Jim Rowley

Today, pop culture includes vampires of all shapes and sizes, from the lovelorn teenagers of the Twilight and True Blood franchises to the bloodthirsty antagonists of the Blade series to the militant version of Dracula found in Castlevania. All modern vampires can trace their origins to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published in 1897, but the aristocratic shapeshifter in Stoker’s novel can trace his origins to diseases that ravaged North America and Europe.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, epidemics like tuberculosis and rabies swept across populations almost unchecked. Since disease and its causes were poorly understood, contemporary medicine offered little help. Facing the very real possibility of a fatal illness, many people turned to superstition for something to blame: vampires.

Here’s the story of how the “vampire panics” of the 1800s – like The Great New England Vampire Panic – inspired the vampire archetype that still scares us today.

________________________________________

• Photo: Cristóbal Rojas / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

A Tuberculosis Outbreak In The 1800s Caused A Lot Of People To Painfully Wither Away

Tuberculosis, or consumption, is an infectious disease that originates from bacteria, and it plagued New England in the late 18th and most of the 19th centuries. Contemporary medical science had little knowledge of the disease’s causes or its potential treatments; germ theory wouldn’t be proposed until the 1870s and not widely accepted until the 1880s. The disease would ultimately wipe out 2% of New England’s total population, making it one of the deadliest in human history.

There was no vaccine or antibiotic to treat it. The only commonly available treatment option would have been to send a tuberculosis patient to a sanatorium. Those who couldn’t afford a sanatorium turned to folk remedies and mythical explanations.

• • Photo: Edvard Munch / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Tuberculosis Acted As Though It Was ‘Draining’ A Person’s Life Force

People were rightfully terrified of tuberculosis itself, but they were also afraid of tuberculosis patients. One 18th-century doctor wrote, “The emaciated figure strikes one with terror. The forehead covered with drops of sweat. The cheeks… a livid crimson. The eyes sunk… The breath offensive, quick and laborious.”

It’s easy to see how such a frightful disease can also captivate the imagination, and many symptoms of tuberculosis would eventually become the characteristics of vampires: fatigue, appetite loss, and weight loss. It was “almost as if something was ‘sucking the life’ out of them,” according to retired Connecticut state archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni, who has excavated the remains of New England “vampires” buried in the 1800s. This is how people came to believe that vampires would suck the blood of their victims.

Other tuberculosis symptoms inspired more details about vampires we know today. It was known as “The White Plague” because tuberculosis patients would often become pale – just like classic depictions of Count Dracula.

• • Photo: Edvard Munch / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Panicked Citizens Worried That The Deceased Were Rising

The way tuberculosis spreads also contributed to the vampire panic. Those infected can take days to show symptoms, and because the disease often spread among family members, an infected relative might not begin displaying signs until after the original carrier had passed.

Lacking a modern medical understanding of the disease, people concluded that their own relatives were rising from their graves and returning to suck the life force out of their living family. Others believed deceased family members still had spiritual connections that allowed them to contact their living relatives without even leaving their graves.

These beliefs would inspire the first versions of the vampire legend. “This was not… bats flying through the night,” says Nicholas Bellantoni, a retired archaeologist. “This is not Bela Lugosi.”

• • Photo: R. de Moraine / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Desperate Townspeople Responded By Digging Up Graves

Since people believed that their own undead family members were a threat to their safety, and since there was still a very real possibility of contracting tuberculosis, fear and paranoia were widespread. Some communities responded by digging up the deceased and “[eradicating] the vampire again” to stop them from bothering the living.

Author Michael E. Bell describes these as “therapeutic exhumation[s].” Often, it was the living family members themselves who would be digging up and ritualistically mutilating their relative’s body. Bell has recorded 80 instances of therapeutic exhumation in New England in the 1800s. The practice also occurred in Europe for centuries.

• • Photo: Bin im Garten / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Townspeople Then Mutilated The Remains, With Rituals Varying By Region

After a suspected vampire was dug up, what happened next varied depending on the region. In some communities in Massachusetts and Maine, the cadaver would simply be flipped over and reburied. In other parts of New England, townspeople would often check the exhumed body’s heart for blood. If it contained blood, they concluded it was most likely a vampire.

Typically, the heart was then removed and burned, and family members would sometimes inhale the smoke to prevent further spread of the disease. Other times, family members would eat the ashes.

In one incident in 1892, 19-year-old Mercy Brown of Exeter, RI, succumbed to tuberculosis. Her mother and sister had already passed due to the illness, but then her brother Edwin became sick.

Worried townspeople dug up Mercy’s grave and discovered blood in her mouth and heart. Thinking she was a vampire, they burned her heart and mixed it into a potion for Edwin to drink. He perished a few months later.

Families would even dig up relatives who had passed years before, which raised a different issue: what do you do with remains that had decomposed to the point of being a skeleton? If the townspeople decided the skeleton was still a threat, they would often rearrange the bones into a skull-and-crossbones pattern. This served to prevent the undead from menacing the living.

In Europe, townspeople also dug up suspected vampires and used a variety of rituals to stop them. Suspected vampires are known to have been burned, rearranged, or had a stake driven through their heart – a ritual that made its way into fiction as a way to slay vampires.

• • Shocking Archaeological Finds In The 1990s Shone New Light On The New England ‘Vampire Panic’

Multiple recent archaeological discoveries have given us much of our knowledge of the Great New England Vampire Panic. In the early 1990s, two boys playing in Griswold, CT, discovered a gravel pit containing 27 graves that collectively belonged to the Rays and Waltons, two families that were ravaged by tuberculosis.

