The Vampire Project

Pantry Preventatives

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:41:00 +0000

Believe it or not, there are things that are common to most household kitchens that were once considered to be vampire-fighting ingredients.

Salt

Possibly because of its antimicrobial properties or because of how often it's used in religious rituals, salt has long been used as a Vampire-Be-Gone.

In Romanian folklore, it was believed that women who ate a lot of salt during pregnancy would have a normal baby. However, if you craved a low-sodium diet, you were destined to give birth to a bouncing baby bloodsucker. Just imagine the joys of nursing that would bring!

Ever make your parents so mad that they damn you to a postmortem vampire existence? Yep, we've all been there. Well, Greek folklore talks about using saltwater to reverse this very specific situation of a parent-initiated vampire curse.

Used as a tracking device, salt would be dumped on the bedroom floor of a vampire victim. The idea was that the vampire would step in the salt and the salt would stick to his bare, vampy feet, which would then allow the Buffys, Van Helsings, and Winchester Brothers of the world to follow the saline path back to the vampire's grave.

Seeds

It would appear that vampires suffered from extreme forms of OCD. According to ancient European peasant folklore, you could keep a vampire from rising and disturbing the peace if you filled his coffin with seeds. Upon waking from his dirt nap, the vampire would be compelled to count and eat all the seeds, and this would keep him occupied until sunrise. You could use carrot or mustard seed, but poppyseeds were favored because of their narcotic effect. After all, a drugged vampire is not a biting vampire.

Garlic

It would appear that during those annoying flare-ups of the Black Plague in the 1300s, people used garlic to mask the delightful scents of death and dying. Before it was known that the Black Plague was, in fact, a plague with explainable roots in rats, people assumed that sudden high body counts were the work of vampires and thus developed the association between garlic and vampires. (A lot of medical mysteries were blamed on poor, misunderstood vampires in the olden days.)

There's also a Christian myth that spins a tale of Satan stomping around the Garden of Eden. Supposedly, garlic sprouted from his left footprint after he, Adam, and Eve were tossed out on their asses. Not totally sure what that has to do with vampires, since it seems more like an explanation why Satan could have benefitted from Tinactin, but stranger associations have been made.

Lard

Because it falls five days before Christmas on the Eastern Orthodox calender, Romanians slaughtered pigs on St. Ignatius Day. (I dearly want to call it "St. Pignatius Day," but I'm afraid of the heavenly ramifications.) They then took the rendered fat and gave "suspicious corpses" a thorough rub-down with it.

The reasoning behind this porcine massage is not clear, but it's just another excuse to keep Fatted Calf bacon on hand.

Vampire Blood

People in Poland believed that if you ate bread made with the blood of a freshly-staked vampire, you'd be protected against vampire attacks. Romanians took it a step further and consumed the entire body. They'd chop up and burn the body of a suspected vampire then mix the ashes with water. This potent potable was drunk by the vampire's surviving family to prevent them from vamping out themselves.

This "vampire vaccine" was used to inoculate relatives of a suspected vampire as recently as 2004.

Was a Hungarian "vampire" countess the world's most prolific serial killer?

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:19:00 +0000

When it comes to naming the world's most prolific serial killer, some boundaries must be established. As Soviet dictator from 1924 to 1953, Josef Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of citizens who died from starvation and internment in gulags (forced labor camps). Adolph Hitler's genocidal bent led to the murders of nearly 21 million people (not including those combatants who died fighting the German army).

But these men, and others like them who've issued wholesale execution orders, did not directly murder the people who died under their authority. And to be considered a serial killer, one must have personally murdered three or more people. Even under the parameters of this definition, there have been some pretty prolific serial killers.

Henry Lee Lucas confessed to killing hundreds of people, but he was linked only to three to 12 victims (in addition to his mother, whom he beat to death). Lucas said he falsely confessed to other murders because he enjoyed toying with law enforcement. Canadian pig farmer Robert Pickton was accused of murdering 26 women. When he was caught, Pickton said that his goal was to kill 50. The most prolific serial killer in recent history, Colombian Pedro Lopez, murdered 300 people, mainly young girls. He was freed from prison in Ecuador in 1998.

Serial killers tend to be men by an overwhelming margin. In fact, there's no definitive profile for female serial killers. But if history and evidential testimony are correct, a woman is the most prolific serial killer of all time. Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Bathory, a Hungarian countess, is believed to have killed as many as 650 people during the 54 years she lived. And exactly how the world's most prolific serial killer took the lives of her victims has proven grisly fodder for storytellers. Bram Stoker is believed to have been inspired by the countess: His Count Dracula is supposedly a hybrid of Wallachian prince Vlad Tepes and Bathory.

Elizabeth Bathory, the "Blood Countess"

Elizabeth Bathory, the woman who came to be known as the "Blood Countess," was born into Hungarian nobility in 1560. She is said to have suffered from fits and outbursts of rage -- possibly even epilepsy. From an early age, she witnessed her father's officers torture the peasantry that lived near her family's estate. Most historical analysis of the countess includes young Elizabeth as witness to a captured thief being sewn into the stomach of a dying horse and left to perish.

This story underscores two major aspects that may have influenced Bathory: exposure to incredible violence and her family's condoning attitude toward it. Accounts depict her penchant for inflicting pain on others and claim that she worked with accomplices. One may have been her husband, Ferencz Nadasdy, and others were members of her court.

Nadasdy married Bathory when she was 15. A soldier, he spent much time away from home. There's speculation that Nadasdy may have taught his wife new torture methods, while other researchers believe he was ignorant of her actions. What's agreed upon is that Bathory practiced most of her crimes in his absence.

Bathory had a penchant for torturing young girls in particular -- historians posit that she was bisexual. The acts she committed ranged from driving needles through her servants' lips and fingernails, to leaving her victims naked in the snow, dousing them with water and letting them freeze to death. One servant girl was beaten by Bathory and an accomplice for stealing a pear. The clubbing was so bloody that Bathory had to change her shirt. The girl was beaten for hours and finally stabbed to death with a pair of scissors.

Bathory's acts have a way of engendering a hybrid of truth and legend. Perhaps the most notorious legend about Bathory is that she bathed in her victims' blood. Inevitably, this led to rumors that the countess was a vampire. This legend was first published in 1720 by a Hungarian priest who interviewed local peasants and read testimony from the trials of Bathory’s accomplices. She reportedly claimed to use blood to keep her skin young -- she wanted to remain beautiful for her husband.

The official testimony of Elizabeth Bathory's murders, which is still extant in Hungarian archives, is both questionable and convicting in nature. Late in 1610, Elizabeth's cousin conducted a raid on Bathory's castle. Inside, there were already dead victims and some imprisoned, supposedly awaiting death. Bathory's accomplices were arrested and put on trial -- she never was. These testimonies still survive.

These testimonies are questionable because they were most likely culled from acts of torture inflicted on Bathory's own accomplices. But the fact that there even were trials regarding Bathory's murders lends some credence to the stories surrounding the woman. From the testimonies, the number 650 was settled upon as her victim count. One witness testified that Bathory kept a registry of her crimes (numbering 650).

None of this testimony amounted to a trial for Bathory. Instead, she was walled into her room, with just enough space for air and food to pass through. She spent the remaining four years of her life there, until she was found dead on the floor in 1614. Her bloody life, whether exaggerated or factual, had come to an end -- and Bathory entered the realm of legend.

Sources

Gilbert, et al. "Female serial killers." Louisiana State University. http://www.lsu.edu/faculty/jpullia/femaleserialkillers.htm
Holmes, Ronald M. and Homes, Stephen T., eds. "Serial murder." Sage Publications. 1998.
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=
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Ivy, Sandra. "Wicked women." University of South Alabama. Fall 2005. http://www.southalabama.edu/english/faculty/annmarie_guzy/
EH%20280%20Fall%202005%20Collection.pdf#page=118
McNally, Raymond T. “Dracula was a woman: In search of the blood countess of Transylvania.” McGraw Hill. 1983.
Moore, Matthew. "The world's most prolific serial killers." The Telegraph. October 25, 2007.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/
news/2007/10/24/wchess224.xml
"Canada farmer is guilty of murder." BBC. December 9, 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7135661.stm
"Democide: Nazi genocide and mass murder." University of Hawaii. November 23, 2002.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTMl
"Elizabeth Bathory." NNDB. http://www.nndb.com/people/263/000112924/
"Elizabeth Bathory - The Blood Countess." BBC. August 2, 2001. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A593084
"Henry Lee Lucas, 64, murderer who said he killed hundreds." New York Times. March 14, 2001.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=950DE2DC1E3AF937A25750C0A9679C8B63
"Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)." BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/stalin_joseph.shtml
"Serial killer." Princeton University.
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=serial%20killer

Luella Miller

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:03:00 +0000

Written by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, taken from The Wind in the Rose-Bush
and Other Stories of the Supernatural.

CLOSE to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a long-past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their childhood. In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller. Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed, and children never played around it as was their wont around an untenanted building. Not a window in the old Miller house was broken: the panes reflected the morning sunlight in patches of emerald and blue, and the latch of the sagging front door was never lifted, although no bolt secured it. Since Luella Miller had been carried out of it, the house had had no tenant except one friendless old soul who had no choice between that and the far-off shelter of the open sky. This old woman, who had survived her kindred and friends, lived in the house one week, then one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and a body of neighbours, a score strong, entered and found her dead in her bed. There were dark whispers as to the cause of her death, and there were those who testified to an expression of fear so exalted that it showed forth the state of the departing soul upon the dead face. The old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house, and in seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of superstitious fear.

There was only one person in the village who had actually known Luella Miller. That person was a woman well over eighty, but a marvel of vitality and unextinct youth. Straight as an arrow, with the spring of one recently let loose from the bow of life, she moved about the streets, and she always went to church, rain or shine. She had never married, and had lived alone for years in a house across the road from Luella Miller's.

This woman had none of the garrulousness of age, but never in all her life had she ever held her tongue for any will save her own, and she never spared the truth when she essayed to present it. She it was who bore testimony to the life, evil, though possibly wittingly or designedly so, of Luella Miller, and to her personal appearance. When this old woman spoke--and she had the gift of description, although her thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village--one could seem to see Luella Miller as she had really looked. According to this woman, Lydia Anderson by name, Luella Miller had been a beauty of a type rather unusual in New England. She had been a slight, pliant sort of creature, as ready with a strong yielding to fate and as unbreakable as a willow. She had glimmering lengths of straight, fair hair, which she wore softly looped round a long, lovely face. She had blue eyes full of soft pleading, little slender, clinging hands, and a wonderful grace of motion and attitude.

"Luella Miller used to sit in a way nobody else could if they sat up and studied a week of Sundays," said Lydia Anderson, "and it was a sight to see her walk. Ilf one of them willows over there on the edge of the brook could start up and get its roots free of the ground, and move off, it would go just the way Luella Miller used to. She had a green shot silk she used to wear, too, and a hat with green ribbon streamers, and a lace veil blowing across her face and out sideways, and a green ribbon flyin' from her waist. That was what she came out bride in when she married Erastus Miller. Her name before she was married was Hill. There was always a sight of "l's" in her name, married or single. Erastus Miller was good lookin', too, better lookin' than Luella. Sometimes I used to think that Luella wa'n't so handsome after all. Erastus just about worshiped [sic] her. I used to know him pretty well. He lived next door to me, and we went to school together. Folks used to say he was waitin' on me, but he wa'n't. I never thought he was except once or twice when he said things that some girls might have suspected meant somethin'. That was before Luella came here to teach the district school. It was funny how she came to get it, for folks said she hadn't any education, and that one of the big girls, Lottie Henderson, used to do all the teachin' for her, while she sat back and did embroidery work on a cambric pocket-handkerchief. Lottie Henderson was a real smart girl, a splendid scholar, and she just set her eyes by Luella, as all the girls did. Lottie would have made a real smart woman, but she died when Luella had been here about a year--just faded away and died: nobody knew what aided [sic] her. She dragged herself to that schoolhouse and helped Luella teach till the very last minute. The committee all knew how Luella didn't do much of the work herself, but they winked at it. It wa'n't long after Lottie died that Erastus married her. I always thought he hurried it up because she wa'n't fit to teach. One of the big boys used to help her after Lottie died, but he hadn't much government, and the school didn't do very well, and Luella might have had to give it up, for the committee couldn't have shut their eyes to things much longer. The boy that helped her was a real honest, innocent sort of fellow, and he was a good scholar, too. Folks said he overstudied, and that was the reason he took crazy the year after Luella married, but I don't know. And I don't know what made Erastus Miller go into consumption of the blood the year after he was married: consumption wa'n't in his family. He just grew weaker and weaker, and went almost bent double when he tried to wait on Luella, and he spoke feeble, like an old man. He worked terrible hard till the last trying to save up a little to leave Luella. I've seen him out in the worst storms on a wood-sled--he used to cut and sell wood--and he was hunched up on top lookin' more dead than alive. Once I couldn't stand it: I went over and helped him pitch some wood on the cart--I was always strong in my arms. I wouldn't stop for all he told me to, and I guess he was glad enough for the help. That was only a week before he died. He fell on the kitchen floor while he was gettin' breakfast. He always got the breakfast and let Luella lay abed. He did all the sweepin' and the washin' and the ironin' and most of the cookin'. He couldn't bear to have Luella lift her finger, and she let him do for her. She lived like a queen for all the work she did. She didn't even do her sewin'. She said it made her shoulder ache to sew, and poor Erastus's sister Lily used to do all her sewin'. She wa'n't able to, either; she was never strong in her back, but she did it beautifully. She had to, to suit Luella, she was so dreadful particular. I never saw anythin' like the fagottin' and hemstitchin' that Lily Miller did for Luella. She made all Luella's weddin' outfit, and that green silk dress, after Maria Babbit cut it. Maria she cut it for nothin', and she did a lot more cuttin' and fittin' for nothin' for Luella, too. Lily Miller went to live with Luella after Erastus died. She gave up her home, though she was real attached to it and wa'n't a mite afraid to stay alone. She rented it and she went to live with Luella right away after the funeral."

Then this old woman, Lydia Anderson, who remembered Luella Miller, would go on to relate the story of Lily Miller. It seemed that on the removal of Lily Miller to the house of her dead brother, to live with his widow, the village people first began to talk. This Lily Miller had been hardly past her first youth, and a most robust and blooming woman, rosy-cheeked, with curls of strong, black hair overshadowing round, candid temples and bright dark eyes. It was not six months after she had taken up her residence with her sister-in-law that her rosy colour faded and her pretty curves became wan hollows. White shadows began to show in the black rings of her hair, and the light died out of her eyes, her features sharpened, and there were pathetic lines at her mouth, which yet wore always an expression of utter sweetness and even happiness. She was devoted to her sister; there was no doubt that she loved her with her whole heart, and was perfectly content in her service. It was her sole anxiety lest she should die and leave her alone.

"The way Lily Miller used to talk about Luella was enough to make you mad and enough to make you cry," said Lydia Anderson. "I've been in there sometimes toward the last when she was too feeble to cook and carried her some blanc-mange or custard--somethin' I thought she might relish, and she'd thank me, and when I asked her how she was, say she felt better than she did yesterday, and asked me if I didn't think she looked better, dreadful pitiful, and say poor Luella had an awful time takin' care of her and doin' the work--she wa'n't strong enough to do anythin'--when all the time Luella wa'n't liftin' her finger and poor Lily didn't get any care except what the neighbours gave her, and Luella eat up everythin' that was carried in for Lily. I had it real straight that she did. Luella used to just sit and cry and do nothin'. She did act real fond of Lily, and she pined away considerable, too. There was those that thought she'd go into a decline herself. But after Lily died, her Aunt, Abby Mixter came, and then Luella picked up and grew as fat and rosy as ever. But poor Aunt Abby begun to droop just the way Lily had, and I guess somebody wrote to her married daughter, Mrs. Sam Abbot, who lived in Barre, for she wrote her mother that she must leave right away and come and make her a visit, but Aunt Abby wouldn't go. I can see her now. She was a real good-lookin' woman, tall and large, with a big, square face and a high forehead that looked of itself kind of benevolent and good. She just tended out on Luella as if she had been a baby, and when her married daughter sent for her she wouldn't stir one inch. She'd always thought a lot of her daughter, too, but she said Luella needed her and her married daughter didn't. Her daughter kept writin' and writin', but it didn't do any good. Finally she came, and when she saw how bad her mother looked, she broke down and cried and all but went on her knees to have her come away. She spoke her mind out to Luella, too. She told her that she'd killed her husband and every body that had anythin' to do with her, and she'd thank her to leave her mother alone. Luella went into hysterics, and Aunt Abby was so frightened that she called me after her daughter went. Mrs. Sam Abbot she went away fairly cryin' out loud in the buggy, the neighbours heard her, and well she might, for she never saw her mother again alive. I went in that night when Aunt Abby called for me, standin' in the door with her little green-checked shawl over her head. I can see her now. 'Do come over here, Miss Anderson,' she sung out, kind of gasping for breath. I didn't stop for anythin'. I put over as fast as I could, and when I got there, there was Luella laughin' and cryin' all together, and Aunt Abby trying to hush her, and all the time she herself was white as a sheet and shakin' so she could hardly stand. 'For the land sakes, Mrs. Mixter,' says I, you look worse than she does. You ain't fit to be up out of your bed.'

"'Oh, there ain't anythin' the matter with me,' says she. Then she went on talkin' to Luella. 'There, there, don't, don't, poor little lamb,' says she. 'Aunt Abby is here. She ain't goin' away and leave you. Don't, poor little lamb.'

"'Do leave her with me, Mrs. Mixter, and you get back to bed,' says I, for Aunt Abby had been layin' down considerable lately, though somehow she contrived to do the work.

"'I'm well enough,' says she. 'Don't you think she had better have the doctor, Miss Anderson?'

The doctor,' says I, 'I think you had better have the doctor. I think you need him much worse than some folks I could mention.' And I looked right straight at Luella Miller laughin' and cryin' and goin' on as if she was the centre of all creation. All the time she was actin' so--seemed as if she was too sick to sense anythin'--she was keepin' a sharp lookout as to how we took it out of the corner of one eye. I see her. You could never cheat me about Luella Miller. Finally I got real mad and I run home and I got a bottle of valerian I had, and I poured some boilin' hot water on a handful of catnip, and I mixed up that catnip tea with most half a wineglass of valerian, and I went with it over to Luella's. I marched right up to Luella, a-holdin' out of that cup, all smokin'. 'Now,' says I, 'Luella Miller, 'you swaller this!'

"'What is--what is it, oh, what is it?' she sort, of screeches out. Then she goes off a-laughin' enough to kill.

"'Poor lamb, poor little lamb,' says Aunt Abby, standin' over her, all kind of tottery, and tryin' to bathe her head with camphor.

"'You swaller this right down,' says I. And I didn't waste any ceremony. I just took hold of Luella Miller's chin and I tipped her head back, and I caught her mouth open with laughin', and I clapped that cup to her lips, and I fairly hollered at her: 'Swaller, swaller, swaller!' and she gulped it right down. She had to, and I guess it did her good. Anyhow, she stopped cryin' and laughin' and let me put her to bed, and she went to sleep like a baby inside of half an hour. That was more than poor Aunt Abby did. She lay awake all that night and I stayed with her, though she tried not to have me; said she wa'n't sick enough for watchers. But I stayed, and I made some good cornmeal gruel and I fed her a teaspoon every little while all night long. It seemed to me as if she was jest dyin' from bein' all wore out. In the mornin' as soon as it was light I run over to the Bisbees and sent Johnny Bisbee for the doctor. I told him to tell the doctor to hurry, and he come pretty quick. Poor Aunt Abby didn't seem to know much of anythin' when he got there. You couldn't hardly tell she breathed, she was so used up. When the doctor had gone, Luella came into the room lookin' like a baby in her ruffled nightgown. I can see her now. Her eyes were as blue and her face all pink and white like a blossom, and she looked at Aunt Abby in the bed sort of innocent and surprised. 'Why,'says she, 'Aunt Abby ain't got up yet?'

"'No, she ain't,' says I, pretty short.

"'I thought I didn't smell the coffee,' says Luella.

"'Coffee,' says I. 'I guess if you have coffee this morin' you'll make it yourself.'

"'I never made the coffee in all my life,' says she, dreadful astonished. 'Erastus always made the coffee as long as he lived, and then Lily she made it, and then Aunt Abby made it. I don't believe I can make the coffee, Miss Anderson.'

"'You can make it or go without, jest as you please,' says I.

"'Ain't Aunt Abby goin' to get up?' says she.

"'I guess she won't get up,' says I, 'sick as she is.' I was gettin' madder and madder. There was somethin' about that little pink-and-white thing standin' there and talkin' about coffee, when she had killed so many better folks than she was, and had jest killed another, that made me feel 'most as if I wished somebody would up and kill her before she had a chance to do any more harm.

"'Is Aunt Abby sick?' says Luella, as if she was sort of aggrieved and injured.

"'Yes,' says I, 'she's sick, and she's goin' to die, and then you'll be left alone, and you'll have to do for yourself and wait on yourself, or do without things.' I don't know but I was sort of hard, but it was the truth, and if I was any harder than Luella Miller had been I'll give up. I ain't never been sorry that I said it. Well, Luella, she up and had hysterics again at that, and I jest let her have 'em. All I did was to bundle her into the room on the other side of the entry where Aunt Abby couldn't hear her, if she wa'n't past it--I don't know but she was--and set her down hard in a chair and told her not to come back into the other room, and she minded. She had her hysterics in there till she got tired. When she found out that nobody was comin' to coddle her and do for her she stopped. At least I suppose she did. I had all I could do with poor Aunt Abby tryin' to keep the breath of life in her. The doctor had told me that she was dreadful low, and give me some very strong medicine to give to her in drops real often, and told me real particular about the nourishment. Well, I did as he told me real faithful till she wa'n't able to swaller any longer. Then I had her daughter sent for. I had begun to realize that she wouldn't last any time at all. I hadn't realized it before, though I spoke to Luella the way I did. The doctor he came, and Mrs. Sam Abbot, but when she got there it was too late; her mother was dead. Aunt Abby's daughter just give one look at her mother layin' there, then she turned sort of sharp and sudden and looked at me.

"'Where is she?' says she, and I knew she meant Luella.

"'She's out in the kitchen,' says I. 'She's too nervous to see folks die. She's afraid it will make her sick.'

"The Doctor he speaks up then. He was a young man. Old Doctor Park had died the year before, and this was a young fellow just out of college. 'Mrs. Miller is not strong,' says he, kind of severe, 'and she is quite right in not agitating herself.'

"'You are another, young man; she's got her pretty claw on you,' thinks I, but I didn't say anythin' to him. I just said over to Mrs. Sam Abbot that Luella was in the kitchen, and Mrs. Sam Abbot she went out there, and I went, too, and I never heard anythin' like the way she talked to Luella Miller. I felt pretty hard to Luella myself, but this was more than I ever would have dared to say. Luella she was too scared to go into hysterics. She jest flopped. She seemed to jest shrink away to nothin' in that kitchen chair, with Mrs. Sam Abbot standin' over her and talkin' and tellin' her the truth. I guess the truth was most too much for her and no mistake, because Luella presently actually did faint away, and there wa'n't any sham about it, the way I always suspected there was about them hysterics. She fainted dead away and we had to lay her flat on the floor, and the Doctor he came runnin' out and he said somethin' about a weak heart dreadful fierce to Mrs. Sam Abbot, but she wa'n't a mite scared. She faced him jest as white as even Luella was layin' there lookin' like death and the Doctor feelin' of her pulse.

"'Weak heart,' says she, 'weak heart; weak fiddlesticks! There ain't nothin' weak about that woman. She's got strength enough to hang onto other folks till she kills 'em. Weak? It was my poor mother that was weak: this woman killed her as sure as if she had taken a knife to her.'

But the Doctor he didn't pay much attention. He was bendin' over Luella layin' there with her yellow hair all streamin' and her pretty pink-and-white face all pale, and her blue eyes like stars gone out, and he was holdin' onto her hand and smoothin' her forehead, and tellin' me to get the brandy in Aunt Abby's room, and I was sure as I wanted to be that Luella had got somebody else to hang onto, now Aunt Abby was gone, and I thought of poor Erastus Miller, and I sort of pitied the poor young Doctor, led away by a pretty face, and I made up my mind I'd see what I could do.

"I waited till Aunt Abby had been dead and buried about a month, and the Doctor was goin' to see Luella steady and folks were beginnin' to talk; then one evenin', when I knew the Doctor had been called out of town and wouldn't be round, I went over to Luella's. I found her all dressed up in a blue muslin with white polka dots on it, and her hair curled jest as pretty, and there wa'n't a young girl in the place could compare with her. There was somethin' about Luella Miller seemed to draw the heart right out of you, but she didn't draw it out of me. She was settin' rocking in the chair by her sittin'-room window, and Maria Brown had gone home. Maria Brown had been in to help her, or rather to do the work, for Luella wa'n't helped when she didn't do anythin'. Maria Brown was real capable and she didn't have any ties; she wa'n't married, and lived alone, so she'd offered. I couldn't see why she should do the work any more than Luella; she wa'n't any too strong; but she seemed to think she could and Luella seemed to think so, too, so she went over and did all the work--washed, and ironed, and baked, while Luella sat and rocked. Maria didn't live long afterward. She began to fade away just the same fashion the others had. Well, she was warned, but she acted real mad when folks said anythin': said Luella was a poor, abused woman, too delicate to help herself, and they'd ought to be ashamed, and if she died helpin' them that couldn't help themselves she would--and she did.

"'I s'pose Maria has gone home,' says I to Luella, when I had gone in and sat down opposite her.

"'Yes, Maria went half in hour ago, after she had got supper and washed the dishes,' says Luella, in her pretty way.

"'I suppose she has got a lot of work to do in her own house to-night,' says I, kind of bitter, but that was all thrown away on Luella Miller. It seemed to her right that other folks that wa'n't any better able than she was herself should wait on her, and she couldn't get it through her head that anybody should think it wa'n't right.

"'Yes,' says Luella, real sweet and pretty, 'yes, she said she had to do her washin' to-night. She has let it go for a fortnight along of comin' over here.'

"'Why don't she stay home and do her washin' instead of comin' over here and doin' your work, when you are just as well able, and enough sight more so, than she is to do it?' says I.

"Then Luella she looked at me like a baby who has a rattle shook at it. She sort of laughed as innocent as you please. 'Oh, I can't do the work myself, Miss Anderson,' says she. 'I never did. Maria has to do it.'

"Then I spoke out: 'Has to do it!' says I. 'Has to do it!' She don't have to do it, either. Maria Brown has her own home and enough to live on. She ain't beholden to you to come over here and slave for you and kill herself.'

"Luella she jest set and stared at me for all the world like a doll-baby that was so abused that it was comin' to life.

"'Yes,' says I, 'she's killin' herself. She's goin' to die just the way Erastus did, and Lily, and your Aunt Abby. You're killin' her jest as you did them. I don't know what there is about you, but you seem to bring a curse,' says I. 'You kill everybody that is fool enough to care anythin' about you and do for you.'

"She stared at me and she was pretty pale.

"'And Maria ain't the only one you're goin' to kill,' says I. 'You're goin' to kill Doctor Malcom before you're done with him.'

"Then a red colour came flamin' all over her face. 'I ain't goin' to kill him, either,' says she, and she begun to cry.

"'Yes, you be!' says I. Then I spoke as I had never spoke before. You see, I felt it on account of Erastus. I told her that she hadn't any business to think of another man after she'd been married to one that had died for her: that she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that's true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it--if she wa'n't like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin' everybody without knowin' what it was doin'.

"Luella she kept gettin' paler and paler, and she never took her eyes off my face. There was somethin' awful about the way she looked at me and never spoke one word. After awhile I quit talkin' and I went home. I watched that night, but her lamp went out before nine o'clock, and when Doctor Malcom came drivin' past and sort of slowed up he see there wa'n't any light and he drove along. I saw her sort of shy out of meetin' the next Sunday, too, so he shouldn't go home with her, and I begun to think mebbe she did have some conscience after all. It was only a week after that that Maria Brown died--sort of sudden at the last, though everybody had seen it was comin'. Well, then there was a good deal of feelin' and pretty dark whispers. Folks said the days of witchcraft had come again, and they were pretty shy of Luella. She acted sort of offish to the Doctor and he didn't go there, and there wa'n't anybody to do anythin' for her. I don't know how she did get along. I wouldn't go in there and offer to help her--not because I was afraid of dyin' like the rest, but I thought she was just as well able to do her own work as I was to do it for her, and I thought it was about time that she did it and stopped killin' other folks. But it wa'n't very long before folks began to say that Luella herself was goin' into a decline jest the way her husband, and Lily, and Aunt Abby and the others had, and I saw myself that she looked pretty bad. I used to see her goin' past from the store with a bundle as if she could hardly crawl, but I remembered how Erastus used to wait and 'tend when he couldn't hardly put one foot before the other, and I didn't go out to help her. But at last one afternoon I saw the Doctor come drivin' up like mad with his medicine chest, and Mrs. Babbit came in after supper and said that Luella was real sick.

