Episode 30: Deep and Twisted Roots

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In the early 1990s, two boys were playing on a gravel hill near an old abandoned mine outside of Griswold, Connecticut.

Kids do the oddest things to stave off boredom, so Playing on a hill covered in small rocks doesn't really surprise me.

And my guess is, they were having a blast.

That is, until one of them dislodged two larger rocks.

But when the rocks tumbled free and rolled down the hill, both boys noticed something odd about them.

They were nearly identical in shape, and that shape was eerily familiar.

They headed down the hill one last time to take a closer look, and that's when they realized what they'd found.

Skulls

At first, the local police were brought in to investigate the possibility of an unknown serial killer.

That many bodies all in one place was never a good sign.

But it became obvious very quickly that the real experts they needed were, in fact, archaeologists.

And they were right.

In the end, 29 graves were discovered in what turned out to be the remnants of a forgotten cemetery.

Time and the elements had slowly eroded away the graveyard, and the contents had been swallowed by the gravel.

Many skeletons were still in their caskets, though, and it was inside one of them, marked with brass tacks to form the initials of the occupant, that something unusual was discovered.

Long ago, it seems, someone had opened this casket shortly after burial and had then made changes to the body.

Specifically, they'd removed both femurs, the bones of the thigh, and placed them across the chest.

Then, moving some of the ribs and the breastbone out of the way, they placed the skull above them.

It was a real-life skull and crossbones, and its presence hinted at something darker.

The skeleton, you see, wasn't just the remains of an ordinary early settler of the area.

This man was different, and the people who buried him knew it.

According to them, he had been a vampire.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

While it might be a surprise to some people, graves like the one in Griswold are actually quite common.

Today, we live in the Brahm Stoker era of vampires, so our expectations and imagery are highly influenced by his novel novel and the world it evokes.

The Victorian gentleman in dark cloaks, mysterious castles, sharp fangs protruding over blood-red lips.

But the white face and red lips started life as nothing more than stage makeup, an artifact from a 1924 theatrical production of the novel called Count Dracula.

Another feature we associate with Dracula, his high collar, also started there.

With wires attached to the points of the collar, the actor actor playing Dracula could turn his back on the audience and drop through a trapdoor, leaving an empty cape behind to fall on the floor moments later.

The true myth of the vampire, though, is far older than Stoker.

It's an ancient tree with deep and twisted roots.

As hard as it is for popular culture to fathom, the legend of the vampire and the people who hunt it actually predate Dracula by centuries.

Just a little further into the past from Brom Stoker, in the cradle of what would one day become the United States, the people of New England were identifying vampire activity in their own towns and villages, and then assembling teams of people to deal with what they perceived as a threat.

It turns out that Griswold was one of those communities.

According to the archaeologist that studied the 29 graves, A vast majority of them were contemporary to the vampire's burial, and most of those showed signs of an illness.

Tuberculosis is the most likely guess.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why the people did what they did.

The folklore was clear.

The first to die from an illness was usually the cause of the outbreak that followed.

Patient Zero might be in the grave, sure, but they were still at work, slowly draining the lives of the others.

Because of this belief, Bodies all across the Northeast were routinely exhumed and destroyed in one way or another.

In many ways, it was as if the old superstitions were clawing their way out of the depths of the past to haunt the living.

The details of another case from Stafford, Connecticut in the late 1870s illustrate the ritual perfectly.

After a family there lost five of their six daughters to illness, the first to have passed away was dug up and examined.

This is what was recorded about the event.

Exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs, they wrote, still fresh and living, encased in rotten and slimy integuments, and in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastening to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered.

This sort of macabre community event happened frequently in places like Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Hampshire, and even Ontario, Canada.

And longtime listeners of lore will of course remember the subject of the very first episode and how the family of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island exhumed her body after others died, doing a very similar thing.

Mercy Brown wasn't the first American vampire though.

As far as we can tell, that honor goes to the wife of Isaac Burton of Manchester, Vermont, all the way back in 1793.

And for as chilling and dark as the exhumation of Mercy Brown might have been, the Burton incident puts that story to shame.

Captain Isaac Burton married Rachel Harris in 1789, but their marriage was brief.

Within months of the wedding, Rachel took sick with tuberculosis, what was then called consumption, because of the way the disease seemed to waste the person away, as if they were being consumed by something unseen.

Rachel soon died, leaving her husband a young widower.

But that didn't last long.

Burton married again in April of 1791, this time to a woman named Hulda Powell.

But again, within just two years of their marriage, Burton's new bride became ill.

