Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen? Help? What? Help?
Speaker 1: Welcome to the occult rejects in this episode. The point
Speaker 1: of this study is to show what we picture today.
Speaker 1: A pale, erotic aristocrat who bites next and shun sunlight
Speaker 1: is a recent composite assembled from straits that were once
Speaker 1: scattered across very different stories, rituals, and court files. If
Speaker 1: you follow the paper trail Dom Augustin Comet gathered in
Speaker 1: the seventeen forties. In the New England Testimonies George R.
Speaker 1: Stetson recorded in the eighteen nineties, you don't find capes
Speaker 1: and castles. You find depositions, autopsies, prayers and kitchen remedies,
Speaker 1: and folk magic. You find villages arguing with magistrates about
Speaker 1: corpses that look suspiciously fresh, Priests negotiating what the church
Speaker 1: will bless or forbid, families in rural Rhode Island opening
Speaker 1: graves during a tuberculosis outbreak, and burning a heart because
Speaker 1: a dead relative is believed to be feeding on the living.
Speaker 1: This project is, at bottom, a history of how communities
Speaker 1: try to name and manage misfortune, illness, sudden deaths. They
Speaker 1: are unquiet dead, and how the label vampire keeps getting
Speaker 1: reused to make the misfortune actionable, acceptable, and maybe even profitable.
Speaker 1: Seen up close, vampire law often cuts against modern expectations.
Speaker 1: In COALNT sources from Hungary, Moravia and Serbia, the vampire
Speaker 1: is not a suave seducer, but a case type, more
Speaker 1: like a dead village, just suspected of rising, throttling sleepers
Speaker 1: and leaving a chain of deaths, followed by an officially
Speaker 1: sanctioned exhumation, a surgeon's inspection for signs supple limbs, fluid blood,
Speaker 1: ruddy color, and then a remedy staking decapitation and burning.
Speaker 1: In Greek and Roman antiquity, the nearest analogies le May
Speaker 1: and Streege are night witches and child killers, not re
Speaker 1: animated corpses. In East Asia, the yang shei feeds on
Speaker 1: she rather than blood. In Stetson's New England, the vampire
Speaker 1: doesn't even need a name. Consumption drains families. The solution
Speaker 1: is to burn the heart of the recently deceased and
Speaker 1: scatter the ashes. Old lore, in other words, is procedural
Speaker 1: and local. It's about what to do when a certain
Speaker 1: pattern of deaths appear. Modern lore is esthetic and individual.
Speaker 1: It's about who the monster is. Procedural spine is where religion, spirituality,
Speaker 1: and law intersect. Calmets dossier shows clergy and civil officers
Speaker 1: treating vamporism as a juridicial problem. Witnesses are sworn, graves
Speaker 1: are opened by order, bodies are examined, and acts of
Speaker 1: destruction are justified by a theology of preventing harm to
Speaker 1: the living. The same files expose spiritual cross currents, orthodox
Speaker 1: crosses and inscriptions. Jesus Christ conquers buried with the dead,
Speaker 1: Excommunication invoked to explain incorrupt corpses. Elsewhere, customary law bleeds
Speaker 1: into folk medicine, bread baked with blood from suspect corpses,
Speaker 1: garlic stakes, and decapitation as a kind of vernacular surgery.
Speaker 1: Stetson's New England interviews add a secular coda. A doctor
Speaker 1: performs an autopsy before the family burns the heart. In
Speaker 1: each setting, the remedies stand at the crossing of church, courthouse,
Speaker 1: and kitchen, ritual actions that also function as public health
Speaker 1: measures in absence or rejection of germ theory. From that
Speaker 1: vantage point, the modern vampire looks curated, hand picked attributes
Speaker 1: stitched into a single charismatic figure. Nineteenth century fiction selects
Speaker 1: immortality and bloodlust, drops the messi village. Epidemiology griffs on
Speaker 1: sexual magnetism from romantic and decadent literature, and imports aristocratic
Speaker 1: glamour to make the monster legible and drawing rooms. Twentieth
Speaker 1: century films add sunlight, allergy, mirror tricks, and a tool
Speaker 1: kit of weaknesses refolds away is just as telling the
Speaker 1: court records the priest's dilemma the family's calculus in a
Speaker 1: winter of wasting disease. By returning to kamets Treaties on
Speaker 1: the Apparition of Spirits and on Vampires and Stetson's animistic
Speaker 1: Vampire or New England recover the older landscape in which
Speaker 1: vampire was less a character than a diagnosis, a community's
Speaker 1: name for a crisis, and a set of sanctioned acts
Speaker 1: meant to stop it. That's the argument. This introduction invites
Speaker 1: the audience to hold today's vampire is a sleek anthology
Speaker 1: of motives, but the older creature lived in the junction
Speaker 1: of belief, law and survival. Reading the eighteenth century treatise
Speaker 1: beside the nineteenth century field notes let us watch that
Speaker 1: shift happen in real time, from exhumation reports to Gothic romance,
Speaker 1: from village remedies to pop icon, and asks a larger
Speaker 1: question the sources keep pressing when people say vampires, what
Speaker 1: are they really trying to cure? The word we use now,
Speaker 1: vampire vampira entered Western print culture in the early eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: almost certainly via Austrian reports out of newly occupied Serbian districts.
Speaker 1: The first widely circulated usage appears in the Vienna's official
Speaker 1: newspaper on July twenty first, seventeen twenty five, in a
Speaker 1: dispatch about the Kasolova case Peter Plogoduwitz, which we will
Speaker 1: talk about later. The German text reproduces a field report
Speaker 1: that includes the term in Latinised form as vampirey, the
Speaker 1: name locals used for revenants that rise from their graves
Speaker 1: to drain the living. Within a few years, the word
Speaker 1: races through German and French, and by seventeen thirty two
Speaker 1: it lands in English, often as vampire with the y
Speaker 1: in newspaper summaries of vampire epidemics in the Habsburg borderlands.
Speaker 1: Behind that sudden debut, though, lies a much older Slavic
Speaker 1: lexicon upire upir upyr at, tested in Old Russian sources
Speaker 1: as early as ten forty seven. The eighteenth century word
Speaker 1: is new, the idea complex is not. When the habit
Speaker 1: Bisburg's pushed the Ottoman frontier back in seventeen eighteen, the
Speaker 1: absorbed districts of what is now northern Serbia and Oltinia,
Speaker 1: military administrators and physicians soon found themselves adjudicating feverish village
Speaker 1: disputes about the restless stead. One such complaint, followed by
Speaker 1: an imperial proviser named Ernst Frumbold, was copied into the
Speaker 1: Darium on July twenty first, seventeen twenty five, under the
Speaker 1: dry headline copy of the writing from the Gradisca District
Speaker 1: and Hungary. The body of the notice, though, was anything
Speaker 1: but dry. It described a corpse exhumed with fresh blood
Speaker 1: and supple limbs, a classic list of signs, and used
Speaker 1: the local name vampire for the supposed revenant. That newspaper
Speaker 1: item is widely taken as the first popular Western print
Speaker 1: occurrence of the word in any spelling. It made enough
Speaker 1: noise that antiquarians and newswriters across Europe began repeating it
Speaker 1: and the term stock. Over the next seven years, vampire
Speaker 1: hardened into a technical label in German, French and English
Speaker 1: news prose. This second pillar was the seventeen thirty two
Speaker 1: Latin memorandum known as Visum et Ripertum, compiled by the
Speaker 1: Austrian regimental surgeon Johannes Fluckinger after an inquest near Belgrad
Speaker 1: the Arnold Pohl outbreak. Even though the report itself is
Speaker 1: in Latin, it was immediately abstracted in German, French, and
Speaker 1: English pamphlets and journals. German was vamp r, French was
Speaker 1: vamp ir, and English was vampyr or vampr. Modern etymologists
Speaker 1: and historians consistently pinpoint seventeen twenty five to seventeen thirty
Speaker 1: two as the exact window when the word naturalized in
Speaker 1: Western languages. If you read those seven twenties to seven
Speaker 1: thirties sources in context, you can see what the vampire
Speaker 1: meant at first contact. It isn't yet a caped aristocrat,
Speaker 1: or even as standardized folk type. It's an administrative shorthand
Speaker 1: for a reverence of a particular kind, one that, according
Speaker 1: to witnesses, leaves the grave at night, assaults or throttles sleepers,
Speaker 1: causes a string of deaths within kin networks or neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: and leaves diagnostic traces in the grave cliant limbs, rubicund skin,
Speaker 1: fluid blood, sometimes blood at the mouth, and apparent hair
Speaker 1: and nail growth. The associated countermeasure exhumation, staking the heart, decapitation,
Speaker 1: burning to ash a part of the same dossier already
Speaker 1: codified in the late seventeenth century periodicals like the Macure Gallant.