In the 1850s, two sons of Henry and Lucy Ray, Lemuel and Elisha, passed from tuberculosis. By 1854, a third son, Henry Nelson Ray, contracted the disease, and according to contemporary newspaper records, the family dug up Lemuel and Elisha and burned them. Unlike Edwin Brown, Henry Nelson Ray is believed to have lived for many more years, and Lemuel and Elisha were reburied.

Burning cadavers wasn’t the only way the people of Griswold dealt with a suspected vampire. In the burial plot, archaeologists also unearthed a coffin marked with tacks that spelled out “JB 55.” In 2019, DNA testing would reveal that “JB 55” was probably a farmer named John Barber.

Inside the coffin, archaeologists found signs that Barber had most likely passed from tuberculosis. They also discovered that five years after his burial, he was dug up, his head hacked from his spine, his femurs placed in an “X” pattern, and evidence suggests someone tried to remove his heart.

• • Photo: Unknown / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Rabies, Another Prevalent Illness, Caused A Hypersensitivity To Light And Smell; Hence, The Roles Of Sunlight And Garlic

Tuberculosis wasn’t the only disease that may have inspired the vampire legend. Rabies was also common in the 1700s and 1800s, especially in Europe.

Dr. Juan Gomez Alonso of Spain first made the connection between rabies and vampirism in 1998, when he noted that a rabies outbreak in Hungary from 1721 to 1728 was followed shortly after by a “vampire epidemic.”

Rabies symptoms also made their way into vampire lore. As Dr. Gomez-Alonso noted, both rabid animals and rabid people often bite others, which passes along the disease. In vampire lore, a bite from a vampire will turn the victim into a vampire themselves.

Rabies also causes hypersensitivity to sunlight and strong smells, like garlic, which is how vampires came to be vulnerable to sunlight and garlic. Even the belief that vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors comes from rabies; as Dr. Gomez-Alonso put it, “a man was not considered rabid if he was able to stand the sight of his own image in the mirror.”

• • Photo: Philip Burne-Jones / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Some People Infected With Rabies Were Known To Become ‘Hypersexualized’

From Dracula all the way up to Twilight, vampires often have erotic undertones, and this is believed to have originated from rabies as well. Rabies affects the centers of the brain that govern sleep cycles and libido. This can lead to insomnia – which contributed to the notion that vampires are nocturnal – and a heightened sex drive.

In 2014, a rabies patient was found to be able to have intercourse 20-30 times a day. Others were reportedly able to maintain an erection for days. Some depictions of vampires were thought to emerge from their crypts to seduce their victims.

In other words, vampires have been sexualized from the very beginning.

• • Rabies Would Appear In Animals, Too, Which Likely Inspired Vampires’ Shapeshifting Ability

Rabies is often found in animals, and the rabies outbreaks that inspired vampire legends most commonly affected dogs, wolves, and other wild animals. This is why some depictions of vampires give them the ability to transform into animals. Bram Stoker’s Dracula has the ability to turn into a wolf, and other legendary vampires were said to turn into dogs.

The bat-vampire connection came into folklore differently than the wolf/dog-vampire connection because vampire bats weren’t known to Europeans until the early Renaissance and the discovery of the Americas. Vampire bats were actually named after vampires, not the other way around, because of their blood-sucking tendencies.

It’s worth noting that vampire bats don’t actually “suck” blood; they make an incision and lick it up.

• • Photo: Nosferatu / Film Arts Guild

Another Condition That Possibly Inspired Vampires Was Porphyria

Besides tuberculosis and rabies, some have theorized that vampirism was inspired by porphyria. Porphyria is a rare genetic disorder that causes a breakdown in the production of “heme,” which is the red pigment in blood.

The condition can cause hypersensitivity to light, a common vampire trope. It can also cause gum tissue to recede, which can give teeth a more fang-like appearance. It’s even possible that one porphyria treatment was to drink blood.

• • Bram Stoker Released ‘Dracula’ In 1897, Crystalizing The Rules Of The Modern Vampire

Abraham “Bram” Stoker wasn’t the first author to write about vampires, but his 1897 novel, Dracula, codified many of the “vampire rules” that still exist today.

Many of these rules came from folklore inspired by diseases. In Stoker’s Dracula, Count Dracula has the ability to shapeshift into different forms, like a bat and wolf, which is believed to have originated from rabies epidemics. Count Dracula is sensitive to sunlight and garlic, just like someone afflicted by rabies. Finally, Dracula bites his victims and drains their blood, like how New Englanders believed tuberculosis drained the life force from its victims.

• • Photo: Universal Pictures

The Suave, Aristocratic Count Dracula Comes From The 1931 Film

While Bram Stoker’s Dracula formally laid out many vampire characteristics that we know today, other subsequent works were just as influential in shaping the vampire myth. Stoker’s Dracula was a wealthy aristocrat who lived in a castle, but he was a withered and ugly old man – closer to the villain from the 1922 silent film Nosferatu.

The suave and aristocratic version of Dracula in a black cape comes from the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi. Stoker’s vampire was already being reimagined just a few decades after his novel was published – and was itself a reimagining of various legends that inspired Stoker.

From the 1930s and onwards, subsequent artists continued to reinterpret vampires, and they’re still evolving today.

ranker.com

AUTHOR PROFILE

People's Tonight