"'I'd offer to go in and nurse her,' says she, 'but I've got my children to consider and mebbe it ain't true what, they say, but it's queer how many folks that have done for her have died.'

"I didn't say anythin', but I considered how she had been Erastus's wife and how he had set his eyes by her, and I made up my mind to go in the next mornin', unless she was better, and see what I could do; but the next mornin' I see her at the window, and pretty soon she came steppin' out as spry as you please, and a little while afterward Mrs. Babbit came in and told me that the Doctor had got a girl from out of town, a Sarah Jones, to come there, and she said she was pretty sure that the Doctor was goin' to marry Luella.

"I saw him kiss her in the door that night myself, and I knew it was true. The woman came that afternoon, and the way she flew around was a caution. I don't believe Luella had swept since Maria died. She swept and dusted, and washed and ironed; wet clothes and dusters and carpets were flyin' over there all day, and every time Luella set her foot out when the Doctor wa'n't there there was that Sarah Jones helpin' of her up and down the steps, as if she hadn't learned to walk.

"Well, everybody knew that Luella and the Doctor were goin' to be married, but it wa'n't long before they began to talk about his lookin' so poorly, jest as they had about the others; and they talked about Sarah Jones,too.

"Well, the Doctor did die, and he wanted to be married first, so as to leave what little he had to Luella, but he died before the minister could get there, and Sarah Jones died a week afterward.

"Well, that wound up everything for Luella Miller. Not another soul in the whole town would lift a finger for her. There got to be a sort of panic. Then she began to droop in good earnest. She used to have to go to the store herself, for Mrs. Babbit was afraid to let Tommy go for her, and I've seen her goin' past and stoppin' every two or three steps to rest. Well, I stood it as long as I could, but one day I see her comin' with her arms full and stoppin' to lean against the Babbit fence, and I run out and took her bundles and carried them to her house. Then I went home and never spoke one word to her though she called after me dreadful kind of pitiful. Well, that night I was taken sick with a chill, and I was sick as I wanted to be for two weeks. Mrs. Babbit had seen me run out to help Luella and she came in and told me I was goin' to die on account of it. I didn't know whether I was or not, but I considered I had done right by Erastus's wife.

"That last two weeks Luella she had a dreadful hard time, I guess. She was pretty sick, and as near as I could make out nobody dared go near her. I don't know as she was really needin' anythin' very much, for there was enough to eat in her house and it was warm weather, and she made out to cook a little flour gruel every day, I know, but I guess she had a hard time, she that had been so petted and done for all her life.

"When I got so I could go out, I went over there one morning. Mrs. Babbit had just come in to say she hadn't seen any smoke and she didn't know but it was somebody's duty to go in, but, she couldn't help thinkin' of her children, and I got right up, though I hadn't been out of the house for two weeks, and I went in there, and Luella she was layin' on the bed, and she was dyin'.

"She lasted all that day and into the night. But I sat there after the new doctor had gone away. Nobody else dared to go there. It was about midnight that I left her for a minute to run home and get some medicine I had been takin', for I begun to feel rather bad.

"It was a full moon that night, and just as I started out of my door to cross the street back to Luella's, I stopped short, for I saw something.

Lydia Anderson at this juncture always said with a certain defiance that she did not expect to be believed, and then proceeded in a hushed voice:

"I saw what I saw, and I know I saw it, and I will swear on my death bed that. I saw it. I saw Luella Miller and Erastus Miller, and Lily, and Aunt Abby, and Maria, and the Doctor, and Sarah, all goin' out of her door, and all but Luella shone white in the moonlight, and they were all helpin' her along till she seemed to fairly fly in the midst of them. Then it all disappeared. I stood a minute with my heart poundin', then I went over there. I thought of goin' for Mrs. Babbit, but I thought she'd be afraid. So I went alone, though I knew what had happened. Luella was layin' real peaceful, dead on her bed."

This was the story that the old woman, Lydia Anderson, told, but the sequel was told by the people who survived her, and this is the tale which has become folklore in the village.

Lydia Anderson died when she was eighty-seven. She had continued wonderfully hale and hearty for one of her years until about two weeks before her death.

One bright moonlight evening she was sitting beside a window in her parlor when she made a sudden exclamation, and was out of the house and across the street before the neighbour who was taking care of her could stop her. She followed as fast as possible and found Lydia Anderson stretched on the ground before the door of Luella Miller's deserted house, and she was quite dead.

The next night there was a red gleam of fire athwart the moonlight and the old house of Luella Miller was burned to the ground.

Nothing is now left of it except a few old cellar stones and a lilac bush, and in summer a helpless trail of morning glories among the weeds, which might be considered emblematic of Luella herself.

-- End --

The Bodysnatcher

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:01:00 +0000

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in the Pall Mall Christmas "Extra" 13 (Dec 1884)

Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham - the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own particular arm-chair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, a man of education obviously, and a man of some property, since he lived in idleness. He had come to Debenham years ago, while still young, and by a mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue camlet cloak was a local antiquity, like the church-spire. His place in the parlour at the George, his absence from church, his old, crapulous, disreputable vices, were all things of course in Debenham. He had some vague Radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, which he would now and again set forth and emphasise with tottering slaps upon the table. He drank rum -five glasses regularly every evening; and for the greater portion of his nightly visit to the George sat, with his glass in his right hand, in a state of melancholy alcoholic saturation. We called him the Doctor, for he was supposed to have some special knowledge of medicine, and had been known, upon a pinch, to set a fracture or reduce a dislocation; but beyond these slight particulars, we had no knowledge of his character and antecedents.

One dark winter night - it had struck nine some time before the landlord joined us - there was a sick man in the George, a great neighbouring proprietor suddenly struck down with apoplexy on his way to Parliament; and the great man's still greater London doctor had been telegraphed to his bedside. It was the first time that such a thing had happened in Debenham, for the railway was but newly open, and we were all proportionately moved by the occurrence.

'He's come,' said the landlord, after he had filled and lighted his pipe.

'He?' said I. 'Who? - not the doctor?'

'Himself,' replied our host.

'What is his name?'

'Doctor Macfarlane,' said the landlord.

Fettes was far through his third tumbler, stupidly fuddled, now nodding over, now staring mazily around him; but at the last word he seemed to awaken, and repeated the name 'Macfarlane' twice, quietly enough the first time, but with sudden emotion at the second.

'Yes,' said the landlord, 'that's his name, Doctor Wolfe Macfarlane.'

Fettes became instantly sober; his eyes awoke, his voice became clear, loud, and steady, his language forcible and earnest. We were all startled by the transformation, as if a man had risen from the dead.

'I beg your pardon,' he said, 'I am afraid I have not been paying much attention to your talk. Who is this Wolfe Macfarlane?' And then, when he had heard the landlord out, 'It cannot be, it cannot be,' he added; 'and yet I would like well to see him face to face.'

'Do you know him, Doctor?' asked the undertaker, with a gasp.

'God forbid!' was the reply. 'And yet the name is a strange one; it were too much to fancy two. Tell me, landlord, is he old?'

'Well,' said the host, 'he's not a young man, to be sure, and his hair is white; but he looks younger than you.'

'He is older, though; years older. But,' with a slap upon the table, 'it's the rum you see in my face - rum and sin. This man, perhaps, may have an easy conscience and a good digestion. Conscience! Hear me speak. You would think I was some good, old, decent Christian, would you not? But no, not I; I never canted. Voltaire might have canted if he'd stood in my shoes; but the brains' - with a rattling fillip on his bald head - 'the brains were clear and active, and I saw and made no deductions.'

'If you know this doctor,' I ventured to remark, after a somewhat awful pause, 'I should gather that you do not share the landlord's good opinion.'

Fettes paid no regard to me.

'Yes,' he said, with sudden decision, 'I must see him face to face.'

There was another pause, and then a door was closed rather sharply on the first floor, and a step was heard upon the stair.

'That's the doctor,' cried the landlord. 'Look sharp, and you can catch him.'

It was but two steps from the small parlour to the door of the old George Inn; the wide oak staircase landed almost in the street; there was room for a Turkey rug and nothing more between the threshold and the last round of the descent; but this little space was every evening brilliantly lit up, not only by the light upon the stair and the great signal-lamp below the sign, but by the warm radiance of the bar-room window. The George thus brightly advertised itself to passers-by in the cold street. Fettes walked steadily to the spot, and we, who were hanging behind, beheld the two men meet, as one of them had phrased it, face to face. Dr. Macfarlane was alert and vigorous. His white hair set off his pale and placid, although energetic, countenance. He was richly dressed in the finest of broadcloth and the whitest of linen, with a great gold watch-chain, and studs and spectacles of the same precious material. He wore a broad-folded tie, white and speckled with lilac, and he carried on his arm a comfortable driving-coat of fur. There was no doubt but he became his years, breathing, as he did, of wealth and consideration; and it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour sot - bald, dirty, pimpled, and robed in his old camlet cloak - confront him at the bottom of the stairs.

'Macfarlane!' he said somewhat loudly, more like a herald than a friend.

The great doctor pulled up short on the fourth step, as though the familiarity of the address surprised and somewhat shocked his dignity.

'Toddy Macfarlane!' repeated Fettes.

The London man almost staggered. He stared for the swiftest of seconds at the man before him, glanced behind him with a sort of scare, and then in a startled whisper, 'Fettes!' he said, 'You!'

'Ay,' said the other, 'me! Did you think I was dead too? We are not so easy shut of our acquaintance.'

'Hush, hush!' exclaimed the doctor. 'Hush, hush! this meeting is so unexpected - I can see you are unmanned. I hardly knew you, I confess, at first; but I am overjoyed - overjoyed to have this opportunity. For the present it must be how-d'ye-do and good-bye in one, for my fly is waiting, and I must not fail the train; but you shall - let me see - yes - you shall give me your address, and you can count on early news of me. We must do something for you, Fettes. I fear you are out at elbows; but we must see to that for auld lang syne, as once we sang at suppers.'

'Money!' cried Fettes; 'money from you! The money that I had from you is lying where I cast it in the rain.'

Dr. Macfarlane had talked himself into some measure of superiority and confidence, but the uncommon energy of this refusal cast him back into his first confusion.

A horrible, ugly look came and went across his almost venerable countenance. 'My dear fellow,' he said, 'be it as you please; my last thought is to offend you. I would intrude on none. I will leave you my address, however - '

'I do not wish it - I do not wish to know the roof that shelters you,' interrupted the other. 'I heard your name; I feared it might be you; I wished to know if, after all, there were a God; I know now that there is none. Begone!'

He still stood in the middle of the rug, between the stair and doorway; and the great London physician, in order to escape, would be forced to step to one side. It was plain that he hesitated before the thought of this humiliation. White as he was, there was a dangerous glitter in his spectacles; but while he still paused uncertain, he became aware that the driver of his fly was peering in from the street at this unusual scene and caught a glimpse at the same time of our little body from the parlour, huddled by the corner of the bar. The presence of so many witnesses decided him at once to flee. He crouched together, brushing on the wainscot, and made a dart like a serpent, striking for the door. But his tribulation was not yet entirely at an end, for even as he was passing Fettes clutched him by the arm and these words came in a whisper, and yet painfully distinct, 'Have you seen it again?'

The great rich London doctor cried out aloud with a sharp, throttling cry; he dashed his questioner across the open space, and, with his hands over his head, fled out of the door like a detected thief. Before it had occurred to one of us to make a movement the fly was already rattling toward the station. The scene was over like a dream, but the dream had left proofs and traces of its passage. Next day the servant found the fine gold spectacles broken on the threshold, and that very night we were all standing breathless by the bar-room window, and Fettes at our side, sober, pale, and resolute in look.

'God protect us, Mr. Fettes!' said the landlord, coming first into possession of his customary senses. 'What in the universe is all this? These are strange things you have been saying.'

Fettes turned toward us; he looked us each in succession in the face. 'See if you can hold your tongues,' said he. 'That man Macfarlane is not safe to cross; those that have done so already have repented it too late.'

And then, without so much as finishing his third glass, far less waiting for the other two, he bade us good-bye and went forth, under the lamp of the hotel, into the black night.

We three turned to our places in the parlour, with the big red fire and four clear candles; and as we recapitulated what had passed, the first chill of our surprise soon changed into a glow of curiosity. We sat late; it was the latest session I have known in the old George. Each man, before we parted, had his theory that he was bound to prove; and none of us had any nearer business in this world than to track out the past of our condemned companion, and surprise the secret that he shared with the great London doctor. It is no great boast, but I believe I was a better hand at worming out a story than either of my fellows at the George; and perhaps there is now no other man alive who could narrate to you the following foul and unnatural events.

In his young days Fettes studied medicine in the schools of Edinburgh. He had talent of a kind, the talent that picks up swiftly what it hears and readily retails it for its own. He worked little at home; but he was civil, attentive, and intelligent in the presence of his masters. They soon picked him out as a lad who listened closely and remembered well; nay, strange as it seemed to me when I first heard it, he was in those days well favoured, and pleased by his exterior. There was, at that period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall here designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known. The man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise, while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for the blood of his employer. But Mr. K-was then at the top of his vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address, partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he had acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. Mr. K-was a BON VIVANT as well as an accomplished teacher; he liked a sly illusion no less than a careful preparation. In both capacities Fettes enjoyed and deserved his notice, and by the second year of his attendance he held the half-regular position of second demonstrator or sub-assistant in his class.

In this capacity the charge of the theatre and lecture-room devolved in particular upon his shoulders. He had to answer for the cleanliness of the premises and the conduct of the other students, and it was a part of his duty to supply, receive, and divide the various subjects. It was with a view to this last - at that time very delicate - affair that he was lodged by Mr. K-in the same wynd, and at last in the same building, with the dissecting-rooms. Here, after a night of turbulent pleasures, his hand still tottering, his sight still misty and confused, he would be called out of bed in the black hours before the winter dawn by the unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table. He would open the door to these men, since infamous throughout the land. He would help them with their tragic burden, pay them their sordid price, and remain alone, when they were gone, with the unfriendly relics of humanity. From such a scene he would return to snatch another hour or two of slumber, to repair the abuses of the night, and refresh himself for the labours of the day.

Few lads could have been more insensible to the impressions of a life thus passed among the ensigns of mortality. His mind was closed against all general considerations. He was incapable of interest in the fate and fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low ambitions. Cold, light, and selfish in the last resort, he had that modicum of prudence, miscalled morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient drunkenness or punishable theft. He coveted, besides, a measure of consideration from his masters and his fellow-pupils, and he had no desire to fail conspicuously in the external parts of life. Thus he made it his pleasure to gain some distinction in his studies, and day after day rendered unimpeachable eye-service to his employer, Mr. K-. For his day of work he indemnified himself by nights of roaring, blackguardly enjoyment; and when that balance had been struck, the organ that he called his conscience declared itself content.

The supply of subjects was a continual trouble to him as well as to his master. In that large and busy class, the raw material of the anatomists kept perpetually running out; and the business thus rendered necessary was not only unpleasant in itself, but threatened dangerous consequences to all who were concerned. It was the policy of Mr. K-to ask no questions in his dealings with the trade. 'They bring the body, and we pay the price,' he used to say, dwelling on the alliteration - 'QUID PRO QUO.' And, again, and somewhat profanely, 'Ask no questions,' he would tell his assistants, 'for conscience' sake.' There was no understanding that the subjects were provided by the crime of murder. Had that idea been broached to him in words, he would have recoiled in horror; but the lightness of his speech upon so grave a matter was, in itself, an offence against good manners, and a temptation to the men with whom he dealt. Fettes, for instance, had often remarked to himself upon the singular freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by the hang-dog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the dawn; and putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to avert the eye from any evidence of crime.

One November morning this policy of silence was put sharply to the test. He had been awake all night with a racking toothache - pacing his room like a caged beast or throwing himself in fury on his bed - and had fallen at last into that profound, uneasy slumber that so often follows on a night of pain, when he was awakened by the third or fourth angry repetition of the concerted signal. There was a thin, bright moonshine; it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened, but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager to be gone. Fettes, sick with sleep, lighted them upstairs. He heard their grumbling Irish voices through a dream; and as they stripped the sack from their sad merchandise he leaned dozing, with his shoulder propped against the wall; he had to shake himself to find the men their money. As he did so his eyes lighted on the dead face. He started; he took two steps nearer, with the candle raised.

'God Almighty!' he cried. 'That is Jane Galbraith!'

The men answered nothing, but they shuffled nearer the door.

'I know her, I tell you,' he continued. 'She was alive and hearty yesterday. It's impossible she can be dead; it's impossible you should have got this body fairly.'

'Sure, sir, you're mistaken entirely,' said one of the men.

But the other looked Fettes darkly in the eyes, and demanded the money on the spot.

It was impossible to misconceive the threat or to exaggerate the danger. The lad's heart failed him. He stammered some excuses, counted out the sum, and saw his hateful visitors depart. No sooner were they gone than he hastened to confirm his doubts. By a dozen unquestionable marks he identified the girl he had jested with the day before. He saw, with horror, marks upon her body that might well betoken violence. A panic seized him, and he took refuge in his room. There he reflected at length over the discovery that he had made; considered soberly the bearing of Mr. K-'s instructions and the danger to himself of interference in so serious a business, and at last, in sore perplexity, determined to wait for the advice of his immediate superior, the class assistant.

This was a young doctor, Wolfe Macfarlane, a high favourite among all the reckless students, clever, dissipated, and unscrupulous to the last degree. He had travelled and studied abroad. His manners were agreeable and a little forward. He was an authority on the stage, skilful on the ice or the links with skate or golf-club; he dressed with nice audacity, and, to put the finishing touch upon his glory, he kept a gig and a strong trotting-horse. With Fettes he was on terms of intimacy; indeed, their relative positions called for some community of life; and when subjects were scarce the pair would drive far into the country in Macfarlane's gig, visit and desecrate some lonely graveyard, and return before dawn with their booty to the door of the dissecting-room.

On that particular morning Macfarlane arrived somewhat earlier than his wont. Fettes heard him, and met him on the stairs, told him his story, and showed him the cause of his alarm. Macfarlane examined the marks on her body.

'Yes,' he said with a nod, 'it looks fishy.'

'Well, what should I do?' asked Fettes.

'Do?' repeated the other. 'Do you want to do anything? Least said soonest mended, I should say.'

'Some one else might recognise her,' objected Fettes. 'She was as well known as the Castle Rock.'

'We'll hope not,' said Macfarlane, 'and if anybody does - well, you didn't, don't you see, and there's an end. The fact is, this has been going on too long. Stir up the mud, and you'll get K-into the most unholy trouble; you'll be in a shocking box yourself. So will I, if you come to that. I should like to know how any one of us would look, or what the devil we should have to say for ourselves, in any Christian witness-box. For me, you know there's one thing certain - that, practically speaking, all our subjects have been murdered.'

'Macfarlane!' cried Fettes.

'Come now!' sneered the other. 'As if you hadn't suspected it yourself!'

'Suspecting is one thing - '

'And proof another. Yes, I know; and I'm as sorry as you are this should have come here,' tapping the body with his cane. 'The next best thing for me is not to recognise it; and,' he added coolly, 'I don't. You may, if you please. I don't dictate, but I think a man of the world would do as I do; and I may add, I fancy that is what K-would look for at our hands. The question is, Why did he choose us two for his assistants? And I answer, because he didn't want old wives.'

This was the tone of all others to affect the mind of a lad like Fettes. He agreed to imitate Macfarlane. The body of the unfortunate girl was duly dissected, and no one remarked or appeared to recognise her.

One afternoon, when his day's work was over, Fettes dropped into a popular tavern and found Macfarlane sitting with a stranger. This was a small man, very pale and dark, with coal-black eyes. The cut of his features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, and stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad's vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.

'I'm a pretty bad fellow myself,' the stranger remarked, 'but Macfarlane is the boy - Toddy Macfarlane I call him. Toddy, order your friend another glass.' Or it might be, 'Toddy, you jump up and shut the door.' 'Toddy hates me,' he said again. 'Oh yes, Toddy, you do!'

'Don't you call me that confounded name,' growled Macfarlane.

'Hear him! Did you ever see the lads play knife? He would like to do that all over my body,' remarked the stranger.

'We medicals have a better way than that,' said Fettes. 'When we dislike a dead friend of ours, we dissect him.'

Macfarlane looked up sharply, as though this jest were scarcely to his mind.

The afternoon passed. Gray, for that was the stranger's name, invited Fettes to join them at dinner, ordered a feast so sumptuous that the tavern was thrown into commotion, and when all was done commanded Macfarlane to settle the bill. It was late before they separated; the man Gray was incapably drunk. Macfarlane, sobered by his fury, chewed the cud of the money he had been forced to squander and the slights he had been obliged to swallow. Fettes, with various liquors singing in his head, returned home with devious footsteps and a mind entirely in abeyance. Next day Macfarlane was absent from the class, and Fettes smiled to himself as he imagined him still squiring the intolerable Gray from tavern to tavern. As soon as the hour of liberty had struck he posted from place to place in quest of his last night's companions. He could find them, however, nowhere; so returned early to his rooms, went early to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.

At four in the morning he was awakened by the well-known signal. Descending to the door, he was filled with astonishment to find Macfarlane with his gig, and in the gig one of those long and ghastly packages with which he was so well acquainted.

'What?' he cried. 'Have you been out alone? How did you manage?'

But Macfarlane silenced him roughly, bidding him turn to business. When they had got the body upstairs and laid it on the table, Macfarlane made at first as if he were going away. Then he paused and seemed to hesitate; and then, 'You had better look at the face,' said he, in tones of some constraint. 'You had better,' he repeated, as Fettes only stared at him in wonder.

'But where, and how, and when did you come by it?' cried the other.

'Look at the face,' was the only answer.

Fettes was staggered; strange doubts assailed him. He looked from the young doctor to the body, and then back again. At last, with a start, he did as he was bidden. He had almost expected the sight that met his eyes, and yet the shock was cruel. To see, fixed in the rigidity of death and naked on that coarse layer of sackcloth, the man whom he had left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern, awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terrors of the conscience. It was a CRAS TIBI which re-echoed in his soul, that two whom he had known should have come to lie upon these icy tables. Yet these were only secondary thoughts. His first concern regarded Wolfe. Unprepared for a challenge so momentous, he knew not how to look his comrade in the face. He durst not meet his eye, and he had neither words nor voice at his command.

It was Macfarlane himself who made the first advance. He came up quietly behind and laid his hand gently but firmly on the other's shoulder.

'Richardson,' said he, 'may have the head.'

Now Richardson was a student who had long been anxious for that portion of the human subject to dissect. There was no answer, and the murderer resumed: 'Talking of business, you must pay me; your accounts, you see, must tally.'

Fettes found a voice, the ghost of his own: 'Pay you!' he cried. 'Pay you for that?'

'Why, yes, of course you must. By all means and on every possible account, you must,' returned the other. 'I dare not give it for nothing, you dare not take it for nothing; it would compromise us both. This is another case like Jane Galbraith's. The more things are wrong the more we must act as if all were right. Where does old K-keep his money?'

'There,' answered Fettes hoarsely, pointing to a cupboard in the corner.

'Give me the key, then,' said the other, calmly, holding out his hand.

There was an instant's hesitation, and the die was cast. Macfarlane could not suppress a nervous twitch, the infinitesimal mark of an immense relief, as he felt the key between his fingers. He opened the cupboard, brought out pen and ink and a paper-book that stood in one compartment, and separated from the funds in a drawer a sum suitable to the occasion.

'Now, look here,' he said, 'there is the payment made - first proof of your good faith: first step to your security. You have now to clinch it by a second. Enter the payment in your book, and then you for your part may defy the devil.'

The next few seconds were for Fettes an agony of thought; but in balancing his terrors it was the most immediate that triumphed. Any future difficulty seemed almost welcome if he could avoid a present quarrel with Macfarlane. He set down the candle which he had been carrying all this time, and with a steady hand entered the date, the nature, and the amount of the transaction.

'And now,' said Macfarlane, 'it's only fair that you should pocket the lucre. I've had my share already. By the bye, when a man of the world falls into a bit of luck, has a few shillings extra in his pocket - I'm ashamed to speak of it, but there's a rule of conduct in the case. No treating, no purchase of expensive class-books, no squaring of old debts; borrow, don't lend.'

'Macfarlane,' began Fettes, still somewhat hoarsely, 'I have put my neck in a halter to oblige you.'

'To oblige me?' cried Wolfe. 'Oh, come! You did, as near as I can see the matter, what you downright had to do in self-defence. Suppose I got into trouble, where would you be? This second little matter flows clearly from the first. Mr. Gray is the continuation of Miss Galbraith. You can't begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning; that's the truth. No rest for the wicked.'

A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.

'My God!' he cried, 'but what have I done? and when did I begin? To be made a class assistant - in the name of reason, where's the harm in that? Service wanted the position; Service might have got it. Would HE have been where I am now?'

'My dear fellow,' said Macfarlane, 'what a boy you are! What harm HAS come to you? What harm CAN come to you if you hold your tongue? Why, man, do you know what this life is? There are two squads of us - the lions and the lambs. If you're a lamb, you'll come to lie upon these tables like Gray or Jane Galbraith; if you're a lion, you'll live and drive a horse like me, like K-, like all the world with any wit or courage. You're staggered at the first. But look at K-! My dear fellow, you're clever, you have pluck. I like you, and K-likes you. You were born to lead the hunt; and I tell you, on my honour and my experience of life, three days from now you'll laugh at all these scarecrows like a High School boy at a farce.'

And with that Macfarlane took his departure and drove off up the wynd in his gig to get under cover before daylight. Fettes was thus left alone with his regrets. He saw the miserable peril in which he stood involved. He saw, with inexpressible dismay, that there was no limit to his weakness, and that, from concession to concession, he had fallen from the arbiter of Macfarlane's destiny to his paid and helpless accomplice. He would have given the world to have been a little braver at the time, but it did not occur to him that he might still be brave. The secret of Jane Galbraith and the cursed entry in the day-book closed his mouth.

Hours passed; the class began to arrive; the members of the unhappy Gray were dealt out to one and to another, and received without remark. Richardson was made happy with the head; and before the hour of freedom rang Fettes trembled with exultation to perceive how far they had already gone toward safety.

For two days he continued to watch, with increasing joy, the dreadful process of disguise.

On the third day Macfarlane made his appearance. He had been ill, he said; but he made up for lost time by the energy with which he directed the students. To Richardson in particular he extended the most valuable assistance and advice, and that student, encouraged by the praise of the demonstrator, burned high with ambitious hopes, and saw the medal already in his grasp.

Before the week was out Macfarlane's prophecy had been fulfilled. Fettes had outlived his terrors and had forgotten his baseness. He began to plume himself upon his courage, and had so arranged the story in his mind that he could look back on these events with an unhealthy pride. Of his accomplice he saw but little. They met, of course, in the business of the class; they received their orders together from Mr. K-. At times they had a word or two in private, and Macfarlane was from first to last particularly kind and jovial. But it was plain that he avoided any reference to their common secret; and even when Fettes whispered to him that he had cast in his lot with the lions and foresworn the lambs, he only signed to him smilingly to hold his peace.

At length an occasion arose which threw the pair once more into a closer union. Mr. K-was again short of subjects; pupils were eager, and it was a part of this teacher's pretensions to be always well supplied. At the same time there came the news of a burial in the rustic graveyard of Glencorse. Time has little changed the place in question. It stood then, as now, upon a cross road, out of call of human habitations, and buried fathom deep in the foliage of six cedar trees. The cries of the sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in seven days the voice of the bell and the old tunes of the precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural church. The Resurrection Man - to use a byname of the period - was not to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs, the paths worn by the feet of worshippers and mourners, and the offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys.

Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday's best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.

Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks and furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without remission - a cold, dense, lashing rain. Now and again there blew a puff of wind, but these sheets of falling water kept it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and silent drive as far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening. They stopped once, to hide their implements in a thick bush not far from the churchyard, and once again at the Fisher's Tryst, to have a toast before the kitchen fire and vary their nips of whisky with a glass of ale. When they reached their journey's end the gig was housed, the horse was fed and comforted, and the two young doctors in a private room sat down to the best dinner and the best wine the house afforded. The lights, the fire, the beating rain upon the window, the cold, incongruous work that lay before them, added zest to their enjoyment of the meal. With every glass their cordiality increased. Soon Macfarlane handed a little pile of gold to his companion.

'A compliment,' he said. 'Between friends these little d-d accommodations ought to fly like pipe-lights.'

Fettes pocketed the money, and applauded the sentiment to the echo. 'You are a philosopher,' he cried. 'I was an ass till I knew you. You and K-between you, by the Lord Harry! but you'll make a man of me.'

