Deviant burial was a common practice in medieval times and with the expansion of archaeological sites all across the world, we have more and more evidence of deviant burials as means to prevent vampires from leaving their graves and terrorizing villages – in this case, one located in Dorchester!
Back in 2007, research by Wessex Archaeology in Little Keep, Dorchester, revealed the remnants of a roman cemetery. Out of the total of 29 graves found, 5 had evidence of deviant burial.
Deviant burial in Dorchester
While some corpses had been entered face-down, others had been decapitated – with their head placed between their legs at the ankles. In some of the other graves the legs themselves were crossed, however this can be a normal result of the decomposition process and not of a deviant burial.
As per the coins found in the one of the graves, the deviant burial can be placed in the region of 4th century AD and it is possible that the coins were added in an effort to “help” the souls of the departed on their way – I`m referring here to the pagan belief that one would need to pay the ferryman on the river Strix for passage to the afterlife.
Since no reports are available for Dorchester as to any vampire activity in that time, I`m afraid that the deviant burial is all we have to go on, however it`s safe to say that the villagers were convinced that this drastic action had to be taken in order to prevent unwanted nightly visits.
The following is a passage from “LA GUZLA – ou – Choix de poésies Illiriques receuillies dans la Dalmatie, la Bosnie, la Croatie et l’Herzegowine” [selection of folklore from Dalmatia, Bosnia, Croatia and Herzegovina] published in 1827 by Prosper Mérimée.
In 1819, I had undertaken a journey on foot to Morlachia and I arrived one evening in the small village of Varboska. My host was a Morlaque, rich for someone from these parts, a jovial man, often drunk. His name was Vuck Poglonovich. His wife was still young and beautiful, and his sixteen-year-old daughter was charming. I wanted to stay at their house for a couple of days, because I wanted to make some sketches of antic ruins in the neighborhood. But I was not allowed to pay the rent for my room – I could only stay as a guest.
One evening, the two ladies had left us about an hour earlier. And to have an excuse not to drink, I sang for my host some songs from his country, when all of a sudden we were interrupted by horrifying cries from the bedroom.
Usually, in this part of the world, there is only one bedroom that serves for all. We ran into the room carrying our arms, and we were confronted by a terrible spectacle. The mother, pale and with her hair in disorder, was holding her daughter who had fainted, even whiter than herself, and who was stretched out on a mattress that served as a bed. She cried: “A vampire! A vampire! My poor girl is dead!”
With united efforts we succeeded to revive the poor Rhawa. She had seen, she told us, how the window was opened and how a pale man, wrapped in a shroud, had thrown himself upon her and had bitten her while he tried to strangle her. When she started crying for help, the specter had run away and she had fainted. Nevertheless she thought to have recognized the vampire as someone from the neighborhood: a man called Wiecznany [Wirezany] who had died fifteen days ago.
On Rhawa’s neck was a small red mark. But I don’t know if this wasn’t something natural, or if an insect had bitten her during the nightmare. When I dared to make this supposition, her Father rejected it rudely. The girl cried and wrung her arms, repeating without a pause: “Alas, to die so young, before marriage!” And the mother swore at me and called me a heathen, saying that surely she had seen the vampire with her own eyes, and that she too had recognized Wiecznany. I thought it best to refrain from further comments.
All the amulets from the house and from the village, soon were hanging from Rhawa’s neck. And her father swore that the next morning he would dig up Wiecznany and that he would burn him in front of all of his relatives. The night passed while it was impossible to calm them down. At daybreak the whole village was on the move. The men were armed with rifles and with hanzars, the women were carrying iron stakes, the children had sticks and stones. They marched to the cemetery crying accusations against the deceased.
I had a lot of trouble to get through this crowd and get a place next to the grave. The exhumation took a long time. As everyone wanted to assist, they were hindering each other, and accidents would surely have happened if some grey old men had not decided that no more than two men were needed to unearth the cadaver. At the moment that they lifted the piece of cloth that covered the corpse, a sharp horrible cry made my hair stand on end. It was a woman standing next to me: “It is a vampire! He has not been eaten by the worms!” she screamed. And a hundred mouths immediately repeated her words. At the same time, twenty rifles shot at close range destroyed the head of the dead man, and Rhawa’s father and relatives finished the job with their long knives.
Women dipped linen clothes in the red fluid that was coming from the corpse to rub it on the sick girl’s neck. Meanwhile, several young men pulled the dead man from the grave. And although the corpse was terribly cut up, they still took the precaution of tying it to a wooden beam. After that, they dragged it, followed by all the children, to a small orchard in front of Poglonovich’s house. There, people had already prepared a pile of wooden beams mixed with straw. They lit the fire, then threw the corpse upon it, and started dancing around and shouting as hard as they could, while they continued to put new wood on the fire. The infected smell I produced forced me soon to leave and return to my host’s house.
