night before, Marusia said no. In response, he
murdered first her father, then, on the following day, her mother. Sensing
her fate, Marusia sought out the advice of her grandmother who instructed
her on how to defeat the ghoulish vampire. Eventually, after a series of
plot twists, Marusia destroyed the vampire-ghoul with a sprinkling of holy
water, which crumpled him to dust.
It is worth noting that W. R. S. Ralston, in his classic Songs of the
Russian People (1872) remarked that, “It is in the Ukraine and in White-
Russia—so far as the Russian Empire is concerned—that traditions are
most rife about this ghastly creation of morbid fancy.” Isn’t it interesting
that these same territories for centuries belonged to the Polish Empire?
Having already seen the confusion of terms prevalent in Russia proper—
conflating vampires, sorcerers, and ghouls—does it not stand to reason that
the cult of vampirism, somewhat dormant in Russia since the Middle
Ages, reentered the Orthodox Empire from Polish lands? Until very
recently even scholars tended to treat Ukraine as part of Russia, calling it
the Ukraine just as we would refer to the Alps or the Appalachians. In
reality, Ukraine is a large Slavic nation with a thousand-year history, its
own language, and its own sophisticated culture. Culturally and
historically, the western part of Ukraine maintained close ties to Poland,
and, until World War II, vast tracts of both Ukraine and White Russia
remained solidly within the Polish state. When Ralston describes vampires
in these parts of the “Russian Empire,” they sound quite familiar:

Everyone knows that when a vampire’s grave is opened no trace of

death is found upon its body, its cheek being rosy and its skin soft;
and that the best way to destroy the monster is to drive a stake
through it, when the blood it has been sucking will pour forth from
 the wound….It is worthy of remark that the stake with which the
vampire’s corpse is pierced must be driven into it by a single stroke.
A second blow would reanimate it. This idea is frequently referred
to in the Russian skazki and other Slavonic stories…

“Other Slavonic stories.” The dependence of English-language

writers on research conducted in Imperial Russia, where subjugated
peoples were incorporated as quaint Russian minorities, and the willful
ignorance on the part of occultists concerning the history and culture of
East Central Europe, has caused Poland to be written out of the study of
vampirism. A somewhat analogous situation exists for the Czechs, whose
Bohemian homeland has too often been treated as a province of Germany,
like another Bavaria. The fact that Ralston goes on to cite two more Polish
examples makes one wonder just how much of the Russian vampire lore
emerging in the nineteenth century was actually Polish and Ukrainian.
We will return once again to Calmet for yet another tantalizing gem
from Poland’s storied age of empire. The dead in Pozna´n, we learned, did
not rest quietly even in the grandest of settings. As a gesture of
appreciation for many years of faithful service, the great Labienski family
intended to inhume in the family vault a steward of the Count Simon
Labienski. This tremendous honor did not placate the dead steward,
however. The sexton notified the Countess Dowager de Labienski that
“there was some derangement in the place,” and the Countess ordered that
action be taken according to the Polish custom: they should cut his head
off. The sexton followed orders, and, as he removed the body of the
undead steward, several witnesses observed the vampire grind his teeth.
Next, blood either jetted from the decapitated vampire or at least flowed
quite freely—whatever happened literally caused the hair of those present
to stand on end and prompted them to take one more precautionary
measure. They dipped a white pocket handkerchief into the crimson blood
and gave it to members of the family to drink.
This story tantalizes because Calmet gives us some solid clues: we
have names, titles, and a place. Calmet calls Labienski a “starost of
Posnania,” our first hint. Starost is a real Polish term, albeit somewhat
vague. Though Poles used the term in a variety of leadership contexts
since the Middle Ages, we can safely assume that Calmet wrote of his
Poland, the Poland of the past few centuries, the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth (Rzeszczpospolita, 1386–1795). During the
Commonwealth the starosta were royal officials who administered
provinces, counties, or other crown lands. By “starost of Posnania,” we
can infer that Labienski was some noted official in the Pozna´n
Voivodeship (Województwo Pozna´nskie). Here we run into our first snag.
No such prominent Labienski existed in a leadership position in Pozna´n
during the seventeenth century.
Once again, we can credit that most difficult of languages with the
confusion. If we admit the possibility that somewhere—from Poland to
France—somebody inadvertently wrote an a for a u, the matter clears itself
up rather quickly. Polish also has the unique “barred l” which is written
as ∂ (lower case) and £ (upper case). This denotes the equivalent of a soft
w in English. Until very recently, even academic publishers frequently
omitted the letter and simply transliterated it as an l. If we add the Polish
´n to these two small changes, we may have restored the name of the
vampirized family: we replace the corrupted “L” with the more Polish
£abie´nski a great Polish name that fits the bill.
In the seventeenth century alone, the £abie´nski family produced
two notable statesmen, scholars, and clerics. Stanis ∂ aw (1574–1640), a
staunch supporter of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, served his
church in the capacity of abbot (1618–1627) of the Benedictine monastery
at Tyniec, and his state as Royal Secretary to King Zygmunt III Waza.
Stanis ∂ aw also worked as regent of the Royal Chancellery, as Crown
Secretary, as the bishop of £uck, and as bishop of Plock. In that last
capacity, he installed an impressive library in the basement of the Plock
Bishop’s Castle in Pu ∂ tusk, for which he is still celebrated today. His life
is the subject of Waldemar Graczyk’s recent biography, Stanislaw £ubie
´nski (2005).
Maciej £abie´nski (1672–1652) achieved even greater renown.
Maciej served as bishop of Pozna´n and became archbishop of Gniezno
and Primate of Poland in 1641, a position he held until his death. Between
the reins of W ∂ adyslaw IV and Jan II Kazimierz, Maciej basically ran the
country as interrex, and historians credit Maciej’s sagacity with staving off
even worse disaster during the Chmielnicki Uprising in Ukraine. He
himself crowned Jan II king. Though he died in £owicz only a few years
after crowning Jan II king, he was interred in his family crypt in Gniezno,
most likely in the same vaults that witnessed the decapitation of the
vampire-steward.
Due north of Gniezno and Great Poland is Pomerania, home of the
Cashubians. The Cashubians are a West Slavonic people who live in
northwest Poland, an area of intense vampire activity. The Cashubians
have witnessed a type of posthumous misbehavior usually only seen in
Germany and West Central Europe—shroud eating. The shroud eater
might be thought of as a species of disease-bearing vampire, Continental
Europe’s equivalent to England’s bloodsucking sanguisuga. These corpses
chewed or gnawed upon their burial shrouds, a bizarre posthumous activity
which earned them the moniker of “shroud eaters.” Though never exactly
explained in the literature, something about their chewing was thought to
bring about the sickness and death of friends and relatives. Some sources,
especially in Germany, insisted that sounds from the munching vampires
could be heard above their graves and that the louder the audible
gastronomic emanations the worse the plague. As the theory went, the
plague would cease once the vampire had devoured its shroud. Though
certainly strange, this belief attracted considerable scholarly attention, and
learned treatises were published in Leipzig by Philipp Rohr (1679) and
Michel Ranft (1728).
In perhaps the most infamous book ever written, the Malleus
Maleficarum (1486), Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger referred to a
shroud-eater case they themselves investigated. An unnamed municipality
failed to punish a sorceress while alive, so her sins were visited on the
innocent in the form of a plague. They wrote:
A town was rendered almost destitute by the death of its
citizens; and there was a rumour that a certain buried woman was
gradually eating the shroud in which she had been buried, and that
the plague could not cease until she had eaten the whole shroud and
absorbed it into her stomach…[The town officials] dug up the grave,
and found half the shroud absorbed through the mouth and throat
into the stomach, and consumed…
 Maciej Lubienski (1572 – 1652)

Reacting to the horror of the situation, they cut off the head of the
enchantress, “and at once the plague ceased.”
Even in Cashubia, local custom preserved various words to identify
the vampire, wieszczy being the most common. Lopi, however, was not
unknown, and folks in southern Cashubia frequently employed nielop. The
Cashubians believed that, after internment, vampires would first set upon
eating their own grave cloths before leaving the tomb to prey upon
relatives. The Cashubians advised that the dying receive Communion
during last rights, since no diabolical spirit could ever displace the Body of
Christ. The Cashubians tended to divide the vigil after death into shifts—
nine at night to one, one to three, etc. Mourners attended to pay their
respects but also to protect themselves. They watched the corpse for signs
of vampirism, especially for a flushed ruddiness. Some Cashubians also
believed that, sometime prior to burial, the left eye of the corpse would
pop open, betraying the vampire. If those keeping vigil saw anything
suspicious, they decapitated the corpse as a prophylactic measure. As in
Poland proper, they frequently placed the head between the legs of the
vampire.
By now the reader has no doubt realized that decapitation reigned
supreme as the primary means of vampire removal, but less-severe
methods also existed for neutralizing suspicious corpses. Peasants
deposited some in swamps; some they buried face down; limbs could be
bound and tendons cut; upon others they erected stone cairns. More
frequently, worrisome dead were buried at crossroads. Some have claimed
that the peasants intended to confuse the rising vampire, but this fails to
take into account the Catholic beliefs of the Poles. When visiting the sick,
the priest would carry the Blessed Sacrament along the center of the road,
giving this ground a “positive” charge. At the crossroads, then, there
existed a doubly charged parcel in the shape of the cross. Stakes of course
were in near-universal use in the lands of the old Polish Empire, with the
northern territories favoring aspen and the south preferring maple or
linden. Ukrainians near Brest rammed an aspen spike directly into the
head, while other places employed a fat iron nail which they drove through
the brow to the base of the skull. Such a skull was unearthed in 1870, near
Piotrków, and is currently in the possession of the anthropology
department at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University.

Piotrkow Skull at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow

Everyone living in the Polish lands believed in fire insurance, but,

like so many of us, few could afford it. Fire was the last word in vampire
prevention and destruction. The reader will notice that, in cases and stories
examined, only the civil authorities of Wroc ∂ aw could afford a
cremation. The ancient ancestors of the Poles indeed did cremate their
dead as far back as 1300 to 1400 B.C., but, truth be told, few of these
cremations actually consumed all the remains. Also, like the Jews and the
Egyptians, Christianity is a resurrectionist faith, and religions that teach
the bodily resurrection frown on cremation, with all its pagan associations.
Poles gradually abandoned cremation in favor of burial as Christianity
penetrated the nation from the eighth century onward. By the twelfth
century, the process was virtually complete. Yet, then as now, economic
factors took precedent. Historian Daniel Scavone estimated that a thorough
pre-modern cremation would require accelerants and about 1,500 pounds
of coal forthe fire to do the job and reach 1,600 ° F for one full hour. Most
likely, the corpse would also have to be wrapped in animal fat. In our
Wroc ∂ aw example, the burghers used pitch.
Fire destroyed the vampire, but other corpse-centered monsters
prowled the countryside of old Poland. The evil, restless dead always
represented a threat, and they therefore needed to be handled with care and
respect. Flight was a characteristic that the dead—be they evil or
benevolent—shared with many vampiric upiory. After death, the very air
became the natural means of transport. Both vampires and departed loved
ones could snatch the unwary and fly them off when they came calling.
Because of this similarity, a knowledgeable Pole would force visiting
spirits to acknowledge the lordship of Jesus Christ before engaging in any
intercourse. “Praised be Jesus Christ!” served as a traditional greeting in
rural Poland. It was followed by “World without end!” Many cautionary
tales circulated that demonstrated the folly of waiting too long before
testing the spirits (I John 4:1).
Russian author Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) featured vampiric flight
in his excellent “Phantoms.” In Turgenev’s tale, the victim allowed
himself to be taken by the vampire, who caught him up and flew him
through the air. Over the course of the next three days, the pattern of
vampiric flight repeated itself, as the victim thinned and deteriorated while
the ethereal vampire grew more substantial. Polish master Zygmunt Krasi
´nski (1812–1859) also employed the imagery of vampiric flight in The
Un-Divine Comedy (1832), where an evil spirit hovered over the ground as
it assumed a human guise. Krasi´nski had her ask, “Wilt thou come to me
whenever I come flying for thee?”
 Chapter 6

Topielec, Poludnica, and

Death as a Maiden
Taking Stock before Moving On

From my grave to wander I am forc’d,

Still to seek The Good’s long-sever’d link,
Still to love the bridegroom I have lost,
And the life-blood of his heart to drink.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)

It might be an unpopular observation in today’s world, when

paganism enjoys a remarkable resurgence with the young, but Poland’s
pre-Christian rituals based themselves on fear—not least of which was fear
of the dead. Poles filled the pusta noc, the Empty Night—the Death Watch
—with innumerable precautions aimed at keeping the recently deceased
from coming back and taking sustenance from the living. Tapers blessed
on Candlemas surrounded the corpse to ward off any evil spirits that might
try to prevent the dead from reaching their blessed reward. No windows or
doors could remain open to trap the departing spirit, and mirrors would be
covered to occlude any portals to a liminal reality. In ancient times the
Poles commemorated their dead twice a year—in early spring and again in
late autumn, though other local festivals existed. Adam Mickiewicz
(1798–1855), often referred to as Poland’s greatest poet, forever enshrined
Dziady [ja-dy] in the minds of his countrymen with his Forefather’s Eve.
But, after the Roman Church consolidated such festivals in 1040 with the
creation of All Souls’ Day, Poland began to follow the rest of Latin
Christendom, and Dziady increasingly became identified with All Souls’
Day (November 2).
 So the Poles don’t celebrate the eve of All Saints’ Day as we do in
America, but they did fly into action on the eve of All Souls’ Day, a day
later. Simple old-fashioned dishes were prepared—something everyone
could enjoy!—and extra places were set at the table. At twilight, the family
lit candles in front of their holy images as they gathered for prayer in front
of the household shrine, which had been reverently cleaned for this
occasion. Then the head of household opened the door and/or windows
and invited the spirits of their dead ancestors in with the following words:

Holy sainted ancestors, we beg you

Come fly to us
To eat and drink, wher’er God grant
Whatever I can offer you
Welcome to whatever this hut can afford
Sainted ancestors, we beg you
Come, fly to us.

The dead were served first, each place setting received a slug of
vodka, and then the dishes were passed around the table. In Poland, a
special rye loaf fashioned into the image of a corpse, called zaduszki [za-
doosh-ki], became so associated with the festival that most Poles now call
the eve of All Souls’ dzie´n zaduszky or Zaduszki, for short. After the
meal, the family took loaves of bread and other food to the local cemetery
where beggars, called dziady, had gathered to receive the gifts. As the
reader may have guessed, many other Poles call the holiday Dziady. For
some reason, these regional names have become a touchy subject for
members of Polonia, the Polish diaspora outside Poland. It appears that
Dziady enjoyed usage in the northeast of the old Commonwealth,
especially Courland, Lithuania, and Prussia. Dziady, Rodonica—and
others! —enjoyed prominent usage elsewhere.
 Possessed Spirit (c. 1900) by Boreslas Biegas, the Polish master of horrific art.

The cemetery where the dziady had gathered would have been
decorated, and candles should have been lit at gravesites. In the old days,
bonfires blazed atop graves as well as wherever someone suffered torment,
violence, or perished suddenly. The flames purified the atmosphere of any
residual negative energy and drove off any lingering evil spirits. At the
conclusion of Zaduszki, the head of household once again opened the
doors and/or windows. Once again the spirits of the forefathers are
addressed:

Sainted ancestors
You came here to eat
To eat—you have eaten
To drink—you have drunk
Homage and honor to you!
Now tell us
What do you need?
Or better, go back to heaven
Begone! Begone! Begone!

Obviously, if their ancestors no longer enjoyed their affection, they

at least commanded their fear and respect. Zaduszki honored the revered
dead, but it also fed them. The undeniable implication is that, if not
properly placated, the forefathers could return and slake their thirst on the
living.
 Vampire in the Form of a Lizard (1914) by Boreslas Biegas.