'Of course we shall,' applauded Macfarlane. 'A man? I tell you, it required a man to back me up the other morning. There are some big, brawling, forty-year-old cowards who would have turned sick at the look of the d-d thing; but not you - you kept your head. I watched you.'

'Well, and why not?' Fettes thus vaunted himself. 'It was no affair of mine. There was nothing to gain on the one side but disturbance, and on the other I could count on your gratitude, don't you see?' And he slapped his pocket till the gold pieces rang.

Macfarlane somehow felt a certain touch of alarm at these unpleasant words. He may have regretted that he had taught his young companion so successfully, but he had no time to interfere, for the other noisily continued in this boastful strain:-

'The great thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don't want to hang - that's practical; but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of curiosities - they may frighten boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them. Here's to the memory of Gray!'

It was by this time growing somewhat late. The gig, according to order, was brought round to the door with both lamps brightly shining, and the young men had to pay their bill and take the road. They announced that they were bound for Peebles, and drove in that direction till they were clear of the last houses of the town; then, extinguishing the lamps, returned upon their course, and followed a by-road toward Glencorse. There was no sound but that of their own passage, and the incessant, strident pouring of the rain. It was pitch dark; here and there a white gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost groping, that they picked their way through that resonant blackness to their solemn and isolated destination. In the sunken woods that traverse the neighbourhood of the burying-ground the last glimmer failed them, and it became necessary to kindle a match and re-illumine one of the lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping trees, and environed by huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed labours.

They were both experienced in such affairs, and powerful with the spade; and they had scarce been twenty minutes at their task before they were rewarded by a dull rattle on the coffin lid. At the same moment Macfarlane, having hurt his hand upon a stone, flung it carelessly above his head. The grave, in which they now stood almost to the shoulders, was close to the edge of the plateau of the graveyard; and the gig lamp had been propped, the better to illuminate their labours, against a tree, and on the immediate verge of the steep bank descending to the stream. Chance had taken a sure aim with the stone. Then came a clang of broken glass; night fell upon them; sounds alternately dull and ringing announced the bounding of the lantern down the bank, and its occasional collision with the trees. A stone or two, which it had dislodged in its descent, rattled behind it into the profundities of the glen; and then silence, like night, resumed its sway; and they might bend their hearing to its utmost pitch, but naught was to be heard except the rain, now marching to the wind, now steadily falling over miles of open country.

They were so nearly at an end of their abhorred task that they judged it wisest to complete it in the dark. The coffin was exhumed and broken open; the body inserted in the dripping sack and carried between them to the gig; one mounted to keep it in its place, and the other, taking the horse by the mouth, groped along by wall and bush until they reached the wider road by the Fisher's Tryst. Here was a faint, diffused radiancy, which they hailed like daylight; by that they pushed the horse to a good pace and began to rattle along merrily in the direction of the town.

They had both been wetted to the skin during their operations, and now, as the gig jumped among the deep ruts, the thing that stood propped between them fell now upon one and now upon the other. At every repetition of the horrid contact each instinctively repelled it with the greater haste; and the process, natural although it was, began to tell upon the nerves of the companions. Macfarlane made some ill-favoured jest about the farmer's wife, but it came hollowly from his lips, and was allowed to drop in silence. Still their unnatural burden bumped from side to side; and now the head would be laid, as if in confidence, upon their shoulders, and now the drenching sack-cloth would flap icily about their faces. A creeping chill began to possess the soul of Fettes. He peered at the bundle, and it seemed somehow larger than at first. All over the country-side, and from every degree of distance, the farm dogs accompanied their passage with tragic ululations; and it grew and grew upon his mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that some nameless change had befallen the dead body, and that it was in fear of their unholy burden that the dogs were howling.

'For God's sake,' said he, making a great effort to arrive at speech, 'for God's sake, let's have a light!'

Seemingly Macfarlane was affected in the same direction; for, though he made no reply, he stopped the horse, passed the reins to his companion, got down, and proceeded to kindle the remaining lamp. They had by that time got no farther than the cross-road down to Auchenclinny. The rain still poured as though the deluge were returning, and it was no easy matter to make a light in such a world of wet and darkness. When at last the flickering blue flame had been transferred to the wick and began to expand and clarify, and shed a wide circle of misty brightness round the gig, it became possible for the two young men to see each other and the thing they had along with them. The rain had moulded the rough sacking to the outlines of the body underneath; the head was distinct from the trunk, the shoulders plainly modelled; something at once spectral and human riveted their eyes upon the ghastly comrade of their drive.

For some time Macfarlane stood motionless, holding up the lamp. A nameless dread was swathed, like a wet sheet, about the body, and tightened the white skin upon the face of Fettes; a fear that was meaningless, a horror of what could not be, kept mounting to his brain. Another beat of the watch, and he had spoken. But his comrade forestalled him.

'That is not a woman,' said Macfarlane, in a hushed voice.

'It was a woman when we put her in,' whispered Fettes.

'Hold that lamp,' said the other. 'I must see her face.'

And as Fettes took the lamp his companion untied the fastenings of the sack and drew down the cover from the head. The light fell very clear upon the dark, well-moulded features and smooth-shaven cheeks of a too familiar countenance, often beheld in dreams of both of these young men. A wild yell rang up into the night; each leaped from his own side into the roadway: the lamp fell, broke, and was extinguished; and the horse, terrified by this unusual commotion, bounded and went off toward Edinburgh at a gallop, bearing along with it, sole occupant of the gig, the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850 -- 1894)

Was it a Dream?

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:21:00 +0000

Written by Guy de Maupassant

"I had loved her madly!

"Why does one love? Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one's mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips--a name which comes up continually, rising, like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name which one repeats over and over again, which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer.

"I am going to tell you our story, for love only has one, which is always the same. I met her and loved her; that is all. And for a whole year I have lived on her tenderness, on her caresses, in her arms, in her dresses, on her words, so completely wrapped up, bound, and absorbed in everything which came from her, that I no longer cared whether it was day or night, or whether I was dead or alive, on this old earth of ours.

"And then she died. How? I do not know; I no longer know anything. But one evening she came home wet, for it was raining heavily, and the next day she coughed, and she coughed for about a week, and took to her bed. What happened I do not remember now, but doctors came, wrote, and went away. Medicines were brought, and some women made her drink them. Her hands were hot, her forehead was burning, and her eyes bright and sad. When I spoke to her, she answered me, but I do not remember what we said. I have forgotten everything, everything, everything! She died, and I very well remember her slight, feeble sigh. The nurse said: 'Ah!' and I understood, I understood!

"I knew nothing more, nothing. I saw a priest, who said: 'Your mistress?' and it seemed to me as if he were insulting her. As she was dead, nobody had the right to say that any longer, and I turned him out. Another came who was very kind and tender, and I shed tears when he spoke to me about her.

"They consulted me about the funeral, but I do not remember anything that they said, though I recollected the coffin, and the sound of the hammer when they nailed her down in it. Oh! God, God!

"She was buried! Buried! She! In that hole! Some people came--female friends. I made my escape and ran away. I ran, and then walked through the streets, went home, and the next day started on a journey.

* * * * * * *

"Yesterday I returned to Paris, and when I saw my room again--our room, our bed, our furniture, everything that remains of the life of a human being after death--I was seized by such a violent attack of fresh grief, that I felt like opening the window and throwing myself out into the street. I could not remain any longer among these things, between these walls which had inclosed and sheltered her, which retained a thousand atoms of her, of her skin and of her breath, in their imperceptible crevices. I took up my hat to make my escape, and just as I reached the door, I passed the large glass in the hall, which she had put there so that she might look at herself every day from head to foot as she went out, to see if her toilette looked well, and was correct and pretty, from her little boots to her bonnet.

"I stopped short in front of that looking-glass in which she had so often been reflected--so often, so often, that it must have retained her reflection. I was standing there. trembling, with my eyes fixed on the glass--on that flat, profound, empty glass--which had contained her entirely, and had possessed her as much as I, as my passionate looks had. I felt as if I loved that glass. I touched it; it was cold. Oh! the recollection! sorrowful mirror, burning mirror, horrible mirror, to make men suffer such torments! Happy is the man whose heart forgets everything that it has contained, everything that has passed before it, everything that has looked at itself in it, or has been reflected in its affection, in its love! How I suffer!

"I went out without knowing it, without wishing it, and toward the cemetery. I found her simple grave, a white marble cross, with these few words:

" 'She loved, was loved, and died.'

"She is there, below, decayed! How horrible! I sobbed with my forehead on the ground, and I stopped there for a long time, a long time. Then I saw that it was getting dark, and a strange, mad wish, the wish of a despairing lover, seized me. I wished to pass the night, the last night, in weeping on her grave. But I should be seen and driven out. How was I to manage? I was cunning, and got up and began to roam about in that city of the dead. I walked and walked. How small this city is, in comparison with the other, the city in which we live. And yet, how much more numerous the dead are than the living. We want high houses, wide streets, and much room for the four generations who see the daylight at the same time, drink water from the spring, and wine from the vines, and eat bread from the plains.

"And for all the generations of the dead, for all that ladder of humanity that has descended down to us, there is scarcely anything, scarcely anything! The earth takes them back, and oblivion effaces them. Adieu!

"At the end of the cemetery, I suddenly perceived that I was in its oldest part, where those who had been dead a long time are mingling with the soil, where the crosses themselves are decayed, where possibly newcomers will be put to-morrow. It is full of untended roses, of strong and dark cypress-trees, a sad and beautiful garden, nourished on human flesh.

"I was alone, perfectly alone. So I crouched in a green tree and hid myself there completely amid the thick and somber branches. I waited, clinging to the stem, like a shipwrecked man does to a plank.

"When it was quite dark, I left my refuge and began to walk softly, slowly, inaudibly, through that ground full of dead people. I wandered about for a long time, but could not find her tomb again. I went on with extended arms, knocking against the tombs with my hands, my feet, my knees, my chest, even with my head, without being able to find her. I groped about like a blind man finding his way, I felt the stones, the crosses, the iron railings, the metal wreaths, and the wreaths of faded flowers! I read the names with my fingers, by passing them over the letters. What a night! What a night! I could not find her again!

"There was no moon. What a night! I was frightened, horribly frightened in these narrow paths, between two rows of graves. Graves! graves! graves! nothing but graves! On my right, on my left, in front of me, around me, everywhere there were graves! I sat down on one of them, for I could not walk any longer, my knees were so weak. I could hear my heart beat! And I heard something else as well. What? A confused, nameless noise. Was the noise in my head, in the impenetrable night, or beneath the mysterious earth, the earth sown with human corpses? I looked all around me, but I cannot say how long I remained there; I was paralyzed with terror, cold with fright, ready to shout out, ready to die.

"Suddenly, it seemed to me that the slab of marble on which I was sitting, was moving. Certainly it was moving, as if it were being raised. With a bound, I sprang on to the neighboring tomb, and I saw, yes, I distinctly saw the stone which I had just quitted rise upright. Then the dead person appeared, a naked skeleton, pushing the stone back with its bent back. I saw it quite clearly, although the night was so dark. On the cross I could read:

" 'Here lies Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He loved his family, was kind and honorable, and died in the grace of the Lord.'

"The dead man also read what was inscribed on his tombstone; then he picked up a stone off the path, a little, pointed stone and began to scrape the letters carefully. He slowly effaced them, and with the hollows of his eyes he looked at the places where they had been engraved. Then with the tip of the bone that had been his forefinger, he wrote in luminous letters, like those lines which boys trace on walls with the tip of a lucifer match:

" 'Here reposes Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He hastened his father's death by his unkindness, as he wished to inherit his fortune, he tortured his wife, tormented his children, deceived his neighbors, robbed everyone he could, and died wretched.'

"When he had finished writing, the dead man stood motionless, looking at his work. On turning round I saw that all the graves were open, that all the dead bodies had emerged from them, and that all had effaced the lies inscribed on the gravestones by their relations, substituting the truth instead. And I saw that all had been the tormentors of their neighbors--malicious, dishonest, hypocrites, liars, rogues, calumniators, envious; that they had stolen, deceived, performed every disgraceful, every abominable action, these good fathers, these faithful wives, these devoted sons, these chaste daughters, these honest tradesmen, these men and women who were called irreproachable. They were all writing at the same time, on the threshold of their eternal abode, the truth, the terrible and the holy truth of which everybody was ignorant, or pretended to be ignorant, while they were alive.

"I thought that SHE also must have written something on her tombstone, and now running without any fear among the half-open coffins, among the corpses and skeletons, I went toward her, sure that I should find her immediately. I recognized her at once, without seeing her face, which was covered by the winding-sheet, and on the marble cross, where shortly before I had read:

" 'She loved, was loved, and died.'

I now saw:

" 'Having gone out in the rain one day, in order to deceive her lover, she caught cold and died.'

* * * * * * *

"It appears that they found me at daybreak, lying on the grave unconscious."

The Upper Berth

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:19:00 +0000

By F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909), from G.P. Putnam's Sons _Autonym Library_ no. 1 (1894)

SOMEBODY asked for the cigars. We had talked long, and the conversation as beginning to languish; the tobacco smoke had got into the heavy curtains, he wine had got into those brains which were liable to become heavy, and it was already perfectly evident that, unless somebody did something to rouse our oppressed spirits, the meeting would soon come to its natural conclusion, and we, the guests, would speedily go home to bed, and most certainly to sleep. No one had said anything very remarkable; it may be that no one had anything very remarkable to say. Jones had given us every particular of his last hunting adventure in Yorkshire. Mr. Tompkins, of Boston, had explained at elaborate length those working principles, by the due and careful maintenance of which the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad not only extended its territory, increased its departmental influence, and transported live stock without starving them to death before the day of actual delivery, but, also, had for years succeeded in deceiving those passengers who bought its tickets into the fallacious belief that the corporation aforesaid was really able to transport human life without destroying it. Signor Tombola had endeavoured to persuade us, by arguments which we took no trouble to oppose, that the unity of his country in no way resembled the average modern torpedo, carefully planned, constructed with all the skill of the greatest European arsenals, but, when constructed, destined to be directed by feeble hands into a region where it must undoubtedly explode, unseen, unfeared, and unheard, into the illimitable wastes of political chaos.

It is unnecessary to go into further details. The conversation had assumed proportions which would have bored Prometheus on his rock, which would have driven Tantalus to distraction, and which would have impelled Ixion to seek relaxation in the simple but instructive dialogues of Herr Ollendorff, rather than submit to the greater evil of listening to our talk. We had sat at table for hours; we were bored, we were tired, and nobody showed signs of moving.

Somebody called for cigars. We all instinctively looked towards the speaker. Brisbane was a man of five-and-thirty years of age, and remarkable for those gifts which chiefly attract the attention of men. He was a strong man. The external proportions of his figure presented nothing extraordinary to the common eye, though his size was above the average. He was a little over six feet in height, and moderately broad in the shoulder; he did not appear to be stout, but, on the other hand, he was certainly not thin; his small head was supported by a strong and sinewy neck; his broad, muscular hands appeared to possess a peculiar skill in breaking walnuts without the assistance of the ordinary cracker, and, seeing him in profile, one could not help remarking the extraordinary breadth of his sleeves, and the unusual thickness of his chest. He was one of those men who are commonly spoken of among men as deceptive; that is to say, that though he looked exceedingly strong he was in reality very much stronger than he looked. Of his features I need say little. His head was small, his hair is thin, his eyes are blue, his nose is large, he has a small moustache, and a square jaw. Everybody knows Brisbane, and when he asked for a cigar everybody looked at him.

"It is a very singular thing," said Brisbane.

Everybody stopped talking. Brisbane's voice was not loud, but possessed a peculiar quality of penetrating general conversation, and cutting it like a knife. Everybody listened. Brisbane, perceiving that he had attracted their general attention, lit his cigar with great equanimity.

"It is very singular," he continued, "that thing about ghosts. People are always asking whether anybody has seen a ghost. I have."

"Bosh! What, you? You don't mean to say so, Brisbane? Well, for a man of his intelligence!"

A chorus of exclamations greeted Brisbane's remarkable statement. Everybody called for cigars, and Stubbs, the butler, suddenly appeared from the depths of nowhere with a fresh bottle of dry champagne. The situation was saved; Brisbane was going to tell a story.

I am an old sailor, said Brisbane, and as I have to cross the Atlantic pretty often, I have my favourites. Most men have their favourites. I have seen a man wait in a Broadway bar for three-quarters of an hour for a particular car which he liked. I believe the bar-keeper made at least one-third of his living by that man's preference. I have a habit of waiting for certain ships when I am obliged to cross that duck-pond. It may be a prejudice, but I was never cheated out of a good passage but once in my life. I remember it very well; it was a warm morning in June, and the Custom House officials, who were hanging about waiting for a steamer already on her way up from the Quarantine, presented a peculiarly hazy and thoughtful appearance. I had not much luggage -- I never have. I mingled with the crowd of passengers, porters, and officious individuals in blue coats and brass buttons, who seemed to spring up like mushrooms from the deck of a moored steamer to obtrude their unnecessary services upon the independent passenger. I have often noticed with a certain interest the spontaneous evolution of these fellows. They are not there when you arrive; five minutes after the pilot has called 'Go ahead!' they, or at least their blue coats and brass buttons, have disappeared from deck and gangway as completely as though they had been consigned to that locker which tradition ascribes to Davy Jones. But, at the moment of starting, they are there, clean shaved, blue coated, and ravenous for fees. I hastened on board. The Kamtschatka was one of my favourite ships. I saw was, because she emphatically no longer is. I cannot conceive of any inducement which could entice me to make another voyage in her. Yes, I know what you are going to say. She is uncommonly clean in the run aft, she has enough bluffing off in the bows to keep her dry, and the lower berths are most of them double. She has a lot of advantages, but I won't cross in her again. Excuse the digression. I got on board. I hailed a steward, whose red nose and redder whiskers were equally familiar to me.

"One hundred and five, lower berth," said I, in the businesslike tone peculiar to men who think no more of crossing the Atlantic than taking a whisky cocktail at down-town Delmonico's.

The steward took my portmanteau, greatcoat, and rug. I shall never forget the expression on his face. Not that he turned pale. It is maintained by the most eminent divines that even miracles cannot change the course of nature. I have no hesitation in saying that he did not turn pale; but, from his expression, I judged that he was either about to shed tears, to sneeze, or to drop my portmanteau. As the latter contained two bottles of particularly fine old sherry presented to me for my voyage by my old friend Snigginson van Pickyns, I felt extremely nervous. But the steward did none of these things.

"Well, I'm d----d!" said he in a low voice, and led the way.

I supposed my Hermes, as he led me to the lower regions, had had a little grog, but I said nothing, and followed him. One hundred and five was on the port side, well aft. There was nothing remarkable about the state-room. The lower berth, like most of those upon the Kamtschatka, was double. There was plenty of room; there was the usual washing apparatus, calculated to convey an idea of luxury to the mind of a North American Indian; there were the usual inefficient racks of brown wood, in which it is more easy to hand a large-sized umbrella than the common tooth-brush of commerce. Upon the uninviting mattresses were carefully bolded together those blankets which a great modern humorist has aptly compared to cold buckwheat cakes. The question of towels was left entirely to the imagination. The glass decanters were filled with a transparent liquid faintly tinged with brown, but from which an odour less faint, but not more pleasing, ascended to the nostrils, like a far-off sea-sick reminiscence of oily machinery. Sad-coloured curtains half-closed the upper berth. The hazy June daylight shed a faint illumination upon the desolate little scene. Ugh! how I hate that state-room!

The steward deposited my traps and looked at me, as though he wanted to get away -- probably in search of more passengers and more fees. It is always a good plan to start in favour with those functionaries, and I accordingly gave him certain coins there and then.

"I'll try and make yer comfortable all I can," he remarked, as he put the coins in his pocket. Nevertheless, there was a doubtful intonation in his voice which surprised me. Possibly his scale of fees had gone up, and he was not satisfied; but on the whole I was inclined to think that, as he himself would have expressed it, he was "the better for a glass". I was wrong, however, and did the man injustice.

II

NOTHING especially worthy of mention occurred during that day. We left the pier punctually, and it was very pleasant to be fairly under way, for the weather was warm and sultry, and the motion of the steamer produced a refreshing breeze. Everybody knows what the first day at sea is like. People pace the decks and stare at each other, and occasionally meet acquaintances whom they did not know to be on board. There is the usual uncertainty as to whether the food will be good, bad, or indifferent, until the first two meals have put the matter beyond a doubt; there is the usual uncertainty about the weather, until the ship is fairly off Fire Island. The tables are crowded at first, and then suddenly thinned. Pale-faced people spring from their seats and precipitate themselves towards the door, and each old sailor breathes more freely as his sea-sick neighbour rushes from his side, leaving him plenty of elbow-room and an unlimited command over the mustard.

One passage across the Atlantic is very much like another, and we who cross very often do not make the voyage for the sake of novelty. Whales and icebergs are indeed always objects of interest, but, after all, one whale is very much like another whale, and one rarely sees an iceberg at close quarters. To the majority of us the most delightful moment of the day on board an ocean steamer is when we have taken our last turn on deck, have smoked our last cigar, and having succeeded in tiring ourselves, feel at liberty to turn in with a clear conscience. On that first night of the voyage I felt particularly lazy, and went to bed in one hundred and five rather earlier than I usually do. As I turned in, I was amazed to see that I was to have a companion. A portmanteau, very like my own, lay in the opposite corner, and in the upper berth had been deposited a neatly-folded rug, with a stick and umbrella. I had hoped to be alone, and I was disappointed; but I wondered who my room-mate was to be, and I determined to have a look at him.

Before I had been long in bed he entered. He was, as far as I could see, a very tall man, very thin, very pale, with sandy hair and whiskers and colourless grey eyes. He had about him, I thought, an air of rather dubious fashion; the short of man you might see in Wall Street, without being able precisely to say what he was doing there -- the sort of man who frequents the Café Anglais, who always seems to be alone and who drinks champagne; you might meet him on a racecourse, but he would never appear to be doing anything there either. A little over-dressed -- a little odd. There are three or four of his kind on every ocean steamer. I made up my mind that I did not care to make his acquaintance, and I went to sleep saying to myself that I would study his habits in order to avoid him. If he rose early, I would rise late; if he went to bed late, I would go to bed early. I did not care to know him. If you once know people of that kind they are always turning up. Poor fellow! I need not have taken the trouble to come to so many decisions about him, for I never saw him again after that first night in one hundred and five.

I was sleeping soundly when I was suddenly waked by a loud noise. To judge from the sound, my room-mate must have sprung with a single leap from the upper berth to the floor. I heard him fumbling with the latch and bolt of the door, which opened almost immediately, and then I heard his footsteps as he ran at full speed down the passage, leaving the door open behind him. The ship was rolling a little, and I expected to hear him stumble or fall, but he ran as though he were running for his life. The door swung on its hinges with the motion of the vessel, and the sound annoyed me. I got up and shut it, and groped my way back to my berth in the darkness. I went to sleep again; but I have no idea how long I slept.

When I awoke it was still quite dark, but I felt a disagreeable sensation of cold, and it seemed to me that the air was damp. You know the peculiar smell of a cabin which has been wet with sea-water. I covered myself up as well as I could and dozed off again, framing complaints to be made the next day, and selecting the most powerful epithets in the language. I could hear my room-mate turn over in the upper berth. He had probably returned while I was asleep. Once I thought I heard him groan, and I argued that he was sea-sick. That is particularly unpleasant when one is below. Nevertheless I dozed off and slept till early daylight.

The ship was rolling heavily, much more than on the previous evening, and the grey light which came in through the porthole changed in tint with every movement according as the angle of the vessel's side turned the glass seawards or skywards. It was very cold -- unaccountably so for the month of June. I turned my head and looked at the porthole, and saw to my surprise that it was wide open and hooked back. I believe I swore audibly. Then I got up and shut it. As I turned back I glanced at the upper berth. The curtains were drawn close together; my companion had probably felt cold as well as I. It struck me that I had slept enough. The state-room was uncomfortable, though, strange to say, I could not smell the dampness which had annoyed me in the night. My room-mate was still asleep -- excellent opportunity for avoiding him, so I dressed at once and went on deck. The day was warm and cloudy, with an oily smell on the water. It was seven o'clock as I came out -- much later than I had imagined. I came across the doctor, who was taking his first sniff of the morning air. He was a young man from the West of Ireland -- a tremendous fellow, with black hair and blue eyes, already inclined to be stout; he had a happy-go-lucky, healthy look about him which was rather attractive.

"Fine morning," I remarked, by way of introduction.

"Well," said he, eyeing me with an air of ready interest, "it's a fine morning and it's not a fine morning. I don't think it's much of a morning."

"Well, no -- it is not so very fine," said I.

"It's just what I call fuggly weather," replied the doctor.

"It was very cold last night, I thought," I remarked. "However, when I looked about, I found that the porthole was wide open. I had not noticed it when I went to bed. And the state-room was damp, too."

"Damp!" said he. "Whereabouts are you?"

"One hundred and five------"

To my surprise the doctor started visibly, and stared at me.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"Oh -- nothing," he answered; "only everybody has complained of that state-room for the last three trips."

"I shall complain too," I said. "It has certainly not been properly aired. It is a shame!"

"I don't believe it can be helped," answered the doctor. "I believe there is something -- well, it is not my business to frighten passengers."

"You need not be afraid of frightening me," I replied. "I can stand any amount of damp. If I should get a bad cold I will come to you."

I offered the doctor a cigar, which he took and examined very critically.

"It is not so much the damp," he remarked. "However, I dare say you will get on very well. Have you a room-mate?"

"Yes; a deuce of a fellow, who bolts out in the middle of the night, and leaves the door open."

Again the doctor glanced curiously at me. Then he lit the cigar and looked grave.

"Did he come back?" he asked presently.

"Yes. I was asleep, but I waked up, and heard him moving. Then I felt cold and went to sleep again. This morning I found the porthole open."

"Look here," said the doctor quietly, "I don't care much for this ship. I don't care a rap for her reputation. I tell you what I will do. I have a good-sized place up here. I will share it with you, though I don't know you from Adam."

I was very much surprised at the proposition. I could not imagine why he should take such a sudden interest in my welfare. However, his manner as he spoke of the ship was peculiar.

"You are very good, doctor," I said. "But, really, I believe even now the cabin could be aired, or cleaned out, or something. Why do you not care for the ship?"

"We are not superstitious in our profession, sir," replied the doctor, "but the sea makes people so. I don't want to prejudice you, and I don't want to frighten you, but if you will take my advice you will move in here. I would as soon see you overboard," he added earnestly, "as know that you or any other man was to sleep in one hundred and five."

"Good gracious! Why?" I asked.

"Just because on the last three trips the people who have slept there actually have gone overboard," he answered gravely.

The intelligence was startling and exceedingly unpleasant, I confess. I looked hard at the doctor to see whether he was making game of me, but he looked perfectly serious. I thanked him warmly for his offer, but told him I intended to be the exception to the rule by which every one who slept in that particular state-room went overboard. He did not say much, but looked as grave as ever, and hinted that, before we got across, I should probably reconsider his proposal. In the course of time we went to breakfast, at which only an inconsiderable number of passengers assembled. I noticed that one or two of the officers who breakfasted with us looked grave. After breakfast I went into my state-room in order to get a book. The curtains of the upper berth were still closely drawn. Not a word was to be heard. My room-mate was probably still asleep.

As I came out I met the steward whose business it was to look after me. He whispered that the captain wanted to see me, and then scuttled away down the passage as if very anxious to avoid any questions. I went toward the captain's cabin, and found him waiting for me.

"Sir," said he, "I want to ask a favour of you."

I answered that I would do anything to oblige him.

"Your room-mate had disappeared," he said. "He is known to have turned in early last night. Did you notice anything extraordinary in his manner?"

The question coming, as it did, in exact confirmation of the fears the doctor had expressed half an hour earlier, staggered me.

"You don't mean to say he has gone overboard?" I asked.

"I fear he has," answered the captain.

"This is the most extraordinary thing----" I began.

"Why?" he asked.

"He is the fourth, then?" I exclaimed. In answer to another question from the captain, I explained, without mentioning the doctor, that I had heard the story concerning one hundred and five. He seemed very much annoyed at hearing that I knew of it. I told him what had occurred in the night.

"What you say," he replied, "coincides almost exactly with what was told me by the room-mates of two of the other three. They bolt out of bed and run down the passage. Two of them were seen to go overboard by the watch; we stopped and lowered boats, but they were not found. Nobody, however, saw or heard the man who was lost last night -- if he is really lost. The steward, who is a superstitious fellow, perhaps, and expected something to go wrong, went to look for him, this morning, and found his berth empty, but his clothes lying about, just as he had left them. The steward was the only man on board who knew him by sight, and he has been searching everywhere for him. He has disappeared! Now, sir, I want to beg you not to mention the circumstance to any of the passengers; I don't want the ship to get a bad name, and nothing hangs about an ocean-goer like stories of suicides. You shall have your choice of any one of the officers' cabins you like, including my own, for the rest of the passage. Is that a fair bargain?"

