Vampires by Charlotte Montague Read Free Book Online

repellent creature with no sexual allure whatsoever. On the contrary, it was foul-smelling and ugly, and people would flee as soon as it appeared. There are several reports about sightings of vampires that date from this early period. One of the most graphic is that of William of Newburgh, also known as William Parvus, a twelfth-century English historian who made a study of ‘revenants’, that is, the deceased who come back from the dead.
    In one case, Newburgh described a man of ‘evil conduct’, who escaped from jail and died when he fell out of the rafters of the roof in his bedroom (where he was hiding to spy on his wife, who was having an affair.) Newburgh relates that the man had a Christian burial, but that he later arose from his grave and wandered around the town, pursued by a pack of barking dogs. He killed a number of townspeople, terrorizing them into staying at home with their doors locked as soon as the sun went down. Eventually, the local people tired of this, and decided to trap the vampire in his lair. They went to the graveyard, dug up the man’s corpse, and laid it bare. A horrible sight awaited them. The corpse, as Newburgh describes it, was ‘swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces.’
    He continues:
     
    ‘The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart.’
     

     
More fat vampires
     
    By the eighteenth century, belief in vampires had reached a peak, so much so that a number of studies into the phenomenon were published, many of them by respected scholars. The most famous of these was by Augustin Calmet, a Benedictine scholar from Lorraine in France. In 1746, he presented his treatise, Dissertation on the apparition of angels, demons, and spirits; and on revenants and vampires in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia . Calmet wrongly supposed that the idea of the vampire as a reanimated corpse who survived by sucking blood was a new one, dating the phenomenon to the late seventeenth century. He wrote:
    ‘In this age, a new scene presents itself to our eyes and has done for about sixty years. In Hungary, Moravia, Silesia and Poland, men, it is said, who have been dead for several months, come back to earth, talk, walk, infest villages, ill use both men and beasts, suck the blood of their near relations, destroy their health and finally cause their death; so that people can only save themselves from their dangerous visits and their hauntings, by exhuming them, impaling them, cutting off their heads, tearing out their hearts, or burning them. These are called by the name of oupires or vampires, that is to say, leeches ... In the twelfth century also, in England and Denmark, some resuscitations similar to those of Hungary were seen. But in no history do we read anything similar, so common, or so decided, as what is related to us of the vampires of Poland, Hungary and Moravia.’
    In his treatise, Calmet carefully presented a collection of descriptions and sightings of vampires, but he himself remained ambivalent about their existence. Many of those who read his essay, however, took it to be positive proof that vampires were, indeed, stalking the land, and overall, it supported the superstitions about revenants. However, another Frenchman, Francois-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, was extremely sceptical about Calmet’s findings, and in his