Then there were the real-life vampires. Or people who just about qualified for the title. In the mid-fifteenth century, a man named Gilles de Rais, a respected French military officer, began torturing and killing children to use their blood in various experiments. He was believed to have killed between two hundred and three hundred children before he was caught and brought to trial.
Further to the east, Vlad Tepes Dracula – the ‘Tepes’ meant ‘impaler’ and ‘Dracula’ the ‘son of Dracul’, while ‘Dracul’ itself meant ‘devil’ or ‘dragon’ – the Prince of Wallachia, now a part of Romania, was also bathed in blood, though by an entirely different mechanism. As the name ‘Tepes’ suggests, his particular speciality was impaling, and he killed literally thousands of his own people as well as every enemy of his country that he could get his hands on. His particular speciality was eating meals outdoors surrounded by newly impaled victims, who might last for hours on the stakes before finally expiring. And he was, of course, at least in name, the inspiration for the villain of Bram Stoker’s novel.
Still in Eastern Europe, the sixteenth/seventeenth-century Countess Elizabeth Bathory von Ecsed (later known as the ‘Blood Countess’ or ‘Blood Queen’) is said to have become obsessed with preserving her youth and looks and, according to some sources, resorted to a study of alchemy and the occult to determine a method that would work. Once again, the answer was ‘blood’, and she began the systematic kidnapping and killing of young girls – the ‘virgin’ concept again – allegedly to obtain their blood, which she would then either drink or bathe in.
As time went on, the social status of her chosen victims began to rise, because the countess apparently believed that the blood of the nobility would be more pure and effective than the blood of the simple peasant girls who were her first victims. Suspicion eventually fell on her because of the sheer number of unexplained deaths of young girls in the area, but she was spared trial and execution because of her status. In 1610 she was sealed up in a windowless tower room in her home – Cseite Castle, then in Hungary, now part of Slovakia and today known as Cachtice – for the rest of her life. Her four accomplices, the servants she had employed to select, kidnap and torture her victims, were all swiftly tried and three of them executed. According to some reports, the countess and her servants were responsible for some 650 deaths altogether, though they were convicted of only eighty.
The stories about her bathing in blood first surfaced considerably later, in the eighteenth century, and it’s now believed that, although the countess and her cohorts were certainly responsible for a large number of killings, her motive may have been simple sadism, as many of the bodies of their victims bore the unmistakable signs of torture, including beating, mutilation and burning.
Superstitions about both vampires and werewolves began to gain ground in Eastern Europe around this time. There was a persistent belief that vrykolakas (the Slavic word for ‘werewolves’) would become vampires when they died, which linked the two legends firmly together. And the wolves – the ordinary kind – that roamed the forests of Europe at the time also became associated with the vampire legend.
Among the largely illiterate population of Europe, the vampire was more than a legend. For many people, the creature of the night was as real as anything else in their lives, a monster to be feared and killed whenever possible. And the results of that fear, and of the steps taken to prevent a vampire from ever rising from its grave, can still sometimes be seen today.
Excavations that took place during 2000, in one of the older cemeteries of Cesky Krumlov in Bohemia, uncovered an eighteenth-century graveyard containing eleven bodies, three of which had been buried in an unusual fashion. Bodies are normally laid to rest east-west, but these were lying north-south. One skeleton had been decapitated and its skull placed between its legs, and also had a stone forced between its jaws. It was believed that moving the head well away from the neck would prevent the vampire replacing the head on its shoulders, and the stone would stop the jaws from being able to chew, an essential first step in turning a dead body into a vampire. All three of these skeletons had been pinned down with flat, heavy stones, to immobilize the bodies.
The remains were taken to Prague for anthropological examination, where it was ascertained that all three were male, and nitrogen analysis confirmed that the skeletons dated from between 1700 and 1750, the height of the anti-vampire craze in central Europe. The sternum of one body revealed a hole consistent with the left side of the chest, above the heart, having been impaled with a sharp object.
The identity of the three corpses has not been ascertained, and almost certainly never will be because of the paucity of records. But other ‘vampires’ were much better known, even notorious.