"Very," said I; "and I am much obliged to you. But since I am alone, and have the state-room to myself, I would rather not move. If the steward will take out that unfortunate man's things, I would as leave stay where I am. I will not say anything about the matter, and I think I can promise you that I will not follow my room-mate."

The captain tried to dissuade me from my intention, but I preferred having a state-room alone to being the chum of any officer on board. I do not know whether I aced foolishly, but if I had taken his advice I should have had nothing more to tell. There would have remained the disagreeable coincidence of several suicides occurring among men who had slept in the same cabin, but that would have been all.

That was not the end of the matter, however, by any means. I obstinately made up my mind that I would not be disturbed by such tales, and I even went so far as to argue the question with the captain. There was something wrong about the state-room, I said. It was rather damp. The porthole had been left open last night. My room-mate might have been ill when he came on board, and he might have become delirious after he went to bed. He might even now be hiding somewhere on board, and might be found later. The place ought to be aired and the fastening on the port looked to. If the captain would give me leave, I would see that what I thought necessary were done immediately.

"Of course you have a right to stay where you are if you please," he replied, rather petulantly; "but I wish you would turn out and let me lock the place up, and be done with it."

I did not see it in the same light, and left the captain, after promising to be silent concerning the disappearance of my companion. The latter had had no acquaintances on board, and was not missed in the course of the day. Towards evening I met the doctor again, and he asked me whether I had changed my mind. I told him I had not.

"Then you will before long," he said, very gravely.

III

WE played whist in the evening, and I went to bed late. I will confess now that I felt a disagreeable sensation when I entered my state-room. I could not help thinking of the tall man I had seen on the previous night, who was now dead, drowned, tossing about in the long swell, two or three hundred miles astern. His face rose very distinctly before me as I undressed, and I even went so far as to draw back the curtains of the upper berth, as though to persuade myself that he was actually gone. I also bolted the door of the state-room. Suddenly I became aware that the porthole was open, and fastened back. This was more than I could stand. I hastily threw on my dressing-gown and went in search of Robert, the steward of my passage. I was very angry, I remember, and when I found him I dragged him roughly to the door of one hundred and five, and pushed him towards the open porthole.

"What the deuce do you mean, you scoundrel, by leaving that port open every night? Don't you know it is against the regulations? Don't you know that if the ship heeled and the water began to come in, ten men could not shut it? I will report you to the captain, you blackguard, for endangering the ship!"

I was exceedingly wroth. The man trembled and turned pale, and then began to shut the round glass plate with the heavy brass fittings.

"Why don't you answer me?" I said roughly.

"If you please, sir," faltered Robert, "there's nobody on board as can keep this 'ere port shut at night. You can try it yourself, sir. I ain't a-going to stop hany longer on board o' this vessel, sir; I ain't, indeed. But if I was you, sir, I'd just clear out and go and sleep with the surgeon, or something, I would. Look 'ere, sir, is that fastened what you may call securely, or not, sir? Try it, sir, see if it will move a hinch."

I tried the port, and found it perfectly tight.

"Well, sir," continued Robert triumphantly, "I wager my reputation as a A1 steward that in 'arf an hour it will be open again; fasteneed back, too, sir, that's the horful thing -- fastened back!"

I examined the great screw and the looped nut that ran on it.

"If I find it open in the night, Robert, I will give you a sovereign. It is not possible. You may go."

"Soverin' did you say, sir? Very good, sir. Thank ye, sir. Good-night, sir. Pleasant reepose, sir, and all manner of hinchantin' dreams, sir."

Robert scuttled away, delighted at being released. Of course, I thought he was trying to account for his negligence by a silly story, intended to frighten me, and I disbelieved him. The consequence was that he got his sovereign, and I spent a very peculiarly unpleasant night.

I went to bed, and five minutes after I had rolled myself up in my blankets the inexorable Robert extinguished the light that burned steadily behind the ground-glass pane near the door. I lay quite still in the dark trying to go to sleep, but I soon found that impossible. It had been some satisfaction to be angry with the steward, and the diversion had banished that unpleasant sensation I had at first experienced when I thought of the drowned man who had been my chum; but I was no longer sleepy, and I lay awake for some time, occasionally glancing at the porthole, which I could just see from where I lay, and which, in the darkness, looked like a faintly-luminous soup-plate suspended in blackness. I believe I must have lain there for an hour, and, as I remember, I was just dozing into sleep when I was roused by a draught of cold air, and by distinctly feeling the spray of the sea blown upon my face. I started to my feet, and not having allowed in the dark for the motion of the ship, I was instantly thrown violently across the state-room upon the couch which was placed beneath the port-hole. I recovered myself immediately, however, and climbed upon my knees. The port-hole was again wide open and fastened back!

Now these things are facts. I was wide awake when I got up, and I should certainly have been waked by the fall had I still been dozing. Moreover, I bruised my elbows and knees badly, and the bruises were there on the following morning to testify to the fact, if I myself had doubted it. The porthole was wide open and fastened back -- a thing so unaccountable that I remember very well feeling astonishment rather that fear when I discovered it. I at once closed the plate again, and screwed down the loop nut with all my strength. It was very dark in the state-room. I reflected that the port had certainly been opened within an hour after Robert had at first shut it in my presence, and I determined to watch it, and see whether it would open again. Those brass fittings are very heavy and by no means easy to move; I could not believe that the clamp had been turned by the shaking of the screw. I stood peering out through the thick glass at the alternate white and grey streaks of the sea that foamed beneath the ship's side. I must have remained there a quarter of an hour.

Suddenly, as I stood, I distinctly heard something moving behind me in one of the berths, and a moment afterwards, just as I turned instinctively to look -- though I could, of course, see nothing in the darkness -- I heard a very faint groan. I sprang across the state-room, and tore the curtains of the upper berth aside, thrusting in my hands to discover if there were any one there. There was some one.

I remember that the sensation as I put my hands forward was as though I were plunging them into the air of a damp cellar, and from behind the curtains came a gust of wind that smelled horribly of stagnant sea-water. I laid hold of something that had the shape of a man's arm, but was smooth, and wet, and icy cold. But suddenly, as I pulled, the creature sprang violently forward against me, a clammy oozy mass, as it seemed to me, heavy and wet, yet endowed with a sort of supernatural strength. I reeled across the state-room, and in an instant the door opened and the thing rushed out. I had not had time to be frightened, and quickly recovering myself, I sprang through the door and gave chase at the top of my speed, but I was too late. Ten yards before me I could see -- I am sure I saw it -- a dark shadow moving in the dimly lighted passage, quickly as the shadow of a fast horse thrown before a dog-cart by the lamp on a dark night. But in a moment it had disappeared, and I found myself holding on to the polished rail that ran along the bulkhead where the passage turned towards the companion. My hair stood on end, and the cold perspiration rolled down my face. I am not ashamed of it in the least: I was very badly frightened.

Still I doubted my senses, and pulled myself together. It was absurd, I thought. The Welsh rare-bit I had eaten had disagreed with me. I had been in a nightmare. I made my way back to my state-room, and entered it with an effort. The whole place smelled of stagnant sea-water, as it had when I had waked on the previous evening. It required my utmost strength to go in, and grope among my things for a box of wax lights. As I lighted a railway reading lantern which I always carry in case I want to read after the lamps are out, I perceived that the porthole was again open, and a sort of creeping horror began to take possession of me which I never felt before, nor wish to feel again. But I got a light and proceeded to examine the upper berth, expecting to find it drenched with sea-water.

But I was disappointed. The bed had been slept in, and the smell of the sea was strong; but the bedding was as dry as a bone. I fancied that Robert had not had the courage to make the bed after the accident of the previous night -- it had all been a hedeous dream. I drew the curtains back as far as I could and examined the place very carefully. It was perfectly dry. But the porthole was open again. With a sort of dull bewilderment of horror I closed it and screwed it down, and thrusting my heavy stick through the brass loop, wrenched it with all my might, till the thick metal began to bend under the pressure. Then I hooked my reading lantern into the red velvet at the head of the couch, and sat down to recover my senses if I could. I sat there all night, unable to think of rest -- hardly able to think at all. But the porthole remained closed, and I did not believe it would now open again without the application of a considerable force.

The morning dawned at last, and I dressed myself slowly, thinking over all that had happened in the night. It was a beautiful day and I went on deck, glad to get out into the early, pure sunshine, and to smell the breeze from the blue water, so different from the noisome, stagnant odour of my state-room. Instinctively I turned aft, towards the surgeon's cabin. There he stood, with a pipe inhis mouth, taking his morning airing precisely as on the preceding day.

"Good-morning," said he quietly, but looking at me with evident curiosity.

"Doctor, you were quite right," said I. "There is something wrong about that place."

"I thought you would change your mind," he answered, rather triumphantly. "You have had a bad night, eh? Shall I make you a pick-me-up? I have a capital recipe."

"No, thanks," I cried. "But I would like to tell you what happened."

I then tried to explain as clearly as possible precisely what had occurred, not omitting to state that I had been scared as I had never been scared in my whole life before. I dwelt particularly on the phenomenon of the porthole, which was a fact to which I could testify, even if the rest had been an illusion. I had closed it twice in the night, and the second time I had actually bent the brass in wrenching it with my stick. I believe I insisted a good deal on this point.

"You seem to think I am likely to doubt the story," said the doctor, smiling at my detailed account of the state of the porthole. "I do not doubt in the least. I renew my invitation to you. Bring your traps here, and take half my cabin."

"Come and take half of mine for one night," I said. "Help me to get at the bottom of this thing."

"You will get to the bottom of something else if you try," answered the doctor.

"What?" I asked.

"The bottom of the sea. I am going to leave this ship. It is not canny."

"Then you will not help me to find out----"

"Not I," said the doctor quickly. "It is my business to keep my wits aobut me -- not to go fiddling about with ghosts and things."

"Do you really believe it is a ghost?" I enquired, rather contemptuously. But as I spoke I remembered very well the horrible sensation of the supernatural which had got possession of me during the night. The doctor turned sharply on me----

"Have you any reasonable explanation of these things to offer?" he asked. "No; you have not. Well, you say you will find an explanation. I say that you won't, sir, simply because there is not any."

"But, my dear sir," I retorted, "do you, a man of science, mean to tell me that such things cannot be explained?"

"I do," he answered stoutly. "And, if they could, I would not be concerned in the explanation."

I did not care to spend another night alone in the state-room, and yet I was obstinately determined to get at the root of the disturbances. I do not believe there are many men who would have slept there alone, after passing two such nights. But I made up my mind to try it, if I could not get any one to share a watch with me. The doctor was evidently not inclined for such an experiment. He said he was a surgeon, and that in case any accident occurred on board he must be always in readiness. He could not afford to have his nerves unsettled. Perhaps he was quite right, but I am inclined to think that his precaution was prompted by his inclination. On enquiry, he informed me that there was no one on board who would be likely to join me in my investigations, and after a little more conversation I left him. A little later I met the captain, and told him my story. I said that, if no one would spend the night with me, I would ask leave to have the light burning all night, and would try it alone.

"Look here," said he, "I will tell you what I will do. I will share your watch myself, and we will see what happens. It is my belief that we can find out between us. There may be some fellow skulking on board, who steals a passage by frightening the passengers. It is just possible that there may be something queer in the carpentering of that berth."

I suggested taking the ship's carpenter below and examining the place; but I was overjoyed at the captain's offer to spend the night with me. He accordingly sent for the workman and ordered him to do anything I required. We went below at once. I had all the bedding cleared out of the upper berth, and we examined the place thoroughly to see if there was a board loose anywhere, or a panel which could be opened or pushed aside. We tried the planks everywhere, tapped the flooring, unscrewed the fittings of the lower berth and took it to pieces -- in short, there was not a square inch of the state-room which was not searched and tested. Everything was in perfect order, and we put everything back in its place. As we were finishing our work, Robert came to the door and looked in.

"Well, sir -- find anything, sir?" he asked, with a ghastly grin.

"You were right about the porthole, Robert," I said, and I gave him the promised sovereign. The carpenter did his work silently and skilfully, following my directions. When he had done he spoke.

"I'm a plain man, sir," he said. "But it's my belief you had better just turn out your things, and let me run half a dozen four-inch screws through the door of this cabin. There's no good never came o' this cabin yet, sir, and that's all about it. There's been four lives lost out o' here to my own remembrance, and that is four trips. Better give it up, sir -- better give it up!"

"I will try it for one night more," I said.

"Better give it up, sir -- better give it up! It's a precious bad job," repeated the workman, putting his tools in his bag and leaving the cabin.

But my spirits had risen considerably at the prospect of having the captain's company, and I made up my mind not to be prevented from going to the end of this strange business. I abstained from Welsh rare-bits and grog that evening, and did not even join in the customary game of whist. I wanted to be quite sure of my nerves, and my vanity made me anxious to make a good figure in the captain's eyes.

IV

THE captain was one of those splendidly tough and cheerful specimens of seafaring humanity whose combined courage, hardihood, and calmness in difficulty leads them naturally into high positions of trust. He was not the man to be led away by an idle tale, and the mere fact that he was willing to join me in the investigation was proof that he thought there was something seriously wrong, which could not be accounted for on ordinary theories, nor laughed down as a common superstition. To some extent, too, his reputation was at stake, as well as the reputation of the ship. It is no light thing to lose passengers overboard, and he knew it.

About ten o'clock that evening, as I was smoking a last cigar, he came up to me, and drew me aside from the beat of the other passengers who were patrolling the deck in the warm darkness.

"This is a serious matter, Mr. Brisbane," he said. "We must make up our minds either way -- to be disappointed or to have a pretty rough time of it. You see I cannot afford to laugh at the affair, and I will ask you to sign your name to a statement of whatever occurs. If nothing happens tonight we will try it again tomorrow and next day. Are you ready?"

So we went below, and entered the state-room. As we went in I could see Robert the steward, who stood a little further down the passage, watching us, with his usual grin, as though certain that something dreadful was about to happen. The captain closed the door behind us and bolted it.

"Supposing we put your portmanteau before the door," he suggested. "One of us can sit on it. Nothing can get out then. Is the port screwed down?"

I found it as I had left it in the morning. Indeed, without using a lever, as I had done, no one could have opened it. I drew back the curtains of the upper berth so that I could see well into it. By the captain's advice I lighted my reading lantern, and placed it so that it shone upon the white sheets above. He insisted upon sitting on the portmanteau, declaring that he wished to be able to swear that he had sat before the door.

Then he requested me to search the state-room thoroughly, an operation very soon accomplished, as it consisted merely in looking beneath the lower berth and under the couch below the porthole. The spaces were quite empty.

"It is impossible for any human being to get in," I said, "or for any human being to open the port."

"Very good," said the captain calmly. "If we see anything now, it must be either imagination or something supernatural."

I sat down on the edge of the lower berth.

"The first time it happened," said the captain, crossing his legs and leaning back against the door, "was in March. The passenger who slept here, in the upper berth, turned out have been a lunatic -- at all events, he was known to have been a little touched, and he had taken his passage without the knowledge of his friends. He rushed out in the middle of the night, and threw himself overboard, before the officer who had the watch could stop him. We stopped and lowered a boat; it was a quiet night, just before that heavy weather came on; but we could not find him. Of course his suicide was afterwards accounted for on the ground of his insanity."

"I suppose that often happens?" I remarked, rather absently.

"Not often -- no," said the captain; "never before in my experience, though I have heard of it happening on board of other ships. Well, as I was saying, that occurred in March. On the very next trip ---- What are you looking at?" he asked, stopping suddenly in his narration.

I believe I gave no answer. My eyes were riveted upon the porthole. It seemed to me that the brass loop-nut was beginning to turn very slowly upon the screw -- so slowly, however, that I was not sure it moved at all. I watched it intently, fixing its position in my mind, and trying to ascertain whether it changed. Seeing where I was looking, the captain looked too.

"It moves!" he exclaimed, in a tone of conviction. "No, it does not," he added, after a minute.

"If it were the jarring of the screw," said I, "it would have opened during the day; but I found it this evening jammed tight as I left it this morning."

I rose and tried the nut. It was certainly loosened, for by an effort I could move it with my hands.

"The queer thing," said the captain, "is that the second man who was lost is supposed to have got through that very port. We had a terrible time over it. It was in the middle of the night, and the weather was very heavy; there was an alarm that one of the ports was open and the sea running in. I came below and found everything flooded, the water pouring in every time she rolled, and the whole port swinging from the top bolts -- not the porthole in the middle. Well, we managed to shut it, but the water did some damage. Ever since that the place smells of sea-water from time to time. We supposed the passenger had thrown himself out, though the Lord only knows how he did it. The steward kept telling me that he cannot keep anything shut here. Upon my word -- I can smell it now, cannot you?" he enquired, sniffing the air suspiciously.

"Yes -- distinctly," I said, and I shuddered as that same odour of stagnant sea-water grew stronger in the cabin. "Now, to smell like this, the place must be damp," I continued, "and yet when I examined it with the carpenter this morning everything was perfectly dry. It is most extraordinary -- hallo!"

My reading lantern, which had been placed in the upper berth, was suddenly extinguished. There was still a good deal of light from the pane of ground glass near the door, behind which loomed the regulation lamp. The ship rolled heavily, and the curtain of the upper berth swung far out into the state-room and back again. I rose quickly from my seat on the edge of the bed, and the captain at the same moment started to his feet with a loud cry of surprise. I had turned with the intention of taking down the lantern to examine it, when I heard his exclamation, and immediately afterwards his call for help. I sprang towards him. He was wrestling with all his might with the brass loop of the port. It seemed to turn against his hands in spite of all his efforts. I caught up my cane, a heavy oak stick I always used to carry, and thrust it through the ring and bore on it with all my strength. But the strong wood snapped suddenly and I fell upon the couch. When I rose again the port was wide open, and the captain was standing with his back against the door, pale to the lips.

"There is something in that berth!" he cried, in a strange voice, his eyes almost starting from his head. "Hold the door, while I look -- it shall not escape us, whatever it is!"

But instead of taking his place, I sprang upon the lower bed, and seized something which lay in the upper berth.

It was something ghostly, horrible beyond words, and it moved in my grip. It was like the body of a man long drowned, and yet it moved, and had the strength of ten men living; but I gripped it with all my might -- the slippery, oozy, horrible thing -- the dead white eyes seemed to stare at me out of the dusk; the putrid odour of rank sea-water was about it, and its shiny hair hung in foul wet curls over its dead face. I wrestled with the dead thing; it thrust itself upon me and forced me back and nearly broke my arms; it wound its corpse's arms about my neck, the living death, and overpowered me, so that I, at last, cried aloud and fell, and left my hold.

As I fell the thing sprang across me, and seemed to throw itself upon the captain. When I last saw him on his feet his face was white and his lips set. It seemed to me that he struck a violent blow at the dead being, and then he, too, fell forward upon his face, with an inarticulate cry of horror.

The thing paused an instant, seeming to hover over his prostrate body, and I could have screamed again for very fright, but I had no voice left. The thing vanished suddenly, and it seemed to my disturbed senses that it made its exit through the open port, though how that was possible, considering the smallness of the aperture, is more than any one can tell. I lay a long time on the floor, and the captain lay beside me. At last I partially recovered my senses and moved, and instantly I knew that my arm was broken -- the small bone of my left forearm near the wrist.

I got upon my feet somehow, and with my remaining hand I tried to raise the captain. He groaned and moved, and at last came to himself. He was not hurt, but he seemed badly stunned.

Well, do you want to hear any more? There is nothing more. That is the end of my story. The carpenter carried out his scheme of running half a dozen four-inch screws through the door of one hundred and five; and if ever you take a passage in the Kamtschatka, you may ask for a berth in that state-room. You will be told that it is engaged -- yes -- it is engaged by that dead thing.

I finished the trip in the surgeon's cabin. He doctored my broken arm, and advised me not to "fiddle about with ghosts and things" any more. The captain was very silent, and never sailed again in that ship, though it is still running. And I will not sail in her either. It was a very disagreeable experience, and I was very badly frightened, which is a thing I do not like. That is all. That is how I saw a ghost -- if it was a ghost. It was dead, anyhow.

(End.)

Vampires and Biochemistry

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:25:00 +0000

Perhaps you are a fan of Twilight the movie or the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, or True Blood the television drama series created and produced by Alan Ball, based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels by Charlaine Harris. Vampires with their frightening appearance and unusual powers and weaknesses can cause one to pause and question how this is possible. Can this mythicalogical being brought to life in Dracula, the 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula, have any basis in reality? Is there any connection to what we know about biological systems that could explain vampirism? I doubt that you would be surprised if I said yes, since this is a biochemistry course website.

Although I am no expert on the vampire mythology or the speculative scientific explanations, there are a few possibilities that others have proposed. Perhaps the most robust explanation is that the vampirism is based on the viral disease rabies (Gomez, 1982; 1992; 1998). The vampire folklore originated in Central Europe in the latter half of the 18th century where injuries caused by rabid dogs and wolves was common (Theodorides 1986). At this time, Eastern Europe was rife with claims of vampire sightings. The 3-dimensional structure of the rabies virus nucleoprotein-RNA complex is shown to the right, and what an incredibly amazing structure it has.

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of a vampire is the biting of its human victim. This affirms the fact that a vampire is a living being, and as such he or she becomes inclined to bite those around them and not only to feed on a victim’s blood, but potentially spread the disease that has already infected them (Theodorides 1998). This is strikingly similar to what can occur when rabies has been transmitted to a person. Disease symptoms include cerebral dysfunction, anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, paranoia and a terror progressing to delirium. Large quantities of saliva and tears are produced, and difficulty swallowing stemming from throat and jaw paralysis causes panic when the person cannot drink or quench his or her thirst. Who hasn’t heard of rabid animals indiscriminately attacking and biting someone?

Dr. David H. Dolphin in a lecture at an AAAS meeting is attributed to have proposed an alternative explanation for the vampire myth that werewolves and vampires may have been based on people suffering from a rare class of genetic diseases known as porphyrias. He suggested that characteristics commonly associated with vampirism such as protruding teeth, avoidance of sunlight, drinking blood, and disfigurement could have been the symptoms of people with a porphyria. Porphyrias are a group of rare genetic diseases that primarily manifest their effects in blood as a result of a defect in the production and synthesis of the heme prosthetic group in hemoglobin (Cox 1995). Symptoms of the disorder porphyria cutanea tarda include disfigurement by light-induced blisters that can cause scarring and skin discoloration. In severe cases, excessive hair growth on the face and hands, gum degeneration, and neurological disorders can occur. Those suffering from a porphyria must avoid the sun and some compounds that can exacerbate the symptoms, including certain metabolites that accumulate in, you guessed it, garlic. Repeated blood transfusions can be required to treat the disease.

Porphyria cutanea tarda results from a dominant mutation in the gene encoding the enzyme urophopyrinogen decarboxylase (Taylor 1998). This enzyme catalyzes the fifth step in the porphyrin biosynthetic pathway that produces precursors for the synthesis of heme-containing molecules. Mutant skin cells accumulate uroporphyrinogen, the enzyme’s immediate precursor. Uroporphyrinogen when illuminated by light will become highly reactive and begin transferring electrons to molecular oxygen. The resulting production and accumulation of reactive oxygen species will cause extensive damage to skin cells and can kill them.

Hampl and Hampl (1997) have suggested that a deficiency of niacin and tryptophan could produce symptoms compatible with being the basis for the vampire myth. Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency disease characterized by lack of niacin (vitamin B3) caused by decreased intake of niacin, tryptophan, or possibly leucine. The protein amino acid tryptophan is a precursor of niacin biosynthesis and niacin is a building block of the nicotinamide coenzymes essential for a host of biochemical processes. People suffering from pellagra are hypersensitive to sunlight. The skin of a pellargrin exposed to sunlight becomes red, scaly and marked by hyperkeratosis. Inflammation and edema can occur and lead to depigmented, shiny skin and/or brown scaly areas. Niacin deficiency will also cause brain degeneration and dementia with symptoms that include insomnia, anxiety, unjustified aggression, and depression. Pica can accompany pellagra. Pica is a craving for substances not usually regarded as food such as ice, clay or other crunchy substances. This odd symptom can be a cause of iron deficiency, or a symptom of an iron deficiency in the person who has become anemic. A pellagrin who happens to become extremely anemic because of gastrointestinal bleeding could give the impression of being 'the living dead' (Hampl and Hampl 1997).

So there you have it. There could be a connection between the folklore of vampirism, and clinical symptoms of known diseases, or just as likely perhaps not. We will never know for sure, but this little story briefly illustrates how biochemistry can relate to myths and classical literature and suggest interesting possibilities.

Albertini A.A., Wernimont A.K., Muziol T., Ravelli R.B., Clapier C.R., Schoehn G., Weissenhorn W., Ruigrok R.W. (2006) Crystal structure of the rabies virus nucleoprotein-RNA complex. Science 313, 360-363.
COX A.M. 1995. Porphyria and vampirism: another myth in the making. Postgrad. Med. J. 71: 643–644.
Gomez-Alonso J. 1982.Rabia y vampirismo: hiptjtesis sobre una interpretacion medica del vampirismo. Jano (Barcelona) 514: 30-33.
Gomez-Alonso J. Rabia y Vampirismo en la Europa de los Siglos XVIII y XIX. Tesis Doctoral. Madrid: Facultad de Medicina
Gomez-Alonso, J. 1998. Rabies A possible explanation for the vampire legend. Neurology 51: 856-859
Hampl J.S. and Hampl W.S. 1997. Pellagra and the origin of a myth: evidence from European literature and folklore. J. Royal Soc. Med. 90: 636-639.
Taylor, C.B. 1998. Vampire Plants? Plant Cell. 10: 1071-1073.
Theodorides J. 1986. Histoire de la Rage, Cave Canem, Paris: Masson, 78-9
Theodorides J. 1998. Origin of the myth of vampirism. J. Royal Soc. Med. 91: 114.

Dr. Charles Guy
Dept. of Env. Hort.
University of Florida
Email: clguy@ufl.edu

BCH 5045 GRADUATE SURVEY OF BIOCHEMISTRY OnLine, FALL 2009

Scientific Reasons to Believe in Vampires, Werewolves & Zombies

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:06:00 +0000

Let's take a look at some of the real-world events and phenomena that may have inspired the creation of vampires, werewolves and zombies.

Vampires

One dark and stormy evening, Spanish neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso was watching a vampire movie when he realized something strange; he noticed that vampires behave an awful lot like people with rabies. The virus attacks the central nervous system, altering the moods and behaviors of those infected. Sufferers become agitated and demented, and, much like vampires, their moods can turn violent.

Rabies has several more vampire-like symptoms. It can cause insomnia, which explains the nocturnal portion of the legend. People with rabies also suffer from muscular spasms, which can lead them to spit up blood. What's stunning is the fact that these spasms are triggered by bright lights, water, mirrors, and strong smells, such as the scent of garlic. (Sound familiar?) After watching the Dracula movies a few more times, Dr. Gomez-Alonso felt compelled to continue studying vampire folklore and the medical history of rabies. Eventually, he discovered an even more profound connection between the two phenomena: Vampire stories became prominent in Europe at exactly the same time certain areas were experiencing rabies outbreaks. This was particularly true in Hungary between 1721 and 1728, when an epidemic plagued dogs, wolves, and humans and left the country in ruins. Gomez-Alonso theorized that rabies actually inspired the vampire legend, and his research was published by the distinguished medical journal Neurology in 1998.

The Madness of King George

Dr. Gomez-Alonso wasn't the first scientist who tried to pin vampirism to a real illness. In 1985, Canadian biochemist David Dolphin proposed a link between vampires and porphyria — a rare, chronic blood disorder characterized by the irregular production of heme, an iron-rich pigment found in blood. The disorder can cause seizures, trances, and hallucinations that last for days or weeks.

As a result, people with porphyria often go insane. (Britain's King George III, the one who inspired our founding fathers to start their own country, is thought to have suffered from it.) Porphyria sufferers also experience extreme sensitivity to light, suffering blisters and burns when their skin is exposed to the sun. Another symptom of porphyria is an intolerance to sulfur in foods. Which food contains a lot of sulfur? That's right, garlic.

Werewolves

In addition to explaining away vampires, medicine also has some answers for werewolves. In The Werewolf Delusion (1979), Ian Woodward explains that rabies may have also inspired the werewolf myth.

Rabies is transmitted through biting, and the dementia and aggression of late-stage rabies can make people behave like wild animals. Now, imagine that you are living in a village in medieval Europe and you see your friend get bitten by a wolf. A few weeks later, he starts foaming at the mouth, howling at the moon, and biting other villagers. Suddenly, that story your grandmother told you about the Wolfman sounds like a decent explanation for what's going on.

