Animalistic Vampires

"The Animistic Vampire in New England"
by George R. Stetson
from The American Anthropologist, Vol. IX, No. 1,
January, 1896


The belief in the vampire and the whole family of
demons has its origin in the animism, spiritism, or
personification of the barbarian, who, unable to
distinguish the objective from the subjective,
ascribes good and evil influences and all natural
phenomena to good and evil spirits.

Mr. Conway remarks of this vampire belief that "it is,
perhaps, the most formidable survival of demonic
superstition now existing in the world."

Under the names of vampire, were-wolf, man-wolf,
night-mare, night-demon--in the Illyrian tongue
oupires, or leeches; in modern Greek broucolaques, and
in our common tongue ghosts, each country having its
own peculiar designation--the superstitious of the
ancient and modern world, of Chaldea and Babylon,
Persia, Egypt, and Syria, of Illyria, Poland, Turkey,
Servia, Germany, England, Central Africa, New England,
and the islands of the Malay and Polynesian
archipelagoes, designate the spirits which leave the
tomb, generally in the night, to torment the living.

The character, purpose, and manner of the vampire
manifestations depend, like its designation, upon
environment and the plane of culture.

All primitive peoples have believed in the existence
of good and evil spirits holding a middle place
between men and gods. Calmet lays down in most
explicit terms, as he was bound to do by the canons of
his church, the doctrine of angels and demons as a
matter of dogmatic theology.
The early Christians were possessed, or obsessed, by
demons, and the so-called demoniacal possession of
idiots, lunatics, and hysterical persons is still
common in Japan, China, India, and Africa, and
instances are noted in Western Europe, all yielding to
the methods of Christian and pagan exorcists as
practiced in New Testament times.

The Hebrew synonym of demon was serpent; the Greek,
diabolus, a calumniator, or impure spirit. The Rabbins
were divided in opinion, some believing they were
entirely spiritual, others that they were corporeal,
capable of generation and subject to death.

As before suggested, it was the general belief that
the vampire is a spirit which leaves its dead body in
the grave to visit and torment the living.

The modern Greeks are persuaded that the bodies of the
excommunicated do not putrefy in their tombs, but
appear in the night as in the day, and that to
encounter them is dangerous.

Instances are cited by Calmet, in Christian antiquity,
of excommunicated persons visibly arising from their
tombs and leaving the churches when the deacon
commanded the excommunicated and those who did not
partake of the communion to retire. The same writer
states that "it was an opinion widely circulated in
Germany that certain dead ate in their tombs and
devoured all they could find around them, including
their own flesh, accompanied by a certain piercing
shriek and a sound of munching and groaning."

A German author has thought it worth while to write a
work entitled "De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulis."
In many parts of England a person who is ill is said
to be "wisht" or "overlooked." The superstition of the
"evil eye" originated and exists in the same degree of
culture; the evil eye "which kills snakes, scares
wolves, hatches ostrich eggs, and breeds leprosy." The
Polynesians believed that the vampires were the
departed souls, which quitted the grave, and grave
idols, to creep by night into the houses and devour
the heart and entrails of the sleepers, who afterward
died.1

The Karems tell of the Kephu, which devours the souls
of men who die. The mintira of the Malay peninsula
have their water demon, who sucks blood from men's
toes and thumbs.

"The first theory of the vampire superstitions,"
remarks Tyler2, "is that the soul of the living man,
often a sorcerer, leaves its proper body asleep and
goes forth, perhaps in visible form of a straw or a
fluff of down, slips through the keyhole, and attacks
a living victim. Some say these Mauri come by night to
men, sit upon their breasts, and suck their blood,
while others think children alone are attacked, while
to men they are nightmares.

"The second theory is that the soul of a dead man goes
out from its buried body and sucks the blood of living
men; the victim becomes thin, languid, bloodless, and,
falling into a rapid decline, dies."

The belief in the Obi of Jamaica and the Vaudoux or
Vodun of the West African coast, Jamaica and Haiti is
essentially the same as that of the vampire, and its
worship and superstitions, which in Africa include
child-murder, still survive in these parts, as well as
in several districts among the negro population of our
southern states. The negro laid under the ban of the
Obi or who is vaudouxed or, in the vernacular,
"hoodooed" slowly pines to death.

In New England the vampire superstition is unknown by
its proper name. It is there believed that consumption
is not a physical but a spiritual disease, obsession,
or visitation; that as long as the body of a dead
consumptive relative has blood in its heart it is
proof that an occult influence steals from it for
death and is at work draining the blood of the living
into the heart of the dead and causing his rapid
decline.

