Vampires Through the Ages by Brian Righi Read Free Book Online

of the literature, including modern fiction, vampirism is a contagion spread by contact between the vampire and its prey. In some reports, even those who survived a vampire attack still ran the risk of becoming one after they died. Coming into contact with the blood of a vampire in some folklore worked as an antidote, while in others it spread the condition like a disease. The Serbs and Croats of Herzegovina believed that when piercing the suspected corpse of a vampire with a stake (which we’ll read about in later chapters), it should be done through the dried hide of a young bull to keep the blood from splattering and infecting the vampire killer.
    The final method of becoming a vampire was often associated with digressions from local burial customs that marked a lack of respect for the body of the deceased. For example, in the folklore of the Balkans, if a cat or dog jumped over the body while it awaited burial the corpse could come back from the dead as a revenant. Tradition held in many cases that the body should be guarded by a family member whose job was to ensure nothing went wrong with the complex burial customs of the time. An animal being allowed in the room, much less desecrating the body, was a major breach of protocol. Other prohibitions warned against shaking hands over a corpse, letting the shadow of a person fall upon it, or passing an object such as a candle across it. Each of these admonitions carried with it the threat that if proper respect was not shown for the dead, dire consequences awaited the living. A botched burial, after all, meant a glitch in the process by which the spirit successfully left the body for good. Disrupting this ensured the spirit would return and crave the sustenance of human blood.
    The Case of Peter Plogojowitz
    Although we have examined the nature and habits of the vampiric creatures that stalked Eastern Europe in the years leading up to the 1800s, it’s difficult to grasp the impact of their bloodthirsty activities on local populations without examining actual reports of vampire attacks from the period. By the mid-1700s, a vampire scare was sweeping across the continent from the shores of the Black Sea in the east to the monarchies of Western Europe. Printing presses streamed with pamphlets, and each day newspapers competed with one another over cataloging the grisly details of fresh vampire assaults in the small villages and lonely mountain passes of the far-off Balkans. One of the first well-documented cases of vampirism to still exist was published in a Viennese newspaper, Wienerisches Diarium , and concerned a Serbian peasant named Peter Plogojowitz.
    In 1718, after a bitter and bloody contest, a treaty known as the Peace of Passarowitz was signed between the Habsburg monarchy of Austria and the ailing Ottoman Empire. Under the agreement, Austria and her allies, the Republic of Venice, were handed parts of Serbia and Wallachia, which had long lay under the Turkish yoke. Suddenly, lands normally isolated from the rest of Europe were swarming with imperial soldiers and bureaucrats sending back dispatches about their new subjects to the recently installed monarchy.
    On July 31, 1725, an official report was issued by an Imperial Provisor named Frombald, claiming to have witnessed the disinterment and staking of a corpse suspected of being a vampire. Sometime during the year 1725 a man named Peter Plogojowitz died in the Serbian village of Kisolova, which today can be found just east of Belgrade on a small island on the Danube River and has been renamed Kisiljevo. Ten weeks following his burial, villagers began whispering in frightened tones that his corpse was seen walking through the narrow streets at night. Within the space of eight days, nine people died mysteriously, all of whom claimed upon their deathbed that the figure of Plogojowitz had visited them in their sleep and attacked them. As the stories grew louder, Plogojowitz’s former wife spoke out and admitted