Vampire Forensics (15 page)

In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull making witchcraft a heresy in Catholic Europe. Yet, the hysteria that overtook Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, when 30,000 to 60,000 people were burned at the stake, never really ignited in the Slavic east. There the witch was, more often than not, the village “wise woman.” The horseshoes, hares’ heads, and boars’ tusks nailed on walls and barns, or the garlic cloves, blue beads, and bloodstones that decorated houses, horses, and caps were as much a defense against the evil eye—the intense gaze, the unblinking stare, the envious glance—as they were charms against witches or vampires. Anyhow, in folklore, witches and vampires were often the same thing.

In Romania,
strigoi
are vampires, while
strigele
are the spirits of witches. In Italy,
strega
are witches or vampires, as the occasion demands. Both shared the same attributes: Witches were said to have long teeth, their bodies might be possessed by demons, and they could leave the grave to eat people. Witches could enter a house through a keyhole; many had to disappear by cockcrow. The hexing action of a witch could dry up cattle’s milk, blast the crops, and unleash the plague among people. All of these activities are likewise imputed to vampires. Little wonder, then, that a Slavic proverb holds that the “vampire and the devil are blood relatives of all witches.”

Many folklorists would include the werewolf in that list. The Serbs, for instance, conflate vampire and werewolf in a single word
—vukodlak—
as do the Greeks in
vrykolakas.
Ukrainians believe a vampire to be the offspring of a witch who mated with either a werewolf or a demon. And in Russia, all three became one: According to 19th-century dictionaries, a vampire was “a sorcerer who turns into a wolf.” You could tell one by its tail.

Werewolves were depicted as particularly savage. Were-wolf madness existed alongside witchcraft hysteria. From 1520 to 1630, there were 30,000 reported cases of lycanthropy—men becoming wolves—in central France alone.

The most notorious werewolf, however, was German. Under torture in 1589, a Westphalian farmer named Peter Stubbe, or Stumpf, confessed to having made a pact with Satan. In return, Stubbe claimed, he had received a magical wolfskin belt that allowed him to rampage in the guise of a wolf for the next 25 years. According to Stubbe’s confession, he had indulged in every act of bestiality that the depraved imaginations of his inquisitors could dream up. This included killing and eating children, pregnant women, and even his own son. Rounding out this litany of horrors was incest with his daughter.

Or so Stubbe said—as might anyone who had been broken on the wheel. His demise was especially grisly. First, Stubbe was flayed alive, his skin peeled off with red-hot pincers. Next, all of his bones were broken with the blunt end of an axe. Finally, he was decapitated. As Stubbe’s carcass went up in flames (alongside those of his daughter and mistress), his severed head was placed on a spike and mounted atop the ghastly agent of his martyrdom, the wheel.

D
ISENCHANTMENT BY
D
ECAPITATION

Medieval Christendom may have envisioned the world as a spiritual battleground, but it inflicted horribly real outrages on earthly tabernacles as well. The desecration of dead bodies—the beheading, the dismembering, the burning of them—was a recapitulation of the capital punishments inflicted on living ones. Such abominations were rooted in a primitive desire to destroy the corpse—an action that in turn was designed to deprive the malefactor of the blessings of resurrection, or to deny a vengeful ghost any instrument for retaliation.

“Disenchantment by decapitation” is a phrase that folklorists have coined to describe those actions in fairy tales where the hero, by cutting off a monster’s head, releases a soul trapped in the fiend’s body by evil enchantment. That motif has deep roots in global culture: The severed head has traditionally constituted the ultimate gory trophy.

Beheading, in fact, was the execution method of choice for kings and aristocrats of old. Of the many heads lost in England, only one had been crowned, anointed, and hedged about with all the supernatural protection that ritual and ceremony could provide. Yet none of that could shield its owner from his own disenchantment by decapitation. “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown,” declared deposed King Charles I as he stepped out of London’s Banqueting House and onto the scaffold on a dark January day in 1649, when he lost his head in a terrible culmination to the English civil wars. Though Charles I was hastily buried in Windsor Castle’s St. George’s Chapel, it was soon bruited about that he had been denied the burial rites in the
Book of Common Prayer.
Eleven years later, the son of Charles I was restored to the English throne, and he went looking for his father’s remains. Neither head nor body could be found.