Speaker 1: They formalized in the Habsburg in quest paperwork that Kalmt reprinted.
Speaker 1: The word and the ritual kit arrived together, how convenient.
Speaker 1: In ancient Greece, creatures resembling Van Empires abounded. A myth
Speaker 1: the Lamia from Greek Lemia was portrayed as a half woman,
Speaker 1: half serpent monster who preyed on the living. She ate children,
Speaker 1: and could transform into a beautiful woman in order to
Speaker 1: seduce young men and suck their blood. Likewise, the imposai
Speaker 1: were female specters that fed on flesh and blood, and
Speaker 1: the gallo were knight demons who slipped into houses to
Speaker 1: attack infants. Ancian sources even call these figures the ancient
Speaker 1: equivalent of vampires. Classical literature also names the Stricts, a
Speaker 1: monstrous owl demon of ill omen as feeding on human blood.
Speaker 1: By Byzantine times and later, popular belief held that an
Speaker 1: improperly buried or an evil person could rise from the grave.
Speaker 1: Traditional law explains Greek vampire as arising when a person
Speaker 1: is not buried with the proper ritual or suffers a
Speaker 1: cruel or unjust death, so that he comes back as
Speaker 1: a vampire to get revenge. Mesopotamia myth provided some of
Speaker 1: the earliest vampire demons. The Lamashetu was a fearsome Babylonian
Speaker 1: demonesse first millennium BCE who preyed on pregnant women and infants.
Speaker 1: Texts and amulants describe her as snatching newborns and drinking
Speaker 1: their blood or poisoned the milk. Similarly, the Lolito spirits
Speaker 1: of Sumer and a cod later Judaism's Lilith were vampiric
Speaker 1: female demons. In two thousand BCE, Gilgamus text, Lilith appears
Speaker 1: as shrieking vampiric demonestse terrorizing the forest. Over time, Lalitu
Speaker 1: Lilith became associated with kidnapping children and killing mothers. Eventually
Speaker 1: fused with the Lamashtu's mythology. These Mesopotamian beliefs of night
Speaker 1: demons draining life from the vulnerable influenced later Hebrew and
Speaker 1: Greek law. The Romans inherited the Greek law and edded
Speaker 1: their own demonic birds and monsters. Rome and naturalists and
Speaker 1: poets mentioned the Strictx, a nocturnal screech owl demon that
Speaker 1: fed on human flesh and blood. The Strix was feared
Speaker 1: as a child killer. Classical authors also preserved the Greek
Speaker 1: Lemea and Impusa stories. One ancient lexicon explains that the
Speaker 1: LeMay assumed the form of handsome women, then sucked their
Speaker 1: blood like vampires and ate their flesh, effectively labeling them
Speaker 1: what the vampires are in modern legends. Thus, both Greek
Speaker 1: and Robin traditions spoke of shape changing female demons who
Speaker 1: drank life's blood. In later centuries, these were largely absorbed
Speaker 1: into Christian demonology emerged with Slavic vampire myths. As those
Speaker 1: spread westward, Chinese folklore developed its own vampire archetype Yangshi
Speaker 1: literally stiff corpse, which appears in the Qing era legend
Speaker 1: and later Jiangxi is reanimated corpse drisen by residual chi
Speaker 1: life energy, usually hopping with outstretched arms. Vocalore says they
Speaker 1: rise at night and may devour the infants of people,
Speaker 1: but they do not typically suck blood. Instead, they drain
Speaker 1: the living's chi. Outside China, related beliefs spread through East Asia.
Speaker 1: Buddhism hungry ghosts preda or famine plagued spirits driven by
Speaker 1: unfulfilled desire. These equi Chinese hungry ghosts were tormented by
Speaker 1: insatiable hunger for offerings, reflecting the idea of lost soul's
Speaker 1: craving life force. Festivals such as the Ghost Month include
Speaker 1: making food and incense offering to appease these hungry shades.
Speaker 1: Mesoamerican cultures had several vampire like spirits. In Aztec myth,
Speaker 1: the Zitsumima were skeletal female star demons. At inauspicious times,
Speaker 1: they were believed to descend to Earth. If the sun's
Speaker 1: rebirth ritual failed, they would descend to devour the last
Speaker 1: of men. Likewise, the spirits of women who died in childbirth,
Speaker 1: the Chiawa Tatio, were thought to walk on five special
Speaker 1: nights each year. These fearsome of the night would haunt crossroads,
Speaker 1: kidnap children, and drain the vigor from men unless placated
Speaker 1: with shrines. Human sacrifice in skull rack rituals and Aztec
Speaker 1: religion also symbolically fed gods with blood, reflecting life force exchange.
Speaker 1: The Maya had the bat god and the jaguar demons,
Speaker 1: though sources do not emphasize blood sucking so much as
Speaker 1: terror and decapitation in general. Pre Columbian beliefs framed vampiric
Speaker 1: imagery as a metaphor for violent death and supernatural penalty. Ritually,
Speaker 1: potent mothers and warriors became restless spirits and nasty omens
Speaker 1: were said to steal souls or blood, similar to vampire motives.
Speaker 1: South American traditions have fewer explicit vampires, but do depict
Speaker 1: soul stealing deity and the blood offerings to underworld gods.
Speaker 1: Hindu scriptures do not explicitly label vampires, but life draining
Speaker 1: spirits play roles in the mythology. The most famous is
Speaker 1: the vatala, a corpse spirit of Hindu legend. A vitala
Speaker 1: is a ghoul like being that hangs in cremation grounds
Speaker 1: or forests and can possess the living folk. Beliefs describe
Speaker 1: the vitala as a dreaded being who takes the light
Speaker 1: in sucking human blood, killing children, causing miscarriages. Similarly, rakasas
Speaker 1: and epic lore or shape shifting demons, often depicted as
Speaker 1: man eaters with fangs and red eyes. Later folk tales
Speaker 1: describe them desecrating graves and drinking blood from skulls. In
Speaker 1: Southern India, Tamil folklore speaks of the pay and pay
Speaker 1: Makety battlefield specters, who drain the blood of a soldier
Speaker 1: dying on a battlefield, even as a merciful deliver of
Speaker 1: a swift death. Many of these entities have parallels in
Speaker 1: Buddhism and in Southeast Asian myths. Hindu and Buddhist cosmology
Speaker 1: also include the concept of preta or hungry ghost. A
Speaker 1: preta is a departed soul cursed with eternal hunger and thirst,
Speaker 1: often due to greed or violent death. They wander seeking
Speaker 1: offerings of water and food. Neglecting one's ancestors in ritual
Speaker 1: might produce such a suffering spirit. In East Asia, this
Speaker 1: belief blossom into ghost festivals and rituals of preta donna
Speaker 1: offering alms to the hungry dead Like a vampire. A
Speaker 1: preda is constantly hungry for life energy, though it usually
Speaker 1: cannot physically bite. Now I would like to start getting
Speaker 1: into the first of the two books I used for
Speaker 1: this work, and that I had mentioned earlier. Both compile
Speaker 1: older accounts of vampires or the like. We have Dom
Speaker 1: Augustin Kalmet Treaties on the Apparitions of Spirits and arm
Speaker 1: on Vampires, or Revenants of Hungary, Morabia and more. Dom
Speaker 1: Augustine Kalmet was a French Benedictine monk, biblical exegute and
Speaker 1: historian whose scholarships straddled the worlds of rigorous Enlightenment inquiry
Speaker 1: and traditional Catholic learning. Best known in his own day
Speaker 1: from massive methodical commentaries on scripture and a widely used
Speaker 1: historical critical Bible dictionary, Kalmens spent decades collating sources, weighing testimony,
Speaker 1: and pre facing interpretation with careful philological and historical work.