Princess Eleonora Amalia
The prologue of this novel describes the burial of Princess Eleonora Amalia of the Schwarzenberg dynasty, and is factually accurate in almost all respects. Eleonora became sick in about 1740, and her health declined rapidly. In those days, about the only known treatment for any serious illness was blood-letting, which was believed to flush out evil spirits. She was moved from Krumlov to Vienna to get better medical treatment, but she died at about six in the morning on 5 May 1741 at the Schwarzenberg Palace in the city.
The empire’s leading physicians assembled for a post mortem, an unusual step as such examinations weren’t usually performed on aristocrats. She apparently had a large tumour in her lower abdomen which had metastasized, invading her lungs – cancer, in short – but the outward signs were as if her body was being drained of blood from day to day, not helped by the blood-letting, obviously. Her preferred physician was Dr Franz von Gerschstov, who also headed various commissions charged with investigating vampires, and who believed that vampirism was contagious. The probability is that the post mortem – which was extremely expensive – was actually an intervention, intended to stop the vampire rising from her grave. That allowed the heart to be legitimately removed from the body to avoid the indignity of impaling or decapitation.
But if the princess was a vampire, that meant there must be another, very powerful, one in the area, who had infected her. Anti-vampire fever swept the land, with the corpses of suspected vampires being dug up and burned, decapitated or impaled. The Schwarzenbergs were traditionally buried in the family tomb in St Augustine’s Church in Vienna, but the princess’s body was returned to Bohemia the same night she died for burial, apparently by her own wish in an addition to her will made a few days before her death. This may have been a forgery, and an attempt to avoid Vienna having a potential vampire buried in the heart of the city.
At the castle in Krumlov, one life-size portrait of her has revealed under X-ray examination that the princess’s head had been removed and a new section of canvas sewn in its place – a symbolic beheading, perhaps?
The milk of wolves
Eleonora had found it difficult to conceive after producing her first child, Maria Anna, in 1706, and had finally resorted to an old remedy to enhance her fertility – she drank the milk of wolves. Their milk was believed to strengthen the female reproductive system and encourage the birth of male babies, and was based on the legend of the twins Romulus and Remus. She had cages built at the castle in which captured wolves were bred, and where the females were milked – a difficult task, and one that caused the animals to howl, an eerie and penetrating sound that could be heard for miles around. At that time, wolves were greatly feared and reputed to be both in league with the devil and friends to vampires.
In 1722, aged forty-one, Eleonora finally gave birth to a son. In 1732, the same year that the word ‘vampire’ first appeared in the German language, her husband was shot dead in a hunt near Prague, accidentally killed by a bullet fired by the Emperor, Charles VI. Her son was taken from her to live in the Emperor’s court near Vienna, while she spent her remaining days roaming the corridors of Krumlov Zamek, the family castle.
Contemporary vampires
After the superstitions and legends that characterized the Medieval and Renaissance periods, the Age of Enlightenment followed in the eighteenth century. Various attempts were made by scholars, priests and others to debunk the vampire myth, as well as other superstitions that were prevalent at the time. But the legend of the vampire proved to be almost as immortal as the creatures it described, and the stories and beliefs persisted.
Vampires started to migrate from the graveyards and forests of Eastern Europe to the pages of Gothic novels and the verses of Romantic poets. The Vampyre by John William Polidori is mentioned in this novel, and that was followed in 1847 by Varney the Vampyre, the longest novel ever written on the subject to that date. To some extent, the popularity of vampires in fiction then declined somewhat, but enjoyed a sudden revival when Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published. Since that time vampires, in one form or another, have always been with us.
Nosferatu in the printed word and on the silver screen
The origin of the word ‘nosferatu’ is obscure. The first recorded reference in print was in a magazine article of 1885, and three years later in a travelogue entitled The Land Beyond the Forest, both written by the British author Emily Gerard. The travelogue described the country of Transylvania (its Latin name translates as ‘the land beyond the forest’). In both she stated that ‘nosferatu’ was the Romanian word for ‘vampire’, but there is no known and identifiable corresponding word in any form of the Romanian language, ancient or modern. The closest are necuratul
