Vampire (also vampir, upyr, upiór, strigoi, vrykolakas)

In the winter of 1725, men in the Serbian village of Kisiljevo opened a grave they had filled only ten weeks earlier. The peasant Petar Blagojević had been buried in the autumn, and the village had buried him properly. What they pulled back into the cold air did not look like a ten-week corpse. The flesh was supple. The skin had not sunk against the bone. Hair and nails seemed longer than before, and fresh blood stood bright at the mouth. An Austrian official sent only to observe and record watched the villagers sharpen a hawthorn stake and drive it through the chest. Blood welled from the ears and the mouth as the wood went in. Then they burned the body to ash, because ash does not climb out of the ground.

The official wrote his report in German and used a word he had heard from the villagers. It reached Vienna, and then the rest of Europe, as Vampyri. That printing is among the earliest the word appears in Western Europe. The word was new to those readers. The thing it named was not.

Long before any Serbian grave was reopened, the people of Mesopotamia knew that the dead could come back hungry. They feared the ekimmu, sometimes written edimmu, the restless spirit of a person who had died badly or been buried without rite. It drifted out of the dry ground and fed on the living, draining strength from anyone it could reach. They feared Lamashtu, daughter of the sky god, who slipped into birthing rooms to drink the blood of infants and their mothers. They feared Lilitu, a night demon later folded into the figure of Lilith, who came to sleeping men in the dark. None of these were called vampires. All of them did what vampires do.

The Greeks had the lamia and the empusa, lovely at a distance and ruinous up close, and the strix, a screeching night bird that fed on the blood of children. Later Greek belief gave them the vrykolakas, a bloated corpse that left its grave to trouble the living. Across the Slavic and Turkic world the figure hardened into its sharpest shape. There it was the upyr, the upiór, the strigoi, the moroi, a corpse that would not stay a corpse. An early Slavic sermon already scolds people for worshipping upyri, which means the belief was old before anyone thought to write it down.

The folkloric vampire bore little resemblance to the pale, elegant aristocrat of later fiction. Villagers who exhumed one expected something worse and stranger: a body grown plump rather than withered, the skin flushed a dark red or purple, the belly swollen tight as a drum. The lips and gums had pulled back from teeth that looked too long. One eye was sometimes said to stay open. Blood, not always its own, smeared the mouth and ran from the nose. It was warm to the touch, or the villagers swore it was. Some accounts add a swollen tongue, a faint limp, a single unbroken eyebrow, coarse hair on the palms. A vampire was not a ghost. It had weight, and it had a body, and that was exactly the problem.

A person became a vampire through the wrong kind of life or the wrong kind of death. Sorcerers and the wicked were at risk. So were suicides, the excommunicated, the unbaptized, anyone denied the proper words over the proper grave. A child born with a caul, with teeth already in its mouth, or with a small tail might be marked from birth. The danger did not rest only with the dead. If an animal leapt over the corpse before burial, or a bird flew above the open grave, the body could be spoiled. Some Slavic traditions spoke of living vampires, people with two souls, who left their sleeping bodies at night to do harm and feed.

What the vampire wanted, first of all, was home. It went back to the house it had lived in. It sat at the table in the dark, or lay down beside the wife it had left, or pressed itself onto the chest of a sleeping child until the breath came short. Families sickened from the inside out. A man would waste over a week or two, insisting each night that a dead neighbour, or a dead father, had come and leaned on him in the dark.

The most famous case began with a soldier. Arnold Paole had served in the Habsburg army and come home to the village of Medveđa. He told people that during his service a vampire had troubled him, and that he had protected himself the only way he knew: he ate soil from the creature’s grave and smeared himself with its blood. Some years later Paole fell from a hay wagon, broke his neck, and died. Within weeks villagers said he was walking. They opened his grave and found him fresh, blood at his mouth, the old skin and nails sloughed away with new growth beneath. They staked him. He groaned, the report says, and bled. They burned him. It did not end there. The deaths went on, and in 1732 Austrian military surgeons came to Medveđa, exhumed more than a dozen bodies, and wrote a sober, detailed account of what a vampire was and how to be sure of one. That report swept across Europe and turned a peasant terror into a subject of learned argument.