Speaker 1: Late in life, he turned that same scharlely toolkit on
Speaker 1: a sensational topic, then gripping europe apparitions, revenance, and the
Speaker 1: reports of vampires emerging from the Habsburg borderlands. His tool
Speaker 1: volume is the first sustained quasi academic survey of the
Speaker 1: vampire phenomenon in Western Europe. The Helmet compiles depositions, military
Speaker 1: and ecclesiastical inquists, newspaper reports and letters about cases from Hungary, Moravia,
Speaker 1: Silesia and beyond. He catalog signs fresh blood at the mouth,
Speaker 1: pliant limbs, apparent hair and nail growth, community countermeasures, exhumation, staking, decapitation,
Speaker 1: creation and competing explanations, premature burial, natural post mortem changes,
Speaker 1: diabolic illusion, divine permission. Crucially, he neither embraces crudelity nor
Speaker 1: dismisses witnesses out of hand. His method is to present
Speaker 1: sources in full, compare variants, test them against theology and
Speaker 1: natural philosophy, end end in measured suspension of judgment. That posture,
Speaker 1: taking emic beliefs seriously while probing for ordinary causes made
Speaker 1: this book a lightning rod for contemporaries and a cornerstone
Speaker 1: for later folklore, anthropology, and the modern forensnsic reading of
Speaker 1: vampire reports. In short, Kalmut is the librarian and cross
Speaker 1: examiner of early vampirism, the monk who gathered the dossier.
Speaker 1: The rest of the field still argues with Calmet's taxonomy
Speaker 1: and his marshaling of case materials set the agenda for
Speaker 1: two centuries of debate skeptical medical and folklore. Modern researchers
Speaker 1: still return to his case synopsises to track the diffusion
Speaker 1: of motives and state intervention. Here I will go over
Speaker 1: some of the chapters that include his research and findings.
Speaker 1: Chapter nine, on vampire corpses and identification. He opens the
Speaker 1: vampire section by describing how Hungarian villagers treated suspected vampires.
Speaker 1: He explains the grave examinations were usually conducted by civil
Speaker 1: and church authorities. Witnesses were summoned, dispositions taken, and the
Speaker 1: corpses inspected for common marks of vampirism. These signs included
Speaker 1: pliancy and flexibility of limbs, a fluidity of blood, and
Speaker 1: unputrefied flesh. These symptoms appeared the corpse was burned. Calmet
Speaker 1: notes that even this did not always stop the specter's appearances.
Speaker 1: He insists all procedure was formal. Witnesses are generally summoned,
Speaker 1: arguments on both sides are taken. In practice. Villagers first
Speaker 1: tried informal remedies, staking or pinning suspected vampires in place.
Speaker 1: Only afterwards did they seek a legal sanction to exhume
Speaker 1: the body. In a famous case, Comet records a man
Speaker 1: named Peter, often called Plogojuits, who I mentioned before, had
Speaker 1: died and been buried about ten weeks. When he began
Speaker 1: appearing at night two neighbors, he squeezed their throats in
Speaker 1: such a manner that they expired within twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: Nine people died in eight days. The dead man's widow
Speaker 1: even reported a visit by his ghosts demanding his shoes,
Speaker 1: which terrified her and she fled the village. These events
Speaker 1: spurred the villages to seek official permission to dig up
Speaker 1: and destroy the body. When the commanding officer and the
Speaker 1: minister inspected the corpse, they found it free from any
Speaker 1: bad smell, and perfectly sound, as if it had been alive.
Speaker 1: The nose was only slightly withered, but remarkably, the beard
Speaker 1: and hair were grown afresh, and a new set of
Speaker 1: nails had sprung in place of the old ones. Under
Speaker 1: the old now pale skin, a new, fresh colored skin
Speaker 1: had formed, and the hands and feet were as entire
Speaker 1: as if they belonged to a person in perfect health. Crucially,
Speaker 1: the mouth was full of fresh blood, which villagers believed
Speaker 1: that the vampire had sucked from the persons he had killed.
Speaker 1: Convinced by these facts, the officials allowed the body to
Speaker 1: be staked and then burned. Comat presents this Hungarian case neutrally,
Speaker 1: detailing each step in observation by courting the official report
Speaker 1: at length. He emphasizes the vivid evidence of the vampire's belief,
Speaker 1: fresh hair and nails, warm blood in the mouth, etc.
Speaker 1: Yet Comet does not endorse a supernatural interpretation. Later chapters,
Speaker 1: which we'll go into, he will crucially assess these signs.
Speaker 1: Here he simply records that villagers believed such marks identified
Speaker 1: vampires and that they followed local custom to burn the
Speaker 1: corpses once identified, and then we'll talk about chapter ten
Speaker 1: Corpses that suck the living. Here Commet leads with a
Speaker 1: formally investigated case from the Hungarian frontier. A soldier billeted
Speaker 1: in a Haydemach household watches a rangers sit down to supper.
Speaker 1: The host recognizes the intruder as his dead father and
Speaker 1: dies the next day. The matter is escalated through the
Speaker 1: regiment to the general staff, who dispatched Count d Cabreras
Speaker 1: with fellow officers, a surgeon and an orditor to take
Speaker 1: sworn testimony. On eccumation. The corpse is found like that
Speaker 1: of a man who has just expired, in his blood,
Speaker 1: like that of a living man, so Cabrera's orders decapitation
Speaker 1: and re intimate. Calmut adds two more depositions gathered at
Speaker 1: the same time. One corpse, dead for thirty plus years,
Speaker 1: had returned three times, sucking the blood of a brother,
Speaker 1: a son, and a servant, each of whom died of
Speaker 1: it instantly, after which officials found the blood fluid and
Speaker 1: drove a large nail into the temple. The third revenant,
Speaker 1: dead sixteen years, was burned. The corpse of this specter
Speaker 1: was exhumed and found to be like that of a
Speaker 1: man who has just expired in his blood, like that
Speaker 1: of a living man. He had come back three times,
Speaker 1: sucked the blood, and all three died of it instantly.
Speaker 1: Calmut reproduces the most famous Habsburg Serbian dossier, the Arnold
Speaker 1: Pale Affair, from the Hayduke district near the Atizza, to
Speaker 1: show how local theory and practice hang together. He summarizes
Speaker 1: the folk epidemiology the Haydukes believe certain dead persons, whom
Speaker 1: they call vampires, drained the living so that the kin
Speaker 1: visibly attenuate, while the corpses swells like leeches with blood
Speaker 1: which oozes through pores and conduits, noses, and ears, even
Speaker 1: soaking the shroud. He repeats the contagion logic, those who
Speaker 1: were sucked in life become active vampires after death. In
Speaker 1: the countermeasures exhumation, inspect for signs, and destruction, stake, decapitation, burning.
Speaker 1: This set piece is the colonel that the eighteenth century
Speaker 1: medical and legal writers debated for decades and count. It
Speaker 1: is the arch compiler who places the official memos, surgeons notes,
Speaker 1: and village testimonies side by side without forcing a single explanation.
Speaker 1: The people believe that certain dead persons, whom they call vampires,
Speaker 1: suck all the blood from the living, so that these
Speaker 1: become visibly attenuated, whilst the corpses fill themselves with blood
Speaker 1: seemed to come by the conduits and even oozing through
Speaker 1: the pores. They remembered that Arnold Pohl had become tormented
Speaker 1: by a Turkish vampire, and that those who have been
Speaker 1: sucked suck also in their turn. What this chapter is
Speaker 1: doing analytically, I think procedure over sensationalism. Comet stresses that
Speaker 1: authorities hear the depositions, bring surgeons, and verify marks bliant limbs,
Speaker 1: fluid blood, uncorrupted flesh before authorizing execution, steak, decapitation, cremation.
Speaker 1: Even in this chapter dense with lurid details, he keeps
Speaker 1: the spotlight on process and testimony, not just marvels, common
Speaker 1: signs and remedies across cases. The diagnostics are consistent fresh color,
Speaker 1: open eyes, fluid blood, supple limbs, blood at the mouth
Speaker 1: of pores, sometimes apparent growth of hair and nails. The
Speaker 1: remedies are the now conical triad steak, decapitate, burn to ash,
Speaker 1: sometimes with heart removal and then reburial. Comet's compilation is
Speaker 1: why these protocols look so standardized, and later forensic and
Speaker 1: folklore summaries to spend a judgment. Even here, comment neither
Speaker 1: declares miracle nor cries fraud. He records that some observers
Speaker 1: appeal to natural philosophy, yet refuse to dismiss them outright.
Speaker 1: Coum It will praise naturalistic versus pre natural explanations in
Speaker 1: subsequent chapters, but this unit's job is to lay down
Speaker 1: the facts who said, what, what was seeing on exhumation
Speaker 1: and what was done? Now we'll move on to chapter eleven,
Speaker 1: The Jewish Letters Vampire story from seventeen thirty two, and
Speaker 1: basically what this chapter argues two ways to erase belief.