The dead could return and walk the earth on the eve of All Souls’.
Sometimes they acted beneficently, giving helpful advice to their relatives.
One tradition states that the dead gathered in parish churches to hear their
own special Mass. If one hears music or other telltale sounds coming from
the church on the eve of All Souls’, it’s best to stay away. The dearly
departed will rip you to shreds for violating their sacred space. The story
of the little girl who walks the earth carrying buckets of her mother’s tears
circulated throughout Poland as a cautionary tale recommending that the
living mourn in moderation. In The Peasants(1904–09) W ∂ adys ∂ aw
Reymont has a character remark on the death of a prominent farmer:
 Do not weep. Weeping only keeps a soul longer upon this earth: you
would prevent him from departing in peace. Open ye the door, and
let the wanderer flee away to the fields of the Lord Jesus.—May he
go, and peace be with him!

A tale from Mazovia, just beyond Warsaw, preserves this sentiment

and sums up many of the salient beliefs of the Poles concerning the dead
and All Souls’ Eve.
On the eve of All Souls’ Day, in the autumn when nature gives in to
death, Marysia waited for her beloved Janek to return home. Soon after the
outbreak of hostilities, Janek had been whisked away with the other young
men—only Janek hadn’t marched back like the others. Marysia sought for
signs and answers in the things and people around her—but none came.
Her tears fell like the leaves that buried her village. On the eve of All
Souls’, when the dead could visit the living, Marysia went out alone,
hoping to find some comfort amid the whirling leaves and scratching
branches. Like an answered prayer, a horseman made his way over the
Mazovian hills. Marysia could watch his approach under the light of the
unnaturally large moon. He rode straight for her. Could it be? Yes! It was!
It really was her Janek!
But Janek made no sign of recognition. His eyes, even when they
beheld her, did not reflect her joy; instead they betrayed great sorrow. Still,
when he told her to mount the horse with him, she did so with all the
alacrity a young girl could muster. While she lost herself in the embrace,
the couple and their horse began to ascend to the sky. At first Marysia
failed to question the experience; all she could do was feel the rapture of
the moment. Then, gradually, another emotion pushed her happiness aside
—terror. This wasn’t her Janek, her betrothed. He didn’t talk or answer
questions. They arrived at the village graveyard exactly as the clock began
to chime midnight, and they set down when the bells tolled twelve. At that
instant, the graves began to shake and tremble, and skeletal corpses
crawled out of the earth. They ambulated toward the couple with halting,
jerking movements. They beckoned to Marysia, and—most horrible of all
—they called her name, inviting her to join them.
When Marysia didn’t come but remained frozen in dread, the
animated things grew angry and told her they would force her to join them.
Marysia bolted and ran to the church as fast as she could, begging God to
save her with each stride. Still, the quivering, cadaverous monstrosities
gave chase, groping out to her with bony, pointy fingers. When she
reached the sanctuary, the sexton helped her in, beating off the skeletal
hands that ripped and clutched at Marysia’s peasant skirts. The tattered
skirts could have been Marysia’s flesh had it not been for the church. The
two listened to the shrieks and howls of the undead until sunrise. In the
morning light Marysia knew that her grief pulled Janek to the world he had
left, and that he could never enjoy the peace he deserved unless she
emotionally let him go.
Let the dead rest in peace—so the story goes. But what if they
can’t? The topielce [to-pyelts-e] cannot pass over; they cannot rest in
peace. Because the topielce were denied the opportunity to complete their
course of spiritual development, they were doomed to dwell forever in the
element responsible for their demise—in this case, water. They feel
jealousy at the living, and they act out their anger by trying to drown
people and animals. Of all the topielce, the spirits of unwanted children,
those drowned by unmarried parents, were most to be feared. They turned
against the race that cast them off with great fury. Though once human, the
water becomes their natural environment, and here they can become quite
powerful. Their power naturally weakens the farther away they are from
their element. A topielec [sing., to-pyel-ets] may appear as a small child
playing near the water, or it may take the form of some monstrous beast,
like a huge black dog or horse. Their power is heightened at noon, and
they have been known to snatch people and livestock from right off a
bridge. Since they are not demons but the lost souls of unbaptized humans,
there really is no way of fending them off save through avoidance.
***
Perhaps it is best to take stock of where we’re at before journeying
deeper into the realms of vampirism. As we’ve leafed through the pages of
vampire lore, we’ve moved from a rather specific definition of the
vampire, the sanguisugae of the Vulgate and the chronicler, to the more
fluid lexicon of traditional Polish folklore. As we peer longer and deeper
down the portal of the human past definitions continue to blend and blur
like a churning psychedelic kaleidoscope. More and more modern authors,
frustrated by this linguistic looseness, have attempted to restrict the use of
the term “vampire” by imposing an artificial dichotomy between the
vampire-as-living-corpse and other unquiet dead. The folkloric sources of
many nations, many realms of the undead, do not support this dichotomy,
which itself is based upon a unique set of eighteenth-century cases. As we
will learn, our contemporary critics commit the same errors as their
Enlightenment counterparts: they impose spin on the partially-understood
experiences of a foreign culture.
If the advance of embalming did not completely cease the
propagation of the walking dead, then it certainly slowed its progress.
Given the protean nature of the folkloric vampire, we cannot categorically
state with complete certitude that these fiends no longer stalk the streets of
America, as the soft white underbelly of urban America affords a happy
hunting ground for all variety of predator. In fact a report issued in June of
2007 admitted that thousands of corpses went unidentified annually, and
that, since 2004, the nation’s coroners and medical examiners recorded as
unidentified the remains of some 13,500 persons. Other aspects of the
vampire—those that drain vitality and gain sustenance from the energy of
the living—have continued without interruption into our times. Generally,
the blood-sucking entities of the modern age are generated as byproducts
of Satanism—itself a rare though insidious phenomenon. For more
information on this, the reader is encouraged to seek out the reports of
reputable demonologists connected to major churches. [A good place to
start is Michael Perry, ed., Psychic Disturbances and Occult Involvement
(London: SPCK, 1996).] For the purposes of this book, we will return to
history’s back pages and leaf through the memorials of the past in an effort
to better understand the vampire as he revealed himself to the Central
European of the early-modern period, the seventeenth through the
eighteenth centuries.
Once again we must stress that our database derives from definite
times, places, and cultures. If we wish to do justice to our topic, then we
must understand the historic vampire within this context. Gaining a basic
understanding of the period should not be viewed as a great obscurantist
enterprise, since the cultures that best preserve the lore of the undead
remain vibrant and active today. Slavs inhabit well over half of Europe,
and nearly 270 million people speak a Slavonic language. In the United
States about 20 million of our neighbors claim Slavic ancestry—be they
Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Serbs, or others. To better know
these cultures is to better know the modern world. Alongside case
histories, these nations have compiled vast treasuries of folklore that
testify to premodern assumptions about the supernatural. As Peter Burke
observed in his classic Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate,
1994), themes uncovered in the study of folklore are those things formerly
taken for granted—things once “treated as obvious, normal, or ‘common
sense.’” If we truly want to meet the vampire, then we have to follow the
lead of early polish ethnographer Adam Czarnocki who wrote in 1818:

We must go to the peasants, visit them in their thatched huts, take

part in their feasts, work and amusements. In the smoke rising above
their heads the ancient rites are still echoing, the old songs are still
heard.

These peasants recognized the vampire as possessing many traits

and many names, which could vary from region to region. So far we’ve
outlined the most common traits and nomenclature, noting that upiory and
zmory enjoyed the broadest circulation in Poland. And we’ve just
encountered the topielce, spirits of the drowned. It is not at all uncommon
to find upiory or zmory used to label the malicious souls of the drowned as
well, especially when these creatures create a variety of poltergeist
disturbances at or near the place of drowning. Folklorist Marion Moore
Coleman collected stories of such zmory along the Narew River in her
1965 A World Remembered. Helen Orze, Coleman’s source, observed:
“Now the zmory were vampires, weird creatures that no grave could hold.
They would come up out of the water, bits of weed and water plants
entangled in their stringy hair, and what evil things they would do to
man…I knew.” An encounter with the father of Orze led to the destruction
of two water wraiths causing serious disturbances in the Mazurian lake
country of northeastern Poland.
As the tale is told, locals avoided a lonely stretch of marsh road
even in the daylight, since the area appeared unnaturally dark. The more
skeptical attributed the darkness to abundant wild vegetation and tall trees,
but the more wary couldn’t help but think the souls of two woodsmen
interred in unhallowed ground had something to do with the dusky byway.
As Orze’s father rode home from the market late one evening, he felt the
reigns snatched from his fingers and he heard the hissing and giggling of
disembodied voices. In the ensuing tumult, voices uttered the names of the
two deceased woodsmen, one urging the other to seize the honest
countryman, who managed to beat an escape. His horses found their way
home in the morning, and a group of neighbors gathered with him to return
to the gloomy stretch of marsh road to see about the wagon. There, at that
haunted spot, they found the wagon—hanging upside down atop one of the
tallest oak trees in the wood! To finally put an end to the disturbances, the
parish priest advised that the woodsmen be disinterred and decapitated,
their severed heads placed upside down between their legs prior to
reburial. Accomplishing these posthumous executions, the working people
of Augustów delivered the marsh road from the curse of the wicked dead.

Map of Poland in 1600

The kaleidoscope turns again, especially in Western Poland, where

we frequently see an intermingling of the malevolent dead with the
messengers of death. One example is the po ∂ udnica [po-wut-nits-a], the
Polish equivalent of the biblical “ noonday devil ” or “destruction that
wasteth at noonday” (Ps. 91:6b). The Czech variety was immortalized in
music by Anton Dvoˇrák (1841-1904) in Op. 108, Polednice. We read of a
lovely maiden who appeared suddenly at noon in shining raiment, her
visitation signaling the imminent death of whomever she saw. Even
contact with objects that had felt her corrupting touch could prove fatal.
Such was the case for one peasant, who struggled with a noonday devil, as
translated by Anna Brzozowska-Krajka in her Polish Traditional Folklore
(1998):

Once a peasant was scything a meadow at midday. Suddenly a

noontime divinity came to him, seized his scythe and intended to cut
 off his head. She rebuked him for working in the field at midday.
The peasant, facing death, started to fight with her and took back his
scythe. In the meantime it was one o’clock in the afternoon and she
had to leave. But the scythe was completely damaged: there was a
notch in each place she touched it. On the following day the man
bought another scythe in town, but used it only a little and died.

Sometime the po ∂ udnica appeared in the guise of a child wrapped

in linen; at other times, the noonday devils took on the appearance of very
large—even gigantic—women. Most often, though, the death-
bearingpo ∂ udnicaassumed the form of a pretty girl. Her vampiric nature
did not escape the great Polish writer W ∂ adys ∂ aw Reymont (1867–
1925), who used the image of the po ∂ udnica to emphasize the enervating
heat of summer in The Peasants:

Sultry silence prevailed: no man was visible; no bird, no living

creature anywhere in sight. Not a leaf, not a blade of grass tumbled.
It was as if the Demon of Noontide had swooped down upon the
country and, with husky lips, were sucking all the strength out of the
swooning earth.

Death too would most frequently manifest itself as a tall, thin

woman draped in a brilliant white shroud. She would carry a scythe as she
walked through villages, rapping on doors and windows to announce her
intentions to the occupants. After three visits, people so named would
surely die. Death as a maiden was not thought of as evil; she could even be
tricked or persuaded away from her fateful missions to the living. She was
known by a variety of local names: Ba´ska among the Mazowians, Jugusia
or Zo´ska around Krakow. Always she was tall, thin, attractive—and a
little sad. The anthology Folklore and Legends: Polish and Russian
(1890), compiled by the enigmatic “C.J.B.,” included a story from
Bukowina, the land of the author’s grandfather, which blurs the noonday
devil and Death as a maiden:

A Russian peasant sat out in the field. The sun was shining fiercely.
In the distance the man saw something coming to him. It came nearer, and
then he saw it was a woman. She was clad in a large cloak, and strode
along with great strides. The man felt much afraid, and would have run
away, but the phantom held him in its bare arms.
“ Do you know the Plague?” said she. “I am it. Take me on your
shoulders and carry me through all Russia. Miss no village or town, for I
must go everywhere. For yourself fear nothing. You shall live in the midst
of death.”
She wrapped her long arms round the neck of the fearful peasant.
The man went on, and was astonished to find that he felt no weight. He
turned his head, and saw that the Plague was on his back.
He first took her to a town, and when they came there, there was joy
in all the streets, dancing, music, and jollity. The peasant went on and
stood in the marketplace, and the woman shook her cloak. Soon the dance,
joy and merriment ceased. Whenever the man looked he saw terror. People
carried coffins, the bells tolled, the burial-ground was full; there was at
length no room for more to be buried in it.
Then the people brought the dead to the marketplace and left them
there, having no pace in which to bury them.
The wretched man went on. Whenever he came to a village the
houses were left deserted, and the peasants fled with white faces, and
trembling with fear. On the roads, in the woods, and out in the fields, could
be heard the groans of the dying.
Upon a high hill stood the man’s own village, the place in which he
was born, and to this place the Plague began to direct his steps. There were
the man’s wife, his children, and his old parents.
The man’s heart was bleeding! When he came near his own village,
he laid hold of the Plague so that she should not escape him, and held her
with all his might.
He looked before him and saw the blue Pruth flowing past, and
beyond it were the green hills, and afar off the dark mountains with snow-
capped tops.
He ran quickly to the stream and leaped under its waters, wishing to
destroy himself and his burden together, and so free his land from sorrow
and the Plague.
He himself was drowned, but the Plague, being as light as a feather,
slipped off his shoulders, and so escaped. She was, however, so alarmed
by this brave deed that she fled away and hid herself in the mountain
forests.
So the man saved his village, his parents, his wife, and his little
children, and all that part of fair Russia through which the Plague had not
passed.

In a continuation of some ancient pagan festival which doubtlessly

included human sacrifice, the Poles drowned “Death” each spring.
Normally, simple folk wove sheaves of straw into a figure called
Marzanna, which they threw into a river or pond. By thus drowning death,
the peasants hoped to keep her from visiting their village that year. As a
welcome diversion from the rigors of Lent, the ritual has continued as a
popular festival all the way into modern Poland, where it exists with local
variations. In Silesia, the effigy could also be called Marzanka, and she
was dressed in the costume of a village lass. Adult women originally
fashioned her outfit, but, in time, younger girls assumed the task. After the
ceremonial drowning, the girls toured their village with a bough or small
tree decorated with colorful ribbons, feathers, and painted eggshells. As
they moved through the homes, they sang that they had taken death from
the village. In some areas of Great Poland the effigy was that of an infant,
a telling clue about the nature of pagan sacrifice.
The chronicler Jan D ∂ ugosz (1415–1480) linked Marzanna to the
destruction of pagan idols following his nation’s conversion to Christianity
in the tenth century. In Maurice Michael’s translation (The Annals of Jan
D ∂ ugosz, 1997) we read:

Rigorous measures are now agreed to ensure that all idols and
images of the old gods are destroyed. Any who continue to worship
them are condemned to loose their estates and heads. All rites,
ceremonies and occasions when honour used to be paid to the idols
are forbidden, as are divination, enchantments and soothsaying. All
games, public or private, that used to be celebrated in honour of the
old gods, are similarly prohibited, since our God is not to be
mollified by applause, indecent gestures and all other impieties, as
pagan deities are. Nonetheless, almost every town and village still
has idols of the old gods and goddesses hidden away in sacred
groves, so Mieczyslaw fixes a day, March 7, on which day in every
town and village, before a throng of both sexes, the images of the
old gods are to be hacked to pieces and these cast into a lake, bog or
marsh, and heaped over with stones. Those who used to make
money out of the old idols are sorely aggrieved and weep, but none
dare do anything, for fear of the Prince’s officials. This destruction
 of the idols has since been celebrated every Laetare Sunday, when,
in many villages, effigies of Dziewanna and Marzanna, are paraded
on poles and then cast into a bog and drowned, a custom that
persists to this day.