The vampire’s powers all came from the same root, which was that it had not finished dying. It rose from the grave under its own strength. It drained blood, or the simple vitality of the living, and what it drained it added to itself, which is why the corpse looked so well fed. Its victims tended to become vampires in turn, so a single bad death could empty a village. In the older Slavic accounts it walked freely by day as well as night, and some traditions let it thin itself into a drifting shape, a butterfly, a night bird, a wisp of straw, to pass unseen. Later lore gave it the bat and the wolf and the power to cloud a watching mind.

Its weaknesses were the weaknesses of a body. It could be found, and it could be destroyed. A stake through the heart pinned it to the earth, and the wood mattered: hawthorn in Serbia, ash in Russia and the Baltic, aspen elsewhere, since the cross itself was said to have been aspen. Decapitation worked, especially when the head was set somewhere the body could not reach it, between the feet or beneath an arm. Fire ended the argument entirely. Grain or seeds scattered in the coffin or along the path could delay it, because it was bound to stop and count each one. Burial at a crossroads confused its way home. The garlic and sunlight and crucifixes that everyone now knows came mostly later, from fiction and from the patchwork of regional charms. The cure that the old records keep returning to is plainer. Find the body. Make sure it is the right one. Destroy it past returning.

The grim joke buried in all of this is that the villagers were good observers and poor anatomists. A body in cool ground bloats with gas, which plumps the skin and forces dark fluid up into the mouth. Decomposition makes the gums recede so the teeth seem to lengthen, and the outer skin loosens in a way that looks like fresh growth underneath. A staked corpse full of gas will groan as the chest is pierced. Every sign that proved a vampire was a real thing the body was doing. The people of Kisiljevo and Medveđa were not seeing nothing. They were seeing death itself, up close, and reading hunger into it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vampire?

A vampire is an undead being from folklore that rises from its grave to drain the blood or life force of the living. The belief is found worldwide but took its sharpest form in Central and Eastern Europe, where a vampire was understood as a specific corpse that had failed to stay dead. Feeding sustained the vampire’s body, which is why folkloric vampires were imagined as bloated and ruddy rather than pale and gaunt.

How did a person become a vampire?

In folklore a person became a vampire through a wrongful life, a wrongful death, or a wrongful burial. Sorcerers, suicides, the excommunicated, and the unbaptized were considered at risk, as were children born with a caul, teeth, or a tail. A corpse could also be spoiled if an animal jumped over it or a bird flew above the open grave before burial.

How do you kill a vampire?

The most reliable methods in folklore were staking, decapitation, and burning. The stake pinned the body to the earth, and the type of wood mattered, with hawthorn used in Serbia and ash or aspen elsewhere. Burning the corpse to ash was considered the surest cure, because ash cannot return to the grave.

Where do vampire legends come from?

Vampire-like beings appear in many ancient cultures, including the Mesopotamian ekimmu and Lamashtu and the Greek lamia and vrykolakas. The word “vampire” itself comes from Slavic languages and entered Western Europe in the 1720s and 1730s, after documented exhumations in Serbia. The most influential case was the 1732 investigation of Arnold Paole in the village of Medveđa, recorded by Austrian military surgeons.

Why did people believe corpses were vampires?

People believed in vampires partly because decomposing bodies genuinely show the signs folklore attributed to feeding. A buried corpse bloats with gas, which swells the skin and can push dark fluid to the mouth, while receding gums make teeth look longer. To villagers who exhumed a suspected vampire, these natural changes looked like proof that the dead had been rising and feeding.

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Lamashtu, Lilith, Ekimmu, Strigoi, Moroi, Strzyga, Nachzehrer, Vrykolakas, Lamia, Empusa, Dhampir, Jiangshi, Aswang, Soucouyant, Chupacabra