Vampires Through the Ages (13 page)

For a French nobleman of the period, however, the only true profession was that of war, and from 1427 to 1435 he served as a commander in the royal army, fighting alongside Joan of Arc against the English and their Burgundian allies. After the siege of Orléans in 1429, Gilles and three other lords were rewarded with the honor of transporting the holy oil of Saint Remy to Notre-Dame de Reims for the coronation of Charles VII as King of France, after which Gilles was named Marshal of France.

A few years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake as a witch by her English enemies in 1431, Gilles hung up his spurs and sword and retired to his vast estates, where he quickly squandered his wealth with extravagant displays and costly theatrical productions. Before long these excesses threatened to bankrupt him, and he did the unthinkable for a French nobleman: he began selling off his holdings to pay for his uncontrolled spending. Feeling the pinch, Gilles also looked for alternative solutions to his dwindling funds and several times found himself swindled by charlatans claiming to be magicians who could turn base metals into gold through alchemy. When these failed, Gilles grew more desperate and began experimenting with the occult under the direction of an equally suspicious character named Francesco Prelati, who claimed to be able to raise a demon he called by the name “Baron.” It was this demon, Gilles later testified, that first provided the impetus for his ghastly crimes, as Prelati promised the restoration of his fortune if he would but sacrifice the lives of innocent children to the evil fiend.

Regardless of whether Gilles truly believed that torturing and murdering children would satisfy the demon Baron or, as is more likely the case, he was simply satisfying his own inner demons, it's believed that he began his bloody work in the spring of 1432 after the death of his grandfather. Most of the abductions involved local village children whose parents were powerless to complain and occurred deep inside the moated walls of his castle at Machecoul, where even their screams could not be heard. The first documented case concerned a twelve-year-old boy named Jeudon, an apprentice furrier. Gilles's cousins, Gilles de Sille and Roger de Briqueville, asked the boy to deliver a message to the castle, but when he failed to return the accomplices told inquirers that the boy must have been carried off by bandits.

Often the crimes followed a ritualistic pattern. They began subtly with a twisted game of cat and mouse that involved dressing the abducted child in fine clothes and setting before him a feast unlike anything he had seen before. As the child ate with relish, Gilles and a small band of confidants riotously feasted and drank a mixture of heated spice wine known as hippocras. Then when the party reached a fever pitch, the child was suddenly taken to a private room where Gilles had him strung up with ropes and strangled while he watched. Many tortures and abuses were committed against his victims before they were finally beheaded with a thick, double-edged blade known as a braquemard. Witnesses to these horrific events later reported that Gilles also stabbed some in the jugular and allowed the warm blood to cover him, which he drank with great excitement. When the men were done with the victim, the body and any traces of the crime were destroyed by fire and the ashes dumped into the castle's moat.

Such atrocities might have gone unpunished if Gilles's own greed and arrogance had not gotten the better of him. On May 15, 1440, he and a small band of armed followers kidnapped a local cleric during a dispute over property Gilles had sold to the clergyman's brother and now intended to take back by force. The incident prompted an investigation by the Bishop of Nantes, who in the process uncovered shocking evidence of Gilles's darker crimes. In short order, Gilles and two close servants, Henriet and Poitou, were arrested and charged with unspeakable crimes ranging from witchcraft to murder. During the trial that followed, Gilles did little to exonerate himself in the eyes of the court but to the contrary exhibited a number of bizarre behaviors, including attempts at bribing the court and delusions that he was a Carmelite monk. In the end, however, Gilles finally admitted to the charges against him in all the graphic details he could muster for the court scribes who took his confession. He was condemned to die by the hangman's noose.

At nine o'clock on October 26, 1440, Gilles and his co-defendants were led to their place of execution on the Île de Nantes, where in a crowded meadow he addressed onlookers with contrition and remorse, even extolling Henriet and Poitou to die bravely and think of salvation. Gilles was then hung by the neck until dead, after which the body was carried away to an unknown resting place. His co-defendants also faced the rope, and afterwards, like many of their young victims, were burned to ashes and scattered to the wind.

