Before Dracula: The Actual Vampire the Eighteenth Century Was Afraid Of

In January of 1725, in the Serbian village of Kisilova, a man named Peter Plogojowitz died, was buried in the churchyard, and, according to nine of his neighbors, came back. Over the following ten weeks, nine villagers died in rapid succession, each of them reporting, shortly before dying, having been visited at night by Peter, who had sat on their chests and attempted, with varying degrees of urgency, to strangle them.

The Austrian military administration, which had controlled this region of Serbia since 1718, dispatched an Imperial provisor named Frombald to investigate. Frombald's report, dated July 21, 1725, is the first detailed bureaucratic document of a vampire case in the Western archival record. He recorded the exhumation: the body was undecomposed. The hair, beard, and nails had grown. Fresh blood was visible at the mouth. A wooden stake was driven through the heart. The body groaned, according to the witnesses, and produced a quantity of fresh blood. It was then burned. The deaths in the village stopped.

What Frombald was describing, to his Austrian superiors, was not a metaphor. It was an administrative incident report. He does not endorse the vampire theory, but he does not categorically reject it either. He reports what was observed. The report was filed, and it lived for a century and a half in obscure Austrian archives before being republished in German in the 1830s and translated into English in the twentieth century.

Arnold Paole, and what followed

In 1732, seven years after the Plogojowitz incident, a more extensive Austrian investigation occurred in the Serbian village of Medveđa. The central figure was a man named Arnold Paole, a hajduk (a kind of irregular border soldier) who had died in a haying accident around 1725. Paole had reportedly told friends, before his death, that he had been troubled by a vampire in Turkish-held Greece and had taken the locally-prescribed remedy of eating dirt from the vampire's grave and smearing himself with its blood. When he died, villagers began to report that he was visiting them. Four died. His grave was opened, forty days after burial. The body was reportedly undecomposed; a stake was driven through it.

The matter seemed resolved until 1731, when a fresh series of deaths, more than a dozen this time, began in the same village. The Austrian authorities sent a more formal investigation: Regimental Field Surgeon Johann Flückinger and two military officers. Flückinger's detailed report, dated January 26, 1732, exhumed thirteen bodies. Some, he noted, were in proper states of decomposition. Five, he noted, were what the local villagers called vampyr: the bodies undecayed, blood in the mouth, skin still supple. These five were staked, decapitated, and burned.

Flückinger's report, which used the Serbian word vampyr (which he transliterated as Wampir), was printed in Vienna, then in Leipzig, then across Europe. It reached Paris, where it was debated by the philosophes. Voltaire wrote about it. The Empress Maria Theresa commissioned her personal physician to investigate it, which he did, concluding that the whole phenomenon was a misunderstanding of the physiology of decomposition. In 1755 she banned further vampire exhumations in the Habsburg territories. The word vampire enters the major European languages in this period, almost entirely because of the Flückinger report.

The word vampire enters the major European languages in the 1730s as a direct import from a Serbian military report, not from a work of literature.

What was actually going on

Modern pathology has a great deal to say about the Serbian vampire reports, and almost all of it is unglamorous. When a body is buried in certain kinds of soil and temperature conditions, particularly the cool, alkaline soils of the Balkans in winter, decomposition can be remarkably slow. The process is non-uniform. Some bodies appear, for weeks or months, to be in far better condition than others buried beside them. The skin, losing its external moisture, can tighten around the nails and hair in a way that makes them appear to have grown. Blood from the body cavity, during certain stages of putrefaction, can be forced upward through the throat by gas pressure and pool in the mouth. The intestinal gases that accumulate during decomposition can, when a body is punctured (say, by a wooden stake), produce an audible groan as they escape through the vocal tract.

These are not quirks; they are predictable features of the decomposition process under specific conditions. What the Serbian peasants were seeing, when they opened a grave and found a body that looked wrong, was a body that was in fact, for a rural village with no professional coroners, looking wrong. The undead interpretation was the available interpretation.

The disease that was killing the nine villagers after Plogojowitz's death was almost certainly an epidemic, probably anthrax or tuberculosis or a hemorrhagic fever of the kind that was endemic to the region in this period. Deaths in clusters after a primary death are a classic signature of a transmissible pathogen. The chest-pressing nightmares that several of the dying reported are classic symptoms of what modern medicine calls sleep paralysis, which is more common in febrile illness.

None of this is to say the villagers were stupid. They were fitting what they saw (clusters of deaths, bodies in suspicious conditions, nightmares) to the explanatory framework they had available. When the explanatory framework was challenged by Austrian military doctors, it did eventually yield. But it yielded slowly, and not entirely.

The American case, 1892

It is worth noting that the vampire tradition persisted, quietly, into the industrial era. The Mercy Brown case of Exeter, Rhode Island, is the last well-documented American instance of a vampire exhumation. Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis in January 1892, at the age of nineteen. Her mother and sister had died of the same disease in the years before. Her brother Edwin was also ill and deteriorating. Local folklore, inherited from the town's Puritan-era New England settlers and reinforced by several earlier vampire exhumations in the region (including one at nearby Jewett City in 1854), held that a dead consumptive could drain the life from living relatives.

In March of 1892, the local families petitioned Mercy's father, George Brown, to exhume his deceased wife and both daughters. The bodies of Mary and Mary Olive (buried in 1883 and 1884) were in normal states of decomposition. Mercy, buried two months earlier and kept in an above-ground crypt during the Rhode Island winter, was not. Her body was intact. There was visible blood in her heart. The heart and liver were burned. The ashes were mixed with water and given to Edwin to drink.

Edwin died two months later.

The case was covered by newspapers in New York, Boston, and London. H. P. Lovecraft, growing up in Rhode Island, would later cite it in his writing. Bram Stoker is reported to have had the Mercy Brown clipping in his research file when he was writing Dracula, published five years later, in 1897. The fictional vampire that enters the world in that novel, and which reshapes the entire subsequent tradition, is a composite of the Serbian vampire of the 1720s, the Mercy Brown case of 1892, Central European folklore about the nosferatu, Stoker's own reading on Vlad the Impaler, and the theatrical conventions of the Victorian Gothic novel.

What the vampire means now

The modern vampire, in its Dracula-and-after form, is an aristocrat. He is seductive. He lives in a castle. He has a relationship to the human body that is, at its core, erotic rather than pathological. The vampire of the Serbian court record is none of these things. He is a peasant. He is dead. He is buried in your village. He is, in some specific, infectious way, killing your family. The modern vampire is a figure of sexual panic. The eighteenth-century vampire was a figure of epidemic panic, and the epidemic was often real.

I think the transition is worth noticing. The vampire was a way for a pre-modern society to make sense of contagion — of the fact that diseases appear to travel from the dead to the living, that they cluster in families, that they produce a kind of hunger in the dying. The Serbian villagers were not entirely wrong about what they were seeing. They were using the category they had. When the category of "infectious disease transmitted by bacilli" became available in the late nineteenth century, the vampire became unnecessary. He was promoted, at that point, to symbol, and to romantic lead.

What remains of him, in the Stoker novel and in everything since, is a trace. The horror of being fed on, of being slowly drained by someone who used to be a person and is no longer, has not gone anywhere. It just needs a less literal address now.