From Dracula to Edward
Cullen, pop culture
has long been fascinated by
handsome bloodsucking vampires.
But once upon a
time, vampires were
more than just an entertaining
monster for a story.
People thought they were real.
And the proof seemed
to be everywhere.
The Lore behind the famous
shape-shifting bloodsucker
can actually be traced
to a series of diseases
that ravaged North
America and Europe
in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Today, we're going
to take a look
at how a 19th century disease
panic created vampires
as we know them.
But before we get started,
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I've come to suck
your blood, haha.
In the late 18th through
late 19th century,
New England was plagued
by tuberculosis,
also known as consumption,
the infectious disease
originated from bacteria.
Since germ theory wouldn't
be proposed until the 1870s
and widely accepted
until the 1880s,
doctors and medical
researchers of the era
had little to no knowledge
of the disease, its causes,
or potential treatments.
One of the deadliest plagues
in human history, tuberculosis
would ultimately kill 2% of
new England's total population.
With no vaccine or
antibiotics to treat it,
the infected had
very few options.
The most common treatment was
to send tuberculosis patients
to a sanatorium.
For those who
couldn't afford that,
there were only mythical
explanations and folk remedies.
Tuberculosis was scary.
And people were afraid,
not only of the disease,
but of those infected by it.
One contemporary doctor wrote
of how the emaciated figure,
sweaty brow, red cheeks, sunken
eyes, and offensive laborious
breath commented
tuberculosis patients struck
most people with terror.
Striking at a time when many
believed in the supernatural,
it's easy to see
how the symptoms
of the frightful
disease, like fatigue,
appetite loss, and weight
loss, captured the imagination.
Over time, these
symptoms were slowly
transmuted into the
characteristics of vampires.
A retired Connecticut
state archaeologist
who spent time excavating the
remains of vampires buried
in the 1800s points
out the symptoms
seemed to imply
something or someone
was sucking the life
right out of the victims.
It's this line of
reasoning that led people
to believe vampires
would suck the blood
right from their victims.
But that's not where
the similarities stop.
Other symptoms inspired
different parts
of the vampire mythos.
For example, tuberculosis
was known as the White plague
because its victims
would often turn pale,
just like the classic
depictions of vampires.
The manner in which
tuberculosis spread also
contributed to the
vampire mythos.
Those infected with
TB can often take
days to show their symptoms.
This meant many would spread
the illness to their family
and then die before
the others started
showing their own symptoms.
Given the supernatural
inclinations of the period
and the lack of
anything resembling
a modern understanding
of disease,
some concluded that
their dead relatives
were rising from the
grave and returning home
to suck the life out
of their living family.
Still, others believe their
deceased family members
had psychic connections to
the living relatives that
allowed them to communicate
without leaving the grave.
Given that people were scared
both of the possibility
of contracting tuberculosis
and the possibility
that their own undead
family members were going
to return from the grave to
suck out their life force,
fear and paranoia were common.
In some places,
citizens even began
digging up the suspected
vampire and killing them again
in order to stop them
from attacking the living.
Author Michael E. Bell
characterized such events
as therapeutic exhumations.
Often, people were
personally digging up
their own deceased family
members and mutilating them.
I guess that's the
type of therapy.
Bill was able to identify
eight separate instances
of these therapeutic exhumations
in 1800s New England.
And you thought your family
gatherings were tough.
Once a suspected
vampire was dug back out
of the ground,
what happened next
would vary depending on where
in the region it was occurring.
Some communities in
Maine and Massachusetts
would simply flip the dead
body over and then rebury it.
In other areas, the townsfolk
would check the exude bodies
heart for blood.
If blood was found, the
most likely conclusion
was that they had
found a vampire.
Usually, the heart would
be removed and then burned.
Family members
would sometimes be
allowed to inhale
the smoke, which
was believed to prevent the
further spread of the disease.
In other instances,
the family members
would eat the ashes, very peaty.
In one case, a 19-year-old
from Exeter, Rhode Island,
named Mercy Brown succumbed
to tuberculosis in 1892.
Her sister and
mother had already
died of the same disease.
But her brother Edwin had not.
However, he quickly became sick.
Concerned townspeople
dug up Mercy's body
and found blood in
her heart and mouth.
Concluding that she was a
vampire, they burned her heart
and mixed it into a potion
for her sick brother to drink.
The potion obviously didn't
work and Edwin passed away
a few months later.
Sometimes families would dig
up their deceased relatives who
had passed away years earlier.
In such cases, the
remains were often
decomposed to the point of
being nothing but bones.
This raised a tough question.
How do you kill a
skeletal vampire?
Well, if the people decided
the skeleton was, in fact,
a threat, they would
typically rearrange the bones
into a skull and
crossbones pattern.
This, it was believed,
would prevent the undead
from rising and
terrorizing the living.
Over in Europe, they had
their own way of doing things.
Suspected bloodsuckers
were dug up
and then burned,
rearranged, or had a stake
driven through their heart.
That last method eventually
made its way into fiction
and, today, is probably
the most well-known method
of slaying vampires,
that, or death by stereo.
Our knowledge of the great
New England vampire panic
owes much to a handful of recent
archaeological discoveries.
In the early 1990s, two boys
in Griswold, Connecticut
were playing when they
stumbled upon a gravel pit that
contained 27 graves.