Following the sympathetic magic of the mock drowning, the

participants would run home at all speed. It was believed that whoever fell
during this sprint would die before the next Marzanna observance. Death
as a maiden had tripped the running celebrant, and her corrupted,
incorporeal touch would bring about their demise. The Poles, like the rest
of humanity, had been fleeing the agents of misfortune since they had first
emerged as a distinct people. Even before, in the misty dawn before the
chronicler scratched vellum parchment with his pen, the ancient Slavs
went on the offensive and felt the need to kill corpses.

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
 Chapter 7
Suspicious Corpses
and the Accusing Hand

But first on earth as vampire sent

Thy course shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghostly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race.
—George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824)

It would be a great injustice to reduce an ethnic group to a few

stereotypical characteristics, but we can say with some authority that fear
of the dead formed a cornerstone of Proto-Slavic belief. So-called
“vampire burials” and “vampires cemeteries” have been unearthed all over
the West Slavic lands of Bohemia, Poland, Slovakia, and Moravia.
Several, especially in Czech lands, date as far back as the sixth century,
and their number dramatically spiked with the spread of Christian burial in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Before continuing with this discussion
of vampire burials, it might be helpful to take a brief look at the extended
Slavic family, a group of some thirteen languages. The Slavs are divided
into three major families: Western, Eastern, and Southern. Poles, Czechs,
and Slovaks are the major members of the Western Slavs. Moravia sits
between the Czechs and Slovaks, and Czechs settled Bohemia. The
Russians and Ukrainians make up the two largest Eastern Slavs, and the
Serbs are the most historically-important Southern Slavs. Our essay
concentrates on Western Slavs, especially Poles, though similar
monographs could be written about any Slavic group. The Western Slavs
speak similar languages, and their histories were pounded out on a similar
historical anvil. Jan D ∂ ugosz rather humorously remarked of the
relationship: “ The Czechs and the Poles have one language and one
origin, while neither has anything in common with the Germans. ”
Throughout Czech lands archaeologists have uncovered vampire
graves where the buried have had their limbs amputated, their torsos
staked, bones broken, their mouths stuffed with stones and garlic—a
variety of methods with one goal in mind: the protection of the living from
the dead. ˇCelákovice undoubtedly remains the most famous of the Czech
vampire graveyards. Discovered accidentally in 1966 during home
renovations, Czech archaeologists under the direction of Jaroslav ˇSpaˇcek
eventually exhumed the remains of fourteen suspected vampires. Some
were decapitated, their mouths filled with sand and stones; none were
staked. At the time, locals circulated rumors that some of the skulls bore
fangs, but archaeologists denied this, and visitors may now view a vampire
exhibit today at the municipal museum. The site itself, only six miles
northeast of Prague, had been occupied since the Stone Age, with Western
Slavs moving in sometime in the ninth century. The graves dated to the
tenth and eleventh centuries, bolstering the theory that the introduction of
Christian burial caused what scholar P. M. Barford labeled “a vampire
panic” among the Western Slavs (The Early Slavs, Cornell University
Press, 2001). The panic appears to have begun with the Czechs, who were
Christianized earlier, and then spread to Poland in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries.
Kaszubian folk piece depicting a demon-possessed fiddle. The role occupied by the demonic in the
lives of gifted musicians is a common theme in Polish folklore.

Some readers may be surprised to find such a topic given space in a

scholarly survey like Barford’s The Early Slavs, but, in truth, the academic
world has long recognized the influence of the undead in the life and
culture of the Slavs—which, of course, does not mean they recognize the
objective reality of vampirism! One notable exception to the scholarly
consensus is Bruce A. McClelland, who, in his Slayers and Their
Vampires (University of Michigan Press, 2006), argues that the vampire’s
supernatural identity evolved over the course of the Middle Ages.
According to McClelland, the demonic vampire took shape as the local
population adapted the Orthodox Church’s teachings on excommunication
and used them to construct a scapegoat to explain disasters.
McClelland bases much of his thesis on the so-called Sofia Text of
the “Oration of St. Gregory.” The text, of Byzantine origin, is sometimes
attributed to the sublime Gregory Nazianzus (d.389), and the original may
have been written as early as the fourth century by a Greek Christian who
railed against pagan feasts and games, which normally followed sacrifices.
According to McClelland, the text was adapted for use by the Orthodox
Church as it moved into the pagan lands of the Slavic north. When an
unknown churchman inserted a line about vampire cults into the
“Oration,” the term probably had no negative supernatural connotation. Of
course, when and all this supposedly happened is up for grabs, and
virtually all other specialists accept the “Oration” as a genuine artifact of
ancient Slavic vampire belief, including Indiana University’s Felix Oinas
and Régis Boyer of the prestigious Sorbonne, who both date the document
to the eleventh century. Boyer even uses the “Oration” as “a kind of
diachronic skeleton” upon which he constructed his survey “Slavic Myths,
Rites, and Gods” in American, African, and Old European Mythologies
(Yves Bonnefoy, ed., The University of Chicago Press, 1993). Boyer
suggested that Slavic vampire belief was rooted in ancient ancestor
worship, and he attributed the cult’s persistence to its vast antiquity.
Finally, McClelland completely fails to deal with the evidence of
vampire belief among the Catholic Western Slavs. Surely, with the
abundant vampire burials, some dating to the sixth century, we can rule out
influence from the Orthodox south. Wilhelm Gaj-Piotrowski studied the
supernatural beliefs of peasants geographically isolated for centuries in a
wedge of territory south of the forks of the Vistula and San rivers, and
there, amidst the barely penetrable marshes, bogs, and forest, he found the
vampire in several guises (Duchy i demony, Polskie Towarzystwo
Ludoznawcze, 1993). Curiously, some members of these isolated pockets
even used the term wampir, a word not in general circulation until after the
First World War. For as far back as we can look, the Slavic people feared
the dead rising in one form or another to prey upon the living.
Undoubtedly, many of the vampire burials were preventative measures
taken in case a suspicious death might rise to join the legion of undead. No
fixed formula existed to determine who would return. A victim of
drowning? An especially wicked individual? One bitten by a vampire? All
constituted a definite maybe—but not a surety. In such cases, the corpse
would be viewed as suspicious. Some proof would be required for further
action, since, after all, most of the undead were once members of the
Church, and molesting their corpse would amount to sacrilege.
The Russians, for example, have a nifty term for these suspicious
corpses, calling them the zalozhnye pokoiniki, or the “set-aside” dead. The
zalozhnye included anyone whose passing occurred before his allotted time
on earth. Since that person’s time wasn’t up, his soul could not pass,
forcing him to linger near the place of death. A special class of the
zalozhnye included the “walking” dead. Anyone who led a particularly
wicked life or who had dealings with the devil was a candidate to go
walking in death. Like the Poles, the Russians revered the earth as sacred,
and, as such, it might refuse to accept the remains of one so wicked, so
these individuals might be buried face down with an aspen stake driven
through their heart as a precaution. The stake may be viewed as something
like a lightning rod. Just as the grounding cable diverts the energy of a
lightning strike, so the stake discharged the negative energy of the corpse
by “earthing” it, thereby preventing the ground from pushing the evil dead
back to the surface. As an interesting aside, some Polish folktales say that
an aspen stake driven into the shadow of a sorcerer will neutralize his
magical power and even pin him to a spot.
The depth of this belief is often found in popular literature—
sometimes in surprising ways. In Elsie Byrde’s The Polish Fairy Book (J.
B. Lippincott, 1925), an authentic collection aimed at younger readers, the
ground regurgitates the corpse of a wicked witch. Byrde simply related
without additional comment: “When they came to bury her the earth
refused to take her in, and so she lay in the fields.” The underlying concept
of the sacred earth rejecting the evil dead is even invoked by the likes of
Boleslaw Prus (1847–1912), often considered Poland’s finest novelist. In
The Outpost (1885), an example of Positivist realism, a negligent servant
is cursed to wandering after death: “May the ground spit him out!”
A variation of this theme might be called the “Accusing Hand,” a
literary motif that has existed since the Middle Ages and continues until
our own day. The basic idea is that the guilty party’s hand will emerge
from the earth to accuse them of their sins until something is done to
rectify their errors—masses said, discipline administered, deeds done, etc.
Paul Barber, in his Vampires, Burial and Death, noted that the theme
turned up in nineteenth-century German literature, and then he gave an
example from 1868 Szczecin, an ethnically Polish city! In Barber’s story
two spoiled children became so unruly that they even dared strike their
parents. We’re not told how they die, but, following their burial, the very
same hands they used to strike their parents reached out from their graves.
Though bloody, the hands did not decay, and—more alarming—whenever
a witness reburied the hands, they would reemerge. Local officials decided
the best way to end these disturbances was to sever the offending hands
and hang them in the vestry of the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul.
In Polish Folklore and Myth (Penfield Press, 2001), Joanne Asala
related a similar tale, told to her as fact by her housekeeper in Chicago,
who said it happened to a friend-of-a-friend back in her village in Poland.
Asala’s story concerns a very nasty child named Marta, who behaved
abusively toward her siblings, disobeyed the nuns at school, and was even
known to slap her mother in the midst of a tantrum. As so frequently
happens in folklore, Marta got her comeuppance and drowned. The sight
of Marta’s small hand sticking out of the rich, black Polish soil horrified
Marta’s mother, dutifully visiting her daughter’s grave. The poor woman
instinctively sought the advice of the village priest, who informed her that,
unless she meted out the punishment she withheld in life, the ground
would continue to refuse her daughter. With the priest there to guide her,
Marta’s mother took a stick back to the grave and beat Marta’s hand back
in the ground. The next morning, the ground over her grave remained
undisturbed. This tale notes how a thick carpet of grass grew over the
grave, indicating that the earth returned to its natural state: sacred and
fertile.
Given the Polish love of folklore, it hardly surprises that the
Accusing Hand worked its way up into the nation’s more formal literature.
Franciszek Morawski (1785–1861) originally published “The Birch Tree
of Gryzyna” in 1835, and Marion Moore Coleman published this
translation in the journal Wis ∂ a and in her anthology A World
Remembered (1965). Gryzyna indeed exists as a small town in Great
Poland, and the local people let their famous birch tree grow to a ripe old
age before finally felling it in 1875.

You’re fond, you say, of the flowers of village dreams?

Then for this one take time:
The first from a hut in Great Poland, it seems,
To be put in rhyme.

Think not it will come in a garment showy or bright,

 But simple and plain,
For modest are always the tales the people recite,
In memory retain.

In Gryzyna there stands, all wreckage and ruin among,

To St. Martin, a church.
Once praise through its aisle resounded to heaven, and song,
Where lone stands the birch.

Grave mounds unnumbered are here to attest the flight

Of time that has been.
And silent above, the birch, in its coat milk white,
Shades the dead as they dream.

Should the birch tree, fairest and first to bloom in the spring,
Tempt your footsteps near,
Then ask of the Gryzyn folk, why a woeful thing
Is the tree, although dear.

They’ll tell you, that far in the past there was buried here
A child that had died.
In the icy grave he’s been laid, yonder village near,
The old church beside.

Not for long had he lain, the pet of his mother, dead
Nor long buried been.
When the one who had dug his grave to the pastor fled
To tell what he’d seen.

“What’s happening yonder?” the fellow blurted in fright,

“For all my great care,
The child that we buried has raised from the grave this night
His hand in the air.”

The pastor with crucifix, prayer book and stole to the scene
Soon swiftly was bound,
To press, thrice making the cross, the hand
Firm back in the ground.
 His heart then to God, and his soul to the heavenly throne
He lifted, to kneel
And pray. But the spectre returned, rising upward alone
Despite his appeal.

Some power of its own must the poor little hand possess,
Some magic unknown,
Snowy white, from its way the grave-soil to press,
And upward to’ve grown.

The pastor, uprising calls, “Have the church bell rung,

To summon the folk!”
And when all were gathered, standing before him as one,
He the silence broke.

The mother it was he addressed, saying, “Yonder hand

YOU ONLY can heal.
For the secret is yours, which at God’s command
You must here reveal.”

The mother refused at first and in silence stood,

Eaten up with despair.
Then, facing the spectre, her tears pouring down in a flood,
Told them waiting there:

“The fault is my own, that I petted and coddled him so,

Which the Lord now repays.
And when I rebuked him, the boy,—you must know—
Struck in anger, my face.”

Said the priest, “Strike the hand with this birchen twig growing near,
As it punished must be.
That you may your son by an earthly punishment here,
From eternal set free.”

“Strike hard,” the pastor encouraged. The mother right,

To the grave then walked slow,
And turning her eyes and the birchen twig raising high,
 Struck the ordered blow.

The hand at the twig’s mere touch seemed the blow to spurn,
As it lifeless fell,
To shrink in horror and back in the grave to return,
Alone, of itself.

Over everyone’s heart, standing there, flows a chilling wave,

And their faces blanch,
As the priest steps forward and sharply the waiting grave
Strikes with the branch.

Then a second wonder: leaves, as in early spring,

On the birch twig see!
And the branch rising up and soaring, a living thing,
Till a full-grown tree!

Gone is the little church, and with passing time

Has come many a turn.
Fallen the oaks, of the forest no single sign,
But the birch stands firm.

Now children in wonder and awe still throng to the site,

Looking round for the church,
And hear again of a boy, of a mother’s plight,
And Gryzyna’s birch.