Friends and neighbors started to whisper, and as people are prone to do, they began to try and draw conclusions.

Unanswered questions bother us, so we tend to look for reasons, and the people of Manchester thought they knew why Hulda was sick.

Although Isaac's wife, Rachel, had been dead for nearly three years, the people of Manchester suggested that she was the cause.

Clearly, from her new home in the graveyard, she was draining the life from her husband's new bride.

With Burton's permission, the town prepared to exhume her and end the curse.

The town blacksmith brought a portable forge to the gravesite.

and nearly a thousand people gathered there to watch the grim ceremony unfold.

Rachel's liver, heart, and lungs were all removed from her corpse and then reduced to ashes.

Sadly though, Holda Burton never recovered, and she died a few months later.

This ancient ritual, as far as the people of Manchester, Vermont were concerned, had somehow failed them.

They did what they had been taught to do.

as unpleasant as it must have been.

And yet, it hadn't worked.

Which was odd, because that hadn't always been the case.

A lot of what we think we know about the roots of the vampire legend is thanks to Dracula, the novel by Brom Stoker.

Most of us know the basics.

Stoker built a mythology around a historical figure from the 5th century, named Vlad III.

Vlad was from the kingdom of Wallachia, now part of modern-day Romania.

Vlad had two titles.

Vlad Tepes, which meant the impaler, referred to his brutal military tactics in defense of his country.

The other, Vlad Dracul, or the Dragon, referred to his membership in the Order of the Dragon, a military order founded to protect Christian Europe from the armies of the invading Ottoman Empire.

But Bram Stoker never traveled to Romania.

The castle that he describes as the home of Dracula, a real-life fortress known as Brand Castle, was just an image he found in a book that he felt captured the mood he was aiming for.

Brand Castle, as far as historians can tell, has no connection to Vlad III whatsoever.

The notion of a vampire, or at least of an undead creature that feeds on the living, does have roots in the area, though.

Stoker was close, but he missed the mark by a little more than 300 miles.

The real roots of the legend, according to most historians, can be found in modern-day Serbia.

Serbia of today sits at the southwestern corner of Romania, just south of Hungary.

Between 1718 and 1739, the country passed briefly from the hands of the Ottoman Empire to the control of the Austrians.

Because of its place between these two empires, the land was devastated by war and destruction, and people were frequently moved around in service to the military.

And as is often the case, when people cross borders, so do ideas.

Peter Vloglievich was a Serbian peasant in the village of Kisijevo in the early 1700s.

Not much is known about his life, but we do know that he was married and had at least one son.

And in 1725, through causes unknown, Peter Peter died at the age of 62.

In most stories, that's the end.

But not here.

You probably knew that though, didn't you?

In the eight days that followed Peter's death, other people in the village began to pass away.

Nine of them, in fact.

And all of them made startling claims on their deathbeds.

Details that seemed impossible to prove, but were somehow the same in each case.

Each person was adamant that Peter Vloglievich, their recently deceased neighbor, had come to them in the night and attacked them.

Peter's widow even made the startling claim that her dead husband had actually walked into her home and asked for, of all things, his shoes.

She believed so strongly in this visit that she moved to another village to avoid future visits.

The rest of the people of Kisievo took notice.

Something had to be done, and that would begin with digging up Peter's corpse.

Inside the coffin, they found Peter's body to be remarkably preserved.

Some noticed how the man's nails and hair had grown.

Others remarked on the condition of his skin, which was flush and bright, not pale.

It wasn't natural, they said, and something had to be done.

They turned to a man named Frombold, a local representative of the Austrian government.

and together with the help of a priest, he examined the body for himself.

In his written report, he confirmed the earlier findings and added his observation that fresh blood could be seen inside Peter's mouth.

Grumbauld describes how the people of the village were overcome with fear and outrage and how they proceeded to drive a wooden stake through the corpse's heart.

Then, still afraid of what the creature might be able to do to them in the future, the people burned the body.

Grumbold's report details all of it, but he also makes the disclaimer that he wasn't responsible for the villagers' actions.

He said that it was fear that drove them to it, nothing more.

Peter's story was powerful, and it created a panic that quickly spread throughout the region.

It was the first event of its kind in history to be recorded in official government documents, but that report was still missing an official cause.

Without it, the stories might have died where they started.

But then, just a year later, something happened, and the legend has never been the same.

Arnold Powell was a former soldier, one of the many men transplanted by the Austrian government in an effort to defend and police their newly acquired territory.

No one is sure where he was born, but his final years were spent in a Serbian village along the Great Moreva River, near Parisin.

