I am a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast. Back in 2000 I wrote this essay for The
Occupants of the Empty House, a scion society of the Baker Street
Irregulars. It would help to read The
Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, by Conan Doyle to fully understand the context. However the essay covers some interesting
history of Vampirism in 1600 and 1700 Europe.
BRITAIN AND VAMPIRISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: AS
RELATED TO “THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE
But
first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy
corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then
ghastly haunt thy native place,
And
suck the blood of all thy race;
There
from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At
midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet
loathe the banquet which perforce
Must
feed thy livid living corpse.
Thy
victims are they not yet expire
Shall
know the demon for their sire,
As
cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy
flowers withered on the stem.
From:
“The Gaiour,” by Lord Byron
Whether we should consider the Vampire included in the
study of Flora and Fauna in the Canon would be a matter of interpretation. The
Random House College Dictionary defines fauna as “the animal of a given region or period.”
Baring-Gould set the date for “The Adventure of the
Sussex Vampire” as taking place between Thursday, November 19, to Saturday,
November 21, 1896. Charles Darwin had
published The Origin of Species in
1859, and a case could be made that even by 1896 many enlightened persons would
consider man to be included in fauna.
Holmes: “The
idea of a vampire was to me absurd.
Such things do not happen in criminal practice in England”
Between 1600 and 1800 while Britain and Western Europe
were in the throws of witch mania, Eastern Europe was experiencing a vampire
frenzy. In the east, even government
officials frequently were involved in hunting and staking vampires. Westerners never seriously considered the
existence of vampires until the mid-eighteenth century when there was an
outbreak of alleged vampire attacks in East Prussia (1721), and Austro-Hungary
(1725).
Two famous cases involved Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold
Paole. Plogojowitz died at the age of 62,
but returned to raise havoc among his family and neighbors, many who died from
loss of blood. Plogojowitz’s grave was
opened and his body was found to be fresh.
Arnold Paole was an ex-soldier who claimed to have
experienced a vampire attack while serving in Greece. Upon returning home he died from a fall
while working on his farm. Within two
months after Paole’s burial there were attacks attributed to him. All of the victims died shortly after. Two military officers, two army surgeons,
and a priest exhumed Arnold Paole’s body; and the corpse was found to be
fresh. Over the next five years there
were a number of inexplicable deaths. A
mass exhumation was carried out in 1732, and eleven corpses were found to display
the same trait as Paole – no decomposition.
Both of these cases were well documented by government
officials who examined the facts and the bodies. These two cases created an epidemic of
alleged vampire attacks in rural villages resulting in a score of bodies being
exhumed. Eventually the Austrian Empress
Marie Theresa sent her personal physician to investigate. He reported back to her that vampires did
not exist. The Empress passed laws
prohibiting the opening of graves and the desecration of bodies, bringing and
end to the vampire frenzy of Austria. (Vampires in Myth and History, by Beverley
Richardson)
One reason for the dichotomy of folklore between
Western and Eastern Europe can be attributed to the split that took place in
1054 between the Orthodox Church in the east and the Roman Catholic Church in
the west. A difference that can be
linked to centralizing the vampire myth to Eastern Europe was the belief of the
Catholic Church that the bodies of saints would not decay in the grave, while
the Orthodox Church believed that undecayed corpses were a sign of evil and a
link with Satan.
In 1486 the church had published The Malleus Maleficarium as a handbook for the discovery and
eradication of witches. It also covered
vampires and how they should be dealt with.
By 1600 this treatise was being used as the ‘bible’ by witch and vampire
hunters across Europe. (Christianity and Vampirism, by Angie
McKaig)
Holmes: “Make a
long arm Watson and see what V has to say.”
I leaned back and took down the great volume to which he referred… “Hello! Good old index. You can’t beat it. Listen to this, Watson. Vampirism in Hungary and again Vampires in
Transylvania.