The bodies, collectively,
belong to two families
that had both been
ravaged by tuberculosis,
the Rays And the Waltons.
Turns out, during the 1850s,
two sons of Henry and Lucy Ray,
named in Lemuel and Elisha,
died of tuberculosis.
In 1854, the third
son, Henry Nelson,
also contracted the disease.
Contemporary newspaper
accounts record
that the family dug Lemuel and
Elisha, out of their graves,
burned them, and
then reburied them.
Henry Nelson, it's
believed, lived for years.
Yet, burning corpses
wasn't the only method
that people of Griswold used to
deal with suspected vampires.
In the same burial
plot, archaeologists
discovered a coffin
with markings
that identified it as holding
the remains of a man named
John Barber.
Inside the coffin,
the archaeologists
found evidence that the man
had died of tuberculosis.
It was also discovered that
five full years after being
interred, Barbara was
dug up, had his head
hacked from a spine,
and his femurs
rearranged into an
x-shaped pattern.
There was also evidence someone
had tried to remove his heart.
While tuberculosis
does explain a lot,
it wasn't the only disease
that may have inspired
the legends about vampires.
It may have had some help
from another illness that
was common in the 1700s
and 1800s, namely, rabies.
It was Dr. Juan Gomez Alonso of
Spain, who, in 1998, first made
the connection between
the folk monsters
and the second disease, which
was widespread in Europe.
Dr. Gomez Alonso noted
that a rabies outbreak that
was known to have occurred
in Hungary from 1721 to 1728
was quickly followed by a
so-called vampire epidemic.
Gomez Alonso pointed out that
both rabid animals and people
with rabies often bite
each other, which,
in turn, passes on the
disease to the bite victim.
The resemblance between this
transmission and the way
vampirism is believed to
spread is pretty apparent.
Rabies is also known to cause
a hypersensitivity to sunlight
and strong smells, like garlic.
Even the idea that
vampires don't
cast a reflection in the
mirror might owe its existence
to rabies, since people
were not considered
rabid if they were able to
stand the sight of themselves
in a mirror.
Based on these
similarities, the doctor
concluded that some
symptoms of rabies
had made their way
into vampire lore.
The erotisizing of
vampires in fiction
goes at least as far back
as Bram Stoker's 1897 novel
Dracula.
The sexy vampire
remains popular today,
as anyone who's seen
Twilight can tell you.
However, even this might be
attributable to a disease.
Rabies is known to affect
the areas of the brain that
governs sleep and libido.
The condition can
cause insomnia,
which may be responsible
for the notion
that vampires are
nocturnal, as well as
having a heightened sex drive.
In fact, in 2014,
one rabies patient
was found to be able to have
sex 20 to 30 times a day.
And some infected men
have reported the ability
to maintain an
erection for days.
That is a curse.
That being said, we like
to remind our viewers who
may be getting ideas
that rabies can kill you,
so stick with the Viagra.
The very rabies outbreaks
that inspired vampire lore
are known to have affected
dogs, wolves, and other animals.
And this is possibly the
reason that many depictions
of vampires include the
power to transform themselves
into various types of animals.
Bram Stoker's
Dracula, for example,
could turn into a wolf
for even a large dog.
Dracula could also
turn into a bat.
But the connection
between bats and vampires
likely entered the mythos
from a different source,
since bats weren't
known to Europeans
until the early renaissance and
the discovery of the Americas.
The fact is, because of
their taste for blood,
vampire bats were
named after vampires
and not, as many believe,
the other way around.
A quick fun fact
here, vampire bats,
unlike their fictional
counterparts,
do not actually suck
blood from their victims.
They just make an incision
and then lick the blood up.
Hmm, that's good.
In addition to rabies
and tuberculosis,
some believe that
vampirism was inspired
by a rare genetic disorder
known as porphyria.
Porphyria causes a breakdown in
the body's production of heme,
which is the red
pigment in blood.
The condition can also cause
a hypersensitivity to light,
which is, of course,
a vampire trope. ,
Additionally porphyria can
cause gum tissue to recede,
which can give ordinary
teeth the appearance of being
fang-like.
It's also believed by some
that drinking blood might
cure the symptoms of porphyria.
However, many scientists have
rejected this explanation
on the basis that drinking blood
would not alleviate porphyria
and that the disease was
not nearly common enough
to explain the widespread
belief in vampires.
Bram was not the first author
to write about vampires.
But given the outsized
influence of his novel, Dracula,
he might as well have been.
The book is responsible
for codifying
many of the vampire rules
we still think of today.
Despite this, Stoker's
Dracula isn't as well-known
as one might think.
When most picture
Dracula, they see
a suave, handsome aristocrat
in a debonair cape.
However, that image
actually comes
from the 1931 film adaptation
starring Bela Lugosi.
In Stoker's novel, Dracula is
a withered and ugly old man,
more like the villain in the
1922 silent film, Nosferatu.
Subsequent writers
and filmmakers
continued to reinvent
the character
and evolve the myth
that surrounded him.
Dracula continues to fascinate
audiences to this very day,
as does the very
idea of vampirism.
So what do you think?
Who is your favorite
fictional vampire?
Let us know in the
comments below.
And while you're
at it, check out
some of these other
creepy stories
from our sister site,
The Graveyard Shift.