In yet another spin off the Accusing Hand motif, we hear of spectral
priests who burn imprints into wood as memorials to their negligence.
Circumstances of war forced Ukrainian refugees to take shelter in a former
Roman Catholic rectory, now remodeled into a tavern in Presov, Slovakia.
The innkeeper warned the refugees that the apparition of a repentant priest
once visited their room. The apparition rested his shackled hands upon the
desk of a young priest and implored him to right a great wrong. He
revealed that in life he had collected fees for a number of memorial masses
but failed to perform the sacraments. After the younger priest recovered
the ledger documenting the Mass schedule, he returned to find two
smoking handprints on his desk. Polish immigrants brought the
phenomenon to America, as we learn from the case of the rectory of Sts.
Peter and Paul, Independence, Wisconsin. According to Helen
Zimniewicz, several priests witnessed the death of one of their own who
had apparently failed to say three memorial masses. Just as he expired,
they saw the image of a human hand burn itself deep into the wood of the
sick room’s door. Many people, both lay and clergy, saw the imprint over
a number of years before the old rectory was finally torn down.
And, finally, lest we dismiss the lot as fairy tales and hokum, TAPS
investigated a nearly identical case at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church,
Prosser, Washington, for their popular SciFi Channel program, Ghost
Hunters in 2007 (“Houses of the Holy”). In the rectory, now home to the
Rev. Deborah Jennings, a foot seemingly stepped out of a wall and burned
its impression on the hardwood floor. TAPS never identified the cause, but
they did discover that the home formerly occupying the site of the rectory
burned down. Nevertheless, TAPS documented an array of startling
phenomena at St. Matthew’s rectory, and the cause and production of the
charred print remains a modern mystery which echoes the lore of the past.
 Chapter 8
The Nobleman as Vampire

Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,

From cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

In the earliest analysis of the vampire in English, Dudley Wright’s

Vampires and Vampirism (1914), we find a tantalizing tidbit supposedly
originating from the Neues Wiener Journal. Wright cited an article by the
famous occultist Dr. Franz Hartmann (1838–1912) from the September
1909 issue of the Occult Review. Hartmann summarized an item the
Austrian paper ran on June 10, 1909, writing that, “the castle of B— had
been burned by the populace, because there was a great mortality among
the peasant children, and it was generally believed that this was due to the
invasion of a vampire, supposed to be the last Count B—, who died and
acquired that reputation. The castle was situated in a wild and desolate part
of the Carpathian Mountains, and was formerly a fortification against the
Turks. It was not inhabited, owing to its being believed to be in possession
of ghosts; only a wing of it was used as a dwelling for the caretaker and his
wife.” Hartmann then went on to spin a terrific vampire yarn, making us
suspect the authenticity of his source. Nevertheless, if events did not
unfold the way Hartmann claimed, he did indeed capture the spirit of the
people. Most peasants surely would have liked to burn down their masters’
estates.
Polish peasants readily employed the metaphor of the greedy
nobleman as vampire in their rich and abundant folk literature. A tale
contained in W. S. Kuniczak’s The Glass Mountain (Hippocrene Books,
1992) introduces us to a certain Mazovian lord who squeezed his peasants
so hard that they resembled lifeless phantoms more than living people.
Despite his complete lack of noblesse oblige, the clergy bowed to his
earthly power and buried him with full Catholic dignity in his family crypt
alongside his ancestors. There he did not rest in peace. He quitted the crypt
at midnight and wandered through the village before disappearing into the
vast Mazovian woods. His midnight ramblings caused a panic among the
simple folk so much so that only dogs would go out after dark. The beasts
could be heard barking and howling until sunrise. With the passage of
time, however, the villagers sensed no physical threat from the habitual
strolls of the Mazovian midnight rambler, and some of the braver lads
began to follow their former master on his jaunts. One boy eventually
tracked him to a crumbling old mill tower, discovering that the dead miser
spent his evenings counting treasure before returning to the grave.
Eventually the boy and his brother located the nobleman’s secret stash and
liberated the treasure for use among the living. They dispatched the
revenant with an aspen stake and bound the lid of his sarcophagus with a
rope plaited with willows.
The tale of “Simon,” collected by Zoë Zajdler in her Polish Fairy
Tales (Follett Publishing Co., 1959) weaves an encounter with an upiór
into a longer narrative. In the story we meet a dreamer and ne’er-do-well
by the name of Simon, who has deceived his father into shipping him
hundreds of thalers to pay for a series of uniforms that would outfit him for
a succession of nonexistent military promotions. After the truth catches up
with him, Simon flees his father’s wrath and wanders the Polish
countryside in search of his destiny. We will catch up with Simon on the
first morning of his adventure:

With that he turned back to the town, and Simon was left alone in
the forest. Dawn was just breaking, the air was fresh and sparkling.
Making his way to the highway, Simon looked towards the horizon,
and the thought came to him that now before him lay once more the
far-off, glittering world which he had once desired to conquer.
Thereafter, he traveled for a long time, as far and as wide as
his legs would carry him. He visited towns and cities and wandered
through hamlets and villages, seeking hospitality from rich lords and
at strange courts. The greater part—both rich and poor—received
him kindly. Some even gave him a coin to take on his way, as well
as filling his satchel with food or lodging him for the night. Simon
had now learned to play very dapperly on the flute. Wandering thus
through the wide world, with his flute and his satchel, he came at
length to a place where he espied two castles, one set very high on a
hill and the other at its foot. The castle at the foot was filled with
lights and bustle, while the castle on the height was shrouded in
gloom and seemed to lie under perpetual shade.
To satisfy his curiosity, he demanded of the people he met
who were the personages living in the two castles.
In reply he learned that in the castle in the valley there lived a
prince with his only daughter. This princess was extremely
beautiful, so blooming and so fresh that all who saw her likened her
to a young tree in an orchard, graceful and charming and seeming as
though each morning she had been newly bathed in dew. But the
princess, although so comely, and the apple of her father’s eye and
rich withal, was never anything but sad. Tears were for ever falling
from her charming eyes as she lamented her sad fate, and all this
because of a spell under which the castle on the height was fast
bound. In this castle, there stalked abroad the spirit of her
grandfather, dead these very many years. In life he had been harsh
and cruel, an oppressor of his people, as spendthrift and a gamester.
When he had died he had left a great fortune behind him, but a
fortune still greater had been recklessly flung away. His soul, after
his time on earth, could find since his death no resting place or
haven. The princess’s fate was that she was forbidden to marry until
a suitor had been found daring and resourceful enough to share the
vigil of the poor earthbound soul, defy all the threats it might offer,
then free the castle from the terrible spell. News of the princess’s
plight had gone out everywhere through the wide world, and no
small number of princes and noble knights had come riding to take
up the challenge, for no other princess in the whole world was so
beautiful or was heiress to so great a fortune. One after another, they
had scaled the height and entered the gloomy castle after set of sun,
but not one of them had ever returned. And no new suitor now ever
came to brave the perils and attempt to break the spell.
When Simon heard all this, he instantly determined that none
but himself should free the princess and live happily ever after. For,
I have not told you this before, with all his faults, Simon had a lion’s
heart.
The very next day he seated himself below the ramparts of the
castle at the foot of the hill, took out his flute and played his
sweetest and merriest airs. The prince and his daughter were so
pleased with this music that they came to the windows and looked
out and saw Simon. Now this I have not told you, either, but Simon
was extremely handsome, with hair the colour of ripe flax and eyes
as blue as the periwinkle in June. The princess begged her father to
send for the young man and his flute. She even said that if anything
could please her it would be that he should stay with them in the
castle for ever and beguile her ears with his airs at the moments
when she felt most sad. The prince was the kindest of fathers and
dearly loved his beautiful daughter. He consented at once. The
princess herself went down from the ramparts and across the bridge
which spanned the moat, until she came to the place on the
greensward where Simon was seated all this time, and with her own
lips begged him to become her father’s and her own court musician.
As for Simon, the moment he saw the princess and heard her voice,
he forgot everything that had passed in the whole of his life before,
and loved her with all his heart.
The prince and his daughter were astonished to find, as they
conversed with him, a young man of such excellent address. They
kept him with them all day, taking care that he should have the best
of everything to eat and drink. He now learned from their own lips
the story which had been told him by the common people. Simon
dared to admit openly that he had already resolved to brave the
terrors of the enchanted castle and to win the hand of the princess.
As he made this declaration the princess said nothing at all, only her
cheeks grew a brilliant red and her eyes shone like stars. It was clear
that, at one and the same time, she both feared to see Simon go into
such danger and felt the dawning of a new and sweet hope steal into
her heart. The young man, seeing all this, became even more eager
than before to undertake the adventure. The prince, finding that he
would not be dissuaded, and seeing that evening was already falling,
ordered a carriage with four splendid horses to be brought, and the
young man conducted to the top of the hill and the entrance to the
gloomy castle. As soon as he had arrived before the castle, Simon
leaped boldly to the ground and passed through the vestibule and
into the first of the great rooms. Striking a light, he saw an immense
chamber with no visible inhabitant. Magnificent painted ceilings
were supported on sculptured columns. The walls were hung with
mirrors in rich gold frames, pictures, blackened now from neglect,
and silk tapestries crumbling into dust. Everywhere were statues and
tissues and other stuffs of great price, all neglected, all falling into
ruin. Beyond the wide windows could be seen the castle gardens,
overgrown with weeds. The trees in the broad alleys which had once
been shapely were now choked with mistletoe and strangling vines.
It was a boding silence. Only, from time to time, a light wind rose or
a night bird stirred a branch with the passage of its wings. Simon did
not allow himself to stand and muse for long. First, he placed a chair
and table beside each other, then sought until he found a clock and
wound it up and set it going, so that he should know how the hours
went. After this he seated himself, took out a book which he had
brought with him, and began to read.
At the hour when the silence was most deep, the clock struck
eleven, then again, the half-hour before twelve.
“He will come now, for sure,” thought Simon. Just as he
thought this, he heard, still a long way off, a sound as of the clinking
of iron, and then another clinking, and then another; drawing nearer
each time. Then he heard, as it were, footfalls also, thought very
light. His heart began to beat very fast in his bosom, but he sat tight
where he was, made not a single movement, and continued with his
reading.
The doors opened and within the opening appeared the
stooping figure of an aged man with a bunch of keys in his hand.
Gazing at him, Simon perceived that he was quite unclothed, and
black as pitch from head to foot. Only his grey moustache stirred
and his eyes blazed, as though fire burned behind them. Simon still
made no move and still studied his book. The apparition moved
close to him, looked him well over, and demanded in a menacing
voice: “Who has given you permission to sit down in my castle?”
“Nobody gave me permission,” replied Simon. “I knew that
the castle was uninhabited and I came here to pass the night.”
“And do you not fear me?” went on the apparition. “Do you
not know how many foolhardy souls have already perished here, and
all at my hand?”
“I am not so easily frightened,” said Simon. “I am the son of a
peasant and a peasant myself, of stout stock. I think that in your
lifetime, satanic Lord, you were a good deal more frightening than
you are now.”
“You speak boastingly, son of a churl, but will you speak so
to the end? We shall see.”
“Here are the keys,” then said the apparition. “Take them and
open the doors into the next room.”
Simon did not move a muscle.
“I can follow, if you so will,” said he, “but not serve you. You
are the master here. Open the doors yourself.”
The phantom made no reply, but as he opened the doors and
passed across the threshold into the next room the hair which grew
close to his brow became perfectly white and fair. Simon saw this
and his heart leaped for joy. At the third pair of doors the same thing
happened again. The phantom once more proffered the keys,
ordering him to open, and Simon again replied: “You are the master
here. Open them yourself.”
As the third pair of doors opened, the whole of the
apparition’s head lost its pitch colour and shone white like silver.
Simon marked this also, but still said nothing. In this way they
passed through the fourth, fifth and sixth, and as far as the twelfth
pairs of doors. As each successive threshold was crossed, the
apparition became fairer and whiter to view. By the seventh, he had
become transformed down to his waist, and at the twelfth he
regained the whole appearance of a human being.
When the twelfth pair of doors was opened, a terrible stench
issued forth, causing Simon almost to swoon. When he came to
himself, he saw that the room was piled with corpses. His
companion smiled and now his countenance was joyful and he
spoke with a voice which was exceedingly gentle.
“See for yourself how many have perished here, who did not
know how to bring about my deliverance. It is plain now that, from
the beginning, this secret was reserved for the son of a peasant.
None but you knew what ought to be said and what should be done.
You have saved both yourself and the castle. As for me, I have no
means of knowing if my ordeal is yet finished. It may be that in
 another world I still have expiation to make, but from this world at
least I am now set free, and need never haunt this castle more. Take
up this axe now, with which I have slain so many, and strike off my
head.”
Simon at first refused this charge, and begged to be excused
from it. His companion however said: “Unless you now sever my
head at the shoulders, all will have been in vain, and your own head
instead of mine will have to fall.”
Thereupon Simon took up the axe and at one stroke cut off the
apparition’s head. Instantly the figure fell to dust, the dust whirled
for an instant in a cloud at Simon’s feet, and from out of the centre
of the cloud flew a white bird which soared out of the window and
above the roof of the castle and disappeared. This was the soul of
the former lord of the castle which at last been set free.
When all this was done, Simon laid himself down to rest, and
slept until morning. As he awoke, the carriage bearing the prince
and princess arrived before the castle. Simon hastened to join them.
At first, they were filled with doubts, for they could hardly believe
that they were truly seeing before them a still living creature, where
so many before him had been lost for ever.
Seeing this, Simon exclaimed with joy: “Why are you so
fretful? The spell is broken. The poor prisoner is freed. If you cannot
yet believe all this, come with me and see for yourselves.”
The prince and princess then visited all the twelve rooms.
They rejoiced greatly that their terrible trial was now ended, that the
castle was itself again, and their own. As for the princess, she could
not have enough of the gazing upon Simon, so proud as so glad did
she feel that he had succeeded where the boldest and most noble
knights and princes of the whole world had failed.

Peasants living in partitioned Poland would no doubt relate to the

image of the vampiric nobleman, an “oppressor of the people,” who had
squandered the wealth of the land and his patrimony on selfish excess. Not
surprisingly, in this peasant’s tale, one of their own restores the natural
order through courage, bold action, and resourcefulness—peasant virtues.
Zajdler also included a variation of the familiar Vampire Princess theme
that we discussed in chapter five. In Zajdler’s redaction, we find the
vampire as a demonically-possessed corpse. Yet, as one born a vampire,
the princess may be delivered from “the second death” in a manner similar
to the old nobleman in “Simon.” Once again, the agent of redemption is a
hard-drinking, downtrodden, and impoverished soldier, desperate to better
his circumstances through bravery and wit.