It is a common belief in primitive races of low
culture that disease is caused by the revengeful
spirits of man or other animals--notably among the
tribes of North American Indians as well as of African
negroes.

Russian superstition supposes nine sisters who plague
mankind with fever. They lie chained up in caverns,
and when let loose pounce upon man without pity.3

As in the financial and political, the psychologic
world has its periods of exultation and depression, of
confidence and alarm. In the eighteenth century a
vampire panic beginning in Servia and Hungary spread
thence into northern and western Europe, acquiring its
new life and impetus from the horrors attending the
prevalence of the plague and other distressing
epidemics in an age of great public moral depravity
and illiteracy. Calmet, a learned Benedictine monk and
abb? of S?nones, seized this opportunity to write a
popular treatise on the vampire, which in a short time
passed through many editions. It was my good fortune
not long since to find in the Boston Athenaeum library
an original copy of his work. Its title page reads as
follows: "Trait? sur les apparitions des esprits et
sur les vampires ou les revenans de Hongrie, de
Moravie, etc. Par le R. P. Dom Augustine Calmet, abb?
de S?nones. Nouvelle edition, revis?e, corrigie, at
augmentie par l'auteur, avec une lettre de Mons le
Marquis Maffei, sur le magie. A Paris; Chez debure
l'aine quay des Augustins ? l'image S. Paul. MDCCLI.
Avec approb et priv du roi."

Calmet was born in Lorraine, near Commercy, in 1672,
and his chief works were a commentary and history of
the Bible. He died as the abb? de S?nones, in the
department of the Vosges.

This curious treatise has evidently proved a mine of
wealth to all modern encyclopedists and demonologists.
It impresses one as the work of a man whose mental
convictions do not entirely conform to the traditions
and dogmas of his church, and his style at times
appears somewhat apologetic. Calmet declares his
belief to be that the vampires of Europe and the
broucolaques of Greece are the excommunicated which
the grave rejects. They are the dead of a longer or
shorter time who leave their tombs to torment the
living, sucking their blood and announcing their
appearance by rattling of doors and windows. The name
vampire, or d'oupires, signifies in the Slavonic
tongue a bloodsucker. He formulates the three theories
then existing as to the cause of these appearances:

First: That the persons were buried alive and
naturally leave their tombs.

Second: That they are dead, but that by God's
permission or particular command they return to their
bodies for a time, as when they are exhumed their
bodies are found entire, the blood red and fluid, and
their members soft and pliable.

Third: That it is the devil who makes these
apparitions appear and by their means causes all the
evil done to men and animals.

In some places the spectre appears as in the flesh,
walks, talks, infests villages, ill uses both men and
beasts, sucks the blood of their near relations, makes
them ill, and finally causes their death.

The late Monsieur de Vassimont, counselor of the
chamber of the courts of Bar, was informed by public
report in Monravia that it was common enough in that
country to see men who had died some time before
"present themselves at a party and sit down to table
with persons of their acquaintance without saying a
word and nodding to one of the party, the one
indicated would infallibly die some days after."4

About 1735 on the frontier of Hungary a dead person
appeared after ten years' burial and caused the death
of his father. In 1730 in Turkish Servia it was
believed that those who had been passive vampires
during life became active after death; in Russia, that
the vampire does not stop his unwelcome visits at a
single member of a family, but extends his visits to
the last member, which is the Rhode Island belief.

The captain of grenadiers in the Regiment of Monsieur
le Baron Trenck, cited by Calmet, declares "that it is
only in their family and among their own relations
that the vampires delight in destroying their own
species."

The inhabitants of the island of Chio do not answer
unless called twice, being persuaded that the
broucolaques do not call but once, and when so called
the vampire disappears, and the person called dies in
a few days. The classic writers from Socrates to
Shakespeare and from Shakespeare to our own time have
recognized the superstition.

Mr. Conway quotes from the legend of Ishtar descending
to Hades to seek some beloved one. She threatens if
the door is not opened--

"I will raise the dead to be devourers of the living;
Upon the living shall the dead prey."5

Singularly, in his discourse on modern superstitions
De Quincey, to whom crude superstitions clung and who
had faith in dreams as portents, does not allude to
the vampire; but his contemporary, Lord Byron, in his
lines on the opening of the royal romb at Windsor,
recognizes this belief in the transformation of the
dead:

"Justice and death have mixed their dust in vain,
Each royal vampire wakes to life again."