Speaker 1: The author chooses hard skepticism. The Leitrice Jewey's writer opens
Speaker 1: by saying there are only two viable strategies. Either explain
Speaker 1: vampire reports by natural or physical causes, or deny the
Speaker 1: story's outright, and he thinks the second is the sure
Speaker 1: and the wisest. Even while favoring outright denial, he concedes
Speaker 1: certain appearances can occur. Some recently buried corpses may shed
Speaker 1: fluid blood, and terrified people may literally sicken or die
Speaker 1: from fear and imagination. So vampirism can be psychosomatic contagion
Speaker 1: amplified by rumor and night terrors. There are corpses which
Speaker 1: shed fluid blood. End it is very easy for certain
Speaker 1: people to fancy themselves sucked, and that fear should deprive
Speaker 1: them of life. He adds that being haunted by such
Speaker 1: ideas by day, sleepers are naturally struck by them at night.
Speaker 1: It is very extraordinary that during their sleep the ideas
Speaker 1: of these phantoms should cause them such violent terror. He
Speaker 1: also adds a contemporary rationalist ally to show he's not alone.
Speaker 1: The author cites Johann Christoff Hemmerberg's book on Vampires from
Speaker 1: seventeen thirty three. Hemmenberg, he notes, argues that vampire debts
Speaker 1: are not caused by revenance at all, but by the
Speaker 1: troubled fancy of the invalids, and he underscores how imagination
Speaker 1: can derange the body. He also observes that in Slavonia,
Speaker 1: the same stake through the heart punishment used for murderers
Speaker 1: was repurposed for alleged vampires, suggesting continuity of legal ritual
Speaker 1: not proof of monsters. And he adds dead who eat,
Speaker 1: anticipating the claim that ancient customs prove post mortem agency
Speaker 1: and thus lend plausibility to vampires. He rehearses texts on
Speaker 1: food for the dead to Turullian on pagan offerings and
Speaker 1: Augustine on Christian funerary meals. In their eventual suppression, the
Speaker 1: point is historiographical. Even if ancients behaved as though the
Speaker 1: dead fed, that does invalidate corpse activity in graves. He
Speaker 1: concludes bluntly all that is said of dead men who
Speaker 1: eat is chimerical and beyond all likelihood. I shall always
Speaker 1: say that the return of the vampires is unmaintainable and impracticable.
Speaker 1: And then we'll move on to Chapter twelve. Other recorded
Speaker 1: vampire incidents come. It opens with local ethnography. The hay
Speaker 1: Dukes believe certain dead whom they call vampires, prey upon
Speaker 1: kin who become visibly attenuated, while the corpses, like leeches,
Speaker 1: fills with blood, sometimes seen at the mouth, pours or
Speaker 1: seeping into the shroud. Again, we're back to Arnold Paul, operak, sequence, signs,
Speaker 1: and remedies. Arnold Paul dies in an incident. Within thirty
Speaker 1: to forty days, four neighbors die in the same manner,
Speaker 1: associated locally with vampire molestation. Had earlier claimed he was
Speaker 1: tormented by a Turkish vampire near Cassovia and that those
Speaker 1: who are sucked suck in their turn. He had tried
Speaker 1: protective rights, eating grave earth, smearing vampire blood, Yet on exhumation,
Speaker 1: about forty days post burial, his corpse showed all the
Speaker 1: arc vampire signs. Body was red, hair, nails and beard
Speaker 1: had all grown again, and veins replete with fluid blood.
Speaker 1: The local hagnagi skilled in vampirism, orders this stake through
Speaker 1: the heart, pierced his body through and through with a
Speaker 1: supposed frightful shriek, and then decapitation and cremation. The same
Speaker 1: is done to the four who died. Then there's a
Speaker 1: resurgent five years later with secondary cases. Despite the first purge.
Speaker 1: Five years on, a new cluster erupts seventeen deaths in
Speaker 1: three months, of different sexes and ages. Some so anothers
Speaker 1: after a short while. A memorial case, Senoska, who wakes trembling,
Speaker 1: cries that Milo's son dead nine weeks, had nearly strangled her,
Speaker 1: then dies three days later. Exhumation shows signs. Officials insurgents
Speaker 1: ask how the scourge returned if the first purge was thorough.
Speaker 1: Their answer is the chapter's epidemiological twist, Arnold Paul had
Speaker 1: not only sucked persons, he had killed oxen, and those
Speaker 1: who ate the oxen, including Milo's son, became new vampires.
Speaker 1: The authorities disenter a cohort of the recent dead, among
Speaker 1: forty seventeen show the most evident signs of vampirism, so
Speaker 1: the standard stake, decapitation, burning is repeated. Ashes cast into
Speaker 1: the river. Then we have chapter fourteen, Vampirism from a
Speaker 1: natural Cause. Here Kalmut entertains a naturalistic explanation posed by others.
Speaker 1: The supposed vampire has never died at all, but merely appear.
Speaker 1: So he writes, a further use may be made of
Speaker 1: these instances by supposing that the specters so much talked
Speaker 1: of in Hungry Morovia, Poland, and etc. Are nothing but
Speaker 1: persons that are still alive in their graves. In other words,
Speaker 1: perhaps these people were buried alive cowmen. Acknowledges that phenomenon
Speaker 1: like fresh hair and warm blood would then have obvious explanations.
Speaker 1: Yet he immediately points out the unanswered puzzle. If they're
Speaker 1: not really dead, how could they repeatedly come out of
Speaker 1: and back into their corphins without disturbance? This does not
Speaker 1: affect the principle of difficulty, how they come out of
Speaker 1: and go into their graves without leaving any mark. Thus
Speaker 1: Calmut shows his method. He listens to folk explanations, then
Speaker 1: raises logical objections. In this chapter he leans towards skepticism
Speaker 1: of original causes, suggests an even common sense lis face
Speaker 1: the inexplicable aspect of the graves being undisturbed. Thus, Calmet
Speaker 1: shows his method. He listens to folk explanations, then raises
Speaker 1: logical objections. In this chapter he leans towards skepticism of
Speaker 1: original causes, suggesting even common sense solutions face the inexplicable
Speaker 1: aspect of the graves being undisturbed. Then, on to chapter fifteen,
Speaker 1: we have causes corpse revival and body changes. Commet systematically
Speaker 1: addresses proposed causes for vampirism. First, he discusses how a
Speaker 1: corpse might rise and why are corpse's hair and nails
Speaker 1: might appear to grow. He notes local belief that bearing
Speaker 1: victims upside down or using garlic might prevent resurrection, implying
Speaker 1: a folk concept of vampires physically leaving the coffin. Importantly,
Speaker 1: Comic quotes natural signs to demystify the hair and nail's growth.
Speaker 1: He writes, the the fluidity of blood, the freshness of color,
Speaker 1: and pliancy of limbs seen in exhumed corpses are circumstances
Speaker 1: not more to be wondered at than the growing of
Speaker 1: their hair and nails. In other words, unrotted flesh and
Speaker 1: regrown nails are not supernatural. Many corpses, especially those who
Speaker 1: die violently, stay moist and retain color. He explained that
Speaker 1: dead bodies can still undergo slow chemical changes. Onions will
Speaker 1: grow after they are taken out of the earth, and
Speaker 1: similarly a corpse's hair may lengthen post mortem dew to
Speaker 1: moisture in the grave. Calmet frames these classic vampire signs
Speaker 1: in purely natural terms. Second, Calmet surveys others suggested causes.
Speaker 1: He reproduces examples from periodicals like the macure Gallant from
Speaker 1: sixteen ninety three to sixty ninety four of villagers believing
Speaker 1: in witchcraft or curses as the cause of vampirism. He
Speaker 1: also quotes letters from the Dutch Gleaner of seventeen thirty three,
Speaker 1: where a local clergy argued for or against real vampires.
Speaker 1: Throughout Coalmet remains neutral, compiling opinions from all sides, miraculous reanimation,
Speaker 1: devilish transformation, or mere animals devices doing the damage. He
Speaker 1: seems most persuaded by naturalistic view, but never entirely rules
Speaker 1: out miracle or devil's work if proven. Chapter sixteen, we
Speaker 1: have the mccure gallant accounts from sixty ninety three to
Speaker 1: sixteen ninety four, what the mecure Gallant reports and how
Speaker 1: Commet uses it. The mercure Galant says that in sixteen
Speaker 1: ninety three to sixty ninety four, periodicals speak of oor pires,
Speaker 1: vampires or ghosts, chiefly in Poland and above all in Russia,
Speaker 1: active from noon to midnight, and sucking blood of people
Speaker 1: and animals. Again, active from noon to midnight, and sucking
Speaker 1: blood of people and animals guests is no sun for them.