A certain king had no heir. His subjects were much troubled at the
thought that after his death there would be nobody to rule them. The king,
in his grief, was heard to exclaim: “Were it to be a monster, even, let there
at least be a child to succeed me.”
After many years, the queen had at last the great joy of expecting an
infant. A princess was born, but alas, a monster indeed! From head to foot
the poor little creature, beautifully shaped and formed and with her
mother’s eyes, was as black as pitch. The queen and her consort were
much afflicted. The king, however, moved with compassion and unwilling
to repudiate their own daughter, who otherwise was in every way a most
engaging child, said to his wife: “What must be, must be. Clearly a curse
has been set upon our posterity. Nevertheless, she is our own, and what has
been given us must be ours to keep.”
He gave orders that the infant, while having fit attendance and the
instruction due to her rank, was to be kept close confined in a tower with a
special household named by himself. Here he called into his presence all
the wisest men and most cunning physicians and astrologers of the
kingdom, as well as philosophers and scholars of all kinds, adjuring them
to find a remedy against the cruel spell which had fallen before her birth
on the hapless princess. Some counseled one thing, some another. The
physicians recommended drugs and potions. The astrologers blamed the
stars. The scholars sought in the brass-bound tomes for chronicles of
similar misfortunes. The philosophers counselled resignation. But the
infant princess remained as pitch-coloured as before, and continued so. No
solution of the difficulty was found, not any way to undo the cruel spell.
One creature only, a simple woman who had no letters, foretold
privately to the king that his daughter would die in her eighteenth year, but
that after her death her sad fate might be changed, and she herself return to
life and live happy ever after, as fair and as beautiful as she was already
good.
Exactly as the old woman had foretold, so it came to pass. The
princess died on the day following her eighteenth birthday. Before her
death she asked a boon of her father: “Kind father,” begged she, “do not
lay me in the ground to moulder there, but enclose my body in a coffin,
and this coffin in a tomb in your own mausoleum, where are the other
tombs of our royal line.” Then she further asked that over the tomb there
might every night be mounted a strict guard, with a single soldier to keep
it.
The king did as she requested. The funeral was celebrated with
much pomp and the coffin was borne to a bier to the king’s own royal
mausoleum amid the tolling of passing bells and the fluttering of mourning
pennons. Maidens of her own age strewed flowers before the bier, and the
princess’s own hatchments were placed at the head of the tomb.
The guard on the first night was mounted by an ensign of the king’s
guard. The deceased princess had asked only for a simple soldier, and not
one even of the Household, but her father wished to be even better than his
word and that everything should be carried out as befitted a princess,
whatever her misfortune and his own. At midnight the coffin flew open,
the lid clattered to the ground and the princess leaped out, horribly
transformed. Her countenance, which in life had been of the greatest
gentleness, was that of a demon. With her own hands she strangled the
young ensign, tore to shreds the mourning pennons, pulled down the
hatchments, overturned bell, book and candle, and danced and performed
the most horrible pranks until the first cock-crow. At cock-crow, she
returned to her coffin and lay down in it, and the lid of its own accord rose
up from the ground and shut her in.
The king and all his court were much afraid. On the second night,
however, the king again ordered a guard to be set. Again an officer of the
Household was strangled and the same horrible scenes were performed.
The stoutest hearts were now dismayed. Some said that an incubus had all
this time occupied the body of the princess, and now, after her death,
would not be confined within wax or lead. Others said that the dreadful
being was a vampire and that the only cure would be to drive a stake
through the heart of the princess as she lay, apparently without life, and in
her coffin, by day. After this, her head should be cut off and the trunk
buried in the common cemetery. But the king remembered the saying of
the ancient woman, which she had made to him privately, and still hoped
for a remedy. Accordingly, he ordered a muster of the whole army and a
proclamation was read by which he made it known that whoever should
succeed in releasing the princess from the spell cast upon her before her
birth, might ask whatsoever favour he desired, even to one-half of the
kingdom, and should not be refused.
No one, however, of all the king’s men was found bold enough to
take his life in his hands and undertake to keep guard over the coffin which
held the princess.
In the end a single volunteer came forward. This man was a
corporal, had served at home and abroad for seven years and had the
reputation of ne’er-do-well and a wastrel. His boon companions were all
idlers and gamblers, like himself. He cared for nothing and nobody, and
his pleasures were tippling and card playing. All his pay had gone for these
things. The corporal well knew that once his service was finished nothing
better awaited him than his remaining ha’pence of pay, a tattered uniform
to his back and a beggar’s staff in his hand. Thereafter the wide world
would be his shelter, the sky his roof, and in the end he would die
somewhere of cold and hunger, with nobody to feel any sorrow at his
passing. Having then little to lose, and being by nature a gambler, he
stepped from the ranks and declared his willingness to undertake the vigil,
provided only that for this one night he should be served with a copious
supper and as much fiery spirits as he could drink. The quartermaster
ordered him to be supplied at once with a quarter of eau-de-vie, but the
corporal, saying that his throat was as dry as his powder, protested that
three such quarters would not be too much for such a thirst.
When he had received the eau-de-vie, a rye loaf and the two thighs
of a fat smoked goose, with a cheese made from ewe’s milk, and a hunk of
lard, he set out with a bold front. His comrades escorted him with honours,
for in their hearts each believed that he was going to his death and wished
at least to send him bravely out of the world. The corporal, as soon as he
found himself alone, sat down on a marble bench among the tombs and put
his lips to the mouth of his bottle. A second mouthful followed and a third,
but still his courage would not rise above his boots. Thick darkness lay all
about him and deep silence. Through one small slit only, high up in the
furthest wall, there came a little fitful light from an overcast moon. The
silence was so profound that he fancied he could hear it ringing in his ears,
and all the time he felt a prickling of his skin and a certainty that from one
moment to another the terrible scene would begin; the coffin lid fly up on
its own accord and crash to the ground, and the princess, covered with
pitch, leap from her coffin and tear out his throat.
Seated on the cold marble, he reflected upon his own folly and the
bravado which had brought him to such a place.
 If he deserted now, a bullet would no doubt be his fate. If he stayed,
his body was almost certainly condemned to perish, but was not, alas, also
his soul? Up to now, the corporal’s thoughts had not often been for any
such part of himself. Now, however, he strove to remember the words of a
prayer and wished that he might ask to be shriven. But, again, there was no
priest in this terrible place of tombs as cold as death itself; and he dared
not leave his post to seek one. There seemed no way at all out of his
predicament. Thinking thus, he remembered many an adventure as many a
moment of mortal danger, from his time in the wars. His spirits rose at the
recollection; then sank again as he remembered that this was no common
danger, and no common enemy was awaiting him, but a being from
beyond the grave.
The clock now struck ten. This sound, in all that darkness and
silence, struck such terror to his heart that he could no longer stay in place,
and ran forth as though he were already pursued, not considering where he
went.
When he came to his senses, he saw that he was in the graveyard
and here a voice spoke to him: “Soldier, whither are you hastening, and
why are you so much afraid?”
The corporal raised his eyes and saw before him an aged man with a
long silver beard. The stranger’s face was gentle and his look clear and
kind. The corporal at once felt cheered and told him the whole story, so far
as he knew it.
“Do not desert your post,” said the aged man. “Return whence you
came, be of good heart, no harm shall befall you. Only do exactly as I new
bid you. When you are once more inside that place, take off your outer
garments, strike your carbine and bayonet and prop them together against
the marble bench upon which you sat now. Cover them with your
greatcoat, place your shako on the bayonet’s point, conceal yourself at a
distance, and wait there resolutely until all is done, neither speaking nor
moving, and thereafter tell nobody what you have seen and heard.”
The soldier took heart, returned to his post, and did everything as
the aged man had bidden him.
When midnight struck, the coffin burst open as before. The pitch
princess leaped to the middle of the floor and seeing the carbine and the
greatcoat with the cap above, cried out gleefully: “Ho, today I have one
more for my partner a handsome and toothsome carabineer.”
So saying, she seized the bayonet and buried her teeth in it, at a
single bite cutting through the steel. When, however, she perceived that
this was not flesh but cold steel, she cried out in a voice of the utmost
anguish: “My father has buried me alive and left me all unprovided for.
Unless, indeed, the living soldier is still here somewhere. If so, I shall soon
find him.”
Her phantom form blew, rather than ran, about the mausoleum. The
corporal watched it all. She grimaced with baffled rage, pounced, feinted,
whirled and turned about, in all the corners, and even below the rafters. All
this time a cold wind blew everywhere, and a fine dry dust rose and settled
in the corporal’s nostrils and throat.
“One more minute and I will have you,” cried the princess again and
again, keeping up the hunt. “I see you. You cannot escape me.”
But the corporal did not answer a word nor move a muscle. The
phantom, occupied with her search, this time left bell, book and candle,
ornaments and pennons, untouched, and the ghastly dance of the night
before and the horrible gestures with which she had shown her satisfaction,
were omitted.
All this time the corporal was mortally afraid, hearing her savage
utterances and seeing her eyes burning like red-hot holes in the face of
pitch. These eyes made him think of the false fire which dances in the
marshes and lures the benighted traveller to his doom. At last came the
first light of dawn and the first cock-crow. The pitch princess was forced
to return to her coffin, where she again lay down. The lid again came up
and closed down over her with the same violence as on the previous night.
When he was satisfied that for this night all was over, the corporal
resumed his greatcoat and shako and sat down to wait. His comrades,
coming to see what had passed, were astounded to find him still alive and
ran with the news to the king. The king commanded that he should at once
appear before him and questioned him as to the night’s events and by what
means he had been preserved alive. The corporal, however, would tell
nothing, mindful of what the old man had said.
When the king made it known that the next night too a watch should
be kept, and the corporal again mount the guard, the veteran was much
discontented. A single night passed in such circumstances was more than
enough for a lifetime. And here they were ordering him to tempt fate in the
same way a second time.
The same ceremonies were again gone through on the second night.
The corporal was again escorted by his comrades. The same provisions as
before were placed within his reach, although this time he did not so much
as ask for them. Once alone, the same fears again overcame him, and he
made up his mind to find his way again to the graveyard and there to seek
his new acquaintance who had counseled him so well on the preceding
night.
“Return to your post,” ordered the aged man, as before. “No harm
shall come to you. This time conceal yourself in the turning of the great
staircase. Sprinkle each step below you with drops of water from this
bottle, and keep in your bosom the leaves of the herb which you will see
springing from the ground where I have set my foot. The phantom will not
then be able to come within reach of you.”
Once more the brave soldier did as he was ordered, plucking the
herb form where the ancient man had set his foot, and sprinkling the stairs
below that on which he took his stand with drops of water from the bottle
he had been given.
When the princess at midnight broke from her prison, grimacing
horribly, it was at once apparent that this time she was savagely hungry.
Her horrible form whirled about among the arches, in and out of the tombs
and about the foot of the staircase, until the soldier’s eyes almost started
from his head with fear. At length, pausing for a moment at the foot of the
stairs, she looked up and saw him. A more piercing shriek than ever before
issued from her lips, and she cried: “Ah soldier, so you are there. I have
you. Now you are mine.”
But, however may times she flung herself upward, as often she was
forced down again, and could not pass even the first of the steps which he
had sprinkled with the drops of water.
In great anger she then turned back and returning to the tombs,
began to toss out all the coffins which were within. Piling one upon
another, she began the ascent from which she hoped to reach out and pull
the soldier down. As she mounted to the topmost of the pile, the first light
of dawn began to appear through the slit where on the former night he had
seen the shining of the moon. The first cock crew, faintly at first and then
loud and clear, and the coffins all came tumbling down, one from off the
other. The pitch princess—as though in her true self she had regard for
order and propriety—before returning to her own, paused to replace them
all in the tombs from which she had hurled them. As he saw this, the
soldier’s heart for the first time was filled with a drop of pity, and he
thought with sorrow of the poor phantom, doomed to commit crimes and
outrage decency, from midnight until cock-crow.
As this first drop of pity moved in his bosom, where the herbs lay,
the princess again entered her own coffin and this time the lid came up
from the floor and shut down over her without tumult or clatter.
When the guard came in the morning, they again wondered at
finding the corporal alive and went to tell the king. Again the corporal told
nothing of all that he had heard and seen, and this time he agreed without
hesitation to take up his vigil on the following night.
As before, he sought counsel of the old man who had helped him on
each former occasion.
“This night,” said the old man, “shall be the last of your ordeal.
Remove your outer garments, as you did before. Hide yourself just outside
the doors of the tomb within which the princess lies. When the coffin
opens and the princess comes forth, the doors themselves will screen you
from her eyes. Once she has left, enter boldly, and lay yourself down in
her place. Lie just as she herself lay, and whatever she threatens or
entreats, whatever she commands or whatever bargain she proposes,
neither move or speak.”
The corporal noted all well and took up his post. The princess, when
she had come forth and had sought him everywhere, at last found him
lodged in her own couch.
“So you are here, my bird,” cried she, upon finding him, and her
voice now was more dreadful than ever before. “Out at once, out from my
vestments, my napkins and cerements, my private couch!”
But the corporal did not so much as stir. Looking from beneath his
eyelids he perceived, to his great joy, the visage and neck of the princess
had paled to the color of curds. Gnawing her lips in her fury, she did not
cease to order and even to entreat him forth. Stealing a further look from
beneath his lids, he saw that nevertheless down to her waist she had lost
the pitchy colour which had been hers till now, and was so far white. So
long as he lay there, still neither speaking nor stirring, she continued in
varying tones to urge or command him forth; but little by little he
perceived that her voice, until now so savage, was losing its harshness. By
and by, when she spoke, it was in a voice as gently as a breath of May. At
last he ventured to take a full look at her and perceived that now she was
not pitchy at all. From head to foot her flesh was as white as the untrodden
snow.
The princess with her own delicate hands now drew him up out of
the coffin and led him with decent and courtly steps across the marble
tessellated floor. Now she no longer raved or threatened, but with dignity
and mildness said, looking into his face: “Chivalrous soldier, you have set
me free of the terrible curse which was laid upon me before my birth.”
The soldier dressed himself again in his outer garments. Without, it
was now almost bright day. The cock, if he had crowed, had not been
heard by either of them. The veteran’s bones, which had known ague in
the wars, felt the morning chill right through them. Looking boldly back at
the princess, who still held him by the hand, he said: “Will you drink a
cordial with me, beautiful princess?”
“My dear heart,” said the princess, “if you drink, then I will drink
with you.” So they drank together and also broke their fast. After this the
princess passed her arms about his neck and so the guard, coming in,
found them. At first they thought that, after all, their rash companion had
been strangled by the incubus. They rushed in, to defend the hero who had
so valiantly survived the two other nights.
The corporal and the princess burst out laughing, and together they
cried: “Give us more of the same cordial, for in the bottle there was not
enough for two.”
Then the guard made haste to the king and told him that the corporal
still lived, that the sore enchantment which had so tormented the princess
was now ended, and that the only thing lacking to their contentment was
more of the cordial which the quartermaster had in supply.
Then the king ordered his finest coach to be made ready, with six of
his finest horses between the shafts, and wedding garments for the princess
to be set in hand, and himself to fetch the pair. The highest in the land
were summoned to a great feast. In the chief place at the table were seated
the corporal and the beautiful princess, who was now as white as snow.
“What reward,” asked the king of his guests, “should the man have
who, after her death, ransomed my daughter and only child from a second
and more terrible death?”
Of those who heard him some said at once that such a one should
have the hand of the princess in marriage. Others, displeased, murmured
among themselves and declared that a princess could not take for her
husband a simple corporal, however valiant.
But the matter was best settled by the princess herself, who would
have no discussion but, winding her arms about the neck of the corporal,
said sweetly: “The one who delivered me, he, and he only, shall have me
for wife.”
And there was nothing strange in her thinking and saying so. Better
a simple soldier and life, than a cold tomb and a curse!

The plight of the Polish soldier, drafted into military service by the
partitioning powers, was familiar to nineteenth-century peasants. In Polish
Folklore and Myth(Penfield Press, 2001), folklorist Joanne Asala’s
collected an interesting story of how yet another soldier evaded the
clutches of two ghouls through the intercession of Our Lady of
Cze˛stochowa. In this story, traditional Polish piety and devotion to this
popular Marian shrine delivered the soldier from a hideous fate. The tale
introduces us to a soldier named W ∂ adys ∂ aw, who, despite his anxious
desire to return home after several years’ service, made time to stop at the
shrine of Cze˛stochowa to venerate Our Lady before continuing on his
way to the family farm outside of town. Darkness had longsince draped the
lush countryside of his youth, but W ∂ adys ∂ aw walked on in confidence
as the familiarity of his surroundings more than made up for any lack of
light. He crossed himself and nodded in the direction of his ancestors ’
graves as he passed the cemetery. Then an unexpected voice jolted him out
of his nostalgic reverie and excited anticipation.
“ You! Hey, you! Wait!”
When W ∂ adys ∂ aw turned to look behind him in the direction of
the voice, what he saw was not an old friend or neighbor but a rotting,
walking corpse. Its eyes were alive, but not with intelligence or soul—they
quivered with writhing maggots. The abomination made its intentions
perfectly clear as it struggled to keep up with the lean soldier: it intended
to rip his flesh from his bones. As the ghoul galloped forward, bits of flesh
sloughed-off his hanging skin.W ∂ adys ∂ aw had no intention of passively
waiting for what would happen next. He bolted.
He sprinted to a tiny chapel in the graveyard, where yet another
corpse was laid out awaiting burial. W ∂ dys ∂ aw crossed himself and hid
in the confessional for a few moments before the lumbering ghoul literally
smashed through the door. The ghoul called to him, telling him that there
was no use in hiding, even in a church. The corpse laid out in front of the
altar, angered at the disturbance, responded in challenge, claiming the
soldier as its own. The newly-deadcorpse then dove off his catafalque and
onto the rotting grotesquerie, biting him and ripping his flesh. As the two
fiends fought and struggled, W ∂ adys ∂ aw implored Our Lady of
Cze˛stochowa to save him, poor sinner that he was. A cock crowed! The
answer to his prayer took form in the shape of a sunbeam. Through the
fractured door, a torrent of light soon poured into the little church dropping
the grappling ghouls to the ground, lifeless lumps of dead flesh. So Our
Lady protects those who do her honor.
In the lands of Partitioned Poland, young men were drafted into
three different armies, cannon fodder for competing empires. To learn how
the once mighty Poles had been brought to such destitution we must once
again crack the pages of their storied past and see how the vampiric
nobility ran the country into the ground, draining it of its lifeblood as they
chased after personal pleasure and opulence. The Polish situation had so
deteriorated that her greatest Romantic writers looked to a future day of
redemption when their nation would rise as if from the dead. We close this
chapter as we began it, with the words of the great English Romantic poet,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, who pondered the vampiric nature of his own
nation’s nobility with words that strikingly reflect the pathetic state of the
abject Polish peasant.

