Essays · by Frater Custos · 12-minute read

The exhumation report

Between 1700 and 2004 a grave was opened at least six times in front of someone who was keeping a record. The bodies described resemble one another down to the detail — but not because there was anything inside. And the word «vampire» is younger than almost everything it claims to explain.

In the winter between 1700 and 1701, on the island of Míkonos, a French botanist watches a village butcher open a corpse buried ten days earlier. The butcher is old and clumsy, and opens the belly instead of the chest. On 1 January 1701 what remains of the body is burned on a pyre. On the night between 9 and 10 January 2004, at Marotinu de Sus, in Oltenia, six men open the grave of Petre Toma, remove a portion of the heart, burn it and dissolve the ashes in water. Between the two acts lie three hundred and three years, two thousand kilometres and a scientific revolution.

Of both there exists a written document: in the first case a travel book published in Paris in 1717, in the second an indictment from the public prosecutor’s office at Craiova. In between there are four more, equally dated and equally verifiable. This article sets those six documents side by side — not the stories, the documents — and looks at what they have in common.

The short answer is: what they have in common is a corpse described always in the same way, and the reason is not that the corpse was a vampire. The long answer takes up the rest of the article, because it leads to a point that is usually taken for granted the other way round: the vampire is not an ancient figure. The practice of opening graves is old and widespread; the word, the category and the file that holds them together can be dated precisely, and they were born in an office.

Six times a grave was opened

To these must be added what the ground gives back, which is not a written source but a material one: burial JB-55 at Griswold, in Connecticut, with the skull and the femurs rearranged on the chest and rib lesions consistent with pulmonary tuberculosis; the treated burials of northern Germany that lie behind the Nachzehrer; and the cemetery of Drawsko, in north-western Poland, where out of some two hundred and eighty-five people buried in the 17th and 18th centuries six carry a sickle across the throat or the abdomen, or a stone beneath the chin.

Why the grave always answers yes

The book that settles the question is from 1988 and is the work of a Germanist turned taphonomist: Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death. His thesis is not that the witnesses were lying. It is that the witnesses were describing correctly what they saw, and that what they saw was a normal corpse.

Point by point, the «signs» are ordinary thanatological phenomena, well established in forensic medicine:

And one variable counts for a great deal, one that the reports always record and never assess: when. Cold, deep burial, clayey and damp ground slow decomposition and favour the formation of adipocere. Medveđa is 7 January; Marotinu de Sus is 9 January; at Exeter they dig on 17 March, and the girl had died in January — according to the most widely accepted reconstruction the body had waited for the thaw in a stone crypt, not under the ground. Kisiljevo, in the summer of 1725, is the exception — and indeed it is the only one of the six cases in which the report, in order to demonstrate the anomaly, needs to resort to the piercing. Someone who dies in winter, in cold, damp ground, may appear all but intact after months.

The test that cannot fail

Here I add a reading of my own, and I declare it as such, because I have not found it formulated in this way in any of the sources I cite.

If one looks at the six documents as one would look at an experimental protocol, one notices something that none of their authors could notice: the protocol is built in such a way that it cannot produce a negative result. The list of signs is long — bloating, colour, blood at the mouth, nails, hair, skin, absence of rigidity, liquid blood — and it is enough for one of them to appear. The time window in which the digging is done is exactly the one in which a body shows at least one of them, almost always. And above all: a grave is not opened at random. The one that is opened is the grave of whoever died first, in a family where people go on dying.

Which means that the verdict is largely written before the spade touches the coffin. The exhumation does not serve to establish whether the dead man is guilty: it serves to see him. It is a procedure of confirmation, not of ascertainment — and among the six cases listed above there is not one that ends with nothing found.

Exeter, 1892, is the cleanest counter-test, because there three bodies were opened. The mother and the sister, under the ground for years, were reduced almost to bones: no sign. Only the third, dead two months earlier, showed blood in the heart — and the physician present said that this was exactly what was to be expected of a body buried for that length of time. Two negative results out of three, and a third that for the expert was no result at all: they were not enough to stop anything, because in a protocol built in this way a single sign is sufficient, and if one opens enough graves it is always found.

From this follows also the limit of the most widespread hypothesis, the one according to which in epidemics the first person buried is blamed. It is plausible, it accounts well for the selection of the grave, and at Exeter it is documented almost to the letter. But it should be said what it does not account for: at Drawsko the strontium isotope analysis, carried out on the five of those six that lent themselves to measurement, showed them all to be local people, not outsiders who had arrived with the contagion. Whoever ended up beneath the sickle was not the stranger: it was the neighbour.

The vampire is not ancient. It dates from 1725

And so we come to the point that reverses the customary order of things.

