A Trail of Blood: The Becoming of the American Vampire

The sky over the cemetery is a fitting grey as the men go about their horrid business. Resolute, shovels in hand, they loose the dirt over the plot, undoing the gravedigger's earnest work. "Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!" the blades sink in soil. "Thunk! Thunk!" the blades strike wood. The men exchange looks of solemn understanding and step forward to open the casket. The boards groan, disturbed, and move away, revealing what no one alive is meant to see: the corpse, dead, lifeless, and yet--how impossible!--turned over in the grave! They act quickly, hands reaching in, carving knives plunging into pale flesh, recovering her heart, still burgeoning with fresh blood, what horror to behold! They burn the organ; sear it to ashes. The curse, they hope, has been lifted.

Introduction

Humans have a great tendency to characterize the unknown with folklore, or folk myth. In 1692, Salem Village, Massachusetts, violent fits plagued the village's children for which no doctor could correctly diagnose. Natural medicine failing to give them an explanation, they arrived at a supernatural one: witches were among the villagers and they were tormenting the girls. Journalist Rebecca Brooks reports that by the end of the hysteria, 4 people had died in prison, 1 person had died from torture, and 19 people had met their fate at the end of a rope (1). While our folk myths may illuminate our dark mysteries, the shadows of our created truths may be just as dark. As this has been true for witches, the same can be said for vampires, and the same can be said for what happened to Mercy Brown.

The Origins of the Vampire

Knowing where the vampire legend originates is an important part of this narrative. As Eric Johnson points out, "key attributes of the vampire itself would draw directly from Slavic folklore." Contrary to our modern impressions, the Slavic vampire was typically a farmer who had become possessed and turned into something akin to a wild beast. Though like we might expect, they drank blood, could turn into a wolf or a bat, and required a stake to the heart to truly kill (2). Many of these attributes can be found in popular works of vampire fiction, such as Bram Stoker's legendary Dracula. Though while our vampire mythos has been informed by Slavic tales, Eastern European vampires were informed by more than just story--they were real.

In Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire, author Paul Barber characterizes vampire mythos as "an ingenious and elaborate folk-hypothesis that seeks to explain otherwise puzzling phenomena associated with death and decomposition" (3). Why, when a loved one died, did their hair, nails, and skin continue to develop? Why were their organs fresh, or liquid blood trickled from their mouth and ears? Why were their family members unable to escape the same fate? While modern science gives us satisfactory answers to these questions, our ancestors saw only darkness, and it was a darkness they tried to fight.

Credit: Emadion

Records of vampire outbreaks from the 1700s have survived to this day, detailing the measures people took to cleanse their communities of the curse. Of these, the most popular was an investigative report called Visum et Repertum (Seen and Discovered) by Dr. Johannes Flückinger, written in 1732. The report begins by detailing the prior history of vampire attacks in Medvegia, a village near Belgrade, Serbia. Dr. Flückinger writes that a dead soldier named Arnold Paole was exhumed under suspicion of vamprism four months after his burial. Finding his corpse covered in blood, the locals "drove a stake through his heart...whereupon he let out a noticeable groan and bled copiously" (4). However, the story does not end there. Eric Johnson writes that Dr. Flückinger had been sent to investigate some forty graves which had been exhumed by the locals in Medvegia in response to the outbreak, in which "thirteen had been identified as vampires" (2). In a particularly gruesome fashion, Dr. Flückinger describes the state of one of the woman identified as a vampire and her dead infant:

A woman by the name of Stana, twenty years old, who had died in childbirth three months before, after a three-day sickness, and who had said before her death that she had painted herself with the blood of a vampire in order to be free of him, wherefore she herself, like her child--which had died right after birth and because of a careless burial had been half-eaten by dogs--must also become vampires. She was whole and undecayed. After the opening of the body a quantity of fresh, extravascular blood was found in cavitate pectoris. The vasa of the arteriae and venae, like the ventriculis cordis were not, as usual, filled with coagulated blood, and the whole viscera, that is, the pulmo, hepar, stomachus, lien et intestina were quite fresh as they would be in a completely healthy person.

Along with the doctor's signature, Visum et Repertum was signed by four other military authorities also present at the scene.

For the Medvigian villagers, vamprism was an observable phenomenon. As Dr. Flückinger reports, the corpse of the soldier Paole was "covered in blood," and Stana's organs were fresh, as if they belonged to "a completely healthy person" (4). For the villagers, vampires that haunted them from the grave were as real a threat as wolves that hunted them from the forest, and they did their best to put them down. Though while they might have succeeded in stopping the curse in their own village, the story would continue to spread. Vampires were moving west.

Have Mercy

When Dr. Flückinger published his report in 1732, Eric Johnson says, it found its way to Western Europe, hundreds of miles away from Serbia and the resting place of poor Arnold Paole (2). There the seed of Western vampire legend was sowed until it made its way to the Americas, blooming in the minds of the colonists headed for the "New World" where it would manifest itself. Folklorist Michael Bell details many of these American vampires in his book, Food for the Dead: in 1817, Frederick Ransom, a college student, who had died from consumption (tuberculosis) had his body exhumed and heart burned in a forge at his father's request in hopes to save his remaining family members, many of whom died of disease shortly after; c. 1800, a child of Bristoe Congdon was exhumed and burned after much of the family had died of consumption; and in 1810, Annie Dennett, a girl of 21, who had died from consumption had her body exhumed in hope that burning her corpse would save her father from the disease. In Annie's case, however, the vampire hunters, which included respected New England minister Enoch Hayes, found the girl in a "natural" state of decomposition. Only bones remained (5). Whereas the Slavic vampires were associated with assaulting the living and drinking their blood, American vampires could perform their work from the grave, consuming the living one by one. Their presence meant succumbing to a horrible, withering disease.

In the 1800s and all throughout history, consumption was a terrible fate. John Frith assembles accounts of tuberculosis throughout history, a great number of which describe the afflicted as one who "wastes away." The disease was so powerful that it could condemn even the strongest of individuals to bed, where they would lay in agony, their skin turning pale or stained red from bloody, gaping lesions, capable of speaking only in painful coughs (6). What darkness must have filled the hearts of those who watched such a pained existence and agonizing death of their loved ones, fearing in their heart that they may be next. Is it any wonder they flailed in their helplessness, clutching onto folk myth and tales of vampires, hoping tradition could save them? What else could they do but try and cast that light?

Mercy Brown's Headstone
Credit: Historic Mysteries

It is not hard to understand why the men entered the cemetery that day in 1892, Exeter, Massachusetts. As Michael Bell points out in his interview with one of Mary Brown's descendants, for months they had watched their kin wither and die, taken by Consumption. One by one their family perished to the same God-forsaken disease, a phenomenon which their folk myth translated to vampire. In the body of the dead was a malevolent spirit intent on draining the life from the living, they were sure, and so they took up their shovels that day in March, and under God's grey sky they desecrated her corpse, burning the heart of Mercy Brown over stone, mixing its ashes in a healing tonic and awarding it to her brother, Edwin, to drink, hoping to remove the vampire's curse--cure him of his consumption--no matter how horrible the cost. Not long after, Edwin died due to the illness (5).