It's difficult to truly account for the number of children who fell into the clutches of the bloodthirsty Gilles de Rais, since he carefully disposed of the bodies. Most of his victims, both boys and girls, ranged in age between six and eighteen, and while some historians claim the final body count is somewhere between eighty and two hundred, others have estimated it could be as high as six hundred.

Although Gilles de Rais achieved many triumphs on the battlefield in defense of his country, it will be his crimes history remembers most. Several years after his execution, his daughter Marie erected a stone memorial at the place of his execution, which over generations became strangely regarded as a holy altar until it was destroyed by Jacobins during the French Revolution. Now all that remains of Gilles de Rais are horror stories told to children to keep them awake at night.

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Count Dracula: Without me, Transylvania will be as exciting as Bucharest … on a Monday night.

—Love at First Bite

6

A Star Is Born

The concept of a supernatural creature that preyed upon the blood of humans left an indelible mark on the accounts that survived the rise and fall of early civilizations. From the Babylonian
Epic of Gilgamesh
sprang vengeful ghosts and demons; in the Sanskrit
Bhagavad Gita
, blood-drinking gods battled one another atop fields of corpses; and from the weathered scrolls of the Greeks, seductive
lamia
led unwary young men to their end. Regardless of which dark shape the vampire took, such tales continued to trickle down through the stream of human consciousness as a literary theme to explain some of humanity's deepest fears.

Nevertheless, for much of the vampire's history it remained a secondary character when compared to the shining gods and heroes that populated the vast majority of early mythologies. Ironically, the theme didn't step forward as a distinct literary device of its own until the Age of Enlightenment dawned across Europe in the 1700s, when many great thinkers were turning away from the mysticism and superstition of the past in favor of science and reason. Sparked by extraordinary reports of vampirism in Eastern Europe, such as the cases of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz, churchmen, scientists, and political leaders alike wrote and debated prolifically on the subject, lending credibility to vampires far beyond their folkloric roots.

For the next one hundred years, intellectual works were circulated to the public in the form of pamphlets, treatises, and books at an ever-increasing pace. In 1732, for example, as many as fourteen works on vampirism appeared in German-speaking lands alone, while each day newspapers across Europe reported new outbreaks. With this rise in media attention, or because of it, reports poured in at an alarming rate, with cases popping up in Prussia in 1710, 1721, and 1750; in Hungary from 1725 to 1730; in Bulgaria in 1775; in Wallachia in 1756; and in Russia in 1772. In each case, newspapers vied with one another in the race to see who could capture the most graphic details or report the highest body count, lending to each new story a greater element of sensationalism. Yet as much as readers feared the very mention of the word
vampire
, they were equally enthralled by it and hungered for more.

Literary Vampires

One of the earliest appearances of a vampire in a fictional work of literature was in a short poem published by the German writer Heinrich August Ossenfelder in 1748, entitled “Der Vampir.” In the poem a man threatens to drink the blood of a young Christian maiden if she spurns his attentions, and by doing so acts as a metaphor for those forces menacing the Christian church during that period. Other works followed, including, in 1797, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem “The Bride of Corinth,” which explored similar themes
sans
the blood drinking, as well as Robert Southey's 1801
Thalaba the Destroyer
, which is the first piece of English fiction to mention vampires. The theme wouldn't truly come into its own though until 1813, when the British poet Lord Byron published a poem entitled “The Giaour,” describing a corpse-like revenant that prowls abandoned tombs at night in search of blood. A portion of the poem reads:

But first, on earth as Vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race:

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

Must feed thy livid living corse …

Wet with thine own blest blood shall drip

Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip;

Then stalking to thy sullen grave

Go—and with the Ghouls and Afrits rave;

Till these in horror shrink away

From spectre more accursed than they!

Lord Byron based the work on tales he heard
while traveling through Eastern Europe, specifically
during his stay at the court of Ali Pasha in Albania, and the poem went on to meet with widespread acclaim from both critics and readers alike.