Everything described so far — opening the grave, burning the heart, drinking the ashes — is old practice, widely spread and independent: it is found in the Cyclades, in Serbia, in Germany, in Poland, in Romania, in New England, and in parallel forms a very long way from there. The name that holds it together today, on the other hand, can be dated to the day.

The earliest appearance in print that is known stands inside the most improbable document in the world: Frombald’s letter, in the Wienerisches Diarium of 21 July 1725, where the official writes that the villagers call them «so sie Vampyri nennen» — with the Latinised ending of a word that German does not yet have. Seven years later, with the Medveđa case, it no longer needs quotation marks.

1732 is the year in which it leaves the office. The first English attestation recorded by the historical dictionaries is from March of that year: the Grub-Street Journal of 16 March 1731/32 — the double date is the calendar still in use at the time — reports the Serbian case, speaking of «dead Bodies (called here Vampyres)». On 20 May, in the Craftsman, the word is already a political metaphor: it serves for corrupt ministers and speculators who live on other people’s money. In little more than two months the word has crossed the Channel and become a newspaper insult.

Which means that before 1725 in western Europe the thing had no name, and that the name arrived by a precise route: not from a tale, not from a novel, not from a folklorist. It arrived from two official acts — the report of a revenue official and the expert opinion of a regimental surgeon — transmitted through the chain of command to Belgrade and from there to Vienna, and printed in a court newspaper. Thomas Bohn, who has reread those documents critically, reads the vampire as a creature of the Enlightenment: a figure constructed by the Western press as an Eastern otherness set against reason. The reading is his; the fact on which it rests — that the file comes before the figure — is verifiable by anyone.

Whoever opened the file also closed it

There is a detail in the opening table worth rereading: of six compilers, only one certifies.

Tournefort writes in order to refute, and says so. Frombald writes to cover himself: he reports having given in to a crowd that was threatening to abandon the village, and distances himself from the procedure that he had nonetheless authorised. Gasser and Wabst are sent expressly to disprove. The prosecutor at Craiova writes in order to indict. Only Flückinger’s commission, in January 1732, puts its signature beneath an affirmative verdict — and it is exactly the document that made the European vampire.

The same administration that created it then dismantled it, and quickly. After Hermersdorf, Gerard van Swieten — court physician and protomedicus of the empire, who never went to the village in person, contrary to what is often read — draws up a bilingual memorandum, the Remarques sur le Vampyrisme de Sylésie de l’an 1755, and in it defines the executions of corpses as the product of a frightened and poorly instructed imagination, indulged by a clergy just as superstitious. On 1 March 1755 Maria Theresa issues a rescript obliging the Church to report every supernatural phenomenon to the secular authority, which must call in a medical expert. In 1766 the provision passes into the Lex caesareo-regia ad extirpandam superstitionem.

It should be said precisely what that rescript does, because it is not a ban on opening graves: it is something more effective. It takes the matter away from the village and hands it to an expert, that is to someone whose trade is to know what a two-month-old corpse looks like. Twenty-three years between the Visum et Repertum, which founds the European vampire, and the rule that takes from those who believe in it the right to verify it. Both signed by the same apparatus.

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What this recurrence does not prove

The conclusion expected at this point is that humanity is everywhere afraid of the dead and has everywhere invented the same creature. I do not write it, because the six documents do not support it, and because it would mix into a single story three things that must be kept separate.

The first is a physical fact. A buried body behaves in the same way in Greece, in Serbia and in Connecticut, and whoever looks at it sees the same six things. This part of the resemblance needs no cultural transmission at all to be explained: it explains itself, and it would explain itself even if the six communities had never known of one another.

The second is a social fact. When in one house people die in sequence — of consumption at Exeter, of cholera perhaps at Drawsko, of whatever it was at Kisiljevo — the sequence calls for a cause, and the nearest cause is the first in the line. This part accounts for why that grave is opened and not another. It is solid as a reconstruction, but it must be kept at its rank: it is an inference that holds up well where we have the parish registers and badly where we do not.

The third is a documentary fact, and it concerns us, not them. Of these six exhumations we know because somebody was keeping a record: a botanist with a notebook, an official under an obligation to report, a military surgeon with a form to fill in, a country doctor, a newspaperman, a public prosecutor. We are not looking at the map of a belief: we are looking at the map of where there was paper. How many times a grave was opened in a place where nobody was writing, nobody knows, and no atlas can say.

One last fact remains, the most uncomfortable of the three, and it has nothing ancient about it. Barber’s taphonomy is from 1988. The Craiova file is from 2004. Sixteen years after the phenomenon had been fully explained, six men opened a grave in Europe for the same reason for which they opened one at Míkonos in 1700 — and they did not do it out of abstract superstition, but because at home there was someone who was ill and they wanted to do something. It is the only part of this story that the explanations do not touch.