William of Malmsbury says that "in England they>believed that the
wicked
came back after death by the
will of the devil," and it was not an unusual belief
that those whose death had been caused in this manner,
at their death pursued the same evil calling.
Naturally under such an uncomfortable and inconvenient
infliction some avenue of escape must, if possible, be
found. It was first necessary to locate the vampire.
If on opening the grave of a "suspect" the body was
found to be of a rose color, the beard, hair and nails
renewed, and the veins filled, the evidence of its
being the abode of a vampire was conclusive. A voyager
in the Levant in the seventeenth century is quoted as
relating that an excommunicated person was exhumed and
the body found full, healthy, and well disposed and
the veins filled with the blood the vampire had taken
from the living. In a certain Turkish village, of
forty persons exhumed seventeen gave evidence of
vampirism. In Hungary, one dead thirty years was found
in a natural state. In 1727 the bodies of five
religieuse were discovered in a tomb near the hospital
of Quebec, that had been buried twenty years, covered
with flesh and suffused with blood.6

The methods of relief from or disposition of the
vampire's dwelling place are not numerous, but
extremely sanguinary and ghastly.
In Servia a relief is found in eating of the earth of
his grave and rubbing the person with his blood. This
prescription, was, however, valueless if after forty
days the body was exhumed and all the evidences of an
archivampire were not found. A more common and almost
universal method of relief, especially in the Turkish
provinces and in the Greek islands, was to burn the
body and scatter the ashes to the winds. Some old
writers are of the opinion that the souls of the dead
cannot be quiet until the entire body has been
consumed. Exceptions are noted in the Levant, where
the body is cut in pieces and boiled in wine, and
where, according to Voltaire, the heart is torn out
and burned.

In Hungary and Servia, to destroy the demon it was
considered necessary to exhume the body, insert in the
heart and other parts of the defunct, or pierce it
through with a sharp instrument, as in the case of
suicides, upon which it utters a dreadful cry, as if
alive; it is then decapitated and the body burned. In
New England the body is exhumed, the heart burned, and
the ashes scattered. The discovery of the vampire's
resting-place was itself an art.

In Hungary and in Russia they choose a boy young
enough to be certain that he is innocent of any
impurity, put him on the back of a horse which has
never stumbled and is absolutely black, and make him
ride over all the graves in the cemetery. The grave
over which the horse refuses to pass is reputed to be
that of a vampire.

Gilbert Stuart, the distinguished American painter,
when asked by a London friend where he was born,
replied: "Six miles from Pottawoone, ten miles from
Poppasquash, four miles from Conanicut, and not far
from the spot where the famous battle with the warlike
Pequots was fought." In plainer language, Stuart was
born in the old snuff mill belonging to his father and
Dr. Moffat, at the head of the Petaquamscott pond, six
miles from Newport, across the bay, and about the same
distance from Narragansett Pier, in the state of Rhode
Island.

By some mysterious survival, occult transmission, or
remarkable atavisim, this region, including within its
radius the towns of Exeter, Foster, Kingstown, East
Greenwich, and others, with their scattered hamlets
and more pretentious villages, is distinguished by the
prevalence of this remarkable superstition--a survival
of the days of Sardanapalus, of Nebuchadnezzar, and of
New Testament history in the closing years of what we
are pleased to call the enlightened nineteenth
century. It is an extraordinary instance of a barbaric
superstition outcropping in and coexisting with a high
general culture, of which Max M?ller and others have
spoken, and which is not so uncommon, if rarely so
extremely aggravated, crude, and painful.

The region referred to, where agriculture is in a
depressed condition and abandoned farms are numerous,
is the tramping ground of the book agent, the chromo
peddler, the patent-medicine man and the home of the
erotic and neurotic modern novel. The social isolation
away from the larger villages is as complete as a
century and a half ago, when the boy Gilbert Stuart
tramped the woods, fished the streams, and was
developing and absorbing his artistic inspirations,
while the agricultural and economic conditions are
very much worse.7

Farm houses deserted and ruinous are frequent, and the
once productive lands, neglected and overgrown with
scrubby oak, speak forcefully and mournfully of the
migration of the youthful farmers from country to
town. In short, the region furnishes an object-lesson
in the decline of of wealth consequent upon the
prevalence of a too common heresy in the district that
land will take care of itself, or that it can be
robbed from generation to generation without injury,
and suggests the almost criminal neglect of the
conservators of public education to give instruction
to our farming youth in a more scientific and more
practical agriculture. It has well been said by a
banker of well-known name in an agricultural district
in the midlands of England that "the depression of
agriculture is a depression of brains." Naturally, in
such isolated conditions the superstitions of a much
lower culture have maintained their place and are
likely to keep it and perpetuate it, despite the
church, the public school, and the weekly newspaper.
Here Cotton Mather, Justice Sewall, and the host of
medical, clerical and lay believers in the uncanny
superstitions of bygone centuries could still hold
high carnival.