Zombies

Zombies may also be creatures of science, at least according to Costas J. Efthimiou, a physicist at the University of Central Florida. In 2006, he attempted to explain the mysterious case of Wilfred Doricent, a teenager who died and was buried in Haiti, only to reappear in his village more than a year later, looking and behaving like a zombie. Efthimiou concluded that Wilfred was not the victim of a curse, but of poisoning. In the waters of Haiti, there is a species of puffer fish whose liver can be made into a powder, which has the ability to make a person appear dead without actually killing him. Wilfred may have been poisoned with the powder and then buried alive.

According to one of Dr. Efthimiou's theories, once underground, Wilfred suffered from oxygen deprivation that damaged his brain. When the poison wore off and Wilfred woke up, he clawed his way out of the grave. (Graves tend to be shallow in Haiti.) Brain-damaged, he wandered the countryside for months until he ended up back in his village.

After Dr. Efthimiou published his explanation of the case, Dr. Roger Mallory, a neurologist at the Haitian Medical Society did an MRI scan of Wilfred's brain. Although the results were nonconclusive, he found that Wilfred's brain was damaged in a way that was consistent with oxygen deprivation. It would seem that zombification is nothing more than skillful poisoning.

This article originally appeared in mental_floss magazine.

Porphyria and Types of Porphyria

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:50:00 +0000

Porphyrins are a group of chemical compounds that occur in most living cells in both animals and plants. These organic compounds are combined with metals such as magnesium in the plant kingdom to produce chlorophyll and with iron in the animal kingdom to produce heme. They are involved in the control of the electron transport systems of the organism and are localized in the intracellular organelles called mitochondria. The mitochondria influence the production, accumulation and utilization of energy. The term porphyria refers to a group of diseases in animals, particularly humans that are caused by the overproduction and accumulation of groups of porphyrins and porphyrin precursors in specific and typical patterns. Each type of porphyria is associated with a specific accumulation of porphyrin compounds and precursors to induce a relatively consistent constellation of symptoms, clinical findings and biochemical abnormalities. The metabolic defects that are associated with this condition are localized primarily in the liver, the bone marrow and the red blood cells and are associated with demonstrable abnormalities in individual enzyme activities.

The porphyrin synthetic pathway begins with the combining of glycine and succinyl coenzyme A to form delta-aminolevulinic acid (ALA). Two of these molecules condense to form a single pyrrole ring structure called porphobilinogen (PBG). Four of these small pyrrole rings are joined to ultimately form a large ring configuration or tetrapyrrole compound called protoporphyrinogen which, in turn, is the precursor of heme. This large ring structure has a specific spacial configuration that enables it to hold an activated iron molecule in the center of the ring in such a way that it can react with reactive molecules such as oxygen. This type of iron porphyrin complex, when attached to the protein called globin is called hemoglobin. It is this combination of the three segments, porphyrin, iron and globin that enables oxygen to be bound and transported preferentially by the red blood corpuscles since they contain large amounts of hemoglobin. The oxygen is picked up and bound to the hemoglobin in the lungs and then released in peripheral tissues by physico-chemical reactions. This particular ring configuration of the porphyrins usually gives them a red colour. Some porphyrins are colorless but will turn red when exposed to sunlight. A similar porphyrin structure in plants when combined with magnesium and a different protein forms chlorophyll which gives the plants their characteristic green colour.

Causes

The porphyrin molecules are synthesized in the body from simple amino acids which contain carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. These amino acids interact under specific enzymatic protoporphyrinogen. Since the side chains of the pyrroles vary in their composition there can be several different forms or isomers of this large ring structure. These isomers undergo further reactions where they lose little segments containing carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and form a variety of different molecules, all called porphyrins, but each has its own physico-chemical and biochemical properties. Most of these porphyrin molecules are not needed for normal metabolic processes, are produced in tiny amounts and are destroyed or eliminated as quickly as they are formed. These porphyrin degradation products are almost always water soluble and are excreted in the urine as uroporphyrins and in the stool as coproporphyrins. Only two of the isomers are clinically important and essential for life. The one with the highest concentration is hemoglobin which is concentrated in red cells, but the porphyrins are also present in the cytoplasm and are essential for many other metabolic processes. As the red cells age they in turn are broken down and the porphyrin ring structures are ruptured to form a long chain molecule called bilirubin. This is coloured yellow green and is excreted by the liver into the bile. Most of the metabolic processes involving the porphyrins occurs in the liver and in the bone marrow.

Each step in the making, restructuring, destruction and degradation of the porphyrins is carried out by a sequence of chemical reactions under the control of a series of enzymes. These enzymes are large protein molecules and are present in either the cytoplasm or the mitochondria of cells. Both the concentration and the activity of the enzymes control the rate of each specific chemical reaction and, as a result they influence the concentrations of both the precursor and end products of the reaction. These enzymes are under the control of the DNA which is present in the chromosomes contained within the nucleus of the cells. The chromosomes present in each cell have multiple condensations of coiled DNA which are called genes. The DNA in these intranuclear genes makes RNA molecules, called messenger RNA which regulate the production of proteins including these enzyme systems contained within the cell.

In general, each gene has several functions, and for the most part each enzyme system is under the control of multiple genes although the specific porphyria enzymes seem to be encoded by single gene loci.. If the DNA structure of the gene is defective or abnormal, the metabolic functions that it controls probably will be defective as well. The 23 chromosomes themselves are paired, one set from the mother, and the other from the father with the result that apart from the x y chromosome which is associated with the sex karyotype, all genes have duplicate representation in the chromosomes. If only one of the pair of genes is defective it can either be dominant to the other normal gene and alter the metabolic process, or be recessive to it which case there will be no metabolic derangement. Rarely, both genes may have the recessive characteristics, in which case the metabolic functions will be significantly altered. Although most of the time the gene is passed on intact, from parent to offspring via the ovum or sperm, occasionally a change in the structure of the gene can occur, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes due to radiation, medications, etc. These changes are called gene mutations. There may be multiple mutations associated with individual genes. Many of the mutations of the individual genes involved in porphyria have been identified. Thus the children of porphyric patients may be at risk of inheriting their parent's disease, but not always. Other times the disease may appear without any antecedent identifiable family involvement.

Several problems can develop when the chemical reactions controlled by the specific enzymes are defective. If the enzyme process is retarded there may be a build up of potentially toxic precursors; if the chemical reaction is too fast the end products may accumulate in too high a concentration; and often the abnormal enzyme systems redirect the reaction and produce abnormal metabolites. These precursors and end products can be retained within the cell cytoplasm where they may interfere with other metabolic processes or be sufficiently toxic to cause the death of the cells. Other water soluble compounds may be carried by the blood to other tissues such as the skin where they can absorb abnormal amounts of radiant energy and so affect the body in a different way. Most compounds are simple excreted in the stool and urine in abnormal amounts without any clinical problem. In pregnancy, sometimes the abnormal compounds will not allow the developing fetus to survive which will then be aborted; other times the metabolic abnormality will not become apparent until after puberty or even middle age. Frequently nothing will happen unless the enzyme abnormalities are brought out or induced by other factors. Excesses of lead or iron overload syndromes, certain drugs such as barbiturates and sulfonamides along with infections such as the virus that causes hepatitis C can either cause porphyria or bring out latent cases.

Types of Porphyria

For the most part, the various syndromes that are classified under the collective name of porphyria are differentiated from each other on the basis of a combination of clinical symptoms and abnormal biochemical findings in blood, urine & stool. On the basis of our current understanding of molecular biology this is somewhat unsatisfactory and illogical. It theoretically would be preferable to classify the porphyrias on the basis of the specific gene or enzyme defects giving rise to the abnormal porphyrin concentrations causing these abnormal clinical and biochemical findings. Unfortunately, much of the gene and enzyme studies have been carried out using ultra sophisticated techniques in specialized university research laboratories and are not available for common diagnostic use. We still have to rely on the sometimes confusing terminology and laboratory testing.

One of the earliest classifications was based on whether the major activity of the defective enzyme system is associated with the liver (hepatic) or with the bone marrow (erythropoietic). Often however the same defective metabolic process takes place in bother organs. The porphyrias can also be classified on the specific tissues in which the abnormal porphyrin concentrations exert their major toxic effects such as in the skin where they are called cutaneous porphyrias or in the liver where they are called hepatic porphyrias. Other organs such as the nervous system are frequently affected. The disease may be considered to be acute with the sudden onset of serious life threatening symptoms, or it can be chronic with only minimally bothersome intermittent problems that develop gradually over months and persist for years. Very frequently, the disease is classified as latent because the patient is asymptomatic until some other outside stimulus such as drugs or sunlight initiates the onset of symptoms in a person who has the genetic predisposition for this disease. In these cases the patient may not even be aware that they are suffering from porphyria until something happens to precipitate the symptoms and bring out the disease.

Acute Intermittent Porphyria (AIP)

This form of porphyria is perhaps the most severe of all of the porphyric syndromes in terms of its symptomatology. It is inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion and is slightly more common in females than in males. Researchers have described several mutations of the single gene, located on chromosome 11, which controls the activity of the enzyme porphobilinogen deaminase (PGB.D). This enzyme is responsible for the joining of 4 porphobilinogen molecules into a linear chain to form a compound called hydroxymethylbilane which is then converted into the cyclic or ring structure characteristic of the porphyrin molecule. The intracellular activity of the enzyme PGB.D in patients with AIP is decreased, usually to less than 50% in both red blood cells and cells obtained from the liver. Usually the enzyme activity at this level is adequate for normal body functions, so that this deficiency is not clinically apparent unless some other stimulus interferes with the enzyme system, at which time an acute attack can occur.

These triggers include an extensive array of exogenous factors such as starvation or unusual diets, street drugs, alcohol, prescribed medications and environmental stimuli. Endogenous stimuli are also often involved including stress, intercurrent illness and normal cyclic menstrual periods. When an attack occurs, the activity of the enzyme becomes further impaired, there is a rapid accumulation of the precursor compounds PBG and ALA and the patient becomes acutely ill. The biochemical or physiologic mechanisms for the development of the neurologic symptoms have yet to be clearly defined, but it appears to be related to a build up of ALA at the nerve endings which acts either as a direct neurotoxin or interferes with neurotransmission.

The symptoms include abdominal pain and cramps, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea or constipation, urinary retention, and peripheral neuropathies with muscle weakness or changes in sensation. In addition hallucinations, confusional states and acute psychiatric syndromes can be identified and occasionally seizures will occur. The autonomic nervous system is involved with a rapid heart rate and high blood pressure. The neuroendocrine parts of the brain can also be affected and bring about decreases in the blood levels of sodium and magnesium which in turn can cause other clinical problems. The diagnosis of AIP is based primarily on clinical signs and symptoms and is supported by the laboratory finding of positive urine screening tests with increased levels of ALA and PBG both in random samples and 24 hour collections. The activity of the enzyme PGB.D may be able to measured in one of the special university referral centers, but the time taken to get the test results back should not delay therapy if urine colour turns brownish red after exposure to bright sunlight due to the condensation of high concentrations of PBG to red coloured porphyrin complexes. This discoloration of the urine is often an important clue to help in the diagnosis of this disease. Occasionally the patients themselves note that their urine turns reddish brown a day or so before the onset of their symptoms and clears as they get better.

Frequently the acute attacks disappear with little medical intervention but occasionally the patient has to be hospitalized. The offending or precipitating causes should be identified and eliminated. High concentrations of glucose and other carbohydrates given either orally or intravenously are helpful and should be initiated at the first signs of this disease. The relief of pain with analgesics such as morphine or Demerol may be essential often in very large doses. Anxiety can often be settled by the use of manifestations such as rapid heart rates and high blood pressure will respond to the beta-blocker group of drugs, such as propanalol. Seizures can be treated with either magnesium or gabapentin, a new anticonvulsant which is thought to be the safest of the anticonvulsants currently available. The abnormal over production of ALA can be stopped by the administration of hematin or heme arginare, and this is usually effective in stopping the attacks. If the attacks are associated with the menstrual cycles, therapy may be warranted with the use of blocking hormones such as birth control pills or LHRH analogues such as leuprolide. This therapy requires a team approach involving gynecologists along with other doctors. The prognosis of the acute attacks is good and most symptoms settle quickly although at times the severe nerve damage and its associated signs of weakness and sensory disturbance may take several months to improve.

Hereditary Coproporphyria (HCP)

This uncommon type of poprhyria is associated with a reduction in the activity of the enzyme coproporphyrinogen oxidase to less than 50% of its usual activity. It is inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion, is more frequent in females than males and is classified as a type of hepatic porphyria since there is an excess accumulation of coproporphyrin in the liver. Most people with the defective gene have no symptoms. The heterozygous carrier may develop symptoms after puberty while the homozygous disease can start in infancy and be quite serious. The clinical symptoms are similar to those of AIP but it can be associated with the type of photosensitive dermatitis seen in PCT. Fatigue and muscle weakness are symptoms and sometimes the patient may be jaundiced. There are marked increases in the excretion of coproporphyrins in the urine and feces and there are usually increased excretions of ALA and PBG in the urine. The treatment is essentially the same as for AIP, with hematin usually being very effective.

Variegate Porphyria (VP)

Variegate porphyria is a type of porphyria that is associated with the symptoms of the neurovisceral crises simeilar to the patient with AIP but is also associated with a classic photosensitive skin disorder. It is inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion. The rate limiting enzyme is protoporphyrinogen oxidase (PPO) which controls one of the final stages of heme synthesis, the oxidation of protoporphyrinogen-IX to protoporphyrin. In patients with this disease, the activity of PPO is reduced by at least 50%. It is relatively common in the white African population of South Africa and is rarely seen in people of native African descent. The disease rarely appears before puberty, is most common in the young adult but may suddenly occur at any age including the elderly.

The neurovisceral crises give symptoms similar to those of patients suffering from AIP, while the photodermatitis shows the typical finding of the standard nonspecific form of skin sensitivity to solar radiation. These skin changes include skin fragility, erosions and blisters in the acute attack, and abnormal pigmentation, skin thickening and kirsuitism with chronic exposure. The precipitating factors are also similar to those of AIP although some experts feel that the acute attacks of VP are not related to menstrual cycles. There is little evidence to show that VP is a cause of long term psychiatric disease. With an acute attack, the urine may turn red and there is always an increase in the excretion of ALA and PBG in the urine. There are increased porphyrins in the urine with coproporphyrins excreted in excess of uroporphyrins. The severity of the attack may be related to the concentration of these prophyrins. Increased levels of both protoporphyrin and coproporphyrin are also found in the feces. These abnormal findings may return to normal when the disease is quiescent or in remission. Many people who are asymptomatic carriers of the abnormal gene will consistently have negative laboratory tests. The enzyme PPO is not present in red cells and is very difficult to measure even in research laboratories.

The treatment of the neurovisceral attacks is similar to that used in AIP, including the administration of hematin. The standard dermatological therapies for photodermatitis are usually ineffective and patients should be advised to avoid sun exposure and to use sunscreens containing zinc oxide or titanium oxide. If both parents carry the abnormal gene so that the patient is homozygous, the disease will present in early childhood and be rather severe. However the outlook for the heterozygous individual is good.

Porphyria Cutanea Tarda (PCT)

Porphyria cutanea tarda is the commonest of all the porphyrias. It is a skin disease only and is caused by decreased activity of the final enzyme step in the heme biosynthetic pathway, called uroporphyrinogen decarboxylase (URO.D). This enzyme is present primarily in the liver although it is also found in the red blood cells. When it concentration is decreased or its activity inhibited carboxylated porphyrins which are concentrated in the skin. Due to their propensity to store radiant energy, and through a photodynamic process, they irritate the tissues and cause cutaneous symptoms.

In about 20% of cases, the disease in inherited as an autosomal dominant trait and associated with deficient activity of URO.D in both the red cells and the liver. The onset of this inherited disease is usually delayed into adulthood although cases can occur in children. Most cases of PCT do not have a familial history (about 80%) and are called sporadic, toxic or acquired. There may however be a demonstrable genetic defect in many of these cases. This type of PCT is associated with deficient enzyme activity only in the liver which itself may be involved in a pathological state. There are several precipitating factors that have been identified. Excess alcohol ingestion has long been recognized as an important cause, possibly related to the development of chronic liver disease. Estrogen therapy may also cause this disease. Viral infections, particularly HIV and hepatitis C viruses have been implicated and hepatitis B may also be a factor. PCT can occur in patients receiving long term renal hemodialysis. Certain halogenated hydrocarbons have been associated with PCT. These compounds which have been contained in fungicides and herbicides were often inhaled or ingested by accident. Iron overload states may cause or magnify the disease. In addition, hematologic diseases associated wit abnormal red cell and iron metabolism are also important causes.

The predominant symptom is that of photosensitivity, with abnormalities on the ares of the skin exposed to light such as the face, the arms and the backs of the hands and wrists. There is irritation and blistering followed by increases in skin fragility, hair growth, scarring and pigment deposition. These finding are diagnostically not specific for PCT and are seen in other types of porphyria such as congenital erythropoietic porphyria as well as other types of skin disorders including a condition called pseudoporphyria. Since there is an overproduction of water soluble porphyrins, particularly uroporphyrins, they spill out into the urine and bile with the result that the urinary and fecal concentrations of these compounds are elevated. Urinary ALA and PBG excretions are unaffected and are always normal. Plasma porphyrin concentrations are increased, particularly the uroporphyrin levels. During clinical remissions, these abnormal levels fall to normal.

Some patients with VP may not have elevated PBG excretion levels, and may be confused with PCT unless plasma or stool analysis are carried out. It is important to try to differentiate between PCT and VP since patients with PCT do not have to worry about avoiding those drugs that may be dangerous in VP and the treatment of the two is also different. The treatment of this disorder is usually quite successful. The aggravating factors should be removed or controlled where ever possible. Repeated removal of blood (phlebotomies) at regular intervals to reduce the iron stores may be all that is required. The antimalarial drug, chloroquine in low dose has proven to be effective and the sun screen skin lotions with beta-carotene are also helpful. The treatment of the viral hepatitis C infection with interferon may be of benefit.

Lead poisoning might also be include in this group although it is somewhat different in that it interferes with the porphyrin biosynthetic pathways at several levels and may cause a rise in ALA levels without an increase in PBG levels. Red cell protoporphrin levels may also be increased in lead poisoning. There is however no photosensitivity in this condition.

Erythropoietic Protoporphyria (EPP)

This type of porphyria is caused by an enzyme defect in the last step of heme synthesis which is the insertion of the activated iron molecule into the middle of the protoporphyrin ring and is due to a partial deficiency of the enzyme called ferrochelatase. It is autosomal dominant in inheritance and the primary source of this excess production appears to be the bone marrow. there are marked accumulations of protoporphyrins in the juvenile red blood cells, and as the red cells mature the compound spills over into the plasma and is cleared by the liver and bile. Since protoporphyrin is poorly water soluble, it is not excreted in the urine but there is a marked increase in the concentration of protoporphyrin is the feces. The urine PBG and porphyrin concentrations are always normal. There is a male preponderance in distribution and the disease can come on in childhood.

The symptoms are precipitated primarily by sunlight and cause burning, itching, swelling and redness of the skin. Blistering and skin ulcers along with increase hair growth and pigmentation can follow chronic sun exposure. Occasionally liver disease may develop and gall bladder disease requiring surgery is a common problem because the high concentration of protoporphyrin in the bile will lead to gall stone formation. The photosensitivity of women with EPP seems to decrease during pregnancy with a corresponding decrease in red cell protoporphyrin levels. The treatment with the vitamin A analogue, beta-carotene and other sunscreens improves the tolerance to sunlight. The use of bile acid binding resins such as cholestyramine or activated charcoal may help in eliminating the protoporphyrins from the body.

Rare Forms of Porphyria

Amino Levulinic Acid Dehydratase Deficiency (ALAD):

is a very rare form of porphyria which is inherited in an autosomal recessive fashion and has been diagnosed in a very small number of patients whose ages range form infancy to adulthood. There is almost a complete lack of enzyme activity with increased excretion of ALA but not PBG in the urine. This enzyme is one of the main enzyme systems also affected by lead poisoning.

Congenital Erythropoietic Porphyria (CEP):

is also a very rare form of porphyria inherited as an autosomal recessive trait associated with a deficiency in the enzyme activity of uroporphyrinogen cosynthetase. The urinary porphyrins are markedly increased and often strain the diapers red. There is a marked degree of photosensitivity leading to considerable disfiguration due to scarring of the skin along with an enlarged spleen and a hemolytic anemia but no neurologic findings. Total avoidance of sunlight is usually essential to prevent further disfiguration. This is the only type of porphyria that can be diagnosed prenatally, and is characterized by the finding of elevated uroporphyrin concentrations in the amniotic fluid.

Hepaterythropoietic Porphyria (HEP):

is associated with a marked deficiency in the activity of uroporphyrinogen decarboxylase. It differs from familial PCT where there is only about 50% reduction and it can be considered to be homozygous variant of familial PCT. Marked phototoxic skin lesions develop early in childhood along with a variety of neurologic abnormalities.

There have been several case reports in the medical literature describing the coexistence of 2 types of porphyria in the same patient, these are also called dual porphyrias. These often present as difficult diagnostic problems as the clinical findings and laboratory results overlap. Fortunately they are very rare.

The Words on Nelly's Tombstone

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:34:00 +0000

Originally printed in Yankee Magazine, January 1994

The villagers of Exeter, Rhode Island, knew that farmer George Brown had a problem. First, in 1883 his wife, Mary, succumbed to a mysterious illness. Six months later, his 20-year-old daughter, Mary Olive, also fell ill and died. Within the next several years, his 19-year-old daughter, Mercy, was also dead, and George's teenage son, Edwin, a healthy lad who worked as a store clerk, became suddenly frail and sick. The village doctor informed George that "consumption" was taking his family. But the country folk of Exeter had another explanation.

On a chilly March afternoon in 1892, a group of men entered Exeter's Chesnuthill Cemetery. There they began to exhume the bodies of George Brown's wife and two daughters. They had concluded that one of the deceased was leaving the grave at night to suck the life out of its relatives. Only by killing the vampire could young Edwin be saved.

First, the men examined the bodies of Mrs. Brown and daughter Mary. Finding them to be properly decomposed, they began to exhume Mercy Brown. Slowly they shoveled into Mercy's grave. When they reached the corpse, the men suddenly stepped back in terror.

Mercy, who had been buried for more than two months, appeared oddly well preserved. It seemed that her hair and nails had grown. And when the men curiously prodded the corpse with their shovel, they found that it was filled with fresh blood. The suspected vampire's heart was removed and burned on a nearby rock. The ashes were added to young Edwin's medicine. Still, the boy died less than two months later.

To the less superstitious, there was perhaps nothing so unusual about the well-preserved condition of Mercy's body. She had been in the ground during the two coldest months of the year. The mysterious wave of illness that swept George Brown's family was probably tuberculosis.

But that did not keep Rhode Island from becoming known as the "Vampire Capital of America". South County, whose isolated villages resembled the lonely hamlets of Transylvania, was a hotbed of vampire rumors between 1870 and 1900. When Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula in 1897, died, newspaper accounts of Mercy Brown were found in his files.

The legend persists to this day. In Rhode Island Historical Cemetery No.2 stands the gravestone of alleged vampire Nelly L. Vaughn of West Greenwich, who died in 1889 at the age of 19. The grave is supposedly cursed. One local university professor who studies vampirism claims that "no vegetation or lichen will grow on Nelly's grave," despite numerous attempts to plant there. And people are still taken aback by the inscription along the bottom of Nelly's tombstone. The curious words read, "I am waiting and watching for you."

Was she a victim ... or a vampire?

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:31:00 +0000

Written By KAREN LEE ZINER

The secret lies buried in Historical Cemetery No. 22, behind Exeter's Chestnut Hill Baptist Church on Route 102, on a hill framed by rustling dark woods that harbor their own uneasy mystery. The death certificate says that Mercy Brown went to her grave at age 19 on Jan. 17, 1892, a victim of tuberculosis. The legend says she was a vampire.

In fact, the story goes, an assemblage of family and townsfolk pulled Mercy Brown out of her final resting place one wintry day because they believed they had a means to cast out the evil spirit that they thought was disturbing her sleep. They performed their own dreadful "cure," but the story of Mercy Brown still haunts the town - especially at Halloween.

There are those from the Brown family who still care to tell the tale, and perhaps they know it best. Reuben Brown lives in the woods of Exeter in a house ancient and creaky and alive with the soft gonging and ticking of an old clock. Brown is 87, hard of hearing and a mite creaky himself. Still, he's full of wit and he loves to tell stories.

One of those is the legend of Mercy Lenna Brown. For this tale, Reuben Brown leans back in his worn brown leather chair, rests his feet on a wooden stool, and clutches his cane for emphatic, here- and-there taps on the floor. In the faded, sunlit living room, white- haired, 92-year-old Marion Brown sits on a couch and interrupts her husband now and then with laughter or correction. The whole fearful matter started with unexplained deaths, says Reuben Brown. Young girls, six or seven on one side of the Brown family, pined away and died. All of them "had a mark on their throats." "People figured they'd been bit by a vampire . . they all had that mark on them and nobody knows who made it," says Brown. Some folks were sure that Mercy - already gone to her grave - was the vampire.

A dozen people got together - members of Mercy's family and others in the town - and decided to open the grave and pull Mercy's body into the sunlight to perform a terrible task. Reuben Brown had a friend who was there. "I used to know a man who saw them when they unearthed her. He said he saw them cut her heart out and burn it on the rock. . . it appeared that Mercy had moved in the grave. She wasn't the way she was put in there . . .

"But he said there were no more deaths after that. That's what he said." Reuben Brown adds this footnote: "My father believed she was a vampire. He said all those girls had the mark on their throat when they died."

Another member of the Brown family, 51-year-old Lewis Peck, also lives in the Exeter woods, and is familiar with the legend. He keeps a collection of yellowed newspaper clippings that tell the story. "It's true, my people did this," says Peck. "They cut her right open, and they cut her heart out, and they burned her heart on the rocks to end what they thought was this vampirish disease. I remember as a kid my mother wouldn't allow us to touch those rocks."

But Peck himself believes that such folklore arose from a general lack of medical knowledge. Mercy Brown most likely died of tuberculosis, and the legend of a wandering predator full of blood lust most likely arose from fear and superstition. "These people came down with this rare sickness. . . of course I imagine the disease was tuberculosis. But they didn't know much about tuberculosis then." Other aspects of the legend are that when they opened the grave, "she had turned partly over."

Town records marking Mercy's death indicate that she certainly was not alone in going to an early death. Diphtheria, cholera, pneumonia, "the grippe," acute tuberculosis and gangrene claimed other young people that same year. But where Mercy was concerned, folks clung to superstition.

In "A Short History of Exeter, Rhode Island" Florence Parker Simister recounted this version of the Mercy Brown story:

" . . .Three members of that family died, probably of consumption, late in the nineteenth century - a mother and two daughters. Then a son became ill, too. The family held a conference and decided that he did not have consumption but was being attacked by a vampire.

"The bodies of the three women were dug up, the hearts were cut out of the bodies and burned on a nearby rock in the cemetery behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. The object of burning the hearts, we are told, 'was to pocure medicine for the ailing Edwin Brown . . . He dissolved the ashes in the medicine his doctor had given him.' "

A newspaper report later said that "only one of the Brown women, Mercy, had blood in her veins when she was dug up and so she was the vampire,". . .Simister writes.

Peck, a hard-bitten Swamp Yankee, dismisses much of this with a sweep of his hand that says: Folderol. "Do you believe in vampires? I don't," he says with a laugh. Over the years, people have visited Peck to hear the story. Yankee magazine, news people from Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, television reporters. "You have no idea," he says with a sigh.

The last time, Peck got a little tired of it all and abandoned a TV crew as it stood in the graveyard wiring up electronic equipment "to listen to her grave or something." ("I didn't like their attitude," he says. "I asked them, 'What are you trying to do, make fun of my family?' ")

Though Peck says he doesn't believe in ghosts or roaming vampires, and though he insists this is all nonsense, he does admit he saw something strange one night, years ago, near Mercy's grave. That was when he was a young man out roaming with his brother and they drove up near that hill framed by restless trees, containing the supposedly restless spirit named Mercy.

"I was about 18 or 19 years old when this thing took place. We had a Model A. . . and I went up in the back of the Chestnut Hill Church with my brother David. "And by God, we looked and we saw a great big ball of light, so bright that it was blue." It hovered in the vicinity of the four or five graves where Brown family members, including Mercy, are buried. "It was a bright light, it was round. God she was bright, that's the part that stuck in you. I have no idea what it was.