A century and a half later, in 1813, workmen in the vaults of St. George’s Chapel accidentally broke in to the crypt of King Henry VIII. Although the crypt was supposed to contain just two coffins—King Henry’s and Queen Jane Seymour’s—the workmen found three. The prince regent assembled a small party, which included Sir Henry Halford, future president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and together they climbed into the dark, musty vault to investigate.

They couldn’t resist peering into the leaden coffin supposed to contain King Henry VIII’s remains. They spied the skeleton within—“some beard remained upon the chin”—but nothing else of note. They chose, however, to leave inviolate the sepulcher containing the queen, as they deemed “mere curiosity” an insufficient motive for disturbing her remains.

The investigators then turned to the third coffin, likewise made of lead. First they discovered an inscription bearing the name of King Charles. Then, prying the lead back, they peered inside.

If the martyred king had indeed been refused burial rites, his body would have been vulnerable to demonic possession. And they did see inside a figure, wrapped in cerecloth, “into the folds of which,” Halford later reported, “a quantity of unctuous or greasy matter, mixed with resin, as it seemed, had been melted, so as to exclude, as effectually as possible, the external air.” Carefully removing these cerements, they beheld a remarkably well-preserved face. This was no skeleton; clearly, Charles I had been embalmed. The cartilage of the nose was gone, “but the left eye, in the first moment of exposure, was open and full….”

A transfixing eye in that dismal place—but instantly it turned to dust. Then, carefully lifting the severed head, the party gazed at the long-dead monarch: The familiar Vandyke beard was perfect, many teeth were still in place, and the left ear was likewise intact. The fourth cervical vertebra had been cleaved in half, “an appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow,” Halford continued, “inflicted by a very sharp instrument….” Before laying the head back in its coffin, where presumably it remains to this day, the men noticed—the passage of 164 years notwithstanding—that it was “quite wet” with what everyone present, including the surgeon, believed to be blood.

Severed heads. The sultan in his palace supposedly greeted Vlad Dracula’s impaled head with delight. The severed heads of malefactors—especially bandits and rebels—adorned city gates, bridges, and public squares all over the ancient and medieval worlds, and could be found in China as late as the 20th century. Such gruesome mementos made the most explicit of warnings. They were bloody cousins of the “hanging” executions, which encompassed crucifixion and impalement in addition to the rope and gallows commonly denoted by the term. All were abominably exemplary: Corpses were often left to rot where they dangled. Little wonder that gallows and execution grounds were seen as polluted, demon-haunted places—every bit the terra damnata of any heretic’s grave.

To be hanged, drawn, and quartered was the particularly barbaric punishment reserved for high treason in England. The condemned man (women convicted of treason were burned at the stake) would be carted to the place of execution, hanged until near the point of death, then cut down, castrated, and disemboweled, his entrails and genitals burned before his dying eyes. His carcass was then decapitated and cut (or often pulled by horses) into four quarters, with the gory head propped atop a pike for all to see.

Such was the punishment meted out to many of the men who had signed the death warrant of King Charles I. The diarist Samuel Pepys watched one of those regicides, Thomas Harrison, get ripped apart in October 1660. Looking “as cheerful as any man could do in that condition,” Pepys recorded, Harrison was hanged, drawn, and quartered. His “head and heart [were] shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.” Tearing him asunder might not stop his returning, however; “he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again.”

Even the dead were not immune from this long arm of the law, for traitors could be hanged, drawn, and quartered posthumously. Three months after Harrison’s demise, for example, his fellow regicide, Oliver Cromwell—the lord protector who had ruled the Commonwealth of England with an iron fist—was removed from his tomb in Westminster Abbey. On January 30, 1661, what was left of his putrefying cadaver was ceremonially hanged, drawn, and quartered before being tossed, it seems, into a pit (although his family was rumored to have spirited it away). Cromwell’s severed head, however, was impaled before Westminster Hall, where it stood in the sun, wind, and rain for nearly 15 years before finally being blown to the ground by a storm. Passed from one collector to another, it became one of the most grotesque objects in any cabinet of curiosities—brown and wizened and repulsive. Mercifully and at long last, Cromwell’s head was interred in the gardens of Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge—in 1960.