The house was full of people. The men were smoking their pipes, the women were all talking at the same time and questioning the sick girl who still was very pale and could hardly speak. Her neck was covered with those rags, colored by the red and infected fluid that they had thought to be blood, and which made a terrible contrast with the neck and half naked shoulders of the poor Rhawa. Little by little, people started to leave the house, and at last I was the only stranger in it.
Rhawa was very worried about the coming of the night, and wanted someone to stay at her side at all times. As her parents, exhausted by the events of the day, could hardly stay awake, I offered my services as a “nurse”. They were glad to accept my offer. I knew that the Morlaques would not think of my proposal as something inappropriate. I will never forget those nights, that I have spent in the company of this unfortunate girl. The creaking of the floorboards, the whistling of the wind, the smallest sound made her shiver. When she started to fall asleep she had horrible visions, and often she woke up all of a sudden, crying out loud.
. . .
The night before she died, she told me: “It is my own fault that I have to die. A boy from the village wanted me to elope with him. I refused and told him to buy me a silver necklace first. He went away to Marcaska to buy me one. On the other hand, if I had not been at home, perhaps he would have killed my mother. It is better this way.”
The next morning she called her father to her bedside and made him promise to cut her throat and the tendons of her legs, so that she would not become a vampire herself, and she did not want anyone but her father to commit these rather unnecessary atrocities to her corpse. After that, she embraced her mother and asked her to go and pray at the tomb of some local saint, and come back afterwards. I admired the delicacy of this peasant girl, who had thought up this pretext to save her mother from the pain of having to be present at her last moments.
She told me to take an amulet from her neck. “Keep it.” She said to me. “I hope that it protects you better than it has protected me.” After that she received the sacraments with devotion. Two or three hours later, her respiration got weaker and her eyes became glassy. Suddenly she grabbed her father’s arm and made an attempt to embrace him. She was dead. Her illness had lasted eleven days. She died of no other disease other than restlessness of body and mind occasioned by superstitious terror.
Some hours later I left the village, cursing vampires, ghosts, and all those who tell stories about them.
Interesting enough this case continues to be regarded by some as being authentic, though over the past years many have come forth to share the idea that is in fact a fictional tale.
The author – Marimee – was poor in the time that he published this [his first book] and openly admitted later in his career that at that time [1827] he would have published anything that would have sold. He even adds in the preface for a later edition that he was too poor to travel abroad but that he did his research about the geography and read “Voyage en Dalmatie” by l’Abbé Fortis to sketch his “artless poems”.
Analysis of the text will reveal that it is too well written to be a true collection of ballads.
Nonetheless it was listed as a true vampire account by Jean Paul Bourre in his “Dracula et les Vampires” [1981] and Peter Haining in his “The Dracula Centenary Book” [1987]
Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvelous worlds have crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose course, decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close.
Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star – how stranger than any dreams of dreamers in the spheres of to-day, or than any vision that hath soared upon visionaries, in their retrospection of the sideral past! There, through cycles of a history whose piled and bronze-writ records were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living like the prodigious metropoli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic heavens-a dome of infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended like a sole, enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its fires from the face of the irresolvable ether, through a baffled and despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and shrouded vistas illimitable of the visionary land.
We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people-we who dwelt beneath that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and obelisks of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night of time; and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.
Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams-the dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces of fretted copper, and streets that ran between lines of carven golden obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and iron-builded fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which the simulacra of century- forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed a necromantic perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and spectral dreams of the past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, we sought the rare and mystic immorteles, with sombre leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed beneath willows of wan and veil-like foliage: or swept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew by the flowing silence of Acherontic waters.
And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.
Although not the first work to present this kind of character, “Dracula” by Bram Stoker was the first novel to truly have success
The creative process wasn`t a spontaneous one, as many would imagine. It took decades to complete the novel, Stoker spending a great deal of time documenting in the British libraries.
The myths may have left their mark on Count Dracula – the character, but the notion of an aristocratic-vampire is a huge step forward! It became the first vampire character that managed to sneak in the collective subconscious, influencing even to this day.
Although Stoker’s vampire summarizes all available superstitions [up to that time], the character in itself brings a new and exciting twist: the undead is of noble origin and retains the title of Count.
The author thus creates a huge gap between the aristocrat Dracula represents and the corpses leaving their tombs at night to feed. The latter behaved more like the zombies in voodoo culture, while Dracula is endowed with intelligence and has other interests outside the “running” after blood.