The first visit in this farming community of
native-born New Englanders was made to ------, a small
seashore village possessing a summer hotel and a few
cottages of summer residents not far from
Newport--that Mecca of wealth, fashion, and
nineteenth-century culture. The ------ family is among
its well-to-do and most intelligent inhabitants. One
member of this family had some years since lost
children by consumption, and by common report claimed
to have saved those surviving by exhumation and
cremation of the dead.

In the same village resides Mr. ------, an intelligent
man, by trade a mason, who is a living witness of the
superstition and of the efficacy of the treatment of
the dead which it prescribes. He informed me that he
had lost two brothers by consumption. Upon the attack
of the second brother his father was advised by Mr.
------, the head of the family before mentioned, to
take up the first body and burn its heart, but the
brother attacked objected to the sacrilege and in
consequence subsequently died. When he was attacked by
the disease in his turn, ------'s advice prevailed,
and the body of the brother last dead was exhumed, and
"living" blood being found in the heart and in
circulation, it was cremated, and the sufferer began
immediately to mend and stood before me and hale,
hearty, and vigorous man of fifty years. When
questioned as to his understanding of the miraculous
influence, he could suggest nothing and did not
recognize the superstition even by name. He remembered
that the doctors did not believe in its efficacy, but
he and many others did. His father saw the brother's
body and the arterial blood. The attitude of several
other persons in regard to the practice was agnostic,
either from fear of public opinion or other reasons,
and their replies to my inquiries were in the same
temper of mind as that of the blind man in the Gospel
of Saint John (9:25), who did not dare to express his
belief, but "answered and said, Whether he was a
sinner or no, I know not; one thing I know, that
whereas I was blind, now I see."

At ------, a small isolated village of scattered
houses in a farming population, distant fifteen or
twenty miles from Newport and eight or ten from
Stuart's birthplace, there have been made within fifty
years a half dozen or more exhumations. The most
recent was made within two years, in the family of
------. The mother and four children had already
succumbed to consumption, and the child most recently
deceased (within six months) was, in obedience to the
superstition, exhumed and the heart burned. Dr.
------, who made the autopsy, stated that he found the
body in the usual condition after an interment of that
length of time. I learned that others of the family
have since died, and one is now very low with the
dreaded disease. The doctor remarked that he consented
to the autopsy only after the pressing solicitation of
the surviving children, who were patients of his, the
father first objecting, but finally, under continued
pressure, yielding. Dr. ------ declares the
superstition to be prevalent in all the isolated
districts of southern Rhode Island, and that many
instances of its survival can be found in the large
centers of population. In the village now being
considered known exhumations have been made in five
families, and in two adjoining villages in two
families. In 1875 an instance was reported in Chicago,
and in a New York journal of recent date I read the
following: "At Peukuhl, a small village in Prussia, a
farmer died last March. Since then one of his sons has
been sickly, and believing that the dead man would not
rest until he had drawn to himself the nine surviving
members of the family, the sickly son, armed with a
spade, exhumed his father and cut off his head." It
does not by any means absolutely follow that this
barbarous superstition has a stronger hold in Rhode
Island than in any other part of the country. Peculiar
conditions have caused its manifestation and survival
there, and similar ones are likely to produce it
elsewhere. The singular feature is that it should
appear and flourish in a native population which from
its infancy has had the ordinary New England
educational advantages; in a State having a larger
population to the square mile than any in the Union,
and in an environment of remarkable literacy and
culture when compared to some other sections of the
country. It is perhaps fortunate that the isolation of
which this is probably the product, an isolation
common in sparsely settled regions, where thought
stagnates and insanity and superstition are prevalent,
has produced nothing worse.

In neighboring Connecticut, within a few miles of its
university town of New Haven, there are rural farming
populations, fairly prosperous, of average
intelligence, and furnished with churches and schools,
which have made themselves notorious by murder,
suicides, and numerous instances of melancholia and
insanity.

Other abundant evidence is at hand pointing to the
conclusion that the vampire superstition still retains
its hold in its original habitat--an illustration of
the remarkable tenacity and continuity of a
superstition through centuries of intellectual
progress from a lower to a higher culture, and of the
impotency of the latter to entirely eradicate from
itself the traditional beliefs, customs, habits,
observances, and impressions of the former.