And then there was burning. As an explicit punishment for heresy, burning is at least as old as the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century. Upon spreading to Catholic Europe, this most dreadful of all methods for sundering body from soul was employed with appalling frequency during the witchcraft hysteria of the 16th and 17th centuries. Death by flame, though agonizing, was swift; the corpse itself, however, seemed to almost actively resist incineration—as we saw in the case of Johannes Cuntius. When St. Joan of Arc, the soldierly Maid of Orleans, was convicted of witchcraft by an opposing English army and put to the torch in 1431, she had to be burned three times; some of her organs, it was said, were impervious to the flames. This was interpreted as a miracle, leading to her canonization 500 years later.

Intriguingly, in 1867, a jar was discovered in the attic of a Paris pharmacy bearing the label “Remains found under the stake of Joan of Arc, virgin of Orleans.” Inside was a paltry set of objects: a charred human rib, some carbonized wood, a fragment of linen, and what turned out to be a cat femur, probably the result of tossing black cats—witches’ familiars—onto the pyres. Yet, all of the items quickly achieved the status of relics.

In 2006, a French forensics team gained permission to examine the articles. Applying cutting-edge spectrometry alongside such traditional techniques as pollen analysis, the team also engaged the noses of celebrated perfumers, who detected traces of “burnt plaster” and “vanilla” in the remains—yet vanillin is the product of decomposition, not cremation. The black crust on the rib bone, long assumed to have resulted from charring, instead turned out to be a mixture of resin, bitumen, and malachite—a mixture akin to that used in primitive embalming. The linen fragment, for its part, matched similar ones from ancient Egypt. Finally, carbon-14 dating fixed the origin of the remains between the third and sixth centuries B.C. Far from being saintly relics, these were pieces of an ancient mummy.

Perhaps the dead feed off the living, perhaps not; but in the cultural cannibalism that was the medieval mummy trade, the living were feeding off the dead.

Mummy,
or
mumia,
comes from the Arabic word
mumiya,
which originally meant “bitumen”—the sticky, tarlike petroleum derivative that was once spread abundantly over the sands of Mesopotamia. Its use as an embalming agent in ancient Egypt gave the word its modern meaning; it also encouraged the belief that bits of a cadaver treated with bitumen, once swallowed, would have a strangely powerful preservative effect on the eater.

This is why, by the 12th century, pulverized Egyptian mummies, mixed with bitumen, pitch, tar, and spices, were being imported into Europe in astonishing numbers, there to be consumed as a tonic, a panacea, and a preservative. “Mummie is become Merchandise,” mused Sir Thomas Browne, “Mizraim [ancient Egypt] cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for Balsoms.”

These nostrums didn’t always come from Mizraim, and they certainly weren’t always pharaoh. Unscrupulous middlemen, it appears, made substitutions. The corpses of suicides were passed off as mummies, as were those of executed criminals who had hung in the sun too long, and even bodies discovered in bogs by Danish peat cutters. In 1645, a Dutch apothecary scolded his colleagues for labeling certain concoctions “mummy” when what they were really offering was an “arm or a leg of a decaying or hanged leper or of some whore-hopper suffering from syphilis.”

W
ARNINGS FOR
P
OSTERITY

Twelfth-century England, in our imaginations, is the green and pleasant land of Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and Richard the Lionhearted. We do not normally associate it with pestilence, much less with
sanguisuga,
or “bloodsuckers.”

Yet, such creatures were apparently plentiful, at least in the imaginations of the ecclesiastical chroniclers who, by guttering candles in cold abbeys, penned their tales of prodigies “as a warning to posterity.” The Abbot of Burton told of two peasants who returned from the grave with their coffins on their shoulders, roamed village and field, and spread disease everywhere they went. But once their bodies were exhumed, the heads cut off, and the hearts removed, the evil abruptly ceased.