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A Senate,—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,—
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Jan III Sobieski (1629-1696) in ancient Roman garb in a 1686 painting by Jerzy Siemiginowski-
Eleuter.
 Chapter 9

Poland as a Corpse
The Saxon Era, 1697–1763

O my fatherland, you fell at the end!

One time so rich in glory and power!
From sea to sea you did one time extend,
Not a small plot left for your sepulcher!
How much we are now moved by this great corpse!
The soul of millions was this body’s force!
~Franciszek Karpi´nski (1741–1825)

The third line from our Karpi´nski selection should strike a chord
with American readers—”From sea to sea did you once extend.” In
Poland’s version of manifest destiny, the empire extended from the Baltic
to the Black Sea, and its influence reached the Adriatic. No Pole living
under the exuberant and powerful Jagiellonian Dynasty could have
envisioned the complete and utter destruction of the Commonwealth, but
the Jagiellonian Dynasty ended with the death of Zygmunt Augustus in
1572, and with him died Poland’s golden age. From then until 1791 Poland
became a royal republic with elected monarchs, continuing as a great
military, cultural, and political power until the end of Jan III Sobieski’s
reign in 1696, the last of Poland’s warrior-kings. For the next six decades
Poland ripened into what Thomas Carlyle called “a beautifully
phosphorescent rot-heap,” eventually imploding. As the saying goes,
nature abhors a vacuum, and Austria, Prussia, and Russia swept in to
divide up Polish lands in a series of partitions—in 1772, 1793, and 1795.
It is difficult to communicate how far the morals of the European
aristocracy had degenerated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Perhaps the most convenient way to acquaint the modern American with
the debased upper crust of the era would be to refer the reader to films that
capture the spirit of the times, like Dangerous Liaisons (1988) or Johnny
Depp’s The Libertine(2004). One telling anecdote involves Poland’s
reforming monarch, Stanis ∂ aw Augustus Poniatowski (r.1764–1795)—
one of the “good guys.” Despite being one of the most erudite rulers of the
time and a genuine champion of enlightened reform, his personal life still
reflected the decadence of the times. In his Diaries, Je˛drzej Kitowicz
(1728–1804) included the following account of pleasant sail down the
Vistula. The mermaid, it should be remembered is the emblem of
Warszawa.

The city of Warsaw offered the king a splendid view of a similar

kind soon after his coronation. A boat on the Vistula was decorated
with pennons, flags, rugs, and other festive ornaments. Six maidens
of great beauty were put in it. Bare to their navels, they represented
the sea sirens, singing for the king on the shore and luring him to
join them. After this maritime exercise, the sirens had the good
fortune of finding themselves in strict incognito in the royal
chamber, where the king, having tasted an inside piece of each fish,
granted them monthly salaried wages, paid for a long time for this
and similar gratifications. (Michael J. Miko´s, ed., Polish Baroque
and Enlightenment Literature [Slavica Publishers, Inc., 1996]).

The most elegant and refined of Poland’s partitioners: Austria. This lovely taler remains one of the
most famous and collected coins in world history.

It is no big surprise that the peasants, after catching wind of what

their “betters” got up to, would cast their rapacious nobles in the shadow
of the vampire. This ill will would only be exacerbated by the increasing
influence of foreigners on Polish soil. From Saxony, the Poles had elected
Augustus II, a prodigious fornicator who sired literally hundreds of
bastards and who carried on as an eager occultist. Early on (1698) he fell
into a friendship with Russia’s Peter the Great based on ambition,
drinking, and a mutual interest in giants and dwarves. History has
bequeathed on Augustus II the sobriquet “the Strong,” as witnesses said he
could bend and twist horseshoes with his bare hands—a feat always good
for a few laughs during his marathon drinking bouts and orgies. During his
reign Poland gradually came under greater Russian influence and, finally,
control. Deposed once in the midst of an unprofitable war, we remember
Augustus II today as the founder of Europe’s first china factory in
Meissen, near Dresden. He died of alcohol poisoning in February of 1733,
uttering the words: “My whole life has been one uninterrupted sin. God
have mercy on me.”
If Augustus II was a man of misspent ability, his son was an idiot. In
The Polish Way (Hippocrene, 1987), Adam Zamoyski described Augustus
III as “obese, indolent and virtually incapable of thought. He would spend
his days cutting out bits of paper with a pair of scissors or else sitting by
the window taking potshots at stray dogs with a pistol. He also drank like a
fish…. Augustus had been first to elevate drinking marathons and duels to
cult proportions, and his porcine son was a worthy successor.” In all his
thirty-six years as king, Augustus spent a mere twenty-four months in
Poland, and he never bothered to learn a word of the language. With such a
vacuum at the top, it’s no wonder that foreign armies moved about the
realm at will, inflation grew unchecked, and the gap between rich and poor
widened. To help things along, Frederick the Great of Prussia flooded
Poland with counterfeit currency from 1753 to 1761. Poland’s real power
devolved to the great noble families like the Sapieha, the Radziwill, and
the Czartoryski, among others, and each family played host to a court of its
own. Warsaw consequently declined as capital, and urban life in general
languished throughout the Commonwealth. In 1710, Pozna´n, as one
example, had a mere two thousand inhabitants—just a tenth of what it had
a century earlier.
By the end of the Saxon Era, Polish sensibilities had become so
twisted and perverse that Fr. Je˛drzej Kitowicz, in his A Description of
Customs in the Reign of Augustus III, could actually regard the reign of the
indolent dolt as the greatest in Polish history, especially when compared to
that of the reform-minded Stanis ∂ aw Augustus Poniatowski! Poland did
indeed embark upon a remarkable and noble program of reforms but they
came too late, as predatory powers moved in to forestall the nation ’ s
resurrection. The Partitions of Poland, as the tragedy is known,
demonstrate just how far ethics had fallen in the eighteenth century. War
served as an oh-so-reasonable tool of state, and an ancient sovereign nation
could be devoured by its neighbors in a bare demonstration of sheer
avarice and raw power. It is said that the Empress Maria Theresa wept at
the First Partition in 1772. The “enlightened” Frederick the Great quipped:
“She weeps, and always takes.” It is a telling commentary that, of the
partitioning powers—Prussia, Austria, and Russia’s Catherine the Great—
Maria Theresa was the most beloved of her people and the only one not
given the title of “enlightened” by historians.
Events in Poland are critical to understanding subsequent vampire
history, since a disproportionate number of cases from the so-called
“vampire epidemic” of the eighteenth century occurred during the most
debased period in the nation’s history, the so-called Saxon Era, when a
number of unsavory ingredients coming together into an indigestible soup.
We start in a political bowl, where we have distracted and incompetent
leadership at the top with powerful nobles all pulling in different directions
throughout the Commonwealth. The state had been experiencing continual
economic decline since the first third of the seventeenth century, and,
socially, religious intolerance had increased almost proportionately to
economic misfortune. The gap between rich and poor widened, famine
increased, and population sharply decreased from nine million during the
reign of Jan Kazimierz (1648–1672) to six or seven million at the
beginning of the Saxon Era. These factors suggest that at least a portion of
the vampire craze in Poland could be attributed to contemporary stress
factors. This does not mean that none of the cases had a factual basis, only
that some cases probably grew out of hysteria, and were a frustrated
attempt to control personal destinies at a time when so much seemed
hopeless and out of control.
The notion of the vampire as scapegoat, however, doesn’t neatly
mesh with the facts. Those incidents labeled as the “first clear vampire
cases” by Hungarian historian Gábor Klaniczay (Silesia, 1591; Bohemia,
1618; Krakow, 1624) do not coincide with the waves of plague which
swept seventeenth-century Poland between 1622 and 1631, 1652-54, 1657-
58, 1660-63, 1674-75, and 1677-79, according to information provided by
Daniel Stone in his authoritative The Polish-Lithuanian State (University
of Washington, 2001). In fact, something of the opposite occurred in
Poland and Bohemia, where we note the presence of the vampire during
the prosperous golden age. The scapegoat theory applies much more
convincingly to the patterns of the Central European witch craze, which
neatly overlaps with periods of crisis and degradation. For example, two-
thirds of Hungary’s known witch trials occurred between 1690 and 1760,
the worst panic being the brutal affair in Szeged, 1728. A similar template
emerged in Poland, where witch persecution peaked between 1675 and
1725, the darkest night in the nation’s history.
The Polish and Hungarian situations also reflect a wider European
phenomenon, where witch persecutions spread to the periphery after they
had already died out in Western Europe. Witch trials swelled in Sweden
from 1660 on and continued until the end of the seventeenth century,
whereas, in France, they were forbidden by royal decree in 1682 following
the black mass and Satanism scare surrounding the “Affair of Poisons”
(1666–82). America, too, fell in with these wider currents, as diabolical
goings-on shuddered New England in the 1690s. All of this of course is
sketchy, but it does suggest areas for future research. No naturalistic
explanation, of course, can explain why victims complained of nocturnal
assault prior to exhumations, nor can they address the uniformity of
supernatural misdeeds attributed to suspected vampires through so many
centuries and by so many cultures.
The Partitions of Poland are also analogous to the decline of
Hungary as a regional power. The Hungarians can boast of glorious
medieval military triumphs and a glittering cultural flowering under the
Angevin Kings. By 1409, with the creation of the Order of the Dragon
(Popularized in James V. Hart’s screenplay for Bram Stoker’s Dracula
[1992]), the Hungarian king had become little more than first among any
number of barons or upper nobility. The reign of Mattias Corvinus (1440–
90) ended Hungary’s hour of “splendor in the grass,” and the great nation
fell to the Turks following the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Thereafter the
Magyars lost control of their own future.
Back to that abhorred vacuum, new political powers replaced Polish
and Hungarian authority in Central Europe as they gobbled up the
heartland of the vampire cult and, in the process of spin, altered the
indigenous lore. The imperialist conquest of Central Europe coincided
with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, and these great
upheavals influenced the way Western European witnesses observed and
wrote about East-Central European vampire scares. Herein we find the true
nature of the eighteenth-century vampire craze. The epidemic occurred
within a context that included science, religion, superstition, culture, and
politics. The cultures experiencing the frights were variously conquered,
colonized, downtrodden, disadvantaged, or oppressed, and the witnesses
recording the famous eighteenth-century cases brought to their narratives
the prevailing attitudes and preconceptions of the day. The confluence of
all these factors gave a unique flavor to eighteenth-century vampire
narratives, with their emphasis on the physical and the superstitious. And,
finally, we should not forget that the eighteenth-century vampire narratives
discussed the ancient traditions of disparate foreign cultures—Poles,
Czechs, Moravians, Serbs, etc. Is it really so shocking to think the writers
simply got it wrong from time to time?
Finally, redrawing the political map of Central Europe at this time
also created the geographical and ethnographic confusion which has
dominated so much subsequent scholarship on the subject, where we all
too often find Poles and Czechs described as Germans and Serbs as
Hungarians. No less a source than Montague Summers continually garbles
and confuses the ethnicity of his witnesses, and we can only assume that
he’s referring to the lands of East-Central Europe coming under the
dominion of the Austrian Hapsburgs in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries when he wrote in The Vampire in Europe (1929): “Hungary, it
may not untruly be said, shares with Greece and Slovakia the reputation of
being that particular region of the world which is most terribly infested by
the Vampire and where he is seen at his ugliest and worst.”
1625 ort, minted in Gdansk during the reign of Zygmunt III (1587-1632), while Poland was still a
dominant power.

More evocative of this region is the moody Carmilla (1872) written

by the Irish master, J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). A genuine occult
researcher in his own right, Le Fanu’s nocturnal habits and natural
reclusivity earned him the moniker “Invisible Prince” by his neighbors,
and there’s no doubt that Le Fanu worked with authentic source material
when authoring this vampire classic, certainly reading Calmet at the vary
least. Hammer Studios ably captured the dripping atmosphere of Le Fanu’s
story in Roy Ward Baker’s Vampire Lovers (1970), which starred the
Polish actress Ingrid Pitt. Despite some silly and gratuitous nudity which
Hammer blamed on American financiers, this ranks as one of the very best
vampire pictures. Setting Carmilla in the Austrian region of Styria, Le
Fanu wrote:

You have heard no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails

in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Servia, in
Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the
vampire.

If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially,

before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all
chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more
voluminous perhaps than exist upon any other class of cases, is worth
anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a
phenomenon as the vampire.
Let us bid adieu to Poland for now and turn our investigation to the
East-Central European lands of the Austrian Hapsburgs and have a look at
the cases that so impressed Le Fanu.
 Chapter 10

Keeping Up with the Hapsburgs

So now beware, whoe’er you are,

That walkis in this lone wood:
Beware of that deceitful spright,
That ghaist that suckis the blude.
—James Clerk Maxwell (1845)

Austria began more as a geographical concept in the wake of

Charlemagne’s ninth-century conquests than anything else. From then on,
Austria joined the ranks of those forgotten nations, like Poland, Hungary,
and Wallachia, destined to shield Western Europe from successive eastern
threats. Members of the Hapsburg (German: Habsburg) family came to
power as compromise candidates in the late thirteenth century, and, for the
next six and a half centuries, the Hapsburgs ruled the Middle Danube.
Centuries would pass, however, before the Hapsburgs would stamp a sense
of national identity on the land. In a mere fifty years, the Hapsburgs
transformed themselves from a minor ruling house to a global power
virtually without bloodshed, a feat prompting Gordon Brooks-Shepherd to
dub Austria a “wedding-ring empire” (The Austrians, 1996). After the
decisive Magyar defeat at Mohács in 1526, Ferdinand I (1526–1564)
assumed control of Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia. In 1556, Charles V
abdicated and divided the vast Hapsburg lands between the Spanish and
Austrian branches of the family, creating two vast empires. The Austrian
branch continued as Central Europe’s dominant political body until the end
of World War I in 1918.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 concluded the horrors of the
Thirty Years’ War and confirmed Hapsburg possession of Bohemia and
Hungary. In an ironic and tragic twist of fate, the Poles liberated the
Austrians so they could join in the Partitions less than a century later. In
the summer of 1683 the Turks besieged Vienna with nearly a quarter of a
million troops. Following a heroic march across the Carpathians in
September, King Jan Sobieski assumed command of the combined
Christian army, still outnumbered ten to one. Following early morning
Mass on September 12, more than twenty thousand of Poland’s famed and
feared “winged cavalry” smashed through the Turkish lines, routing
Ottoman forces in one of history’s most decisive and critical battles. The
relief of Vienna marked the end of Poland as a great power; thereafter,
Austria culturally and politically dominated Central Europe.
After pushing the Turks out of Vienna, the Austrians drove further
east, liberating Buda in 1686 and capturing most of Hungary. In 1699 the
Turks signed the Peace of Karlowitz, which ceded to Austria most of the
Hungarian lands that the Ottomans had controlled since 1547, including
Transylvania and Slavonia. With the Peace of Passarowitz in 1718, more
vast tracts of East-Central Europe came into the Hapsburg fold, and the
rapidly-expanding and diverse Austrian Empire came face-to-face with a
multitude of peoples who claimed that their friends, family members, and
neighbors returned from the grave to suck their blood and spread disease.
In other words, the dizzying imperial success of the upstart House of
Hapsburg inadvertently kicked off the vampire epidemic of the eighteenth
century. Already in 1718 we read in the annals of Lubló, a town along the
Polish-Hungarian border, of a merchant named Kaszparek. Kaszparek, we
are told, died soon after relieving a Polish customer of his riches—but he
did not remain long in his grave. The terrors he inflicted on the citizens of
Lubló forced the civic authorities to call witnesses and investigate the
disturbances. Despite the protests of the deceased’s wife, several attempts
at laying the corpse to rest were carried out—all unsuccessfully. Finally,
the authorities cremated Kaszparek’s corpse, and the disturbances ceased,
but the case has lived on in Hungarian literature, where Kálmán Mikszáth
reworked the story into a novel.
As the Hapsburgs pushed further and further into East-Central
Europe, they set up a vast bureaucratic machine to administer their far-
flung empire, and cases like that of Kaszparek shocked and overwhelmed
the system. As the eighteenth century wore on, the civil service expanded
and received greater definition, particularly during the reigns of Maria
Theresa and her son Joseph II (1780–90). Joseph II set up to what
amounted to a secret police, and his agents penetrated deeper and deeper
into the lives of his subjects. Brook-Shepherd called his six thousand
imperial edicts “mind-boggling in their volume and scope,” adding that:

His roving commissioners were charged to investigate everything in

the district they visited, from whether the houses had numbers to
whether the local clergy were respected; from what was being done
for blind, deaf and crippled children to whether the sale of
contraceptive methods was permitted.