While many of these earlier works still relied on the folkloric imagery of a monster running amuck in the graveyard at night, an important paradigm shift began to take place in how writers and therefore readers saw the vampire. On April Fool's Day 1819, a groundbreaking new short story entitled “The Vampyre
”
appeared in the English journal
New Monthly Magazine
. Penned by none other than Lord Byron's former physician John William Polidori, the inspiration for the tale began as all good horror stories do: on a dark and stormy night.

Byron and Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati near the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816 with the poet Percy Shelley; his soon-to-be wife, Mary Godwin; and Godwin's stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Inclement weather kept the small group confined indoors most days, but at night they amused themselves by reading horror stories to one another. On one such night, as the rain pelted the shutters and lightning flashed outside, someone proposed they have a contest to see who could write the best ghost story. The result of the challenge produced two of the greatest works in horror literature to date: Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
and Polidori's “The Vampyre.”

In Polodori's vampire tale, a young Englishman named Aubrey meets the mysterious aristocrat Lord Ruthven. While the two are traveling across Europe together, they are set upon by a ruthless gang of bandits, resulting in Lord Ruthven receiving a mortal wound. Before succumbing to his injuries, he makes Aubrey swear an oath upon his honor to keep his death a secret from the world for one year and one day. Aubrey soon after returns home to England, where he is shocked to find Lord Ruthven very much alive and well, and although he suspects a supernatural influence at work he is honor-bound to keep the secret. Aubrey's horror is further compounded when he learns that his sister and Lord Ruthven are engaged to be married on the very day his oath is to expire. As the story climaxes, Aubrey writes a letter to his sister warning her of the danger she faces, but the correspondence arrives too late. Lord Ruthven has already married the young, unsuspecting girl and murdered her on their wedding day before disappearing into the night.

While “The Vampyre” became a bestseller across Europe, running through numerous editions and translations, many at the time attributed the work to Lord Byron, even as he emphatically denied it. The relationship between the two men quickly soured after their stay at the villa, and they went their separate ways never to speak again, but many scholars believe that Polidori based his vampire character on Lord Byron himself.

The genius of the work, however, lay not in the act of the author maligning his former employer, but in the way he turned the very idea of the vampire upside down. Polidori dragged the vampire from its dank tomb, dusted him off, gave him expensive clothes and a crisp new English accent, and set him loose to roam among the well-bred of society. With this new take on the old tale, John William Polidori in turn created a new vampire—the romantic vampire. Unfortunately for Polidori, however, he never realized the importance he played in the annuals of the vampire, as he committed suicide in London on August 24, 1821, by drinking cyanide.

Yet while the author may have perished, the legacy he helped to found lived on, and in 1845 the Scottish writer James Malcolm Rymer picked up the thread by releasing the gothic horror story
Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood
. Appearing from 1845 to 1847 in serialized installments known as “penny dreadfuls” (because of their inexpensive cost and bloodcurdling storylines), the work when collected in its entirety spanned 850 pages over 220 chapters.

The series begins with a brutal vampire named Sir Francis Varney terrorizing a family, the Bannerworths. From there on the storyline, which is confusing enough, weaves its way in and out of various plot twists, barely keeping to its narrative. Characters come and go, and there are even hints that Varney is related to his victims; readers are told that he bears a strong resemblance to a portrait in Bannerworth Hall of the late Marmaduke Bannerworth.

Despite its ponderous and convoluted storyline, the uniqueness of the work lay in the evolution of its main character. In early installments Rymer portrayed Varney as a bloodthirsty and remorseless creature bent on revenge, yet as the tale progresses the vampire is seen with increasing sympathy as a man cursed for the ages with a condition he cannot escape. While Varney meets his end on a number of occasions, he is forced to rise each time to carry on the nightmare of his existence. His final end, and that of the series, comes when Varney casts himself into the fires of Mount Vesuvius, leaving a written account of his life with a priest.

Unlike Polidori's infamous Lord Ruthven, who struts across the pages as the quintessential aristocrat of polish and sophistication, Varney was written to be far more monstrous in both his appearance and his intentions. Rymer also employed many of the vampiric themes and conventions modern readers have come to recognize in the creature today, including supernatural strength, hypnotic powers, and fangs that left puncture marks in the necks of his victims. He did not, however, saddle his villain with some of the limitations associated with vampires, such as an aversion to sunlight, garlic, and religious icons.