Speaker 1: In several notices, corpses are found with blood oozing. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it flows from the nose and principally at the ears,
Speaker 1: and the corpse may swim in its own blood in
Speaker 1: the coffin. Colmet reproduces this to show a standardized popular
Speaker 1: picture of the vampire. Before the eighteenth century, Habsburg inquests,
Speaker 1: the reviving being or orpire, or a demon in his likeness,
Speaker 1: leaves the grave at night, embraces and hugs violently relatives
Speaker 1: or friends, and drains them until they attenuate and die.
Speaker 1: The persecution typically runs through a family unless the revenant
Speaker 1: is stopped. An early printed version of the familial contagion
Speaker 1: logic calme it later details in the Arnold Pyol Outbreak
Speaker 1: de Mercura Gallant lists the standard countermeasures again decapitation, cutting
Speaker 1: off the head, or opening the heart to halt attacks.
Speaker 1: It also preserves a folk prof phylactic, mixing the vampire's
Speaker 1: blood with flour to bake bread eaten in ordinary so
Speaker 1: that the spirit returns no more. Kalmut includes this precisely
Speaker 1: because it reveals popular medicine around vampirism, not just official punishments.
Speaker 1: And then we have chapter fifty five corpses chewing in
Speaker 1: their graves. On page two eighty four, Kalmut opens bluntly,
Speaker 1: it is an opinion widely spread in Germany that dead
Speaker 1: persons chew in their graves her to eat like pigs.
Speaker 1: He reminds the readers he has elsewhere dismissed this as ridiculous.
Speaker 1: The imagination of those who believe that the dead chew
Speaker 1: in their graves is so ridiculous that it does not
Speaker 1: deserve refuted. In quotes the Panfin literature that spread it.
Speaker 1: Kalmut then names the chief authorities who popularized the notion.
Speaker 1: We have Michael Raulf, who treats grave mastication as proved ensure,
Speaker 1: claiming some dead have devoured their shrouds and even their
Speaker 1: own flesh. And then we have Philip Ribrius, an earlier
Speaker 1: tract from sixteen seventy nine under the same title, which
Speaker 1: Rareroof cites as President rarerof Catalog's regional countermeasures, which coume
Speaker 1: It repeats to show the ethnographic spread of the belief.
Speaker 1: Prop the jaw a mote of earth underneath their chin
Speaker 1: in the coffin, block the mouth, a little piece of
Speaker 1: money and a stone in their mouth, and bind the
Speaker 1: throat a handkerchief tightly around their throat cowm It calls
Speaker 1: these ridiculous customs and notes Raouf citations of other German
Speaker 1: writers who mention them. The case role What's plausible verse
Speaker 1: what isn't colm It lists the set pieces rareof and
Speaker 1: others parade, then sorts them Buried alive plausible. Henry count
Speaker 1: of Psalm, interred alive, cries at night toombed, open body
Speaker 1: found turned over. Comet flags this as a classic premature burial.
Speaker 1: Barley Duke explausible, a man buried after heavy drink later
Speaker 1: found to have gnawed his own arms. Comet says this
Speaker 1: came from ocular witnesses and again implies premature burial. Then
Speaker 1: we have Bohemia thirteen fifty five's reported a woman who
Speaker 1: had eaten half her shroud. Similar tales in the time
Speaker 1: of Luther of a man and a woman who gnored
Speaker 1: their entrails, and Moravia a dead man ate the linen
Speaker 1: of the woman buried next to him. He concedes that
Speaker 1: such things are very possible if the person wasn't truly dead.
Speaker 1: What he rejects is a leap to real corpses moving
Speaker 1: their jaws and masticating after death. All that is very possible,
Speaker 1: but that those who are are really dead move their
Speaker 1: jaws is a childish fancy. What Cowmet thinks is really
Speaker 1: going on. Premature burial explains the chewing cases that look credible.
Speaker 1: We have mechanical puppetry and fright culture. He likens the
Speaker 1: story to Rome's Mandicas, a carnival figure with a spring
Speaker 1: jaw that snapped to scare children. Comet's way of saying,
Speaker 1: mastication tales are stage illusion plus credulity, like what the
Speaker 1: ancient Romans said of their Mandicus, a grotesque figure teeth
Speaker 1: moved by springs to frighten children. The final verdict, as
Speaker 1: a general claim, the notion that the dead have been
Speaker 1: heard to eat in chew like pigs in their grays
Speaker 1: is manifestly fabulous. Now on to chapter twenty seven Calmet's reflections,
Speaker 1: specifically page two eighty eight. In the final chapter, Comet
Speaker 1: steps back to reflect on whether vampires are really dead
Speaker 1: or not. He explicitly enumerates the five general opinions discussed
Speaker 1: in Chapter twenty seven miracle delusion, living corpses, demon trick,
Speaker 1: or animal activity. Then he gives his judgment. Coalmu argues
Speaker 1: that the not dead but alive and grave theory is
Speaker 1: appealing but ultimately unsatisfactory due to the burial puzzle. He
Speaker 1: also finds the animal theory far fetched, no animal coumbite
Speaker 1: without being seen, and the good demon prank theory unsatisfying. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: Commet suggests that many vampire cases may stem from premature
Speaker 1: burial or misidentified corpses, but he coincides he cannot definitely
Speaker 1: explain every detail. He closes by noting that many respected correspondents,
Speaker 1: even in the gleanering toward the natural explanation, yet none
Speaker 1: can answer all the objections. Thus Commet leaves the matter unresolved.
Speaker 1: He neither fully validates nor dismisses vampirism, but clearly leans
Speaker 1: toward a rational account. Throughout these chapters, Comet's tone is
Speaker 1: scholarly and cautious. He quotes primary counts and translation, provides
Speaker 1: exact page and letter references, especially with the mccurr gallant
Speaker 1: in the Jewish Letters, and continuously ask logical questions. He
Speaker 1: does not simply call the phenomenon superstition. He investigates it
Speaker 1: as a serious inquiry, but the balance of his commentary
Speaker 1: favors natural causes. For example, he observes that a corpse
Speaker 1: preserved blood and flexibility are not more to be wondered
Speaker 1: at than corpse's hair growth. By systematically covering specific cases
Speaker 1: and then offering scientific explanations, Coalmet frames the vampire problem
Speaker 1: as one of data gathering and rea skepticism. Now we
Speaker 1: will be moving on to George R. Stetson's eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: six The Animistic Vampire in New England. George R. Stetson,
Speaker 1: The Animistic Vampire in New England, American Anthropologist, Volume nine,
Speaker 1: number one, Pages one through thirteen. George R. Stetson was
Speaker 1: a late nineteenth century American folk lores and contributor to
Speaker 1: American Anthropologist, whose work mixed comparative anthropology and New England
Speaker 1: vernacular belief. He gathered oral testimony and local reportages from
Speaker 1: rural Rhode Island and neighboring towns, then set those materials
Speaker 1: alongside classic European sources to show how old world ideas
Speaker 1: could persist and adapt in a modern American setting. The
Speaker 1: Animistic Vampire in New England is considered a landmark journal article.
Speaker 1: It argues that what we now call the New England
Speaker 1: vampire panic was a culturally meaningful response to tuberculosis. Families
Speaker 1: interpreted wasting illness as a dead relative feeding on the living,
Speaker 1: and performed a ritual remedy exhuming the corpse, removing and
Speaker 1: burning the heart, and scattering the ashes. Stetson's piece is
Speaker 1: prized for its mix of theory and on the ground detail.
Speaker 1: He maps European motifs, signs, omens remedies to New England practices.
Speaker 1: Quotes Tyler to frame two classic vampire theories, a living
Speaker 1: soul that praise versus a dead soul that returns, and
Speaker 1: records first hand witnesses, including a local mason and a physician.
Speaker 1: The result is the first systematic scholarly account of American vampirism.
Speaker 1: The Foundation later researches, most famously Michael Bell built upon
Speaker 1: to interpret these rights as vernacular medicine and community crisis
Speaker 1: management rather than mere sensational superstition. And then we have
Speaker 1: the opening frame vampirism as animism pages one through two.
Speaker 1: He opens with a theoretical claim belief in vampires and
Speaker 1: the whole family of demons is rooted in atomism, the
Speaker 1: projection of agency onto unseen forces by barbarian cultures unable
Speaker 1: to separate inner experience from the outer world. He immediately
Speaker 1: positions the New England material inside a global continuum from
Speaker 1: Chaldea to Babylonia, the Polynesia and New England, each culture
Speaker 1: naming Knight, visiting spirits that leave the tomb to torment
Speaker 1: the living. The belief in the vampire has its origin
Speaker 1: in atomism and personification. As before suggested, it was the
Speaker 1: general belief that the vampire is a spirit which leaves
Speaker 1: its dead body in the grave to visit and torment
Speaker 1: the living. The modern Greeks are persuaded that the bodies
Speaker 1: of the excommunicated do not putrefy in their tombs, but
Speaker 1: appear in the night as in the day, and that
Speaker 1: to encounter them is dangerous. Then we have Tyler's two
Speaker 1: theories of vamps and Afro Caribbean parallels, pages two through three.