"And to answer you how it went out, I don't know. We didn't stay," he says with a nervous grin that indicates he thinks he and his brother barely escaped an unfriendly encounter. The brothers drove down the road to a neighbor, also a member of the Brown family. He said of the glowing orb, 'Sonny, we've seen it before.' " "And then he laughed," says Peck. "Then we talked to someone from the other side of the family, and she'd seen it, too," Peck says, the memory of his boyhood fright driving the glint out of his eye. Does he think he saw a ghost? "Don't know what it was," he says. But he saw something.

And Lewis Peck says he just can't think of any way to explain it.

Copyright © 1997 The Providence Journal Company

New England vampires? Folklore battled a genuine specter

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:29:00 +0000

Written By JOHN CASTELLUCCI

Every Halloween, Rhode Islanders tell the story of Mercy Brown: How she was stricken by a mysterious illness more than 100 years ago and followed her mother and sister to the grave. How her brother Edwin fell ill, too, and their father was persuaded that Mercy was a vampire who was rising from the dead to feed on Edwin's flesh. How old George T. Brown and some neighbors in Exeter dug up her body one wintry March day and found that it had shifted in the coffin. How her heart was burned on a rock after it was found to contain fresh blood. However Edwin was fed the ashes as a cure but died less than two months later, on May 2, 1892.

Now a researcher is saying Mercy Brown was not the first Rhode Island vampire case - that she was the fifth and last. State folklorist Michael E. Bell says he has unearthed evidence that what happened to the Browns happened to at least 15 other New England families.

In the process, Bell says, he has uncovered reminders of a far deadlier killer than vampires, one that doctors say is making a comeback after 30 years.

Tuberculosis, the disease that physician Frank Ryan, author of the 1993 book The Forgotten Plague, calls "the greatest killer in history," is the common thread that connects Mercy Brown to the long line of vampire cases that Bell says began in this country in 1793.

Tuberculosis is a highly communicable disease. It was not until the development of antibiotics in the 1940s and 1950s - more than half a century after the cause of tuberculosis was discovered - that doctors could offer a cure.

Rather than stand by helplessly while their children died of the illness that was then called consumption - because the victim literally wasted away - Bell says desperate parents turned to folklore, which taught that vampires were responsible for the spread of the disease.

In none of the Rhode Island cases was the word vampire ever mentioned. But, in each case, Bell says, people clearly believed that the surviving members of a family struck by tuberculosis could be saved if the dead were exhumed and there bodies dismembered, burned or otherwise disrupted before being returned to the grave.

"To characterize it as nothing but an ignorant superstition is to miss why the people involved thought it was reasonable," Bell says. "Medical science had failed. So that's when you turned to folklore. Folklore always has an answer."

Bell first heard the Mercy Brown story when he arrived here with a team of folklorists from the Library of Congress's Folk Life Center in 1979. He identified the 15 other New England cases by sifting through town records, reading local histories, tracing genealogies and listening to family yarns.

The first known case occurred in 1793 in Manchester, Vt., where a local history says "a strange infatuation took possession of the minds of the friends and connections of the family" of Capt. Isaac Burton after his second wife, Hulda, began to die of consumption, the disease that killed his first wife, Rachel, a few years before. Rachel's body was exhumed, and, after her liver, heart and lungs were burned, Hulda was made to consume the ashes.

Three years later, in Cumberland, R.I., Stephen Staples got the permission of the Cumberland Town Council to exhume the body of a recently deceased daughter "to try an experiment" to save the life of another daughter, who had also fallen ill.

"It's not as explicit" as the Vermont case, Bell says. But when he described his research into other exhumation cases to the historian who told him about the Cumberland case, Ruth Wallis Herndon, "she jumped up and said, 'That's got to be it!' "

The next Rhode Island vampire case occurs in Exeter, and, as in a fairy tale, the deaths were foretold by a dream. Stukeley "Snuffy" Tillinghast, a prosperous Pine Hill farmer, dreamed one night that half his orchard had died. For a long time, according to Sidney Rider, a 19th-century historian, Tillinghast had no idea what the dream meant. But then, Rider wrote, six of Tillinghast's 14 children died of consumption, one right after another, and a seventh child was taken ill. "They all complained that Sarah (the first child to die) was coming back at night and putting pressure on their bodies," Bell says. A common symptom of pulmonary tuberculosis is a feeling of pressure on the chest.

Unable to stop the dying, Tillinghast consulted neighbors, who persuaded him to open the six graves and examine the bodies. The first five bodies were found in advanced stages of decomposition, but Sarah's heart and arteries were filled with fresh blood. "It was clear at once to these astonished people that the cause of their trouble lay there before them," Rider wrote. They burned Sarah's heart, and reburied all the bodies. Nevertheless, Rider wrote, the seventh child stricken with illness died.

"I did some genealogical research," Bell says. "I found that there was a Stukeley Tillinghast who had 14 children. Something like four children died in 1799." The three other deaths were an exaggeration, he says. "It's a better story to say half," Bell offers, "because of the dream."

In the next Rhode Island case, in 1827 in Foster, the remains of Nancy Young, 19-year-old daughter of Capt. Levi Young, were dug up and burned. In what Bell says was a variation of the vampire myth, the surviving family members inhaled the fumes. Genealogical research shows that four of Young's remaining eight children died anyway. Two sons and a daughter escaped.

The next exhumation case is sketchy. In 1874, according to a Catholic priest who Bell says believed in vampires, William G. Rose of Peace Dale had his 15-year-old daughter, Ruth Ellen, exhumed and her heart burned in the belief that she was causing the bodies of her relatives to waste away.

Bell says he has found connections between this case and two other suspected Rhode Island vampires. But, after the Mercy Brown exhumation in 1892, nobody in Rhode Island ever dug up the body of a suspected vampire again.

What made the practice die out? Bell theorizes that the discovery, in 1882, that tuberculosis was spread by bacteria finally began to take hold. In addition, the practice of embalming had reached rural areas, making it implausible to imagine that vampires were rising from the grave to search for blood.

Proof that New Englanders once believed in vampires doesn't come only from historical records. Three years ago, a lost cemetery in Griswold, Conn., yielded compelling evidence of the vampire myth. The cemetery was in a gravel pit run by a construction company. In the process of relocating the cemetery, the Connecticut state archeologist and some students found a coffin in which the bones of a 55-year-old man with the initials "J.B." had been rearranged. The upper leg bones had been crossed on the lower chest and the skull placed on the upper chest in a skull-and-crossbones pattern, said physical anthropologist Paul Sledzik. Lesions on the bones suggested tuberculosis, he said. The stake-in-the-heart legend notwithstanding, folklore prescribed other ways to kill vampires, says Sledzik, curator of anatomical collections at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. In the 19th century, Sledzik said, "the gist of 'killing the vampire' was to cause some disruption to the corpse."

Copyright © 1997 The Providence Journal Company

Real Vampires

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:55:00 +0000

"Real Vampires"-how can this be anything but a contradiction in terms? We all know about vampires. Stock characters of fiction, guaranteed box-office draws, the media vampire has been familiar to us since childhood. Generally speaking, our blood-suckers appear with a tongue planted firmly in one toothy cheek-from Bela Lugosi hamming it up in the 1950's, to last summer's teenage "vamp" movies, to Count Chocula breakfast cereal, the media seldom treat the vampire as truly fearsome. The stereotyped vampire traits are familiar to any child: vampires have big fangs, sleep in coffins, are instantly incinerated by sunlight, and are best dispatched by a stake through the heart. But the most important "fact" that we all know of course is that there are no such things.

Of course, in terms of the mythical, literary and cinematic conventions, we are correct: there are no "legions of the undead" stalking the unwary. We have explained the folklore with politics, misunderstood diseases, and hysteria, the literary and cinematic images with psychology, history, and sociology. We of the 20th century are confident that vampires could not really exist. But then, most of us are never forced to think otherwise. For a number of people, the concept of vampires becomes a critical and often lifelong concern. To live with, love, or befriend a real vampire is to encounter a set of problems which may demand expanding the boundaries of one's accepted reality. To come to terms with being a real vampire oneself is to face a lifetime's karmic challenge.

Some people reading this article already know this. The rest are probably thinking, "Real Vampires, give me a break! Sure, there are some pretty weird people out there, but all they need is a good therapist." Yes, there are people who take on all the trappings of a gothic novel: dressing in black, claiming or pretending to be "vampires" in the supernatural sense, wearing capes, sleeping in boxes, even getting their teeth capped. There are more frightening people who seek to torture or kill animals or human beings in order to gain power, emotional release or sexual thrill, and who sometimes call themselves (or are called) "vampires". But most of these individuals are troubled people who have been attracted by the cultural myths about the vampire: supernatural powers (because they feel powerless), overwhelming sexuality (because most of them have sexual issues and no true relationships), immortality (because they fear aging and death). Individuals like these are the most recent "explanation" for humanity's persistent belief in vampires. But beyond and behind all the folklore, the psychological theories, the role playing, even the traditional spiritual assumptions, lies the real truth about vampires.

The field of vampirology is complex and mysterious. There are many aspects to the vampire phenomenon, and they would require several books to fully explore. One aspect of vampirism which frequently troubles magickal, spiritual and other small groups, the most common form of vampire, is found among living people who share with us the benefits and disadvantages of physical existence on this plane, yet are not quite human. These people appear on the surface to be somewhat eccentric members of society, yet their outward idiosyncrasies only hint at how different they are from those around them.

Each of us incarnates for a lifetime with a certain way of relating to the physical world through the vehicle of our physical body. A vampire is a person born with an extraordinary capacity to absorb, channel, transform, and manipulate "pranic energy" or life force. She also has a critical energy imbalance which reels wildly from deficit to overload and back again. This capacity for handling energy is a gift, but the constant imbalance of her own system is the cause of the negative behavior patterns and characteristics which may be notable about a vampiric person.

Real vampires do not necessarily drink blood-in fact, most of them do not. Blood-drinking and vampirism have been confused to the extent that for the average person, a vampire is defined as something that drinks blood (such as a "vampire bat"). But when we look beyond casual assumptions to the details of common beliefs, we find something quite different. Throughout both folklore and literature, there is an understanding that vampires require energy or life force. Many old folktales accept that vampires suck blood, yet never describe this actually happening. The victims slowly decline and waste away, and the survivors assume that some evil fiend is draining them of blood. They know that the Bible says, "the blood is the life", and anyone who was losing their life force must be losing blood. Yet, in many instances the vampire's "attack" does not even involve physical contact. In others, it is clearly sexual energy which is exchanged.¹

Fresh blood is the highest known source of pranic energy (life force).² Human beings have practiced blood-drinking for many reasons throughout history, but drinking blood alone does not indicate that a person is a vampire. Only real vampires can directly absorb the pranic energy in fresh blood, and for this reason some real vampires are attracted to blood and find different means of obtaining it.³ However, it is a rare vampire who cannot absorb energy in much more subtle ways. This is the mechanism that causes real vampires to inflict harm on others and themselves if they fail to recognize what is happening and do conscious work on transforming their inner natures. Vampires are no more likely to be either malicious or spiritually aware than the general population, but without awareness, they can spend their lives making themselves and others unhappy, and will continue to incarnate in this pattern until they take action to change it.

There are a number of external symptoms of vampirism, but it is important to realize that some of them are found in ordinary human behavior. Real vampires are identifiable partly because they have a majority of the symptoms, not just one or two. But more significantly, real vampires are distinguished by a certain quality to the energy. While anyone reading a description of the symptoms and behavior patterns might find a few that apply to people he knows, or even to himself, real vampires have a way of standing out vividly to everyone who interacts with them. There are few people who do not know at least one vampire.

Physically, vampires are usually "night people"" on a biochemical level. They have inverted circadian rhythms, with body cycles such as temperature peaks, menstrual onset, and the production of sleep hormones in the brain occurring at the opposite time of day from most people. They have difficulty adjusting to daytime schedules and frequently work nights. They tend to be photosensitive, avoiding sunlight, sunburning easily, and having excellent night vision. Their vitality ranges widely, and they can be vigorous and active one day, depressed and languorous the next.

They frequently have digestive trouble. Even those with cast-iron stomachs have many issues with food that are rooted in their constant hunger for energy. Contrary to the image of the vampire as thin, many real vampires are troubled by obesity because of a hunger that makes them food addicts, and a system that is sluggish in processing physical food. They are also sometimes troubled by other substance addictions for the same reasons, but since their systems are tuned to pranic energy more than to processing physical substance, they may not be as sensitive to drugs and alcohol as an ordinary person would be.

Emotionally and physically, vampires are unpredictable, moody, temperamental and overwhelming. The major distinguishing characteristic of real vampires as opposed to ordinary people who share those qualities is the vampire's intensity. Vampires are extremely intense people. They are frequently given nicknames such as "the black hole." When others talk about them (usually to complain about them), vampires are often described by such terms as "needy,"

"attention-seeking," "grandstanding," "manipulative," "exhausting," "draining," "monopolizes the conversation," "jealous," "huge ego," and so on. A vampire's emotions are deep, fervent, and powerful, and she usually displays great psychic ability and has uncontrolled magickal and psychic experiences. Vampires are also empaths, and while they remain unconscious of their natures, they are frequently "psychic sponges" who simply absorb vibrations from everywhere, with the expected emotional instability resulting.

A "hungry" vampire -- one whose energy level is imbalanced to the deficit side -- becomes an involuntary psychic vortex, drawing all pranic energy in the area towards her. When the energy does not flow in fast enough -- and it is typical of vampires that the energy never flows fast enough for them -- she will begin manifesting behavior patterns to increase the amount of conscious attention she gets from others. For this reason, some vampires develop a pattern of being aggressively confrontational, or of constantly antagonizing people with whom they have relationships. Nearly all vampires, whatever ploys they use, have a talent for attracting (or distracting) the attention of everyone present.

Once a vampire overloads on energy, she reverses her behavior patterns. She may become morose, silent, withdrawn and introverted. Some vampires become maniacally cheerful when they are satiated, but even their good moods seem to annoy others, and it is more typical for vampires to be infamous as wet blankets. "Hungry" and "overload" phases can occur within a few minutes or last for days at a time. Vampires are commonly loners, in part because they feel so different from those around them, but also because they have a need to control the degree of contact they have with sources of energy.

Real vampires are not the demonic fiends of Christianized folklore, but as long as they refuse to accept their inner nature, their bad reputation is not undeserved. Unconscious vampires have a tendency to reach adulthood with less than the average level of social skill and general finesse, and tend to be selfish and self-centered. The demands of their own energy systems are so distracting to them that it is difficult for them to pay attention to the needs of others. Their relationships tend to be disasters. Different vampires develop different patterns according to what works best for them in their life situation, but several patterns are common. The "femme fatale" or "lady-killer" vampire forms a continuous series of sexual connections with one partner at a time, dropping each unfortunate lover as they become too exhausted (or defensive) to support the vampire's energy needs. Other vampires form a long-term relationship with a single person: either another vampire whose energy cycle complements their own, or a person who derives satisfaction from being a psychic servant or martyr. A common pattern, especially in young adults, is to continuously join social, religious, political and magickal groups and either blow them apart or end up being thrown out. Vampires may go through roommates, housing situations, magickal groups, jobs and lovers like so much Kleenex.

Many people find that they feel "creepy" or "weird" around a vampire. This is usually due to the effects of one's own life force being drawn towards the vampire's vortex. Most people feel uncomfortable and distracted when their energy is pulled away from themselves. In addition to this, a common result of such an energy drain is for the aura to pull in tightly towards the body, and this causes a prickling sensation on the skin -- the "creepy-crawlies."

It is no more common for vampires to be psychopaths or killers than it is for any random person on the street. However, a prolonged, or very involved, relationship with a vampire can put a severe strain on the emotional and psychic energy systems of an ordinary person. Folklore suggests that victims of a vampire become vampires themselves. In reality, people who have been seriously "drained" -- that is, have had their own energy pulled off balance into a deficit -- also become psychic vortices which pull life force away from other living things. However, they are never as powerful as a true vampire, and unlike vampires, quickly recover and stabilize. True vampires are born the way they are -- no one can be "turned into a vampire." However, years of energy depletion can lead to health problems ranging from depression and malaise to a suppressed immune system and susceptibility to serious illnesses. Most people will break off the relationship before it gets that far.

Many vampires are attracted to magickal paths. In a magickal working group, their ability to wreak havoc is increased because of the psychic openness and trust that exist there. But there can be a benefit, as well. Some vampires become aware of their true natures and choose to undertake serious work to transform themselves. As soon as they begin doing so, they become more acceptable working partners and companions. Once in control of their capacity for handling energy, they become extraordinary magicians and healers. Their ability to hold the attention of others gives them the potential to be fine leaders and teachers. Ultimately, the purpose of vampires is not to plague the universe but to facilitate its healing. Vampirism is the dark, or unfocused, side of a certain kind of psychic talent, one which has been developing for many lifetimes. It is destructive only when a vampire either refuses to face the truth about herself and work with her abilities, or when she chooses to play out a sinister role because of the illusion of power it gives her.

Because of this, many of the vampire characteristics described above are far less evident in the most powerful vampires, the ones who have done considerable work on their inner selves. Many of these are poised, pleasant, competent individuals, with great personal power. They have come to terms with who and what they are, and no longer exhibit the negative qualities associated with "psychic vampirism."

⁴ Unfortunately, unconscious vampires are far more common than evolved ones, and it is these troubled souls who more usually appear in magickal groups.

There is no "generic advice" to give those who believe they may be dealing with a real vampire. Those who are so inclined might try to help a friend or fellow group member explore their inner nature and come to terms with their destructive behaviors. Those who feel victimized can choose to end the relationship. Each case is different, and can only be judged by the individuals concerned. But it is important for anyone involved in magickal or psychic work to understand that vampires are a real phenomenon, and that, like all perils, they should not be greeted with fear or anger. Nothing is evil by nature -- only by choice. Terror of discovery (followed by ridicule or rejection) inhibits the self-development of many real vampires. When they reach out for friendship, they are often reaching out for help.

A person who believes she may be a real vampire herself has a long and difficult process ahead of her. The most important step on her path is complete self-awareness: of her relationships, patterns, energy levels, and all other personal qualities. The most challenging work may often be summarized in the simplest of terms. Knowledge, awareness, and control are the lessons real vampires must learn in order to harness their abilities. If real vampires are not the immortals of fiction, they can at least be confident of one thing: for better or worse, they will keep the qualities they develop for many lives to come.

(The author welcomes inquiries from readers with a personal interest in the subject of vampirism. She is available at vyrdolak@net1plus.com. Readers wishing for more information about vampire lore in general are referred to the Bibliography.)

NOTES

For a thorough examination of traditional vampire folklore, see the works of Montague Summers and Anthony Masters.
Other high sources of pranic energy include semen, fresh fruits and vegetables, and the breath of living animals. Meat -- filled with chemicals, long dead, refrigerated, frozen and "aged" (partially decomposed) as it is -- contains almost none. Many real vampires, aside from drinking blood, are vegetarians.
For a somewhat flawed but interesting look at blood-drinking and vampirism, see Stephen Kaplan. Leonard Wolf explores this subject from a more philosophical and personal viewpoint.
This is not to suggest that even evolved vampires are always comfortable to be around. They remain unpredictable, intense, emotional, and altogether overwhelming personalities. Most are remarkable sexually, and all still draw energy, although they can generally control this to some extent. Furthermore, this article is not intended to mislead -- real vampires, even evolved ones, do sometimes drink blood in order to obtain their energy. Those who understand the many ways that life "gives way" to nurture more life will see this as no more unnatural than eating live vegetables or animals for food.

PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stephen Kaplan,Vampires Are (ETC Publications, 1984)
Anthony Masters, The Natural History of the Vampire (Berkley Publishing Corp., 1972)
Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula (New York Graphic Society, 1972)
Montague Summers, The Vampire, His Kith and Kin (University Books, 1960)
Montague Summers, The Vampire in Europe (The Aquarian Press Limited, 1980)
James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Duke University Press, 1981)
Leonard Wolf, A Dream of Dracula (Popular Library, 1972)

Author: Inanna Arthen
Website: http://www.earthspirit.org/fireheart/fireheartpre.html

Vampires - Succubi

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:48:00 +0000

I received an email, a while back asking me if I was disregarding Succubi as vampires or thinking the idea too far-fetched to even mention it. The fact is I just didn't really research the subject and couldn't write about something I didn"t know. Still today, I do not know much about it, but I will be using what little information I could gather on the Internet to talk about these creatures. Hope not to offend anyone with my lack of knowledge!

The succubus (singular form of succubi) is a seductive night demon figure closely associated with the vampyre. The succubus, female version of the incubus, was known for its habit of invading a man's bedroom at night, lying on top of him to attack and steal his sperm. The effect of such an attack could varry from extreme pleasure to absolute terror but in either case, it left the victim exhausted. Now, a point I did not find out was if the victims knew they had been attacked or slept throughout the entire act, oblivious to it, just knowing pleasure or terror for no apparent reason to them. If I was able to learn that, I would already feel a bit more enlightened, a little less ignorant if you would.

The main reason a succubus would attack while its victim slept was simply to be able to copulate with them without them fighting. During the intercourse, not only would the demon rob the man of his sperm, but it would also render him impotent. One tale goes that the succubus would steal the semen of a man and the incubus would steal the ova of a woman so that the two could mate in order to produce more demonic offspring. The child borne of such an union would be called a cambion. (another thing I will have to research no doubt.. ~s~)

The land of origin of the succubi is believed to be the Middle East, but India and Orient have also been listed as other origins for these crestures. The element which most characterize them as well as the incubi is air. Why? Probably because this is the mean they used to travel and enter their victim's room. Just like vampires in a way. Which leads me to believe this is why they are related in mythology since they are not said to drink blood.

It was once believed that anyone claiming to have had contact with a succubus was mad an they were summarily incarcerated. But the evidence for their existence is seemingly well-documented and their assaults are still going on today according to the book "A Witches Guide to Faery Folk" by Edain McCoy. Pick up any popular work on modern hauntings and there will be at least one story of a frightening sexual attack by an astral entity which has occurred in the last few years.

Persons who have been attacked by these malevolent spirits display mild to severe bruises and bite marks, many of them in places where they could not be self-inflicted. Women may also show torn vaginal tissue after an attack by an incubus.

There are two folk remedies which may help keep them from you. A peony flower taken to bed or a cauldron in the room is said to keep away the incubus, and bluebells or phallic-shapped magical tools are supposed to ward off the succubus.

I remember hearing Lilith, Adam's first wife, refered to as the Queen of Succubi. So when I came across a site on which was the Lilith Myth (ftp://d.armory.com/pub/user/leavitt/gnos... I looked this up. Nowhere is Lilith formally associated with succubi, but the description of what she is does make her the first known succubi in Creation I do believe. The following is from the book "Hebrew Myths" by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai and was found on the aforementionned site (Many thanks to the author Christeos Pir who wrote this back in 94.)

--- Lilith's Myth ---

Some say God created man and woman in His own image on the Sixth Day, giving them charge over the world, but that Eve did not yet exist. Now, God had set Adam to name every beast, bird and other living thing. When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam --being already like a twenty-year-old man-- felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried coupling with each female creature in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: "Every creature but I has a proper mate!" and prayed God would remedy this injustice.

God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust. From Adam's union with this demoness, and with another like her named Naamah, Tubal Cain's sister, sprang Asmodeus and innumerable demons that still plague mankind.(Many generations later, Lilith and Naamah came to Solomon's judgement seat, disguised as harlots of Jerusalem.)

Adam and Lilith never found peace together, for when he wished to lie with her, she took offense at the recumbent position he demanded. "Why must I lie beneath you?" she asked. "I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal." Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.

Adam complained to God: "I have been deserted by my helpmeet." God at once sent the angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof to fetch Lilith back. They found her beside the Red Sea, a region abounding in lascivious demons, to whom she bore 'lilim' at the rate of more than one hundred a day. (the lilim are the demon children borne to Lilith) "Return to Adam without delay," the angels said, "or we will drown you!" Lilith asked: "How can I return to Adam and live like an honest housewife, after my stay beside the Red Sea?" "It will be death to refuse!" they answered. "How can I die," Lilith asked again, "when God has ordered me to take charge of all newborn children: boys up to the eighth day of life, that of circumcision; girls up to the twentieth day. None the less, if ever I see your three names or likenesses displayed in an amulet above a newborn child, I promise to spare it." To this they agreed; but God punished Lilith by making one hundred of her demon children perish daily; and if she could not destroy a human infant, because of the angelic amulet, she would spitefully turn against her own.

Some say that Lilith ruled as queen in Zmargad, and again in Sheba; and was the demoness who destroyed Job's sons. Yet she escaped the curse of death which overtook Adam, since they had parted long before the Fall. Lilith and Naamah not only strangled infants but also seduced dreaming men, and one of whom, sleeping alone, may become their victim.

--- End of Lilith Myth ---

Somehow, I hate that I did not find more information for you and for me because the subject seems highly interesting. But I have to admit my search time today has been very limited and not having my own computer puts a glitch on running searches at home during my spare time.

I hope you liked this (and even more, I hope it made sense!) and please, if you do have more information on succubi and incubi, do not hesitate to contact me or to post them in the discussion board. It is there for all of you too.

Blessed Be, Jacynthe

Author: Jacynthe Durocher
Source: Suite101

Myth vs. Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:40:00 +0000

What are some of the stories you've heard about vampires? Surely, in this day and age, there isn't a person out there who hasn't heard of, or read about Dracula. Yes, that undead, night prowling count of over-told powers and unlimited appeal has caused quite a stir. And perpetuated the frightening myths that can make reality hard to live in.

Holy water, silver, sunlight and garlic do absolutely nothing to harm a real vampire, unless there is already a sensitivity to silver, sunlight or garlic. Holy water is, after all, only water that's been blessed by a priest, and I've yet to hear of anyone being allergic to water. There are medical instances where people are allergic to sunlight however, and these folks will break out in hives, and often burn severely if exposed to the sun for more than a very few moments at a time. But, for myself (as an example) although I burn easily, I only burn once a year, and that turns into a deep enough tan I don't burn again (but I still don't sit out in the sun for more than a half hour at a time). I don't like being outside in the sunlight simply because it hurts my eyes, even with heavy duty sunglasses on. This is true for summer or winter. Cloudy days are often just as bad.

We are not immortal, although many of us seem to have (or claim to have) strengthened immune systems, and tend to look younger than our years. Again, this is not always the case however, since I have had grey hair since I was in my mid-teens, and I certainly look in my thirties. As well, I have just finished battling the flu - I still have the sniffles - and it's been a week and a half. However, when I think about it, I was last asked for ID at a local bar 3 years ago, when I was 28 and I hadn't dyed my hair for several years. In any case, no matter if someone is vampire or not - you can't battle genetics! If the family genetics indicate early aging, you're going to age early.

While we tend to be nocturnal, the whole sleeping in a coffin from dawn until dusk is a myth. Although, there again - I DO know someone that slept in a coffin for several years, but I think he grew out of that. Most of us just generally function better in the night hours. I know I do - I write and research mainly between 10 PM and 3 AM. Frankly, I couldn't stand sleeping in a coffin - there just isn't enough room to sprawl out!

Another thing is, we don't stalk "victims" searching to drain the life-blood from them. Well, I have done, but the "victim" was willing and it was a game of sorts, and I certainly didn't drain him. To my knowledge, no vampire takes more than an ounce or two from a donor. For myself, I've never gone beyond an ounce and that was spread out over a few hours. The first time I drank from my first donor I was close to being completely drunk (and no - not from alcohol, but it's the only way I can describe the feeling) after only a few sips. I've been told to go beyond an ounce or two would make one physically sick, but then - I do believe that it is psychological in nature, because our bodies would not be able to distinguish between the blood-juice from say a beef steak, or the blood from a donor. And besides, I've watched Fear Factor - not many of those participants drinking the huge glasses of cow's blood actually vomit.

In reality - you could very well know a vampire. You could work with one, have one in your family. If they didn't tell you - you wouldn't know.

Author: Jodi Wetherup
Source: Suite101

Blood and Body Fluid Precautions

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:38:00 +0000

What are blood and body fluid precautions?

Blood and body fluid precautions (universal precautions) are recommendations designed to prevent the transmission of HIV, hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and other diseases while administering first aid or other health care. These precautions treat all blood and body fluids as potentially infectious for diseases that are transmitted in the blood (blood-borne pathogens).

Blood and body fluid precautions apply to blood and other body fluids that contain visible traces of blood, semen, and vaginal fluids. They also apply to tissues and other body fluids, such as from around the brain or spinal cord (cerebrospinal fluid), around a joint space (synovial fluid), in the lungs (pleural fluid), in the lining of the abdomen and pelvis (peritoneal fluid), around the heart (pericardial fluid), and amniotic fluid that surrounds a fetus.

Why are blood and body fluid precautions important?

While intact skin provides some protection from exposure to potentially infectious material, when providing health care it is recommended that health professionals use blood and body fluid precautions for further protection. These precautions also help protect you from exposure to a potential infection from your health professional in the unlikely event that you may come in contact with the health professional's blood.