It is apparent that our increased and increasing
culture, our appreciation of the principles of
natural, mental, and moral philosophy and knowledge of
natural laws has no complete correlation in the
decline of primitive and crude superstitions or
increased control of the emotions or the imagination,
and that to force a higher culture upon a lower, or to
metamorphose or to perfectly control its emotional
nature through education of the intellect, is equally
impossible. The two cultures may, however, coexist,
intermingling and in a limited degree absorbing from
and retroacting favorably or unfavorably upon each
other--trifling aberrations in the inexorable law
which binds each to its own place.

The most enlightened and philosophic have, either
apparent or secreted in their innermost consciousness,
superstitious weaknesses--negative, involuntary, more
or less barbaric, and under greater or lesser control
in correspondence with their education, their present
environment, and the degree of their development--in
the control of the imagination and emotions. These in
various degrees predominate over the understanding
where reason is silent or its authority weakens.

S?nya Koval?vsky (1850-1890), one of the most
brilliant mathematicians of the century, who obtained
the Prix-Bordin from the French academy, "the greatest
scientific honor ever gained by a woman," "whose love
for mathematical and psychological problems amounted
to a passion," and whose intellect would accept no
proposition incapable of a mathematical demonstration,
all her life maintained a firm belief in apparitions
and in dreams as portents. She was so influenced by
disagreeable dreams and the apparition of a demon as
to be for some time thereafter obviously depressed and
low-spirited.

A well-known and highly cultured American
mathematician recently said to me that his servant had
seven years ago nailed a horseshoe over a house door,
and that he had never had the courage to remove it.

There is in the Chemnitzer-Rocken Philosophie, cited
by Grimm, a register of eleven or twelve hundred crude
superstitions surviving in highly educated Germany.
Buckle declared that "superstition was the curse of
Scotland," and in this regard neither Germany nor
Scotland are singular.

Of the origin of this superstition in Rhode Island or
in other parts of the United States we are ignorant;
it is in all probability an exotic like ourselves,
originating in the mythographic period of the Aryan
and Semitic peoples, although legends and
superstitions of a somewhat similar character may be
found among the American Indians.

The Ojibwas have, it is said, a legend of a ghostly
man-eater. Mr. Mooney, in a personal note, says he has
not met with any close parallel of the vampire myth
among the tribes with which he is familiar. The
Cherokees have, however, something analogous. There
are in that tribe quite a number of old witches and
wizards who thrive and fatten upon the livers of
murdered victims. When some one is dangerously sick
these witches gather invisibly about his bedside and
torment him, even lifting him up and dashing him down
again upon the ground until life is extinct. After he
is buried they dig up his body and take out the liver
to feast upon. They thus lengthen their own lives by
as many days as they have taken from his. In this way
they get to be very aged, which renders them objects
of suspicion. It is not, therefore, well to grow old
among the Cherokees. If discovered and recognized
during the feast, when they are again visible, they
die within seven days.

I have personal experience of a case in which a
reputed medicine-man was left to die alone because his
friends were afraid to come into the house on account
of the presence of invisible witches.

Jacob Grimm8 defines superstition as a persistence of
individual men in views which the common sense or
culture of the majority has caused them to abandon, a
definition which, while within its limits sufficiently
accurate, does not recognize or take account of the
subtile, universal, ineradicable fear of or reverence
for the supernatural, the mysterious, and unknown.

De Quincey has more comprehensively remarked that
"superstition or sympathy with the invisible is the
great test of man's nature as an earthly combining
with a celestial. In superstition is the possibility
of religion, and though superstition is often
injurious, degrading and demoralizing, it is so, not
as a form of corruption or degradation, but as a form
of non-development."

In reviewing these cases of psychologic
pre-Raphaelitism they seem, from an economic point of
view, to form one of the strongest as well as the
weirdest arguments in favor of a general cremation of
the dead that it is possible to present. They also
remind us of the boutade of the Saturday Review, "that
to be really Medieval, one should have no body; to be
really modern, one should have no soul;" and it will
be well to remember that if we do not quite accept
these demonic apparitions we shall subject ourselves
to the criticism of the modern mystic, Dr. Carl du
Prel, who thus speaks of those who deny the
miraculousness of stigmatization: "For these gentleman
the bounds of possibility coincide with the limits of
their niggardly horizon; that which they cannot grasp
either does not exist or is only the work of illusion
and deception."