Speaker 1: The Polynesians believe that the vampires were departed souls which
Speaker 1: quitted the graves and grave idols to creep by night
Speaker 1: into the houses and devour the heart and entrails of
Speaker 1: the sleepers, who afterward died. The Kreines tell of Cpu,
Speaker 1: which devours the souls of men who die. The miniteria
Speaker 1: of Malay Peninsula have their water demon who sucks blood
Speaker 1: from men's toes and thumbs. Stetson quotes Edward B. Tyler's
Speaker 1: Primitive Culture to summarize two classic theories. The first theory
Speaker 1: of the vampires superstitions, remarked Tyler, is that the soul
Speaker 1: of the living man, often a sorcerer, leaves its proper
Speaker 1: body asleep and goes forth, perhaps in the visible form
Speaker 1: of a straw or fluff of down, slips through the keyhole,
Speaker 1: and attacks a living victim. Some say these warai come
Speaker 1: by night to men, sit upon their breasts and suck
Speaker 1: their blood, while others think children are alone attacked, while
Speaker 1: to men they are nightmares. The second theory is that
Speaker 1: the soul of a dead man goes out from its
Speaker 1: buried body and sucks the blood of living men. The
Speaker 1: victims become thin, languid, bloodless, and falling into a rapid
Speaker 1: decline and dies. In New England, the vampire superstition is
Speaker 1: unknown by its proper name. It is believed that consumption
Speaker 1: is not a physical but a spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation,
Speaker 1: that as long as the body of a dead consumptive
Speaker 1: relative has blood in its heart, it is proof that
Speaker 1: in an occult influence steals from it for death and
Speaker 1: is at work draining the blood of the living into
Speaker 1: the heart of the dead and causing his rapid decline.
Speaker 1: And now we have old world law and practices in detail,
Speaker 1: Pages four through six. A brisk tour through seventeenth and
Speaker 1: eighteenth century Continental law, mostly via countate and other antiquarians.
Speaker 1: The late Monsieur de Visimont, councilor of the Chamber of
Speaker 1: the Courts of bar was informed by public report in
Speaker 1: Monravia that it was common enough in that country to
Speaker 1: see men who had died some time before present themselves
Speaker 1: in a party and sit down to table with persons
Speaker 1: of their acquaintance without saying a word and nodding to
Speaker 1: one of the party. The one indicated would infallibly die
Speaker 1: some days later. The captain of Grenadier's in the Regiment
Speaker 1: of Monsieur le Baron Trenck, cited by Comet, declares that
Speaker 1: it is only in their family and among their own relations,
Speaker 1: that the vampire's delight in destroying their species. William of
Speaker 1: Malmesbury says that in England they believed that the wicked
Speaker 1: came back after death by the will of the devil,
Speaker 1: and it was not an unusual belief that those whose
Speaker 1: death had been caused in this manner at their death
Speaker 1: pursued the same evil calling. Naturally, under such an uncomfortable
Speaker 1: and inconvenient infliction, some avenue of escape must, if possible,
Speaker 1: be found. It was first necessary to locate the vampire.
Speaker 1: If on opening the grave of a suspect, the body
Speaker 1: was found to be of a rose color, the beard,
Speaker 1: hair and nails renewed, and the veins filled, the evidence
Speaker 1: of its being the abode of a vampire was conclusive.
Speaker 1: A voyager in the Levant in the seventeenth centuries quoted
Speaker 1: as relating that an excommunicated person was exhumed and the
Speaker 1: body found fully healthy and well disposed, and the veins
Speaker 1: filled with the blood the vampire had taken from the living.
Speaker 1: In a certain Turkish village of forty persons exhumed, seventeen
Speaker 1: had evidence of vampirism. In Hungary, one dead thirty years
Speaker 1: was found in natural state. The bodies of five people
Speaker 1: were discovered in a tomb near the hospital of Quebec
Speaker 1: that had been buried twenty years, covered with flesh and
Speaker 1: suffuse with blood. And then we have the methods of relief.
Speaker 1: In Servia, a relief is found in eating of the
Speaker 1: earth of his grave and rubbing the person with his blood.
Speaker 1: This prescription was, however, valueless, if after forty days the
Speaker 1: body was exhumed and all the evidence of the arch
Speaker 1: vampire were not found. The Turkish provinces and in Greek
Speaker 1: islands was to burn the body and scatter the ashes
Speaker 1: to the winds. Some old writers are of the opinion
Speaker 1: that the souls of the dead cannot be quiet until
Speaker 1: the entire body has been consumed. Exceptions are noted in
Speaker 1: the Levant, where the body is cut in pieces and
Speaker 1: boiled in wine, and where according to Voltaire, the heart
Speaker 1: is torn out and burned. And than we have in
Speaker 1: Hungary and in Russia. They choose a boy young enough
Speaker 1: to be certain that he is innocent of any impurity,
Speaker 1: put him on the back of a horse which has
Speaker 1: never stumbled and is absolutely black, and make one ride
Speaker 1: over all the graves in the cemetery. The grave over
Speaker 1: which the horse refuses to pass is reputed to be
Speaker 1: that of a vampire. This old world kit of diagnostics
Speaker 1: and cures is the template against which Stetson will map
Speaker 1: New England's actions. And then we have geographic focus Y
Speaker 1: Rhode Island, pages six through eight. Stetson narrows to southern
Speaker 1: Rhode Island by some mysterious survival, a cult transmission, or
Speaker 1: remarkable outavism. This region, including within its radius the towns
Speaker 1: of Exeter, Foster, Kingstown, East Greenwich and others, with their
Speaker 1: scattered hamlets and more pretentious villages, is distinguished by the
Speaker 1: prevalence of this remarkable superstition, a survival of the days
Speaker 1: of Sardanapolis, of Nebraknezer, and of New Testament history in
Speaker 1: the closing years of what we are pleased to call
Speaker 1: the enlightened nineteenth century. It is it's an extraordinary instance
Speaker 1: of a barbaric superstition outcropping in and coexisting with a
Speaker 1: high general culture of which Max Miller and others have spoken,
Speaker 1: and which is not so uncommon, if rarely so extremely aggravated,
Speaker 1: crude and painful. And next we have primary cases, firsthand witnesses,
Speaker 1: a living mason, and a physician's report, pages seven through nine.
Speaker 1: The first visit in this farming community of native born
Speaker 1: New Englanders was made to a small seashore village possessing
Speaker 1: a summer hotel and a few cottages of summer residents,
Speaker 1: not far from Newport, that mecca of wealth, fashion, and
Speaker 1: nineteenth century culture. The family is among its well to
Speaker 1: do and most intelligible inhabitants. One member of this family
Speaker 1: had some years since lost children by consumption, and by
Speaker 1: common report, claimed to have saved those surviving by exhumation
Speaker 1: and cremation of the dead. In the same village resides
Speaker 1: an intelligent man by trade, a mason, who is a
Speaker 1: living witness of the superstition and of the efficacy of
Speaker 1: the treatment of the dead, which it prescribes. He informed
Speaker 1: me that he had lost two brothers by consumption. Upon
Speaker 1: the attack of the second brother, his father was advised
Speaker 1: by the head of the family to take up the
Speaker 1: first body and burn its heart when he was attacked
Speaker 1: by this disease. In his turn, advice prevailed, and the
Speaker 1: body of the brother last dead was accordingly exhumed, and
Speaker 1: living blood being found in the heart and in circulation,
Speaker 1: it was cremated, and the sufferer began immediately to mend,
Speaker 1: and stood before me a hale, hearty and vigorous man
Speaker 1: of fifty years. When questioned as to his understanding of
Speaker 1: this miraculous influence, he could suggest nothing, and did not
Speaker 1: recognize the superstition even by name. He remembered that the
Speaker 1: doctors did not believe in its efficacy, but he and
Speaker 1: many others did. At a small isolated village of scattered
Speaker 1: houses in a farming population distant fifteen or twenty miles
Speaker 1: from Newport and eight or ten miles from Stuart's birthplace,
Speaker 1: there have been made within fifty years, and a half
Speaker 1: dozen or more exhumations. The most recent was made within
Speaker 1: two years. In the family, the mother and four children
Speaker 1: had already succumbed to consumption, and the child most recently
Speaker 1: deceased within six months, was, in obedience to the superstition,
Speaker 1: exhumed and the heart burned. The doctor who made the
Speaker 1: autopsy stated that he found the body in the usual condition.