The American Red Cross recommends that everyone use blood and body fluid precautions while giving first aid.

What is not covered by blood and body fluid precautions?

Although it is recommended that you use blood and body fluid precautions whenever you come into contact with nasal secretions, breast milk, stool, sputum, sweat, tears, urine, or vomit, it is not absolutely necessary unless these fluids contain visible traces of blood. Blood and body fluid precautions apply to saliva only when it contains blood or in a dental or oral surgery setting where contamination with blood is likely.

How can I reduce my risk of exposure to blood and body fluids?

Blood and body fluid precautions involve the use of protective barriers such as gloves, gowns, masks, and eye protection. These reduce the risk of exposing the skin or mucous membranes to potentially infectious fluids. Health care workers should always use protective barriers to protect themselves from exposure to another person's blood or body fluid.

Gloves protect you whenever you touch blood, body fluids, mucous membranes, or broken, burned, or scraped skin. The use of gloves also decreases the risk of disease transmission from needle sticks.

Always wear gloves for handling items or surfaces soiled with blood or body fluids.
Wear gloves if you have scraped, cut, or chapped skin on your hands.
Change your gloves after each use.
Wash your hands immediately after removing your gloves.
Wash your hands and other skin surfaces immediately after they come in contact with blood or body fluids.

Masks and protective eyewear (such as goggles or a face shield) help protect your eyes, mouth, and nose from droplets of blood and other body fluids. Always wear a mask and protective eyewear if you are doing a procedure that may expose you to splashes or sprays of blood or body fluids.

Gowns or aprons protect you from splashes of blood or body fluids. Always wear a gown or apron if you are doing a procedure that may expose you to splashes or sprays of blood or body fluids.

How else can I reduce my risk?

The American Red Cross recommends that everyone use blood and body fluid precautions while giving first aid. You may wish to have gloves available in your home, office, or automobile if you think you may be required to help another person in an emergency.

Other precautions can help you minimize your risk of exposure to contaminated blood and body fluids.

If you give yourself or a family member injections:

Use puncture resistant containers to dispose of needles, scalpels, and other sharp instruments.
Do not recap needles.
Do not bend or handle used needles or disposable syringes.

Have a disposable face shield or pocket mask available if you think you might be required to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Wash your hands immediately after any exposure to blood or body fluids, even if you wear gloves.
Avoid touching objects that may be contaminated.

Source: WebMD

Vampires in Myth and History

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:22:00 +0000

Vampire myths go back thousands of years and occur in almost every culture around the world. Their variety is almost endless; from red eyed monsters with green or pink hair in China to the Greek Lamia which has the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a winged serpent; from vampire foxes in Japan to a head with trailing entrails known as the Penanggalang in Malaysia.

However, the vampires we are familiar with today, although mutated by fiction and film, are largely based on Eastern European myths. The vampire myths of Europe originated in the far East, and were transported from places like China, Tibet and India with the trade caravans along the silk route to the Mediterranean. Here they spread out along the Black Sea coast to Greece, the Balkans and of course the Carpathian mountains, including Hungary and Transylvania.

Our modern concept of the vampire still retains threads, such as blood drinking, return from death, preying on humans at night, etc in common with the Eastern European myths. However many things we are familiar with; the wearing of evening clothes, capes with tall collars, turning into bats, etc are much more recent inventions.

On the other hand, many features of the old myths such as the placing of millet or poppy seeds at the gravesite in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting seeds rather than preying on relatives, have all but disappeared from modern fiction and film.

Even among the Eastern European countries there is a large variety of vampires.

SLAVIC VAMPIRES:
The Slavic people including most east Europeans from Russia to Bulgaria, Serbia to Poland, have the richest vampire folklore and legends in the world. The Slavs came from north of the Black Sea and were closely associated with the Iranians. Prior to 8th century AD they migrated north and west to where they are now.

Christianization began almost as soon as they arrived in their new homelands. But through the 9th and 10th centuries the Eastern Orthodox Church and the western Roman Church were struggling with each other for supremacy. They formally broke in 1054 AD, with the Bulgarians, Russians, and Serbians staying Orthodox, while the Poles, Czechs, and Croatians went Roman. This split caused a big difference in the development of vampire lore - the Roman church believed incorrupt bodies were saints, while the Orthodox church believed they were vampires.

The origin of Slavic vampire myths developed during 9th C as a result of conflict between pre-Christian paganism and Christianity. Christianity won out with the vampires and other pagan beliefs surviving in folklore.

Causes of vampirism included: being born with a caul, teeth, or tail, being conceived on certain days, irregular death, excommunication, improper burial rituals etc. Preventative measures included: placing a crucifix in the coffin, or blocks under the chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the same reason, placing millet or poppy seeds in the grave because vampires had a fascination with counting, or piercing the body with thorns or stakes.

Evidence that a vampire was at work in the neighbourhood included: death of cattle, sheep, relatives, neighbours, exhumed bodies being in a lifelike state with new growth of the fingernails or hair, or if the body was swelled up like a drum, or there was blood on the mouth and if the corpse had a ruddy complexion.

Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (the Kashubs placed the head between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, holy water on the grave, exorcism.

ROMANIA:
Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it isn't surprising that their vampires are variants of the Slavic vampire. They are called Strigoi based on the Roman term strix for screech owl which also came to mean demon or witch.

There are different types of strigoi: strigoi vii are live witches who will become vampires after death. They can send out their soul at night to meet with other witches or with Strigoi mort who are dead vampires. The strigoi mort are the reanimated bodies which return to suck the blood of family, livestock, and neighbours.

A person born with a caul, tail, born out of wedlock, or one who died an unnatural death, or died before baptism, was doomed to become a vampire. As was the seventh child of the same sex in a family, the child of a pregnant woman who didn't eat salt or was looked at by a vampire, or a witch. And naturally, being bitten by vampire, meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.

The Vircolac which is sometimes mentioned in folklore was more closely related to a mythological wolf that could devour the sun and moon and later became connected with werewolves rather than vampires. The person afflicted with lycanthropy could turn into a dog, pig, or wolf.

The vampire was usually first noticed when it attacked family and livestock, or threw things around in the house. Vampires, along with witches, were believed to be most active on the Eve of St George's Day (April 22 Julian, May 4 Gregorian calendar), the night when all forms of evil were supposed to be abroad. St Georges Day is still celebrated in Europe.

A vampire in the grave could be told by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse with a red face, or having one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were found by distributing garlic in church and seeing who didn't eat it.

Graves were often opened three years after death of a child, five years after the death of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for vampirism.

Measures to prevent a person becoming a vampire included, removing the caul from a newborn and destroying it before the baby could eat any of it, careful preparation of dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing over the corpse, placing a thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on windows and rubbing it on cattle, especially on St George's & St Andrew's days.

To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body followed by decapitation and placing garlic in the mouth. By the 19th century people were shooting a bullet through the coffin. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed with water, and given to family members as a cure.

GYPSIES AND VAMPIRES:
Even today, Gypsies frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced by Bram Stoker's book "Dracula" in which the Szgany gypsies served Dracula, carrying his boxes of earth and guarding him.

In reality, Gypsies originated as nomadic tribes in northern India, but got their name from the early belief that they came from Egypt. By 1000 AD they started spreading westward and settled in Turkey for a time, incorporating many Turkish words into their Romany language.

By the 14th century they were all through the Balkans and within two more centuries had spread all across Europe. Gypsies arrived in Romania a short time before Vlad Dracula was born in 1431.

Their religion is complex and varies between tribes, but they have a god called O Del, as well as the concept of Good and Evil forces and a strong relationship and loyalty to dead relatives. They believed the dead soul entered a world similar to ours except that there is no death. The soul stayed around the body and sometimes wanted to come back. The Gypsy myths of the living dead added to and enriched the vampire myths of Hungary, Romania, and Slavic lands.

The ancient home of the Gypsies, India has many mythical vampire figures. The Bhuta is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wandered around animating dead bodies at night and attacked the living like a ghoul. In northern India could be found the brahmaparusha, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood.

The most famous Indian vampire is Kali who had fangs, wore a garland of corpses or skulls and had four arms. Her temples were near the cremation grounds. She and the goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija who could reproduce himself from each drop of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so none was spilled, thereby winning the battle and killing Raktabija.

Sara or the Black Goddess is the form in which Kali survived among Gypsies. Gypsies have a belief that the three Marys from the New Testament went to France and baptised a Gypsy called Sara. They still hold a ceremony each May 24th in the French village where this is supposed to have occurred.

One Gypsy vampire was called a mullo (one who is dead). This vampire was believed to return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a person (usually a relative who had caused their death, or not properly observed the burial ceremonies, or who kept the deceased's possessions instead of destroying them as was proper.)

Female vampires could return, lead a normal life and even marry but would exhaust the husband. Anyone who had a hideous appearance, was missing a finger, or had animal appendages, etc. was believed to be a vampire.

Even plants or dogs, cats, or farm animals could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons kept in the house too long would start to move, make noises or show blood.

To get rid of a vampire people would hire a dhampire (the son of a vampire and his widow) to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, gypsies drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it, decapitating the corpse, or burning it.

In spite of the disruption of Gypsy lives by the various eastern European communist regimes, they still retain much of their culture. In 1992 a new king of the Gypsies was chosen in Bistritz, Romania.

BATS:
No discussion of vampires is even thinkable without talking about bats. They are integral to the modern day concept of the vampire, but this was not always the case.

Many cultures have various myths about bats. In South America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. On the other hand, the Gypsies thought them lucky - they wore charms made of bat bones. And in England the Wakefield crest and those of some others have bats on them.

So how did bats end up becoming associated with vampires? There are only three species of vampires bats in the entire world, all of which occur in Central and South America. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with them and recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their mythical vampires. It wasn't long before they began to associate bats with their vampire legends. Over the following centuries the association became stronger and was used by various people, including James Malcom Rhymer who wrote "Varney the Vampyre" in the 1840's. Stoker cemented the linkage of bats and vampires in the minds of the general public.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VAMPIRE CONTROVERSY:
Today everyone is familiar with vampires, but in Britain very little was known of vampires prior to the 18th century. What brought the vampire to the attention of the general public? During the 18th century there was a major vampire scare in Eastern Europe. Even government officials frequently got dragged into the hunting and staking of vampires.

This controversy was directly responsible for England's current vampire myths. In fact, the word Vampire only came into English language in 1732 via an English translation of a German report of the much publicized Arnold Paole vampire staking in Serbia.

Western scholars seriously considered the existence of vampires for the first time rather than just brushing them off as superstition. It all started with an outbreak of vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Austro-Hungarian empire from 1725-1734.

Two famous cases involved Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole. Plogojowitz died at the age of 62, but came back a couple of times after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the next day. Soon Plogojowitz returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood.

In the other famous case Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who had been attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After death people began to die and it was believed by everyone that Paole had returned to prey on the neighbours.

These two incidents were extremely well documented. Government officials examined the cases and the bodies, wrote them up in reports, and books were published afterwards of the Paole case and distributed around Europe. The controversy raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural people having an epidemic of vampire attacks and digging up bodies all over the place. Many scholars said vampires didn't exist - they attributed reports to premature burial, or rabies which causes thirst.

However, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well respected French theologian and scholar, put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746 which said vampires did exist. This had considerable influence on other scholars at the time.

Eventually, Austrian Empress Marie Theresa sent her personal physician to investigate. He said vampires didn't exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies. This was the end of the vampire epidemics. But by then everyone knew about vampires and it was only a matter of time before authors would preserve and mould the vampire into something new and much more accessible to the general public.

Author: Beverley Richardson

Phlebotomy: The Ancient Art of Bloodletting

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:19:00 +0000

The practice of bloodletting seemed logical when the foundation of all medical treatment was based on the four body humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Health was thought to be restored by purging, starving, vomiting or bloodletting.

The art of bloodletting was flourishing well before Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C. By the middle ages, both surgeons and barbers were specializing in this bloody practice. Barbers advertised with a red (for blood) and white (for tourniquet) striped pole. The pole itself represented the stick squeezed by the patient to dilate the veins.

Bloodletting came to the U. S. on the Mayflower. The practice reached unbelievable heights in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The first U.S. president, George Washington, died from a throat infection in 1799 after being drained of nine pints of blood within 24 hours. The draining of 16-30 ounces (one to four pints) of blood was typical. Blood was often caught in a shallow bowl. When the patient became faint, the "treatment" was stopped. Bleeding was often encouraged over large areas of the body by multiple incisions. By the end of the 19th century (1875-1900), phlebotomy was declared quackery.

A variety of devices were used to draw blood:

The lancet was first used before 5th Century B.C. The vein was manually perforated by the practitioner. Many shallow cuts were sometimes made.
Spring loaded lancets came into use during the early 18th Century. The device was cocked and a "trigger" fired the spring-driven blade into the vein.
The fleam was heavily used during the 18th and 19th centuries. Many varieties exist. Sometimes a wooden "fleam stick" was used to hit the back of the blade and drive it into the vein. (Ouch!) The fleam was often used by veterinarians.
The scarificator, a series of twelve blades, was also in vogue during the 18th Century, This device was cocked and the trigger released spring-driven rotary blades which caused many shallow cuts. The scarificator seems more merciful than the other blood-letting instruments.

Blood was caught in shallow bowls. During the 17th to 19th centuries, blood was also captured in small flint glass cups. Heated air inside the cups created a vacuum causing blood to flow into the cup - a handy technique for drawing blood from a localized area. This practice was called cupping.

Source: Museum of Questionable Medical Devices

Psychic vampires - Warding off their attacks

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:18:00 +0000

Some people are acutely aware when a psychic vampire is feeding from them but do not know how to stop it from happening. Mainly because this is not a subject they teach in self-defense classes. I just could see this, can't you? ~chuckles~

One of the most common things to do would be to put an amethyst in your home if you want to keep astral bodies from entering your home and feed on you. Wearing an amethyst might protect you as well for the same reasons. It is a known fact that crystals enhance psychic abilities, be it to contact people or to keep them at bay. Now, I do not know yet if other crystal would be more likely to help a psi-vamp connect with you. All I know is that psi-vampires will sometimes use silver and/or copper to enhance or depress their own feeding abilities. It is important though that they wear it where it can get in contact with their skin, otherwise the effects are null. In that regard, a vampire who will wear silver will depress its abilities, which can be very useful for more advanced vamps who wish to be close to someone without feeding on them subconsciously. One that will wear copper will increase its powers since copper will act as a catalyst for its feeding. Weak psi-vamps will find copper a wonderful thing to have around...

Another way to stop a vampire from feeding on you is to simply clean your aura and, in the even you know who is feeding on you, alter your aura slightly like a filter so that they cannot hook up or tap into you again.

How does one clean their aura? Well first, you have a nice hot bath with a small amount of salt in it. While you are relaxing in the bath (a shower could be used as well but it is much harder to totally relax in it.. unless you want to pay the doctor's bill when you slip and fall), start an in depth scan of your aura. Start with your toes and work your way up. The forehead is the most important place to scan so make sure you really do a good cleaning here since it is the center for your third eye.

When you are scanning your aura, you are looking for any cold or dark spots in it. Every time you find one, picture or feel yourself cutting them off with an energy knife and sealing your aura shut with your other hand. ALWAYS double-check the spot you just removed a tap from because sometimes there can be more than one in the same spot. It won't do much good if you still have a tap there. Repeat this process as often as you feel necessary and you should see immediate results. Of course, do not expect miracles the first times, and I highly doubt this would work on someone skeptical because the relaxation level would be highly insufficient.

For the method on how to use your aura as a filter, read the first article of this series on psi-vamps located at the URL: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/4238... and look for the paragraph explaining the shielding method.

Author: Jacynthe Durocher
Source: Suite101

Psi-vamps - The feeding process

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:17:00 +0000

If feeding is pretty well known for sanguinarius vampires, the process for psychic vampires still stays a perfect mystery for most. What happens, what do they feed on, how do we know we are being fed on? How to defend ourselves against these attacks? So many questions because this is a subject not often explored. I researched the subject some and hope to have come with some answers at last.

Psi-vamps can feed on you using 3 methods basically: feeding by proximity, feeding by touch or physical contact or feeding by touch in self-defense. What does each imply?

Feeding by proximity is simply to feed from sight and not touch. It is harder to master for the vampire but safer for the "donor" and has the merit of attracting a lot less attention on the vampire. It is safer to feed from large groups of people rather than one single individual. You see, taking too much energy from one person can be really hazardous to their health; so in a crowd, you can feed a little from many people, thus having your fill and still most people won't notice you just fed from them.

The best way to do this is to walk through a busy shopping area and feel the energy swirl together in a funnel around you. All the vampire has to do is picture or feel this funnel being made of water and simply drink in some of this "water"... or just breathe in some of the energy if they can't picture the water.

There are 2 types of energy a vampire can feed from when using this method: your life energy or your emotional energy. The hardest to tap into is the first aforementioned. This is when you use the funnel technique. But emotional energy is much easier to perceive. When a person feels the stronger emotions like aggravation, anger, fear, hatred or if they are feeling rushed or panicked, they broadcast out energy to signal us to leave them alone. You have seen that happened so you know what I mean. This is much easier to tap into this energy because it is outside of their bodies and not inside of them. A vampire though will NEVER feed on fear though. It could cause permanent emotional and mental damage (in short, drive them insane).

Feeding by touch or physical contact may be done in many ways; however, this normally tend to draw attention. Any place on your body that forms a hollow (like the hollow in the base of your throat, or in your shoulder) can be used to feed from. Or if someone touches the vampire, they can actually deplete themselves of their own energy.

Most vampires will feed using their right hand and drain with their palm (but NEVER over the heart because the shock could seriously hurt them or even kill them if they have a heart condition); this is why psi-vamps do not like to shake hands.

If a vamp is attracted to someone, they will feed with their mouth, either from their shoulder or from their neck. For the same reason, they will be easily aroused if someone nuzzles their neck. They don't drink their victim's blood, but their energy in a way similar to giving a hickey. This is the most intimate a psi-vampire will go without actually having sex.

Feeding by touch in self-defense is when the vampire feeds on the aggressive emotions of their attackers as well as the energy they are using to attack them with. Draining the energy will throw the attacker off balance and weaken them to the point they will wonder what happened and why they even bothered to attack you in the first place either cause they are confused or because the vamp will suddenly seem too strong for them.

This method is in direct contradiction with martial arts training: there, they teach you to redirect the energy of your attacker. A vampire will rather feed on it which makes the attacker believe they are super strong when in fact they are not.

The danger of this resides in the fact the vampire could get too engrossed in feeding from the aggressiveness and really hurt its attacker. Psi-vamps are no monsters and in this case they will often start to perceive themselves as such and will start to hate themselves. It appears that 75% of vampire deaths are due to suicide only.

Author: Jacynthe Durocher
Source: Suite101

Count Dracula and the Folkloric Vampire: Thirteen Comparisons

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:14:00 +0000

“There are such beings as vampires ...The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting once.” -- Van Helsing (Dracula 286-87)

Western European words such as vampire (English and French) and vampiros (Spanish) derive from vampir which occurs in the Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian languages. The term entered the mainstream press of Western Europe during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century along with sensational reports of “vampire plagues” from Eastern Europe. The original vampir of Slavic folklore was indeed a revenant who left his grave in corporeal form (at least in appearance -- there are cases where the revenant was considered to be the spirit of the dead person), brought death to the living, and returned to his grave periodically. There were other Slavic names for such revenants such as vorkudlak (Serbo-Croatian), obour (Bulgarian), upir (Russian, Ukranian, and Polish). But the name vampire became so fixated in western Europe that it has come to be applied to all the corporeal revenants bringing death to the living which occur in the folk beliefs of Eastern Europe.

In Romanian folklore, which is non-Slavic, the common names for corporeal revenants include strigoi, moroi, pricolic, and varcolac. Occasionally, one of these words applies to a certain set of origins or attributes of the revenant. For example, moroi might specifically refer to those revenants who died in their infancy without having been baptized. But in general there are no hard and fast rules for connecting a set of motifs with a certain name. As Agnes Murgoci notes, “We find also strigoi, moroii, and varcolaci, and strigoi and pricolici, used as if they were all birds of the same feather” (321).

Bram Stoker's research papers for Dracula, including articles from newspapers, magazines, and books, indicate that his primary source for vampire folklore was “Transylvanian Superstitions” by Emily Gerard published in the July 1885 issue of The Nineteenth Century: “More decidedly evil, however, is the vampire, or nosferatu, in whom every Roumanian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell” (142).1

Below are matches between thirteen motifs of Stoker's Count Dracula and those of folkloric vampires. In only one case, Dracula's lack of a reflection, is there no counterpart to be found in recorded folklore.

1. Blood Drinking

“The vampire live on, and cannot die by the mere passing of time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 289)

In “Transylvanian Superstitions”, Emily Gerard (142) wrote that the nosferatu sucks the blood of his victims. Along with the word vampire came the general notion that all East European corporeal revenants drink the blood of their victims. Rather trivial to say, the motif of blood drinking became the hallmark of the literary vampire. But in the majority of reports concerning folk beliefs about such revenants, even those under the name vampir, there is no mention of the revenant drinking the blood of his victims. Yet, for most countries or ethnic groups which hold belief in such revenants, there is usually found at least a minority of cases in which the revenant is said to be a blood drinker. Regarding Romanian lore, I have found two examples recorded by Romanian scholars where such revenants do indeed drink human blood.

One folktale, recorded in the Romanian journal of folklore Ion Creanga, begins as follows: “There was a time when vampires were as common as leaves of grass, or berries in a pail, and they never kept still, but wandered round at night among the people. They walked about and joined the evening gatherings in the villages, and, when their were many young people together, the vampires could carry out their habit of inspiring fear, and sucking human blood like leeches” (qt in Murgoci 341). In the tale, it is said of the vampire that “He sucked their blood, he threw their flesh and bones under the bed, cut off their lips, and put their heads in a row under the window.”

The Romanian linguist, Emil Petrovici, records this folk tale: “Once a strigoi turned into a handsome young man and a young girl fell in love with him. They were married, but the girl also wanted a religious wedding. He rejected this idea. Her parents insisted, so he agreed to go to the church, but when they emerged from the church he looked at his wife in a strange way, baring his teeth. She became afraid and told her mother about it. Her mother said, 'Don't be afraid. He loves you. So that's why he bared his teeth.' When their parents came to visit them, they couldn't find them. They had locked themselves in, but the people could see them through the window. He was sucking her blood. When the people saw it, they shot him through the window” (qt in Perkowski 314). He also records that “When a moroi comes it drinks the blood of cattle and they die” (Perkowski 315). Outside of direct Romanian sources, Barber notes: “Mannhardt reports that in Krain [a district of Romania] vampires both suck blood and create new vampires by doing so. Cremene adds that (again in Romania) the bite is never at the jugular but usually over the heart, the blood of which is in demand. More rarely, the bite is over the eyes” (32).

2. The Vampire's Victims Become Vampires

“They cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening” - Van Helsing (Dracula 261)

That the vampire's victim becomes a vampire after death is common in Eastern European folklore. In actual historic reports, we find that plagues of diseases were sometimes blamed on vampires. This is often the case in the famous “vampire plagues” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which drew the attention of Austro-Hungarian military and government authorities. Frequently, every victim of the plague was suspected of having becoming a vampire after his or her death. The ultimate test of contracted vampirism in these cases was to dig up the body of the victim from his grave to see if it was still fresh or had other signs to indicate that the corpse was actually undead. If the corpse exhibited such a condition, it was most typically treated by such means as driving a stake through the heart, decapitating it, cremating it, or otherwise mutilating it.

Emily Gerard writes that “every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcized” (142). The basic notion is supported by Barber's statement (see above): “Mannhardt reports that in Krain vampires both suck blood and create new vampires by doing so.” Further support will be found in the next topic. But with a twist of irony!

3. To Drink the Blood of a Vampire

“Then he spoke mockingly to me 'And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and helper. You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall minister to your needs ... He pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp fingernails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the -- Oh my God! my God! What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days.” - Mina Harker (Dracula 343-44)

I have found no precedent in folk belief to support the notion that it is necessary for the victim of a vampire to drink the blood of the vampire in order to become a vampire himself or that a vampire compels his victim to drink his blood in order to gain power over him. To the contrary, Emil Petrovici records this bit of Romanian folk belief: “A dead person becomes a pricolici and he feeds on his relatives. When he is exhumed his rump is facing upwards and he has blood on his lips. You have to take some of that blood and feed it to the person at home who is suffering from the pricolici. In this way the relative regains his health” (qt in Perkowski 316). There are also examples in Romanian folklore where the ashes of organs of a cremated vampire were mixed with water and then drunk by living victims of a vampire to prevent the victim from dying from the disease induced by the vampire. Two of these cases are reported in Ion Creanga and translated by Murgoci (324, 325).

Somewhat similar cases can be found outside of Romanian folklore. Calmet reports that in the early eighteenth century “Arnald Paul had often related that in the environs of Cassovia, on the frontier of Turkish Serbia, he had often been tormented by a Turkish vampire ... but that he had found means to cure himself by eating earth from the vampire's grave, and by smearing himself with his blood, a precaution which, however, did not prevent him from becoming a vampire after his death” (51).

4. The Vampire's Ability to Shapeshift

“He can transform himself to wolf ... he can be as bat...” - Van Helsing (Dracula 289)

“He can come in mist which he create ... He come on moon rays as elemental dust ... He become so small - we ourselves saw Miss Lucy ... slip through a hairbreath space at the tomb door.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 290)

There is indeed quite direct Romanian folkloric support of the notion that vampires can shapeshift, though I know of no evidence that Stoker actually knew of this. Petrovici records this anecdote: “A person who was born with pain and regret when he dies turns into a cat or dog and torments his relatives during the night. The solution is to exhume him and pierce his body with a needle or nail. Another solution is to walk around the grave with burning hemp [marijuana]. The hemp smoke renders the strigoi harmless.” He also records: “A dead person can turn into a moroi in the form of a dog, horse, sheep, or a man. In order to get rid of it, you burn his clothes.” And, “A dead person can turn into a moroi in the form of a dog, horse, sheep, or a man. In order to get rid of it, you burn his clothes” (Perkowski 315). Murgoci writes that “When vampires do enter, they do by the chimney or the keyhole” (334). She also reports that some Romanians considered a hole about the diameter of a snake near a tombstone as evidence that the buried person was a vampire because it was through such holes that vampires left and entered their graves (327).

5. The Vampire's Ability to Affect the Weather

“He can, within his range, direct the elements: the storm, the fog, the thunder.” -- Van Helsing (Dracula 287)

Petrovici records a Romanian folk belief that persons are destined at birth to cause a certain type of calamity if they become strigoi after their death (Perkowski 313). Floods and hail storms are included among these disasters. Murgoci writes that “heavy rains in Zarnesti were supposed to be caused by a recently buried girl, thought to be a vampire” (332). What is lacking in such accounts is the clever use of such power found in Stoker's Dracula where Count Dracula manipulates the winds to his advantage while traveling aboard ship to reach England.

6. Ways to Destroy the Vampire

“This stake must be driven through her... Take this stake in your left hand, ready to place the point over her heart, and the hammer in your right.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 262)

Arthur bent and kissed her, and then we sent him and Quincey out of the tomb; the Professor and I sawed the top of the stake. Then we cut off the head and filled the mouth with garlic. - Dr Seward's Diary (Dracula 264)

“The branch of the wild rose on his coffin keep him that he move not from it; a sacred bullet fired into the coffin kill him so that he be true dead; and as for the stake through him, we know already of its peace; or the cut-off head that giveth rest.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 290)

Emily Gerard writes that “Every person killed by a nosferatu becomes a vampire likewise after death ... till the spirit has been exorcized, either by opening the grave and driving a stake through the corpse, or firing a pistol shot into the coffin. In very obstinate cases it is further recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing the ashes over the grave” (142). There can be no doubt that Stoker was greatly influenced by this. But Gerard says nothing about driving the stake specifically through the heart. The Eastern European practice of driving a stake through the heart of the exhumed body of an alleged vampire became known in Western Europe with the widespread publication of the reports of “vampire plagues” in Eastern Europe such as the cases of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnod Paole (aka Arnold Paul), both of which occurred in Serbia.

Murgoci asserts that “The commonest method [in Romania] is to drive a stake through the heart or navel. In Valcea it is sufficient to drive a needle through the heart. Garlic may be placed in the mouth” (328). But the various cases she gives reveal a wide variety of means: piercing one or more particular places of the body (including the heart) by stake, needle, nail, iron fork, or scythe, beheading, cutting out the heart and sometimes the liver as well, and burning the cut out organs or the entire corpse. Quite often a combination of these methods was used. Petrovici recorded in the Romanian village of Stefanesti an anecdote about shooting the corpse: “The old people say that if a cat walks over or under a body it will turn into a strigoi. The antidote is to exhume the body and shoot it” (Perkowski 315). Note that the Romanian use of metal instruments to pierce the bodies of alleged vampires is similar to Count Dracula's destruction by knives that cut his throat and pierce his heart.