In 1872, twenty-five years after Varney ceased to terrify readers, a novella entitled
Carmilla
appeared as a three-part series in the magazine
The Dark Blue
. Composed by Dublin-born mystery writer Sheridan Le Fanu, the story was later collected for publication in the book
In a Glass Darkly
, which featured a number of gothic and mystery tales by the author.

Narrated by the heroine Laura, the suspense-driven tale begins with a carriage accident near her family's castle in the forests of Styria that brings into her life a girl of the same age named Carmilla. While Carmilla is recuperating at the castle, her mother oddly announces that she must leave on pressing business and will return in three months' time to fetch her daughter. During Carmilla's stay, the two girls become fast friends, and while their relationship blossoms so do Carmilla's romantic advances towards Laura. Before long Laura grows suspicious of her new companion, who carefully avoids speaking of her past and prefers to sleep most of the day and roam about at night.

When a painting arrives at the castle of Laura's ancestor Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein, its resemblance to Carmilla is uncanny. Eventually Laura tracks down the grave of her ancestor Mircalla—only to be attacked by Carmilla, who finally reveals herself as a vampire. Soon the vampire hunter Baron Vordenburg joins the cast and helps locate Carmilla's secret tomb, where an imperial commission is convened to exhume and destroy Carmilla's sleeping corpse.

With
Carmilla
, Le Fanu departed from the accepted role of the vampire as a primarily male seducer and also infused within the tale erotic undertones between the two main female characters that have labeled Carmilla one of the first lesbian vampires in the history of literature—although not the last. The name of Laura's ancestor Mircalla is of course an anagram for Carmilla, and thus once again highlights the familial aspect of the vampire to its victim present in so much folklore. Yet Le Fanu was also not above adding his own inventions to the mix. In the story, Carmilla slept in a coffin by day, exhibited an unnatural beauty, could pass through solid walls, and could assume the form of a fiendish-looking black cat when she so chose.

In 1897 another Irish author, Bram Stoker, built on the success of his predecessors and burst onto the literary scene with a sensational vampire novel entitled
Dracula
. First produced in a hardback edition on May 26, 1897, by the publisher Archibald Constable and Company, the novel lived on to give audiences its most enduring image of the vampire to date, spawning numerous other books, plays, and movies across genres as diverse as horror, science fiction, and even comedy. Stoker, who was the business manager for the world-famous Lyceum Theatre in London at the time, wrote the novel to supplement his income, originally calling it
The Dead Un-Dead
and then just
The Undead
before settling on the name of its main character, Dracula, for the title.

In the epistolary novel, told through a series of letters, journal entries, and even a ship's log, an English solicitor named Jonathan Harker travels to Count Dracula's castle in the wild Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania to finalize the purchase of certain properties. Once there he unwittingly becomes the prisoner of the count and for a time falls under the spell of three female vampires. With Harker trapped in the ancient castle, Dracula makes his way to England on the Russian ship the
Demeter
, which washes ashore along the northeastern English coast with all its crew either missing or dead. Now loose in the English countryside, Dracula begins to menace Harker's fiancée, Mina, and her friend Lucy. When Lucy falls ill with a strange wasting disease, Professor Abraham Van Helsing is called in to treat her, but despite his best efforts Lucy dies shortly after his arrival. Following her burial she begins to rise from the grave each night as one of the undead, forcing Van Helsing and several of her former friends to drive a stake through her heart and decapitate her.

While these events are transpiring, Harker escapes Dracula's castle and makes his way to Budapest, where Mina joins him and the two are married. The newlyweds return to England, where they join Van Helsing and others in the hunt for Count Dracula. In the process Mina is bitten by Dracula three times before he flees back to his native land of Transylvania. In hot pursuit the vampire hunters catch up with him just outside his castle walls as the sun begins to rise. In a final climactic scene, one of the vampire hunters slashes the throat of Dracula while another pierces his heart with a knife. Dracula then crumbles into dust as the sun crests the mountain's peaks. The puncture marks on Mina's neck disappear, signaling that she is free of the vampire's influence.