Speaker 1: After an intermate of that length of time, I learned
Speaker 1: that others of the family have since died and one
Speaker 1: is now very low with the dreaded disease. The doctor
Speaker 1: remarked that he had consented to the autopsy only after
Speaker 1: the pressing solicitation of the surviving children who were patients
Speaker 1: of his Stetson says exhumations had occurred in five families
Speaker 1: in one village, three in an adjacent one, and two nearby,
Speaker 1: evidence that this was not a one off panic, but
Speaker 1: a patterned response across clustered communities. He notes a similar
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy five Prussian case a six son exhumed his
Speaker 1: father and cut off his head, Arguing that the logic
Speaker 1: of vampirism travels, but Rhode Island's persistence is sociologically specific,
Speaker 1: and then onto why is it persisted isolation? Two cultures
Speaker 1: and educated People's superstition Pages nine through eleven. Stetson makes
Speaker 1: a sociological argument education and higher culture do not erase
Speaker 1: animistic thinking. Two cultures, rational and animistic coexist into mingling
Speaker 1: and at times influencing each other, Even the most enlightened
Speaker 1: harbor superstitious weakness shaped by environment and development. He cites
Speaker 1: the mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya's belief importanance and and an American
Speaker 1: mathematician who kept a horseshoe nailed over his door for
Speaker 1: seven years. Habits of belief persist even among elites. He
Speaker 1: thinks Rhode Island's isolation, sparsely settled religions where thought stagnates
Speaker 1: allowed the vampire remedy to survive into the late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: But he's careful. The same human tendencies exist everywhere. Conditions
Speaker 1: just made them visible there. It is apparent that our
Speaker 1: increased and increasing culture, our appreciation of the principles of
Speaker 1: natural mental and moral philosophy, and knowledge of natural law,
Speaker 1: has no complete correlation in the decline of primitive and
Speaker 1: crude superstitions or increased control of the emotions or the imagination,
Speaker 1: and that to force a higher culture upon a lower,
Speaker 1: or to metamorphose or to perfectly control its emotional nature
Speaker 1: through education of the intellect is equally impossible. The two
Speaker 1: cultures may, however, coexist, intermingling and in a limited degree,
Speaker 1: absorbing from and retroacting favorably or unfavorably upon each other,
Speaker 1: trifling aberrations in the exhonerable law which binds each to
Speaker 1: its own place. Then we go on to Stetson's implicit diagnosis.
Speaker 1: Although he uses the language of barbaric superstition, Stetson is
Speaker 1: not writing mockery. He is offering an anthropological ideology. Tuberculosis
Speaker 1: is reinterpreted as spiritual predation. Inside kinship lines, the dead
Speaker 1: drains the living, making the ritual actionable medicine. In a
Speaker 1: world without cures, the family clustering of TB genetics shared
Speaker 1: exposure would have looked like targeted predation, So exhumation and
Speaker 1: heartburning becomes a public health ritual. However, Grim this point
Speaker 1: is implicit in his data. An explicit and later literature
Speaker 1: building on stetson Old world signs blood in the heart,
Speaker 1: rosy corpse, renewed hair and nails, and cures burning decapitation
Speaker 1: provide a cognitive script. New Englanders adapt to their own
Speaker 1: illness ecology. They don't need the word vampire to behave
Speaker 1: with the vampire logic. Now, something I wanted to start
Speaker 1: adding from my own is I wanted to start showing
Speaker 1: a little bit more of TB and other things that
Speaker 1: have happened and ran along with vampiresm We have Mercy
Speaker 1: Lena Brown, Rhode Island of eighteen ninety two, the best
Speaker 1: documented case. After multiple consumption deaths in the family, Mercy's
Speaker 1: heart and liver were burned. A tonic made from the
Speaker 1: ashes was given to her brother Edwin. He died shortly
Speaker 1: after a local physician, doctor Harold Metcalf, and a reporter
Speaker 1: were present. And then we have Frederick Ransom south Woodstock, Vermont.
Speaker 1: Eighteen seventeen Dartmouth student died of TB. Town records and
Speaker 1: press accounts note the exhumation and heartburned on a forge
Speaker 1: to protect surviving kin. We have Rachel Harris Burton from Manchester, Vermont,
Speaker 1: exhumed in seventeen ninety three, Congressional Deacon Isaac Burton dug
Speaker 1: up his first wife, Rachel to try to save his
Speaker 1: second wife, Holda from consumption. The ritual failed, and Holda
Speaker 1: died later that year in New Ipswich. In New Hampshire.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty, physician doctor John Chloe records a family
Speaker 1: predisposed to consumption who exhumed a relative and burned the
Speaker 1: heart he says the remedy didn't out work. Identify the
Speaker 1: exhumed as Samuel Saladay in New England. Vampire cures tracked
Speaker 1: the spread of TB almost one from one from Willington, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty four at the start of the regional epidemic
Speaker 1: to Exeter, Rhode Island in eighteen ninety two at its
Speaker 1: symbolic end, while the ritual kit exhumation, heart removal, burning
Speaker 1: astonic functions as a vernacular public health in a world
Speaker 1: before Kotch's eighteen eighty two discovery made the bacterial cause clear. Now,
Speaker 1: tuberculosis wasn't the only current running vampire stories, and the
Speaker 1: Balkans rabies outbreaks overlapped the very decades vampire stories filled
Speaker 1: the streets. Peleegras wasting in sun, tender skin added more
Speaker 1: bodies to read in graveyards. Decomposition physics, purge, fluid skin slippage,
Speaker 1: flexible joints looked like life to people who didn't have
Speaker 1: forensic textbooks, and a few premature burials kept the fear plausible.
Speaker 1: Even transmission had a logic. Bale's case talks about the
Speaker 1: cataly as a vector a peasant epidemiology centuries before Katch.
Speaker 1: Some moderns tried to medicalize the myth with pufforia, but
Speaker 1: that's a late add on. What always travels with the
Speaker 1: vampire is procedure, depositions, priests, surgeons, and a remedy the
Speaker 1: village can perform. And again, what else tracks the vampire reports?
Speaker 1: I mentioned rabies the Balkans in the eighteenth century. A
Speaker 1: wildly sided medical hypothesis argues that rabies helped prime Bulkan
Speaker 1: communities for vampire explanations symptom oval apisierie, nocturnal agitation, biting, attacking,
Speaker 1: hypersensitivities to stimuli, hydrophobia, sexual disinhibition, and rapid death in
Speaker 1: transmission chains. Crucially, the timelines matched the classic Grain vampire
Speaker 1: epidemic window from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: and Habsburg Ottoman borderlands. Juan Gomez Alonzo's neurology paper makes
Speaker 1: the case explicitly even popular summaries, nor did the correlation
Speaker 1: once the article appeared. Ingrained dependent peasants zones pealegra nisin
Speaker 1: deficiency produced photosensitive dermatitis, wasting, and neuropsychiatric changes. Historians of
Speaker 1: medicine have flagged that palegra and rabies were epidemic during
Speaker 1: the very decade. Vampire stories went viral across Eastern and
Speaker 1: Central Europe. Pelager's sunlight sensitivity and wasting fed into popular
Speaker 1: ideas of a night active, blood draining scourge. No one
Speaker 1: claims Palagra is the vampire, only that it furnished recognizable
Speaker 1: bodily signs during crisis. Again and again, the physical proofs
Speaker 1: the triggered exhumation turn out to be normal post mortem changes,
Speaker 1: purge fluw is at the mouth and nose, abdominal bloating,
Speaker 1: Rubicune's skin, flexible joints after rigor passes, and the illusion
Speaker 1: that hair and nails grew really skin retraction and nailbet exposure.
Speaker 1: Forensic overviews and classic folklore analysis show how these were
Speaker 1: reliably misread as life in the grave, especially in the
Speaker 1: cold seasons or tight coffins that slowed pertrification exactly the
Speaker 1: context of many eighteenth century inquists. Add in genuine premature burials,
Speaker 1: coma and intoxication, and you get credible tales of chewing
Speaker 1: movement or torn shrouds within any revenue. The famous Arnold
Speaker 1: Pohle dossier explicitly describes cattle as a transmission pathway. Powell
Speaker 1: sucked oxen. Villagers who ate the meat later died in
Speaker 1: the vampire cluster, prompting mass exhuminations. Whatever we think of
Speaker 1: the belief, the file shows people thinking in contact chain
Speaker 1: terms humans livestock, humans sound familiar, which looks like pre
Speaker 1: germ theory epidemiology writing under a vampire label. And just
Speaker 1: to even make this more interesting, let's add drinking blood
Speaker 1: to tales of TB consumption and sprinkle in some bats
Speaker 1: and rabies. In the late eighteen hundreds, consumption tuberculosis and
Speaker 1: weak blood iron deficiency anemia were rampant and poorly understood.