Vampire myths go back thousands of years and occur in
almost every culture. The Vampire
folklore spreads out along the Black Sea Coast to Greece, the Balkans and
Carpathian Mountains, including Hungary and Transylvania. The Slavic people from Russia to Bulgaria
and Serbia to Poland also had rich vampire folklore (B. Richardson)
He
turned over the pages with eagerness, but after perusal he threw down the great
book with a snarl of disappointment.
“Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What
have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their graves by
stakes driven through their hearts?
It’s pure lunacy.”
The vampires of folklore of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries have only basic similarities to the vampire fiction of
today. The vampires then did not fly,
or wear capes, or change into bats. A
man who was contaminated died, then returned to feed on the blood of his family
and neighbors. After a while (anywhere
from a few days to a few years, depending on the country of the occurrence) he
became more humanlike and was indistinguishable from living humans. He was able to remain out in the daylight
and eat normal food. At this time he
would move to another town and often get married and have children, reverting
to his blood lust only on weekends or certain saint’s days. (The
socially Sophisticated Undead in Folklore, by Patrick Johnson)
Considering the original vampire legends, the action
of Delores Ferguson could well have been interpreted as vampirism. Though vampire fiction became popular in the
eighteen hundreds in Britain, the stereotype of today’s vampire fiction was not
yet embedded. In 1813 the vampire appeared in Britain in
Lord Byron’s poem “The Giaour.” In 1819 John Polidori wrote The Vampire on a challenge from Lord
Byron (Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein at
the same challenge/time). And, in 1848 Varney the Vampyre began serialization
as a penny dreadful. If we accept
Baring-Gould’s date of the Sussex incident as 1896, Holmes was conducting his
investigation one year before Bram Stoker introduced Dracula and set the
pattern for vampire fiction, as we know it today.
Accounts of vampirism in the rural areas of Eastern
Europe were not unheard of even in Sherlock Holmes’s time. In Twelve
Years’ Study of the Eastern question in Bulgaria by S. B. G. St. Clair and
Charles A. Brophy (London: Chapman and Hall, 1877) the authors account an
episode that alleged to have taken place in the 1840’s in the village in
Bulgaria in which they were presently living.
The Locals told them that a man had arrived in the village and
established himself as a tradesman. He
married a local girl, but his new wife complained that he was out every night
until dawn. Cattle and horses became
sick and died and it was noted that blood had been drained out of them. The village suspected the man of being a
vampire and when they examined him they
found he had only one nostril – a sure sign that he was a vampire. The villagers bound him, took him to a hill
outside the village, and burned him alive.
Surely with Holmes’s penchant for the unusual he had knowledge of this
and other incidents.
Watson: “A living
person might have the habit. I have
read, for example, of the old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain
their youth.”
“You
are right, Watson. It mentions the
legend in one of these references. But
are we to give serious attention to such things?”
The reference is obviously of Elizabeth Bathory who
was born a noblewoman to a powerful family in Transylvania in 1560. Elizabeth was married as a teenager, but
lived with a constant fear of aging.
Her husband died in 1604 and she moved to Vienna. Countess Elizabeth became convinced that the
blood of young girls was the secret to eternal youth and beauty. She is believed to have murdered more than
six hundred young women in order to have blood to drink and bathe in. In December of 1610 she was put on trial for
her crimes, but being a noblewoman she was not allowed by law to be sentenced
to death. She was sentenced to life
imprisonment in her castle in Cachtice, where she died in August 1614. (Who is
Elizabeth Bathory? By Angie McKaig)
Holmes constantly reminds us that it is a capital mistake
to theorize in advance of the facts (SCAN, SECO, STUD) – yet in the case of the
Sussex Vampire he does exactly that.
Before leaving Baker Street he had decided the outcome of the case, and
he commences to pursue his investigation to secure the facts to support his
theory. Considering the extensive
vampire folklore of Eastern Europe that goes back for centuries, why is Holmes so
adamant and closed-minded in considering the possibility of the existence of
vampires? IS this an indication of some
prior experience with the preternatural, supernatural, and things that go bump
in the night? This is the real mystery
in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.”
the Ol'Buzzard