7. The Vampire's Aversion to Garlic

Shortly after I had arrived, a big parcel from abroad came for the Professor. He opened it ... and showed a great bundle of white flowers ... “These is for you, Miss Lucy,” he said ... “This is medicinal but you do not know how. I put him in your window, I make pretty wreath, and hang him around your neck so that you sleep well.” ... Lucy had been examining these flowers. Now she threw them down saying ... “Why, these flowers are only common garlic.” - Dr Seward's Diary (Dracula 167-68)

In “Transylvanian Superstitions” Gerard writes about the practice of placing garlic in the mouth of an exhumed vampire, but nowhere does she say that Romanians used garlic to prevent a vampire from entering a dwelling or to otherwise protect a person from becoming a vampire's victim.2

How Stoker found out about this practice is a mystery. But in 1926, nearly thirty years after the publication of Dracula, Murgoci writes: “Garlic keeps off vampires, wolves, and evil spirits, and millet has a similar action. On St Andrew's Eve and St George's Eve, and before Easter and the New Year, windows should be anointed with garlic in the form of a cross, garlic put on the door and everything in the house, and all the cows in the cow shed should be rubbed with garlic. When vampires do enter, they do by the chimney or the keyhole, so these orifices require special attention when garlic is rubbed in. Even though the window is anointed with garlic, it is wisest to keep it shut” (334). And in 1934, Petrovici records that in the town of Coropceni “On the Feast of St. Andrew [November 30] it is useful to rub garlic on the doors and windows to protect yourself against the strigoi” (Perkowski 315).

8. Inability to Cross Running Water

“It is said, too, that he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 290)

The Count, even if he takes the form of a bat, cannot cross the running water of his own volition, and so cannot leave the ship. - Jonathan Harker's Journal, (Dracula 395)

It is not known how Stoker arrived at this notion. Perhaps he invented it. But there are precedents for this in folk beliefs. On some of the Greek islands, including Hydra, Kythnos, and Mitylene, there was occasionally found the practice of re-burying the corpse of an alleged vampire on a desert island in belief that the vampire could not cross the water to another shore. For example, Rennel Rodd tells us: “Hydra is said to have been formerly infected by vampires, but a zealous bishop transferred them to the unoccupied island of Therasia, in the Santorini group, where they still walk at night, but being unable to cross salt water, find no one to torment” (194). In China too, the undead were sometimes believed unable to cross water. For example, the revenant in one Chinese folktale retold by Olga Hoyt (35-37) turns into a wolf upon being frustrated by its inability to cross a stream in pursuit of a man. But it still can't cross the water. And when this man returns to the revenant's grave, he finds the body of an infant sucked dry of blood. There are also precedents in the British Isles, albeit these apply to other supernatural creatures. Oxford scholar Katherine Briggs notes: “If chased by evil fairies, one could generally escape by leaping to safety across running water, particularly a southward flowing stream” (336).

9. The Vampire in the Day

“His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day. Only at certain times can he have limited freedom. If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 290)

“They are racing for the sunset. We may be too late. God's will be done!” - Van Helsing (Dracula 440)

The original Count Dracula created by Stoker cannot be destroyed by sunlight. In Dracula (215-16), Mina Harker describes in her journal entry for September 22 the circumstances of how Jonathan Harker happened to see and recognize the Count outdoors in London, watching a pretty girl. Right after this event, Jonathan and Mina walked to Green Park to sit for a while. Mina noted: “It was a hot day for autumn, and there was a comfortable seat in a shady place.” There is not even a hint here that Dracula had any concerns regarding the sun.

In Dracula (290), Van Helsing seems to say that Dracula can only transform into an animal, or a mist, etc., at sunrise, noon, and sunset. The Count's last hopes for maintaining his undeath are on the sun setting before he and the gypsies are intercepted by the heroes. It certainly seems to be Stoker's intention here that Dracula would have enhanced powers after sunset, allowing him to defeat or escape from his pursuers, but that was foiled when his heart was pierced and his throat cut by knives just at the critical moment.

The vampires in European folklore typically do have schedules to follow. Regarding Romanian vampires, Murgoci says that it was commonly believed that the vampire “must be exhumed on a Saturday, as on all other days it will be wandering from its grave” (326). But she adds that “In general dead vampires come out every night except Saturday, when they are to found in their graves. The vampires that are reanimated corpses or spirits of the dead disappear, like all evil spirits, at cockcrow” (333). Abbott records the Slavic Macedonian belief that the vrykolakas left his grave at two hours before midnight, wandered about committing such acts as sucking the blood of men and beasts, and then returned to his grave at “the first crowing of the morning cock” (217-18). But other Eastern European beliefs allow the vampire to be about during some daylight hours. Calmet reports: “The public memorials of the years 1693 and 1694 speak of oupires ... which are seen in Poland, and above all in Russia. They make their appearance from noon to midnight, and come and suck the blood of living men or animals” (59). Cambridge scholar Robert Pashley reports that, in Crete and the Greek isles during the early nineteenth century, “many believe that, even in the day time, it is only once a week, on a Saturday, that he [the vampire] is allowed to occupy his burial place” (qt in Summers 221).

10. No Reflection of a Vampire Seen in a Mirror

“He throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect, as again Jonathan Harker observe.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 289)

Stoker has left us with no clues in research notes and papers as to where or how he came up with this idea. And recorded vampire folklore is mute on this subject.

There is at least one historical account about the shadow of a vampire. St Clair and Brophy report the Bulgarian belief that nine days after a person predisposed to become an obour is buried, he returns from the grave in a form invisible except that in the dark he gives off sparks and in the light he casts a shadow (see Summers 315-19).

There are anecdotes concerning superstitions that the shadow or reflection of a person was actually that person's soul. There was also an old belief that the vampire was a corpse that had been possessed by a demon after the person died and the soul had departed. Putting these two beliefs together could lead to the conclusion that the vampire would cast no shadow or reflection. This, of course, is all speculation.

11. Vampire Intellect and Social Sophistication

“But he is clever ... That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 291)

A current notion is that literary vampires such as Count Dracula are much smarter and more sophisticated than the corporeal revenants of folklore. In this argument, the latter are typically portrayed as being creatures with not even the sense to keep clean the burial clothes that they continue to wear. I must admit that many cases from the original folklore support such an impression. But there are significant exceptions.

In Romanian folklore, there are tales where vampires had the ability to dress up and behave in social circumstances quite well enough to seduce young women. I have already given two such examples above under “Blood Drinking”: the tale recorded in Ion Creanga and the tale recorded by Petrovici. Also, according to Murgoci, “If the vampire is not recognized as such, and rendered innocuous, it goes on with its evil ways for seven years. First it destroys its relations, then it destroys men and animals in its village and in its country, next it passes into another country, or to where another language is spoken, and becomes a man again. He marries, and has children, and the children, after they die, all become vampires and eat the relations of their mother” (327). Cremene clarifies this in his Mythologie du Vampire en Romanie where he states that, after seven to twelve years from the time of burial, the strigoi will have reached a stage where he is no longer tied to his grave, and will go forth in the world, moving to another village, marrying, and raising a family. At the beginning of this phase, the strigoi ceases to prey upon humans but instead attacks wild and domestic animals. But then he reaches the point where he can sustain himself on a normal diet and it is then that he goes off to another village where he passes as a normal mortal human. But even when the strigoi is living incognito in another village with another family and doesn't have to take nourishment from the living, he is still bound by the requirement of living for short periods of time as a vampire. Usually, these times are from Friday night until Sunday morning. During this time, he might find a resting place in a nearby cemetery or go cavorting with other strigoi. Being bound by this necessity of joining his own kind for this period each week, a strigoi in this stage of undeath must learn to be very cautious about his doings so as not to arouse suspicions about his true nature. This is a very hard thing to do for a long time. Also these strigoi are not affected by sickness or aging, so they have the reputation of being nomads. They wander into a village or town, take a wife, have children, and eventually find it necessary to wander again and make a new life somewhere else.

I have found other cases of advanced, sophisticated vampires from other southeastern European countries. In due fairness to Count Dracula I now give a quick review of these.

Matthew Bunson notes that in both Serbia and Albania it was believed that, if an undead vampire wasn't destroyed within thirty years after burial, it would become “human” and travel the world under a different name (156). He also says that in some regions of Albania it was believed that the vampire grew stronger with time until it reached a final stage where it is called a kukudh. It was then no longer required to return to its grave and could live in a home during the day, and typically it traveled to other lands as a merchant (148).

George Horton (115-17) records a tale about a particular vrykolakas, a Greek vampire, who reached an advanced stage where he could emigrate, marry, and have children after being in the grave and wandering about at night for only two weeks. The vampire then left his home island and traveled to another where he managed to set himself up as the lucrative owner of the general store, marry, and have children. But each week, from Friday night to Sunday, he returned to his grave on his home island. His wife became suspicious not only because of his weekend absences but also because he ate the raw organs of animals instead of normal cooked food, and because their children's bones were made of gelatin. (In southeast European folklore, there is the motif that the child of a vampire has bones made of gelatin.) The vampire's cover was completely blown after his living brother happened to come to the island and recognized him. There seem to be no living human victims in this tale until near the end where it is told that the vampire devoured his brother whole out of revenge for his betraying him. Immediately after, the vampire was consumed by a fire set by villagers to destroy him.

St Clair and Brophy (see Summers 315-19) report the Bulgarian belief that, nine days after a person predisposed to become an obour is buried, “he returns to upper earth in aeriform shape,” invisible except that in the dark he gives off sparks “like those from a flint and steel” and in the light he casts a shadow. His harm is confined to such activities as roaring out in a loud voice or calling out cottage dwellers in endearing terms and then beating them black and blue, and entering cottages to turn things topsy turvy like a poltergeist, spit blood on the floors, and smear cow dung everywhere. After forty days from burial, the obour arises from the grave in bodily form and is able to pass himself off as an ordinary mortal human being who lives “naturally and honestly.” They give as an example what was alleged to have happened beginning thirty years before in the village they themselves were now living in. It was then that a stranger arrived in the village, established himself, and married a wife. The newly-wed wife's only complaint was that every night he stayed out until dawn. It was soon noticed that there were many dead horses and cattle about, partially eaten. This came to an end, but then cattle grew sick and died, and it was noticed that the blood had been drained out of them. When the villagers learned from the stranger's wife that he was always out all night, they suspected that he was the vampire responsible for the animal deaths. They examined him and found that he had only one true nostril - a sure sign that he was a vampire. So, they bound him, took him to a hill outside the village, made a big fire of thorn bushes, and burned him alive.

12. Vampires of Noble Birth

“He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk...” - Van Helsing (Dracula 291)

There is of course no historic or folkloric connection between vampires and the historical Dracula, Vlad Tepes, a one-time Voivode (Prince) of Wallachia and son of the Voivode Vlad Dracul. And I know of no case where a person of Romanian nobility was ever thought to have become a vampire after his death. By attributing nobility to his vampire, Stoker was following an already established literary tradition. This includes such stories as The Vampyre by John Polidori (1819), and Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). But, looking into non-fiction beyond Romania, I have found two cases of Eastern European vampires who were of noble birth -- albeit one might be classified as a fairy tale, and the other might possibly be a fabricated report inspired by Stoker's Dracula.

Melton (479) gives a synopsis of a Polish folktale found in the collection A World Remembered: Tales and Lore of the Polish Land compiled by Marion Moore Coleman (Cherry Hill Books, 1965). The title is “The Vampire Princess”. The tale is about a poor man named Jacob and a king whose daughter had become a vampire. Near the end, the princess is put to true and final rest as the result of Jacob entering her tomb after she had left it, writing the name of The Holy Trinity on her coffin, and sprinkling it with holy water.

Dudley Wright (67-78) quotes an entire article, “An Authenticated Vampire Story” by Dr Franz Hartmann, originally published in the September 1909 issue of Occult Review. This article begins by referring to a report published on 10 June 1909 in the Vienna newspaper, Neues Wiener Journal, about the burning down of the castle of “Count B-- “ by the neighboring peasants. These peasants believed that the last Count B-- had become a vampire after his death and was the cause of an abnormally high number of deaths among their children. The castle was located in a desolated region of the Carpathian Mountains, and was once a fortification against the Turks. It had been abandoned except for one wing in which dwelled the caretaker and his wife.

12. Vampire Cadet School

“The Dracula were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.” - Van Helsing (Dracula 291)

Stoker learned about the Scholomance from the article “Transylvanian Superstitions” by Emily Gerard which he included among his research papers. Gerard wrote: “As I am on the subject of thunderstorms, I may as well here mention the Scholomance, or school supposed to exist somewhere in the heart of the mountains, and where all the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all imaginable magic spells and charms are taught by the devil in person. Only ten scholars are admitted at a time, and when the course of learning has expired and nine of them are released to return to their homes, the tenth scholar is detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon an Ismeju (dragon) he becomes henceforward the devil's aide-de-camp, and assists him in 'making the weather,' that is, in preparing thunderbolts. A small lake, immeasurably deep, lying high up among the mountains south of Hermanstadt, is supposed to be the cauldron where is brewed the thunder, and in fair weather the dragon sleeps beneath the waters” (136).

The Scholomance described by Gerard has nothing explicitly to do with vampires. But according to a belief found in parts of Eastern Europe, black magicians and others who deal with the devil during their mortal lives become vampires after death. According to Murgoci, his belief was once held in Romania: “Roumanians think that a man born with a caul becomes a vampire six weeks after his death; similarly people who were bad and who had done evil deeds in their lifetime, and more especially women who have had to do with the evil one and with spells and incantations” (329). In Romanian lore there are also quite explicit forms of supernatural training specifically for people still living who will become undead vampires after they die. The training is most often for those fated at birth to become vampires, but there are exceptions. The trainers include undead vampires. Murgoci writes: “People destined to become vampires after death may be able in life to send out their souls, and even their bodies, to wander at cross-roads with re-animated corpses. This type may be called the live vampire [strigoi viu] type. It merges into the ordinary witch or wizard, who can meet with other witches or wizards either in the body or as a spirit” (321). Furthermore, “Some Roumanians think that, if anyone is fated to be a vampire, they will become one whether they wish to or not ... Then during their lifetime, when they sleep, their soul comes out of their mouth as a little fly” (329). Later she notes that “It is said that the strigoi meet the moroii and varcolaci at the boundaries, and decide on their programme of evil for the coming year - who is to be killed and by whom. Elsewhere it is said that at these same boundaries, where neither the cuckoo sings nor the dog barks, the dead vampires meet the living ones and teach them all sorts of incantations and spells” (330). And again, “Vampires, whether live or dead, are generally born rather than made. However, a peasant from Strojineti said that there is a class of female vampires which are really only half vampire, that is to say, they are not vampires by birth, but have been taught to be vampires by the real ones, and shown how to do things. They put enchantments on cows, take the form of a girl's lover, and so kill her.... Such vampires are alive, but after they die they walk” (332).

Conclusion

No single vampire in folklore has all of the attributes of Stoker's Count Dracula. Yet the Count's attributes can be considered to be a collection drawn from many of these folkloric vampires. The one exception is Dracula's inability to cast a reflection. Known folklore regarding vampires is mute on that point. If Stoker himself were brought back to life today, he might be surprised to find how well he did in this survey!

Works Cited:

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death. Yale University Press, 1988.

Briggs, Katherine. An Encyclopedia of Fairies. Pantheon Books, 1976.

Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1993.

Calmet, Dom Augustine. Treatise on Vampires and Revenants. 1746. Ed Clive Leatherdale. Desert Island Books, 1995.

Cremene, Adrien. Mythologie du Vampire en Romanie. Editions du Rocher, 1981.

Gerard, Emily. “Transylvanian Superstitions.” The Nineteenth Century (July 1885): 128-144.

Hoyt, Olga. Lust for Blood. Scarborough House, 1984.

Horton, George. Home of Nymphs and Vampires: The Greek Isles. Bobbs-Merril Co., 1929.

Melton, J Gordon. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, First Edition. Visible Ink Press, 1994.

Murgoci, Agnes. “The Vampire in Roumania.” Folk-Lore, xxxvii, 4 (December, 1926).

Perkowski, Jan. “The Romanian Folkloric Vampire.” East European Quarterly xvi.3 (September, 1982).

Rodd, Reginald. The Custom and Lore of Modern Greece. 1892. Argonaut, 1968.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. The Essential Dracula. Ed Leonard Wolf. Plume/Penguin Books, 1993.

Summers, Montague. The Vampire in Europe. 1929. University Books, 1968.

Wright, Dudley. Vampires and Vampirism. 1914. Retitled The Book of Vampires. Dorset Press, 1987.

Acknowledgments

My special thanks to B.J. Kuehl for accessing Mythologie du Vampire en Romanie by Adrien Cremene at my request and providing me with her translations of passages from this work.

Author: Patrick Johnson

Feeding Safely

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:02:00 +0000

For any Sang vampire, feeding safely from a donor is of the utmost importance. We have many concerns that need to be addressed when forming a relationship with a new donor, and some that need to be re-addressed when with the donor(s) we may already have. The modern ages have many, many fluid born illnesses we must consider before proceeding.

First, never feed from a donor you don’t know well. I have made that mistake myself, and luckily – got away with it. Others have not been so lucky, or have free access to the kinds of tests one needs to take afterwards. AIDS, Hepatitis C and the like will transfer to the Vampire during the feed, if the donor carries the virii. Going to a well-known donor is much more safe and proves to not only provide a quality feed, but strengthens the bonds of friendship as well. Many Sang vamps have personal relationships with their donor(s), which makes safety less of a concern in the arena of illness.

If you are wishing to become involved with a new donor, the best thing is to hold off until certain medical tests are performed and the results returned. As noted above, HIV/AIDS and Hep C are the most common, however there are others that need to be done as well. A full Hep spectrum, for instance. While not all Hep Virii are transferred through blood, it is best if the donor is checked – he or she will become ill eventually and need to be treated. This is particularly for their own safety. Occasionally the doctor will request an Iron level test as well – another one more for the donor safety, but informative for the Sang as well – never, ever feed from an anemic donor! They NEED their own blood worse than you ever could.

Other tests include those for various STDs and are often included in the testing when one goes in for an HIV test. Most donors are uncomfortable approaching a medical professional with the information that they are going to provide fresh blood for a Sang vampire…it’s easier, and more accepted unfortunately, to state one has been engaging in unprotected sex. For women, it’s a Pap Smear and a couple of small vials of blood…for men it’s a penile swab and the blood. My medical contact has not confirmed this – I’m going on past experiences on having the tests performed, and what a male friend explained to me.

Never feed from a donor who is undergoing serious medical treatment. They need their own resources for healing themselves; not to mention the fact that their treatments don’t belong in your body. Almost all drugs will stay in the bloodstream for some time, and may well cross to you during the feed. For example, D was on painkillers at one point, and the transfer of that medicine left me woozy for some time. It was not worth the feed, to tell the truth, I felt worse afterwards than I had before. Had I known at the time that the medicine he was receiving was time release and not immediately absorbed, I would not have fed at all. Make sure your donor knows what his/her physical health is, and what drugs they are taking!

More on this subject will come as I complete the research and discussions with my friend – the nurse. Thankfully, she understands vampirism otherwise it could have been an interesting few weeks!

Author: Jodi Wetherup
Source: Suite101

Sanguine Vampires

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:00:00 +0000

An explanation of the word FETISH as used in this article: The word 'fetish' means 'magical implement' - A Fetish is used in magic, for healing and many other positive things. The word in modern day usage has more often come to mean a deviant behavior, a sexual act to help gain arousal or completion. With a blood fetish, it means someone who needs the presence of blood during the sexual act, either their own or that of a partner. The bloodist is usually connected to bondage or S&M, where the entire experience is based on power and control for both, or either, of the participants. A Fetishist can be a Bloodist, but a Bloodist may not be a Vampire.

A Sanguine is a vampire who partakes of human or animal blood, for the purpose of taking in its energy. Anyone who partakes of the blood of another is not necessarily a Sanguine. Bloodists often call themselves vampires or are called vampires by outsiders and the uninformed. Again, the word Bloodist, as used here, is an umbrella term to them meaning a human who intakes blood.

Bloodists and Fetishists are not real vampires.

They, Bloodists, are only humans who enjoy feeding from one another. They are not vampires and they do not necessarily have the psychological problems so often attributed to sexual fetishists.

Bloodists do not need blood to survive. They simply have made a life style out of sharing one another's blood for pleasure, intimacy or some other form of bonding and closeness. Bloodists do often have both blood and sex, or just the 'blooding' which in many cases replaces the passion of sex itself. Again, I remind you that these are not vampires.

Sanguines are vampires and obtain their blood from donors and friends. Usually they do so by slicing with a razor, scalpel or other device included in the design of various jewelry. Blood pumps and needles are also used but biting is seldom employed by Sanguines. Most often these arrangements are consensual, but very dangerous. Such practices can lead to infections and transmitted illnesses of the blood. There are many things just as bad as AIDS which can be carried in the blood of an infected person. Illnesses that lay dormant, then strike a few months or years from now ... all just as serious and many just as deadly. And all of which can be passed on by you ... if you contract them without knowing it.

The safest thing is to not take part in Sanguine vampirism, but if you must then be sure you and your blood partners have valid lab tests before you proceed. Go with that person so you can be sure it is their actual blood and urine samples that are given to the lab. If you are going to use a razor or needle, be sure it is sterilized with alcohol and heat before and after every usage. Use disposable needles, do not share used needles and do not use a razor that is not completely cleaned of blood each and every time. But the best way to stay safe is to keep away. Don't even begin.

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Psychic Vampires

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Psi-Vamps

Psi-Vamps are people who have the ability to drain away energy in all of its forms. To do so enhances their mental and physical energies as normal feeding would to regular Vampires. A Psi-Vamp may or may not be psychic in the normal sense, but this use of the terminology means the psychic ability to drain another of energy or life forces. It also means such an individual can drain thoughts, emotions, life force, mental and physical strengths.

About 50 percent of Psi-Vamps do so automatically without intending to or even realizing that they are doing so. Everyone has known or shall know a person like this, be it a sibling, lover, relative or friend. No matter how little time you spend with them you always feel tired and weak when they leave. The other 50 percent do so with intent. Some do so just to increase their own power, while others do so as a challenge --- a sort of game, to see how much they can take.

Like Vampires, Psi-Vamps can sense another of their kind and sometimes attack mentally just to see if the victim feels it or reacts to it. They enjoy the hunt and love the challenge when the victim feels it and tries to block or responds in kind. Then it becomes more than a Battle of Wills.

There is no magic attached to this, it is pure mental and psychic energy and force of will. One of the prevailing beliefs is that the Psi-Vamp attacks from the Astral Plane ... controlling the Astral State and its Astral Body. Another view is that the Psi-Vamp is in some way ill or unable to maintain it’s own energy levels for some reason, so it draws energy either unconsciously or deliberately from another to sustain it’s own energies. This does not mean the Psi-Vamp or Symbiot is a creature or spirit or anything else living or originating on the psychic plane. By doing so he/she can launch an attack upon the Astral Body of anyone else by eliminating negative energy, such as can be seen in auras, the Psi-Vamp can actually heal.

Some Psi-Vamps care very little that the energies they are draining could seriously hurt their prey. Especially if the victim is weak from illness, injury or is in a diminished mental state due to mental illness, physical illness or severe depression. By feeding on these victims, the loss of both physical and mental energies to the extreme, could cause death.

It is believed that some very rare Psi-Vamps try to make themselves immortal by preventing the 'second death'. The second death being the death of the Astral Body shortly after the death of the physical body.

It is also generally believed, that in these rare instances, if this state of increased physical energy to the astral body is sufficient, the astral body of the Psi-Vamp could possibly be freed, upon the death of the physical body and yet maintain its own separate 'living' (i.e.: continuing) astral state. In so doing, the astral body of the Psi-Vamp would then be freed to continue the drawing off of energies of both astral and physical bodies of those remaining alive. In a sense, gaining a true immortality.

Involuntary Psi-Vamps often do not realize they are draining energies of those around them. It is thought that these people do so on a non-conscious level. In many cases the involuntary Psi-Vamp is, in some way, ill or in some sort of diminished capacity. The energies being drawn from those around may be an automatic procedure of their own astral bodies in an effort to gain strength to preserve or create a more healthful state for its own physical body.

Symbiotics

This is perhaps the other side of the coin, as Symbiotics, or Symbiosis, is a form of Psi-Vamp. But instead of feeding off of the life force, and physical and mental energies, this Vampire feeds off of the spiritual energies and electro-bio-chemical energy found in a person's aura. Feeding off this energy can also have a negative effect on the source. However, this Vampire is known for draining the negative energies away from or off of the aura, allowing these energies to be naturally replaced by the person's own individual auric replacements.

Example: A person is ill or weak, his aura is black, grey or greenish yellow, or perhaps purple. If a Symbiotic begins to drain off this energy, the person's own recuperative powers become stronger and the physical, mental or spiritual healing may proceed at a faster pace.

Most Symbiotics do what they do with intent -- unlike their cousin the Psi-Vamp, only a few do so unawares. Psi-Vamp is short for Psychic Vampire. Again, a Symbiotic may be a real Vampire ie, Classical, Inheritor, Night-timer, etc. or a human. The term Vampire is used in this case mainly because there is a draining or feeding, even though most regular Vampires are not Symbiotics or Psi-Vamps. Any human may be a Symbiotic or Psi-Vamp. The victims are not usually aware of a Symbiotic, as the results usually makes the so called victim feel much better. Most Psychic Vampires and Symbiotics are not blood feeders, and therefore are not generally considered true Vampires. However, many are Bloodists or viral Vampires, though most are human in nature.

The term psychic, as in having ESP or other psychically related qualities, does not in this instance refer to a Psi-Vamp. Most humans are indeed psychic to some extent, in the normal use of the word. Because they are human, Psi-Vamps and Symbiotics may indeed also display some degree of psychic ability but, as referred to the term Psi-Vamp or Psychic Vampire does not relate to this characteristic. Most Psi-Vamps can see auras easily, or may be trained to do so. Where in general, most bloodist Vampires do not have that capability but may be able to develop it. Bloodist Vampires, on the other hand, do tend to be highly psychic in the true sense of the term, as a normal function of their being. Psychic Vampires tend to be human, have normal human life spans and, except where already discussed, are not immortal in the normal sense of the word.

As with humans, and vampires, Psi-Vamps come in all types of personalities. There are good, there are games-players, and there are evil people, just as with any other society. Most Psi-Vamps are intentional, for one reason or another, but do not seek to harm anyone in their efforts to gain energy to sustain themselves. Many automatic Psi-Vamps desperately wish to stop draining others but it is something they can’t control, and if they could control it, or stop it, it could be detrimental to their health. The majority of Psi-vamps and symbiots should be seen in a positive light, because most of all they are people, just like everyone else.

Author: Catherene / NightPoe

Psychic Vampire Attack & Defense

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:58:00 +0000

You’re sitting at a night club talking to your friends and having drinks. A man comes to sit next to you at the bar. You ignore him and then he seems to just disappear as quickly as he came. All of a sudden you feel tired and drained. But wasn't it just a moment ago that you were full of energy enjoying yourself? More than likely you have been subject to a psychic vampire attack and didn’t even know it. How do you know if you have been subject to a psychic attack and how do you protect yourself? Here are a few of the symptoms along with some defense techniques to hopefully help ward you against unwanted energy drain.

Some of the most common symptoms of a psychic attack are a significant energy loss, chronic fatigue, difficulty concentrating, sleep disturbances, irritability, depressed mood, excessive anxiety, sexual indifference and even impaired memory.

One known method of protection form energy drain is by the use of a charged quartz crystal. The first thing you are going to want to do after you have chosen a crystal is to remove it first of all previous energies. To do this simply hold the crystal under running water and let it air dry on a towel. Once your crystal has dried completely hold the crystal in your left hand and while stroking it with your right picture in your mind your body surrounded by a white light.

This is your protective shield. Repeat three times while stroking your crystal and holding the image,” This is my shield and I am protected. With this crystal all attacks are rejected.” Now your crystal is charged and ready for use. Carry it with you always preferably in a small pouch in your pocket. You will however need to recharge your crystal at least once a month.

Another known method of protection and probably the most used is visualization. Using your mind to create images, you are able to change your own aura which will help to shield you from psychic attack. Just as you did in the above technique you will need to picture yourself surrounded buy a white glowing light. This will balance your aura and help to prevent energy drain.

Even with the two methods of protection listed in this article the only true way to defend yourself and stop an attack is to leave the situation as quickly as possible. Pay attention to your bodies reactions when you are out in public. If you start to experience any of the above described symptoms, create your auric shield and leave the situation as soon as possible.

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