Speaker 1: Patients in several cities began drinking fresh animal blood, usually
Speaker 1: cow or sheep, straight from the slaughterhouse. Paris's Abertoi di
Speaker 1: la Villetti even drew morning cues a period engraving captions
Speaker 1: the scene plainly sick parisons come to drink the blood
Speaker 1: of freshly slaughtered beef to find a cure. A medical
Speaker 1: history roll Up notes that in the eighteen seventies, about
Speaker 1: two hundred people were said to regularly drink blood at
Speaker 1: New York slaughterhouses, take warm, usually straight from the neck,
Speaker 1: with observers, pointing out that many clients were women, using
Speaker 1: free blood as an iron rich substitute when meat was
Speaker 1: scarce and unaffordable. Writers also recorded first person tastings that
Speaker 1: normalize the practice. One famous eighteen seventies account describes ordering
Speaker 1: a glass of blood a butcher, rinsing a tubbler, opening
Speaker 1: bullock's throat, and catching the blood in the glass. Marked
Speaker 1: as a tonic for consumptives. A scholarly thesis pulls dozens
Speaker 1: of newspapers and medical items together and makes the point
Speaker 1: explicit blood drinking consumptives were compared to vampire in the
Speaker 1: period press, an image that fed back into popular vampire
Speaker 1: imagery just as the literary vampire was taking form. So
Speaker 1: here we have Paris from the eighteen seventies to the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties, engraved reportage of invalids lining up daily for
Speaker 1: ox blood as a cure for consumption or weak blood.
Speaker 1: New York City stockyards in the eighteen seventies around two
Speaker 1: hundred people regularly drinking blood warm from the neck of
Speaker 1: the dying animal, orphan women framed as a free iron supplement,
Speaker 1: And in Cincinnati in eighteen seventy five, a published glass
Speaker 1: of Ballock's blood tasting from a city abatar presented as
Speaker 1: a medical drought for the sick. How this ties into
Speaker 1: vampire talk. Late Victorian reporters literally likened these patients to vampires,
Speaker 1: giving you a visual the pale invalid sipping warm blood
Speaker 1: that audiences immediately map on to the monster. The folklore
Speaker 1: dossier colmet Preserved is earlier and different, but by the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies to nineties, the medicalized blood drinker and the
Speaker 1: literary vampire reinforced each other in headlines and cartoons. Now
Speaker 1: we get to the bat rabies blood drinking spiderweb of hysteria.
Speaker 1: A classic neurology paper argued that rabies epidemics in the
Speaker 1: Balkans overlapped the seventeen twenties to the seventeen fifties vampire
Speaker 1: epidemics with very similar symptoms nocturnal agitation, biting, hyperreactivity, sexual disinhibition, hydrophobia,
Speaker 1: rapid death, and person to person fear chains. The thesis
Speaker 1: isn't that people drank blood for rabies. It is the
Speaker 1: rabies made the vampire narrative plausible in time in place,
Speaker 1: here are two folkures for rabies, no blood drinking, but
Speaker 1: very ritualized Saint Hubert's key from Western Europe. Priests heated
Speaker 1: a special metal key and quarterized bites to prevent madness,
Speaker 1: a church endorsed practice recorded in the late nineteenth and
Speaker 1: early twentieth century. In medical terms, early quartery can reduce risk.
Speaker 1: In ritual terms, it mirrors vampire remedies that sacrileze harm prevention.
Speaker 1: And then we have the madstone from the US. Healers
Speaker 1: pressed a revered bizarre like stone often boil the milk
Speaker 1: between applications onto bite wounds to draw out rabies, hugely popular,
Speaker 1: widely reported in America. With TB you get blood drinking
Speaker 1: as a remedy that newspapers labeled the vampiric. With rabies
Speaker 1: you get outbreaks that made vampire behavior believable. Plus ritual
Speaker 1: cures that, like vampire remedies, sat at the intersection of liturgy, law,
Speaker 1: and lay medicine. And now to us in a bat
Speaker 1: only the New World vampire bats three species truly feed
Speaker 1: on blow. The very taxonomic naming in the eighteenth nineteenth
Speaker 1: centuries Vampium vampium spectrum helped cement the bat vampire idea
Speaker 1: in print culture. Bram Stoker simply popularized the link already
Speaker 1: floating around natural history and newspapers a vampire who turns
Speaker 1: into a bat. One reason the rabies vampire idea sticks
Speaker 1: is bats. The only truly blood feeding bats are called
Speaker 1: vampire bats. In the United States, bats now account for
Speaker 1: the majority of human rabies debts. In Latin America. Vampire
Speaker 1: bats transmit paralytic rabies to cattle and sometimes people that
Speaker 1: modern ecology retro colors the legend a thing that feeds
Speaker 1: at night and spreads a fatal bite. So vampire and
Speaker 1: actual blood feeding bat plus rabies are literally connected and
Speaker 1: now stitching. This all back to vampire law. In cities
Speaker 1: like Paris and New York, consumptives and anemis took warm
Speaker 1: slaughterhouse blood as a tonic, and reporters called them vampires.
Speaker 1: This imagery seeped into the same decades that fixed the
Speaker 1: vampire's look in fiction, even as New England families were
Speaker 1: still exhuming TV victims. Mercy Brown is one example, and
Speaker 1: burning hearts as a vernacular public health right in the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century. Balkans, rabies outbreaks and the legal medical inquists
Speaker 1: calmet reprints share a time window and behavior of script biting, contagion,
Speaker 1: sudden death, folk raby cures, Saint Hubert's key, madstones looked
Speaker 1: procedurally like vampire remedies. Steak, decapitation, burning, both authorized interventions
Speaker 1: when fear outruns science. And then we got bats. The
Speaker 1: name vampire bat, the blood meal. In their role as rabies,
Speaker 1: vectors give today's audience a natural history bridge between disease
Speaker 1: and myth. Why the bite matters, why night matters, Why
Speaker 1: chains of illness feel like someone is feeding? And so,
Speaker 1: after all of this has been said in disgust, it
Speaker 1: is of my opinion that in the end, vampire turns
Speaker 1: out to be less a creature than a method. Away
Speaker 1: communities have tried to make chaos legible and stoppable. Ease
Speaker 1: the Heart. Calmet's files showed us how belief became procedure.
Speaker 1: Depositions taken by candlelight, graves opened under order, a surgeon's
Speaker 1: hand on a cold wrist, deciding if the signs fit
Speaker 1: the script. Stetson's Rhode Island witnesses showed us the same
Speaker 1: impulse translated into a new world. A doctor's autopsy, a
Speaker 1: family's calculation, a heart consigned to fire because tuberculosis had
Speaker 1: no cure. They trusted. Between those bookends. The word carried law, religion,
Speaker 1: and folk medicine in the same breath. It named a problem,
Speaker 1: then authorized the remedy. What modernity did was curate fiction,
Speaker 1: lifted a handful of traits immortality, blood, seduction, and left
Speaker 1: the village epidemiology, the priest's dilemma and the court room formaladies.
Speaker 1: We treated a communal What do we do now for
Speaker 1: a solitary who is he? That shift produced one of
Speaker 1: the great icons of popular culture, but also flattened a
Speaker 1: messy human history into a sleek silhouette. When you put
Speaker 1: the docierer back on the table Calmeut's treatise beside Stetson's
Speaker 1: field notes, the older picture re emerges law crossing with liturgy,
Speaker 1: households absorbing risk, remedies that are rituals, and rituals at
Speaker 1: a public health. So as we close hold two truths
Speaker 1: at once, the vampire we know is a brilliant anthology,
Speaker 1: a hand picked composite that keeps evolving. And the vampire
Speaker 1: our sources knew is a social technology, a name for
Speaker 1: sudden loss, and a license to act. If this survey
Speaker 1: has done its job, you can now hear both voices,
Speaker 1: the courtroom clerk reading a deposition in seventeen thirty two,
Speaker 1: and the narrator of a modern Gothic. Between them lies
Speaker 1: the real story, how a label from misfortune became a
Speaker 1: character we can't stop reinventing, and how even now, the
Speaker 1: question behind the words still matters when we say vampire,
Speaker 1: what are we trying to cure?