The Science of Vampires by Katherine Ramsland

Author:Katherine Ramsland
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2019-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

Then there’s the groaning and shrieking: How can a dead person cry out when the stake is driven through his or her body? It’s not possible, so that means the person is still alive.

Not really. Any funeral director will tell you that bodies in the back of the hearse may shift, release gas, and seem to moan as decomposition claims them. It makes for a creepy ride to the funeral home or hospital, but the person is indeed dead (usually). Now, given what’s happening inside the body, it’s no wonder that driving an object like a stake through it might result in a few loud noises. As Paul Barber states, the vampire tale is an “ingenious folk hypothesis” to explain clearly observed phenomena that otherwise seem impossible.

Yet what can we make of the hesitation of animals to walk over the graves of vampires? It may indicate a stench from a shallow grave, and since animals have a better sense of smell than humans, they object more readily. That different animals are used for this purpose appears to depend on the region—some people preferring a black animal, some a white one, some a horse, some a goose. For this method to work, the animals must have no blemishes, which suggest that peasants believed that uniformly colored animals possessed a purity that caused them to be repelled by a vampire’s corruption.

At any rate, sometimes the appearance of a decomposing corpse was quite disturbing, especially one that was immersed in its own liquids, and the idea that this thing was getting out at night and trying to turn everyone else into what it was provided sufficient reason to chop it up and burn it. For that, a ritual was needed.

Yet in Dracula and other fiction, people looking for vampires don’t tend to dig up the graves until after they’ve seen the signs of a vampire’s work on victims. This, too, has some parallels in folklore, taking us back to a time when people knew little about the cause of diseases like consumption or tuberculosis. The symptoms were quite similar to the notion of a vampire’s attack:

failing strength

increased suffering at night

a sunken chest, emaciation, and wasting away

a feeling of heaviness on the chest, as if a demon were sitting on it

increasingly pale skin

no appetite

blood in the sputum and crimson cheeks

offensive breath

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