For the most part the autocracy of the Hapsburgs was a benevolent
despotism, but, if crossed, they could lash out with savage fury. For
example, after Wallachian peasants revolted in Transylvania in 1784,
Joseph II himself had their leader broken on the wheel and 150 of his
followers publicly impaled. The bureaucratic structure of the Austrian
Empire alienated some of its more sensitive subjects, blessing the rest of
us with the likes of Franz Kafka (1883–1924). In Mike Mitchell’s
anthology Austrian Fantasy (Ariadne, 1992) he described a type of
bureaucratic horror created by the Empire’s writers. In this literature,
Austria appeared as a state, “where the elemental forces embodied in the
myths of antiquity still managed to survive behind a grotesquely
bureaucratic surface.” This spirit survived right through the collapse of the
Empire, producing writers like Gustav Meyrink (1886–1932), Friedrich
Freiherr von Gagern (1882–1924), and Karl Hans Strobl (1877–1946),
authors who all took the supernatural very seriously. The machinery of
state also recorded the most famous and influential cases of vampirism in
history, cases which, along with Bram Stoker’s novel, have become the
canvas within which our picture of the vampire has been framed.
Numerous reports of various disturbances came in from the
Hapsburg Empire’s new subjects, and the monarchs responded by sending
out their bureaucratic tentacles. In the ensuing cultural clash, the vampire
got caught up in the greater issue of the day—how to best apply the new
power of science to society. Western Europe had stumbled into the
scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, and, consequently, the
Hapsburg commissioners interpreted the vampire as they would any other
new species, necessarily emphasizing the physicality of the monster.
Where traditional folklore viewed the actual presence of a corpse as
optional, the eighteenth-century testimony saw it as essential. As observers
rather clumsily tried to apply the scientific method to vampirism, they
asked different questions than had been raised in the past; therefore, their
record differs somewhat than the ancient memorials, when visitations were
given a more spiritual treatment. Peasants simply accepted the reality of
the supernatural without wondering much about the whys and wherefores,
and older accounts never attempted to describe the particulars of exactly
how vampires left their graves or how they went about sucking blood; they
simply and unequivocally stated that these things did happen. In the
eighteenth century, observers wanted to know why someone became a
vampire, how a corpse issued from its tomb, and what it did with the blood
it supposedly drank. Even Le Fanu felt the need to add: “How they escape
from their graves and return to them for certain hours every day, without
displacing the clay or leaving any trace of disturbance in the state of the
coffin or the cerements, has always been admitted to be utterly
inexplicable.”

Six kreuzer minted for Polish Silesia in 1673 then under the Habsburg ruler Leopold I “the Hog-
Mouthed” (1658-1705)

The most famous case came from Medvegia, Serbia, ca. 1726, when
Arnod Paole fell off a hay wagon and into the pages of history. It seems
that in times past Arnod had been attacked by a vampire in Turkish Serbia,
but he saved himself by eating earth from the vampire’s grave and by
smearing himself with the fiend’s blood. Years later, Arnod was dead and
things weren’t quite right in his village. Within a month of his accident,
several villagers complained that Arnod visited them in the night, and four
deaths were attributed to Arnod’s nocturnal predation. Even those spared a
direct encounter with Paole suffered as they saw their livestock molested
and drained of blood. After forty days of internment, Arnod’s neighbors
exhumed his corpse, and, finding it intact, drove a stake through his heart,
“whereby he gave an audible groan and bled copiously.” His remains were
cremated—but the terror in Medvegia did not abate. A score of similar
deaths followed the destruction of Paole. Previously healthy and hale
people died suddenly—sometimes within two or three days. In one
instance, a girl named Stanacka, stepdaughter of the Hajduk Jowiza,
awoke trembling at midnight with a terrible scream. Stanacka related that
one Milloe, son of another hajduk, who had died nine weeks previous,
throttled her in her sleep. She complained of great pain in her chest, and
her condition worsened until she finally perished three days later. This
prompted the elders to open more than a dozen graves, finding some
remains intact and others in advanced stages of decomposition despite
being interred more recently. The whole ghastly business was duly
witnessed and recorded by authorities of the Austrian Empire, including
medical officers. Johannes Flückinger’s report, Visum et Repertum (1732),
remains the most famous account of vampirism in Western historiography.
In Visum et Repertum, Flückinger makes a telling remark, stating
that, “all those who were tormented and killed by the vampires must
themselves become vampires.” In the folklore, this isn’t so. Death by
vampirism would render a corpse suspect and worthy of scrutiny, but no
more so than death by drowning or murder. There was no one way to
become a vampire. Flückinger’s statement provides us with a fine example
of how the famous eighteenth-century accounts subtly altered through
emphasis and exaggeration the folklore of East-Central Europe. They
transformed the vampire into a more physical monster who exponentially
propagated his species by infecting the innocent with its bite—just like any
other infectious disease. This eighteenth-century interpretation of the
vampire formed an indelible image on the imagination of the Western
mind, as later authors and filmmakers adopted and embellished it at the
expense of the vaguer, more expansive vampire of folklore. It is also
regrettable that the eighteenth-century accounts base their inquiries on
cases that occurred during an episode of obvious religious hysteria.
The other great case emerging from lands recently gathered into the
Hapsburg Empire involved Peter Plogojowitz, who returned from the
grave in 1725 to prey upon the villagers of Kisilova. Some ten weeks after
his burial, nine fellow Kisilovans perished from the same mysterious
twenty-four-hour illness within a week. While still alive, they all stated
publicly that the deceased, “had come to them in their sleep, laid himself
on them, and throttled them, so that they would have to give up the ghost.”
Suspecting that Plogojowitz had become a vampire, the villagers sought
the approbation of their parish priest and the local Austrian official in
dealing with the revenant in the traditional manner. Fearing that the mob
would quit their homes rather than face vampiric victimization, the
Imperial Provisor grudgingly assented, and Plogojowitz was indeed found
to be in the vampire state. The Imperial Provisor wrote in his official
report that a sharpened stake pierced the vampire’s heart, and, “as he was
pierced, not only did much blood, completely fresh, flow also through his
ears and mouth, but still other wild signs (which I pass by out of high
respect) took place.” They then reduced the body of Plogojowitz to ashes.
This case found its way into Michael Ranft’s De Masticatione Mortuorum
in Tumulis Liber (Leipzig, 1728) and thereafter into numerous works, both
popular and scholarly.
By the time of Ranft’s treatise, Leipzig had already published Philip
Rohr’s Dissertatio Historica-Philosophica de Masticatione Mortuorum in
1679 and Karl Ferdinand von Schertz discussed the restless and
malevolent dead in Moravia in his Magia Posthuma (1704). Johann
Christian Stock (Dissertatio Physica de Cadaveribus Sanguisugis, 1732)
and Johann Heinrich Zopft (Dissertatio de Vampiris Serviensibus, 1733)
similarly regarded the vampire not as a physical reality but as a
demonically-inspired dream. While on an expedition to Greece and Asia
Minor, French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708)
witnessed the destruction of a purported Greek vrykolakas on the island of
Mykonos, an event he reported in a manuscript bearing all the watermarks
of the Enlightenment, his Account of a Journey to the Levant (French ed.,
1717; English trans., 1741). Iconoclastic in matters of religious tradition,
he managed to bash both the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic
Jesuits, and he concluded that the episode of the vrykolakas “’twas an
Epidemical Disease of the Brain as dangerous and infectious as the
Madness of Dogs.” Of the once mighty Greeks he could only say that, “the
Greeks of today are not the great Greeks, and there is among them only
ignorance and superstition!”
We know that Austrian Emperor Charles VI (1685–1746) followed
the Plogojowitz investigations closely, and that French King Louis XV
(1710–74) kept abreast of the Paole affair through the Duc de Richelieu,
his ambassador to Austria. For those not among the academic elite or the
ruling class, the word “vampire” snuck into the French language via the
Mercure Gallant in the 1690s, and the rest of the West made it their own
during the Serbian vampire epidemic of 1725–32, when vampirism
became something of a media event. Le Glaneur, a popular journal at
Louis’ court, covered Paole in its March 3, 1732, issue, making vampirism
the cause célèbre at Versailles and beyond. The eighteenth century saw the
growth of the free and unfettered press, and a number of these publications
snatched up the vampire as a ready metaphor for the parasitic nobility of
the Old Regime.
Voltaire, the gifted polemicist and quintessential figure of the
French Enlightenment, reflected back on the media frenzy kicked off by
the cases of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnod Paole in his Philosophical
Dictionary (1764), observing that, “Nothing was spoken of but vampires
from 1730 to 1735.” Voltaire loved the sarcasm of de Tournefort’s
account, and he reworked the vampire into a metaphoric cat’s-paw to
scratch out his enemies’ eyes. To Voltaire, the real vampires were not the
reawakened dead, but the “stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business
who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not
dead, though corrupted.” And, never one to leave out his favorite whipping
boy, he added that, “the true vampires are the monks, who eat at the
expense of both kings and people.” The London Journal employed a
nearly identical metaphor, stating that members of the nobility made up the
authentic vampires. Such agitating from the media tapped into the anger
and resentment we noted in peasant lore; both of these strata would push
Europe into democratic revolution as the century wore on.
The Church’s need to respond to the sensation stimulated the
production of one of our greatest sources for vampirism, Dom Augustin
Calmet’s Phantom World (1751). Before Calmet, the Archbishop of
Florence, Giuseppe Davanzati, had already produced Dissertatione sopra i
Vampiri (1744), and no less an authority than Pope Benedict XIV refuted
their existence in Book IV of De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et de
Beatorum Canonizatione (1749). As we can see, contrary to the
Enlightenment propagandists of the eighteenth century and the
innumerable websites of our day, the Church of Rome by no means
fostered or encouraged belief in vampires. This seems to be something of a
turnabout from days past, when works like Kramer and Spenger’s Malleus
Maleficarum (1486) circulated as guides to such matters. It’s also a
departure from an earlier authoritative pronouncement, Canon 22 of the
Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which recognized that physical illness
could proceed from spiritual causes. Canon 22 stated:
 Since bodily infirmity is sometimes caused by sin, the Lord saying
to the sick man whom he had healed: “Go and sin no more, lest
some worse thing happen to thee” (John 5:14), we declare in the
present decree and strictly command that when physicians of the
body are called to the bedside of the sick, before all else they
admonish them to call for the physician of souls.

Many clergy in the Western Church, including Montague Summers,

also found support for their vampire belief in the Apocryphal book of
Ecclesiasticus, which says in verse 39:28 that “There be spirits that are
created for vengeance, which in their fury lay on sore strokes; in the time
of destruction they pour out their force, and appease the wrath of him that
made them.” This translation, however, hinged on an incorrect rendering
of the Greek jEsti pneumata as “There be spirits,” rather than the much
more sensible ““wind,” which the context demands.
Some have speculated that Rome hastened in its opposition to check
the authority of the Eastern Orthodox Church, into whose territory the
Austrian Empire now moved. This wouldn’t be all that surprising, since a
similar debate over ghosts took place between Catholics and Protestants in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the face of the Enlightenment
onslaught, the Roman Church beat back a retreat to a tactically sound
position—one that could be defended. Rather than uphold a belief in
monsters, Roman prelates would surrender so-called superstitious ground
while reiterating core doctrines about the miraculous, saints, and dogmas.
Pope Benedict went as far as to label Polish vampire belief
superstitious at best and a tool of base greed at worst. In a letter to the
Bishop of Leopolis, he targeted the Polish clergy with the remark that,
“possibly there are priests who support belief in vampires in order to
obtain from gullible peasants the payment of exorcisms and Masses.” In
Poland itself, Bishop Ignacy Krasicki among others waged an unrelenting
war against all varieties of superstition in the pages of Warsaw’s Monitor
(published from 1765 to 1785). As in France, Polish philosophes used all
literary devices—essays, satires, humorous diatribes—as tools of reform
against indifference, intolerance, and, of course, superstition. To Poles like
Franciszek Bohomolec and Alexander Zorawski, belief in vampires and
other superstitions proceeded from ignorance and irrationality; they
therefore only disgraced the Catholic religion. The Enlightenment in
Poland won a great victory in the fateful year of 1776, when the Polish
State banned the use of torture in witchcraft proceedings.
Writers like Voltaire chose to ignore the Roman Church’s
opposition to vampire belief simply because they found in the vampire a
useful propaganda tool. Despite the fact that Calmet denounced belief in
vampires, Voltaire wrote that, “Calmet became their historian [i.e., the
vampires’], and [he] treated vampires as he treated the Old and New
Testaments, by relating faithfully all that had been said before him.”
Maligning the character and integrity of a genuine scholar like Calmet
didn’t bother Voltaire in the least. After all, Calmet was a cleric and
therefore an enemy. The image of an ossified Christianity was too precious
a weapon to be sacrificed for niceties like honor and decency. This same
Voltaire praised Frederick II’s “ingenious” scheme to partition Poland, just
as he similarly lauded Catherine the Great’s wisdom when she moved
troops into Poland as a guarantee of “religious freedom.” For these
salacious deceits, Voltaire earned lavish gifts of gold, fur, and china from
the two grateful tyrants. Then, as now, facts came with a definite point of
view. With this in mind, perhaps it is best to turn to some of the less-
publicized cases emerging from the Hapsburg Empire, particularly those
from the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia. There we’ll learn how
some interesting developments in the world of science may have affected
shadowy history of the vampire.

Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau

Mock on Mock on! ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind
And the wind blows it back again
—William Blake (1757–1827)
 Chapter 11

Czeching Our Sources

Necromancy as a Source of Vampirism

And now beside me, whatever betide me,

This woman is, night and day.
For she cleaves to me so, that, wherever I go
She is with me the whole of the way.
And her eyes are so bright in the dead of the night,
That they keep me awake with dread;
While my life blood pales in my veins and fails,
Because her red lips are so red
That I fear “’tis my heart she must eat for her food;
And it makes my whole flesh creep
To think she is drinking and draining my blood,
Unawares, if I chance to sleep.
—Lord Robert Bulwer-Lytton (1831–1891)

Adolph Hitler once quipped that Czechoslovakia stabbed into the

heart of Germany like a dagger, and, indeed, as a mixed blessing, the
Czechs have experienced close cultural and political ties to Germanic
peoples through much of their history. Though sometimes waves of
German immigration threatened to drown Slavic culture in Bohemia, the
Czechs proved too indigestible to swallow. Their Germanic ties also
acquainted a wider world with Czech accomplishments in the arts and
sciences. Unlike their Polish cousins to the northeast, the supernatural
undercurrent in Czech history has not gone unappreciated; in fact, today’s
Prague is justly celebrated for its supernatural flavor. For all this public
renown, we can credit the Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), who
made a concerted effort to transform his capital into the most learned and
cosmopolitan city on the planet. In the process, he brought as many
accomplished alchemists, magicians, and occultists to Prague as possible.
In this endeavor, he succeeded brilliantly.
At the same time as their political ascendancy, the Poles and Czechs
enjoyed profound cultural and intellectual stimulation from the Italian
Renaissance and the arrival of more than a hundred thousand Jews seeking
a better life. These twin influences brought hordes of world-class scholars
and precious manuscripts to Krakow and Prague at a time when the cities
were wealthy enough to provide adequate patronage and a free
environment for inquiry. It is no accident that scientists working in
sixteenth-century Poland and Prague sowed the seeds of the seventeenth-
century scientific revolution. In Prague, the likes of Johannes Kepler and
Tycho Brahe took the reigns from the Pole Copernicus as they refined our
understanding of the universe.
At the time, pressures from church and state forced scholarly
occultists to lead itinerant lives, moving from place to place as they wore
out their welcome. Many, like the semi-legendary Dr. Faustus, found a
home in fifteenth-century Krakow, but, as the century wore on, Prague
came to rival, then surpass Krakow as Europe’s center of arcane
knowledge. The two cities functioned as hubs, continually spitting a tight
network of seekers at each other through the early seventeenth century. At
its height Rudolfine Prague employed as many as two hundred permanent
alchemists, and the Emperor established a permanent alchemical workshop
in the Powder Tower of Prague Castle. Rudolf also assembled one of
Europe’s greatest collections of art and curiosities, which he installed in
his Kunstkammer, or “chamber of art.” One of the most treasured objects
he tucked away in the Kunstkammer was a bell chased in magical symbols
which he used to call up the dead. For such esoteric rituals, Rudolf would
frequent the Star Summer House outside the city—a retreat which took its
name from the elaborate sacred geometry of its design, based on the Seal
of Solomon.
 1765 30 kreutzer minted for Hungary under Maria Theresa (1740-80)

Establishment historians happily admit that these men laid the

foundation of today’s science, but they gloss over the uncomfortable facts
that these same men claimed to talk with angels and to raise the dead. The
career of Englishman John Dee (1527–1608) perhaps best epitomizes the
state of the occult sciences at the time. Dee completely devoted himself to
learning from an early age, and he quickly became one of Europe’s leading
mathematicians. In fact, Dee’s calculations helped establish the Gregorian
calendar. After a well-received series of lectures in Paris, he was offered a
post at the Sorbonne, but he preferred the life of an independent scholar.
By the 1580s Dee hooked up with the convicted forger and necromancer
Edward Kelley, a shadowy figure also accused of stealing a corpse from
Walton-le-Dale for some unknown magical purposes. The team began
experiments in crystallomancy and angelic communication which
impressed magnate Adalbert £aski enough to invite them back to Poland.
When the pair failed to be as productive as £aski expected, he sent them
packing with letters to Rudolf II. They reached Prague in 1584, but only
received a professional reception from the Emperor. They pinballed back
and forth between the magical hubs, stopping off in Krakow to enjoy
several audiences with King Stefan Batory (1533–1586), uncle of the
infamous Blood Countess, before settling in Tˇreboˇn, Bohemia, under the
patronage of Vilém Roˇrmberk, an adept and wealthy noble. Dee
eventually returned home in 1589, only to die in poverty. Kelley’s skills as
a con-artist fared him better, as he went on to lead a life of ease and
comfort until he died escaping from imprisonment in 1597.
As to the Emperor Rudolf II, his investigations carried him into
darker and darker realms. By 1700 many observers openly wondered
whether he suffered from madness, demonic influence, or even possession.
He demonstrated a marked aversion to holy objects, refused the
Sacraments, and even attempted suicide with a dagger. He rallied back
from the abyss for a short time, but we know he ended his life vainly
performing black rituals in an attempt to challenge the political ascent of
his brother, Matthias. He died rejecting all last rites. Matthias, his
successor, quickly moved the capitol to Vienna. Whatever ailed the
Emperor seems to have assailed his favorite son as well. Apparently
committed to evil, Don Giulio had been banished to Krumlov Castle,
where he could spend his days in hunting and debauchery a little less
noticeably. When Don Giulio took a fancy to a girl named Marusˇka, he
did what came naturally: he kidnapped and raped her. After a month of
being romanced after Don Giulio’s particular fashion, Marusˇka managed
to escape, but threats against her father the barber persuaded her to return.
She knew Don Giulio meant business. On February 17, 1608, the day after
she returned, servants found Marusˇka’s battered body. What once Don
Giulio found so irresistible he had hacked up with a hunting knife. Her
teeth were shattered, her eyes gouged out, her ears cut off. Clutching the
battered corpse was Don Giulio, naked and covered in feces. He died in
captivity four months later.
 Evil is contagious, and like disease polluting groundwater, once it’s
in a community, every member of that community is affected, even if not
infected. More was going on in Krakow and Prague than the noble and
innocent beginnings of astronomy and chemistry. By their own admission,
men were summoning the dead, talking to a variety of spirits, and
practicing black magic. Unless we completely dismiss all these learned
proto-scientists as completely deluded on the exact same point, is it not
possible that their actions carried consequences? In their attempts to
conjure and restore life to dead bodies, could these men have unleashed
unnatural monsters upon their communities? Was vampirism a byproduct
of black necromancy? Is it more than a coincidence that the post-
Renaissance outbreak of vampirism occurred in Poland and Bohemia
while these areas reached their cultural and political zeniths?
To be sure, the vampire had made his nest in Bohemia since ancient
times, and we have records of his activities since the Middle Ages. In the
1330s we read of a shepherd near Kadan who returned from the grave to
call out the names of his former neighbors, who, once so summoned,
perished a week or so later. When dispatched with a stake, the arms and
legs of the vampire shepherd flailed wildly and jets of blood spurted up
from his chest. Montague Summers first popularized the case of Stefan
Hubner from the town of Trutnov, east of Prague, but Rob Brautigam and
David Keyworth have recently traced the story back to 1567. Hubner, it
appears, preyed upon both people and livestock, a habit which prompted a
district court to order his exhumation. Finding Hubner’s corpse in the
vampire condition, they had it decapitated and cremated, tossing his ashes
into the wind. As a precautionary measure, nearby graves were similarly
exhumed and their occupants cremated. The ashes of these unfortunates
were reburied, as befitted Christian dignity.
The area surrounding the ancient city of Olomouc, former Moravian
capital, seems to have been something of a vampire central in times past.
Archaeologists unearthed a coffin bound with iron bars while excavating
the rectory of Holy Trinity Church, fifteen kilometers to the southwest.
The vampire burial dated to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the
corpse so interred was severed at the torso and had stones piled atop its
legs. In August of 1999 a dig near the city turned up the medieval grave of
a woman buried as one of the damned. Not only was she positioned face
down with her arms and legs tied together, but she suffered the further
indignity of a north-south orientation, at a time Christians normally faced
their dead east in anticipation of the Second Coming.
Olomouc also provided the setting for what we might call the
Olomouc Danse Macabre. Calmet regarded the account as nonsense and
Rob Brautigam judges it to be a type of Wandersage, a tale akin to our
modern urban legends. Calmet said that “a sensible priest” told him how
the Canon of Olomouc Cathedral invited him to visit nearby Libavá and
investigate the predations of a vampire, who had harried the inhabitants a
few years earlier. The attacks only ended after a “Hungarian stranger”
passing through claimed some experience in such matters and offered to
put a stop to them. The brave Hungarian mounted the church steeple
overlooking the graveyard and there waited for the undead to rise. As the
monster issued from the earth, he deposited his burial shroud atop his
grave and then went out to molest the good people of Libavá. The
Hungarian quickly snatched the shroud and hurried back to his aerie,
knowing that the vampire could not secrete himself in the earth without his
shroud. Following his evening prowl, the vampire screeched upon not find
his cerements where he had deposited them, and the Hungarian gestured to
the monster that, if he wanted them, he should come and get them. As the
vampire scrambled up a ladder to the tower, the Hungarian flung him
backwards and cut off his head with a spade.
Though we can’t be sure that their source was Calmet, both J.
Sheridan Le Fanu and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe incorporated the story
into their own work. Le Fanu improved on it a bit and included the story in
Carmilla; Hammer Studios, in turn, gave the tale its definitive treatment to
date in Vampire Lovers. Though he may have taken German folklore as his
inspiration, Goethe used the framework of the story for his poem “Der
Todtentanz” (1813). Goethe’s “Dance of Death”:

The warder looks down at the mid hour of night,

On the tombs that lie scatter’d below:
The moon fills the place with her silvery light,
And the churchyard like day seems to glow.
When see! First one grave, then another opens wide,
and women and men stepping forth are descried,
In cerements snow-white and trailing.

In haste for the sport soon their ankles they twitch,

And whirl round in dances so gay;
The young and the old, and the poor and the rich,
But the cerements stand in their way;
And as modesty cannot avail them aught here,
They shake themselves all, and the shrouds soon appear
Scatter’d over the tombs in confusion.

Now waggles the leg, and now wriggles the thigh,

As the troop with strange gestures advance,
And a rattle and a clatter anon rises high,
 As of one beating time to the dance.

The sight to the warder seems wondrously queer,

When the villainous Tempter speaks thus in his ear:
“Seize one of the shrouds that lie yonder!”
Quick as thought it was done! And for safety he fled
Behind the church-door with all speed;
The moon still continues her clear light to shed
On the dance that they fearfully lead.

But the dancers at length disappear one by one,

And their shrouds, ere they vanish, they carefully don,
And under the turf all is quiet.
But one of them stumbles and shuffles there still,
And gropes at the graves in despair;
Yet ’tis by no comrade he’s treated so ill.
The shroud he soon scents in the air.

So he rattles the door—for the warder ’tis well

That ’tis bless’d, and so able the foe to repel,
All cover’d with crosses in metal.

The shroud he must have, and no rest will allow,

There remains for reflection no time;
On the ornaments Gothic the wight seizes now,
And from point to point hastes to climb.

Alas for the warder! His doom is decreed!

Like a long-legged spider, with ne’er-changing speed,
Advances the dreaded pursuer.

The warder he quakes, and the warder turns pale,

The shroud to restore fain had sought;
When the end,—now can nothing to save him avail,—
In a tooth formed of iron is caught.

With vanishing luster the moon’s race is run,

When a bell thunders loudly a powerful One,
 And the skeleton falls, crushed to atoms.

A less famous but massively important case from the newly-

acquired Slavic lands of the Hapsburgs involved Rosina Polakin, in the
Moravian town of Hermersdorf, near the Polish frontier. Soon after
Rosina’s death in December of 1754, residents began experiencing attacks
in the night. Officials ordered the removal of her body and declared her a
candidate for vampirism, since her body had not decomposed and she still
had fresh blood in her veins. Inasmuch as a cold winter had settled on the
land, people hesitated, but her family finally caved in and dragged the poor
woman beyond the cemetery walls, cut off her head, and cremated her
remains. After hearing of the incident, Empress Maria Theresa (r.1740–80)
dispatched two court physicians to investigate. We can assume that she
reflected on the Plogojowitz affair which had so interested her father,
Charles VI. Once the physicians reported back to court, Maria Theresa
deemed it necessary to send her principal court physician Gerard van
Swieten to Hermersdorf for further study.
 King Zygmunt II Augustus (1520-1574). A persistent legend states that the sorcerer Pan
Twardowski raised his queen, Barbara, from the dead.

The case disgusted van Swieten, who dismissed it all as monstrous

superstition. He observed that “these vampires bother the living with
apparitions, noises, suffocations, etc.” and noted that the inhabitants
viewed the undecayed dead with suspicion and that the presence of “fresh
blood” caused alarm. Along with the other physicians involved, he
recommended that the State do what it could to eliminate such ignorant
barbarisms. As a direct result of the Rosina Polakin case, the Hapsburg
Empire promulgated legislation that banished traditional applications of
“posthumous magic” in 1755, and they subsequently created other laws
(1758–66) which reserved witchcraft judgments for the central
government, effectively ending witch persecutions.
 Beautiful ½ grosz from the zenith of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 1556 Zygmunt II
(1544-1572)

The exact relationship between witchcraft, vampirism, and sorcery

remains a mystery, but the mind boggles when it considers that, at the very
same time hundreds of thousands of women were hounded and harassed
for witchcraft throughout Europe, elites dabbled in sorcery and outright
devil worship in the universities and at the great courts. The Bodleian
Library preserves a relic from this period known as the Prayer Book of
King W ∂ adys ∂ aw. Manufactured sometime in the 1430s or 1440s, the
Prayer Book juxtaposes standard Christian prayers with formulae for
crystal gazing and instructions for ritual magic. Textual scholars assure us
that one of Poland’s Jageillonian kings actually used this book. Rumors
still persist that the last of this dynasty, Zygmunt II Augustus, used a
necromancer to briefly bring bacBeautiful ? grosz from the zenith of the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 1556 Zygmunt II (1544-1572). k the
shade of his beloved Barbara, to comfort him after her untimely death. As
we’ve seen, sixteenth-century Krakow would be the place to find a
necromancer if you needed one. And in Prague we met an emperor who
suffered from thanatophobia, an unnatural fear of death. What experiments
took place as Rudolf’s wizards sought ways of prolonging life?
 Pan Twardowski raises Queen Barbara from the dead.

The higher one climbs the magical ladder, the more secret and
esoteric the knowledge acquired becomes, but publishing adepts claim that
the soul of the recently departed can briefly be rechanneled into their
expired bodies, providing a weak semblance of life. And vampirism is
seen as a developmental stage in some forms of ritual magic. During
squabbles between members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
MacGregor Mathers reportedly sent a vampire to attack Aleister Crowley.
In our own country, the 1992 FBI report Satanic Ritual Abuse recognized
uniformity in victims’ testimony but dismissed any notion of a widespread
satanic conspiracy. The author, Kenneth V. Lanning, outlined common
complaints:

Some of what the victims in these cases allege is physically

impossible (victim cut up and put back together, offender took the
building apart and then rebuilt it); some is possible but improbable
(human sacrifice, cannibalism, vampirism); some is possible and
probable (child pornography, clever manipulation of victims); and
some is corroborated (medical evidence of vaginal or anal trauma,
offender confessions).

Satanic Ritual Abuse reads like many of the Enlightenment

interpretations of vampirism in East Central Europe. An a priori bias
against the supernatural permeates these documents—child pornography is
accepted as a fact, but levitation is not. In an orderly society governed by
laws, our courts can only convict on verifiable facts. How can anyone
prove they saw a ghost? A vampire? It’s virtually impossible, and it’s a
good thing for the machinery of state to remain agnostic. With the
alternative, we slide down the slippery slope to the excesses of the witch
trials. In Satanic Ritual Abuse, Lanning also noted how the topic became
intensely polarizing:

On the one side of the issue are those who say that nothing really
happened and it is all a big witch hunt led by overzealous fanatics
and incompetent “experts.” The other side says, in essence, that
everything happened; victims never lie about child sexual abuse, and
so it must be true.

Sound familiar? We’ve arrived in much the same place in

vampirology, where researchers are divided into the believers and
nonbelievers. This author would suggest that we follow the example of
Maria Theresa and the FBI: some of what you read in the preceding pages
really happened and some of it resulted from mistaken observation and/or
hysteria. Dark corners exist whether we wish them to or not, and evil
supernaturalism has taken many forms over the centuries. Occasionally,
even if we walk in the light, we catch a glimpse of those things that hide in
the shadow. Though they were undoubtedly mistaken from time to time,
our ancestors took the time to record things they found significant and
important. We should hear their testimony with an open mind and within
the context they intended.
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