Vampires and Werewolves: The Real History Behind the Legends

The vampire most people picture, an aristocrat in a cape with fangs and a castle, is largely the creation of fiction: John Polidori's story The Vampyre (1819), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and the films that followed. The vampire of Eastern and southeastern European folk belief was something different. It was a revenant, a recently dead villager, often described as bloated and ruddy, who returned from the grave to trouble family and neighbors, bringing sickness and death. The remedies centered on the corpse itself: dig it up, drive a stake through it, cut off the head, burn it.

Many of the rules audiences now take for granted came from novels and films rather than from village belief. Stoker's Count, for instance, can walk abroad by day, with his powers merely weakened. What the folk tradition did supply was the core idea that a body in the grave could remain somehow active, and that a cluster of deaths might be traced back to it.

Western Europe learned about these beliefs largely through official paperwork. In the 1720s and 1730s, Habsburg administrators and army doctors in newly conquered Serbia sent reports of exhumations to Vienna, and newspapers across Europe reprinted them. English papers began using the word "vampire" in 1732, when they reported one of these cases, and educated Europeans spent the next few decades arguing about what the reports meant.

After the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, the Habsburg Monarchy ruled much of Serbia under military administration until 1739, and its officials recorded what they found in frontier villages. In 1725, in a village recorded as Kisilova, probably today's Kisiljevo, a man named Petar Blagojević died, and within eight days nine more people died after short illnesses, reportedly saying he had come in the night and throttled them. His widow said he had visited her asking for his shoes. The imperial official Frombald attended the exhumation and described a body that seemed undecayed, with grown hair and beard, "new" skin and nails, and fresh blood in the mouth. The villagers staked and burned it. Frombald's account, printed in the Vienna newspaper Wienerisches Diarium, is one of the earliest documented vampire reports.

The most influential case came from Medveđa. Arnold Paole, a former irregular soldier, claimed he had once been troubled by a vampire and had cured himself by eating earth from its grave. Around 1726 he died after a fall from a hay wagon; within weeks four people complained that he was plaguing them, and all four soon died. About 40 days after his burial he was exhumed, found apparently fresh with blood at the mouth, and staked, at which, the report says, he gave an audible groan. In the winter of 1731 a new wave of deaths struck the village. A military surgeon, Johann Flückinger, led a commission that opened the graves in January 1732 and judged most of the bodies to be in a "vampiric condition". They were beheaded and burned, and his report, Visum et Repertum, dated 26 January 1732, was printed and reprinted across Europe.

The officials seem to have described what they saw honestly. The problem was what they expected a dead body to look like. In Vampires, Burial, and Death (1988), the scholar Paul Barber argued that almost every sign of vampirism in these reports matches ordinary decomposition. Gases produced by bacteria bloat a corpse, making it look plump and well fed. That pressure can push blood-stained fluid out of the mouth and nose, which looks like fresh blood from a recent meal. The outer skin slips away, exposing a raw-looking layer underneath that observers called new skin, and nails can loosen and fall off. When a stake is driven into a bloated body, escaping gas can be forced past the vocal cords and make a sound like a groan. And burial, especially in cold ground, slows decay a great deal, so a body dug up after weeks can look fresher than anyone expects.

The deaths themselves need no supernatural cause either. Clusters of illness in poor villages in winter point toward infectious disease, and one of the medical officers sent to Medveđa before Flückinger found no sign of contagion but suspected malnutrition. The authorities eventually drew the same conclusion. In 1755 Empress Maria Theresa sent her court physician, Gerard van Swieten, to look into vampire cases in Moravia. His report blamed superstition, fear and the natural behavior of corpses, and the empress followed it by banning the traditional measures of staking, beheading and burning the dead.

Vampire fears were not confined to Eastern Europe. In rural New England in the 18th and 19th centuries, tuberculosis, then called consumption, killed members of the same family one after another, slowly wasting them away. Some families concluded that a dead relative was draining the living and exhumed the body to look for signs, such as liquid blood in the heart or a corpse that seemed too fresh. Burning the heart was the usual remedy. The folklorist Michael Bell documented many such cases in his book Food for the Dead (2001).

The most famous is Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island. Her mother and elder sister had died of consumption in the 1880s; Mercy died of it in January 1892, at about 19, and her brother Edwin was gravely ill. On 17 March 1892, with her father's permission, villagers, a doctor and a newspaper reporter exhumed the bodies. Mercy's, after about two months in the New England winter, was far less decayed than the others and still had blood in the heart. Her heart and liver were burned, and the ashes were mixed with water and given to Edwin to drink. He died about two months later. The doctor reportedly judged her condition normal for the time and the cold.

Archaeology has confirmed that such practices were real. In 1990, in Griswold, Connecticut, archaeologists excavating an old family burial ground uncovered in a gravel quarry found a 19th-century coffin marked with brass tacks reading "JB 55". The skeleton showed signs of a chronic lung disease such as tuberculosis, and after death its skull and thigh bones had been rearranged in a skull-and-crossbones pattern. In 2019, DNA analysis combined with historical records suggested he may have been a farmer named John Barber.

The werewolf has a long literary pedigree. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the god Jupiter turns the cruel King Lycaon into a wolf, and in Petronius's Satyricon a guest tells of a soldier who strips off his clothes among moonlit tombs and becomes a wolf. But the werewolf's darkest chapter is the 16th and 17th centuries, when courts in France and the German lands tried people for werewolfery, often alongside charges of witchcraft and murder.

Gilles Garnier, accused of killing and eating children near Dole in eastern France, was burned alive in the 1570s. Peter Stumpp of Bedburg, near Cologne, was executed with horrific cruelty on 31 October 1589, along with his daughter and a female companion, after confessing under torture to murders committed in the form of a wolf with the help of a magic belt from the Devil. Nearly everything known about his case comes from a single pamphlet printed in London in 1590, translated from a German original that does not survive. Historians question how much of it is true, and some suggest that religious and political conflict in the region shaped the prosecution.

Not every court was so harsh. In 1603 the Parlement of Bordeaux reviewed the case of Jean Grenier, a youth who claimed to be a werewolf. Judging him too young and ignorant to be fully responsible, it confined him to a Franciscan friary instead of executing him. The judge and demonologist Pierre de Lancre visited him there around 1610. The ruling shows judges weighing a confession against the mental state of the person making it.

Psychiatrists use the term clinical lycanthropy for a rare delusion in which a person believes they have turned, or are turning, into an animal. Case reports go back to 1852, and most involve severe mental illness such as schizophrenia or psychotic depression. Some of the people accused in the old trials may well have suffered from something like it; others confessed under torture to whatever their interrogators suggested. Other explanations that circulate, such as rabies, poisoning by the grain fungus ergot, or rare conditions that cause heavy hair growth, are speculative, and none has strong evidence behind it as an explanation for the trials.

The fear also had a real animal behind it. In pre-industrial Europe wolves did sometimes kill people, especially children tending flocks. In the Gévaudan region of southern France between 1764 and 1767, a series of attacks killed many people, with estimates ranging from dozens to more than a hundred, and newspapers spread the panic across the country. The killings largely ended after a local hunter shot a large wolf in June 1767. A real predator and the fear of human murderers together gave the werewolf its power.

The movie werewolf, with its silver bullet, wolfsbane and helpless transformation, owes a great deal to 20th-century film, especially Universal's The Wolf Man (1941). Its screenwriter, Curt Siodmak, wrote a verse for the film that was presented as old folklore and has sometimes been quoted since as if it were.