The Count is able to plan the journey and even counterstrike some obstacles, avoiding difficult situations throughout the story and especially he allows for an evil character to be exposed by the [first] hunter: Van Helsing.
Even his image is a special one. He seems to be endowed in order to seduce his victims.
Traditional vampires used their powers to subdue victims, but Dracula is shown as a courtly gentleman, with good quality clothing – even manages to mimic life for a few days as his lawyer visits him to sign the contract for buying the future home in England.
The general image of a vampire is supposed to be complete with a shroud and / or semi-decomposed clothes, unkempt appearance [hair disheveled, broken nails because of numerous exits from the tomb] and blood – incriminating evidence around the mouth of any vampire.
We rarely find dialogues in the old stories, but we can not put too much emphasis on this because there weren`t so many writers [of short stories and novels] that focused on these issues ahead of Stoker. The classic poems present scenes of vampires and their victims [almost always undead relatives or lovers] without much dialog.
In the legends who inspired Bram Stoker, the vampire is a creature of darkness that shows a lot of negative aspects – that Irish has introduced in the description of Dracula. Associated with the shadows and night, the Church used the vampire to incite fear and it was considered a servant of the devil; the vampire was “kept out of the world by the light of God” during the day.
Unlike other mythological creatures, the vampire did not have duality before the changes made by Stoker! While in other cases demons behaved like normal people while the sun was in the sky [often taking the appearance of a member of the community], and after nightfall their monstrous side would manifest, the vampire spend the day in the cemetery, more precisely in its grave. The night was dedicated to hunting!
Stoker changed certain elements without changing the nature of his character.
Like other vampires, Dracula cann`t move during the day, but neither is he trapped in the cemetery. His coffin travels without major issues from Transylvania all the way to Britain -he even uses of his powers to subdue the will of the crew and changes the environment to his liking [causes fog and storm during the trip]. No other vampire before Dracula was so strong and had so many supernatural powers.
His duality occurs at nightfall, when he is both the courteous aristocrat who commands respect, and bloody and scary vampire, bringing more of an animal.
This chain of events seams to be a motif for certain regions in Europe. It dates back to the 15th century and has inspired both literature and movies in the last decades.
It is linked to the belief that the vampires are infected by a disease that is spread from one undead to the others in his vicinity. Lore has it that after the burial the vampire will spend the days chewing away at its own shroud and then pass to the dead close to it thus infecting them and enabling them to turn into vampires as well.
At night, the vampire would leave his shroud near his grave and would put it back on when returning to the resting place. Without it he or she wouldn`t be able to return to its grave.
The common legend about this specific type of vampire is that it was always found and slain because of this piece of cloth.
Mainly… when the villages would confront themselves with such issues they would set up watch in the tower of the church [keep in mind that we are talking about the Middle Ages so the cemetery was near the church]. The grave of the vampire would be found because it would be the marked by a shroud.
The villagers would either deal with the vampire during the day or the watchman would steal the shroud during the night and then dispose of the vampire upon its return.
In either case the nearby graves would be inspected also.
A similar story is captured by Goethe in his ~Dance of Death~. His ballad is about a watchman who looks down on the churchyard at midnight from the top of the church tower. He sees how the dead are leaving their tombs and take off their shrouds joining in a “Dance of the Dead”.
The watchman sneaks down, steals one of the shrouds and climbs back up.
After the dance, all the dead put on their shrouds and go back to their graves except for the one whose shroud has been stolen.
When he is confronted by the watchman the vampire starts climbing the tower wall. When he has almost reached the top, the tower clock strikes one so since the witching hour is over and the dead man falls down.
An episode that matches this one may be found in “Carmilla” by Sheridan La Fenu and in the screen adaptation “The vampire lovers” [1970].
In the opening scene of the movie we are presented with a specter leaving the grave and going hunting into the nearby tavern. When it returns it is provoked by a nobleman that stole its shroud and it makes its way to the church.
It is revealed that the vampire is an extremely attractive woman and the man is almost seduced by her. When she is about to feed on him she burns herself on the silver crucifix hanging by his neck and when the spell is broken he manages to fight her off and decapitate her.
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No, my kind of vampires don`t sparkle in the sun and don`t have emo hairdos. They most certainly don`t wear tons of make-up and don`t chase deer in the forest! For me, the vampire is the bloodthirsty mythological creature that inspired the gothic novels and brought to surface the fears of the subconscious. For me… the image of the vampire is Norferatu or Dracula, surely not Edward Cullen. The only romantic shades that I can accept are those given by Anne Rice in the Vampire Chronicles.