In his post-war life, Arnold became a farmer, and he frequently told stories from days gone by.

In one such story, Arnold claimed that he had been attacked by a vampire years before while living in Kosovo.

He survived, but the injury continued to plague him until he finally took action.

He said that he cured himself by eating soil from the grave of the suspected vampire.

Then, after digging up the vampire's body, he collected some of its blood and smeared it on himself.

And that was it.

According to Arnold and the folklore that drove him to it, he was cured.

When he died in a farming accident in 1726, though, people began to wonder.

Because within a month of his death, at least four other people in town complained that Arnold had visited them in the night, and attacked them.

When those people died, the villagers began to whisper in fear.

They remembered Arnold's stories.

Stories of being attacked by a vampire, of taking on the disease himself, stories of his own attempt to cure himself.

But what if it hadn't worked?

Out of suspicion and doubt, they decided to exhume his body and examine it.

Here, for what was most likely the first time in recorded history, the story of the vampire was taking on the form of a communicable disease, transmitted from person to person through biting.

This might seem obvious to us now, but we've all grown up with the legend fully formed.

To the people of this small Serbian village, though, this was something new and horrific.

What they found seemed like conclusive evidence, too.

Fresh skin, new nails, longer hair and beard.

Arnold even had blood in his mouth.

Putting ourselves in their context, it's easy to see how they might have been chilled with fear.

So, they drove a stake through his heart.

One witness claimed that, as the stake pierced the corpse's chest, the body groaned and bled.

Unsure of what else to do, they burned the body.

And then they did the same to the four who had died after claiming Arnold attacked them.

They covered all their bases, so to speak, and then walked away.

Five years later, though, another outbreak spread through the village.

We know this because so many people died that the Austrian government sent a team of military physicians from Belgrade to investigate the situation.

These men, led by two officials named Glasser and Flukinger, were special though, because they were trained in communicable diseases.

Which was a good thing.

By January 7th of 1731, just eight weeks after the beginning of the outbreak, 17 people had died.

At first, Glasser had looked for signs of a contagious disease, but came up empty-handed.

He noted signs of mild malnutrition, but there was nothing deadly that could be found.

The clock was ticking, though.

The villagers were living in such fear that they had been gathering together into large groups each night.

taking turns keeping watch for the creatures they believed were responsible.

They even threatened to pack up and move elsewhere.

Something needed to be done, and quickly.

Thankfully, there were suspects.

The first was a young woman named Stanna, a recent newcomer to the village who had died during childbirth early on in the outbreak.

It seemed to have been a sickness that took her life, but there were other clues.

Stanna had confessed to smearing vampire blood on herself years before as protection.

But that, the villagers claimed, had backfired and most likely turned her into one instead.

The other suspect was an older woman named Milika.

She was also from another part of Serbia and had arrived shortly after Arnold's death.

Like so many others, she had a history.

Neighbors claimed that she was a good woman who never did anything intentionally wicked, but she had told them once of how she'd eaten meat from a sheep killed by a vampire.

And that seemed like evidence enough to push the investigation to go deeper.

Literally.

Literally.

With permission from Belgrade, Glasser and the villagers exhumed all of the recently deceased, opening their coffins for a full examination.

And while logic and science should have prevailed in a situation like that, what they found only deepened their belief in the supernatural.

Of the 17 bodies, only five appeared normal, in that they had begun to decay in a manner that should be expected.

These were reburied and considered safe.

But it was the other 12 that alarmed the villagers and the government men alike, because these bodies were still fresh.

In the report filed in Belgrade in January of 1732, assigned by all five of the government physicians who witnessed the exhumations, these 12 bodies were completely untouched by decay.

Organs still held fresh blood, their skin was healthy and firm, and new nails and hair had grown since burial.

These are all normal occurrences as we understand decomposition today, but three centuries ago, it was less about science and more about superstition.

This didn't seem normal to them, and so when the physicians wrote their report, they used a term that, until that very moment, had never appeared in any historical account of such a case.

They described the bodies as vampiric.

In the face of unanswered questions, the only conclusion they could commit to was that each of the 12 bodies had been found in a vampiric condition.

With that, the villagers did what their tradition demanded.

They removed the heads from each corpse, gathered all the remains into a pile, and then burned the whole thing.

The threat to the village was finally dead and gone.

But it was too late.

Something new had been born.

Something more powerful than a monster.

Something that lives centuries and spreads like fire.

A legend.

Many aspects of folklore haven't fared too well under the critical eye of science.

Today, we have a much deeper understanding of how illness and disease really works.

And while experts are still careful to explain that every corpse decomposes in a slightly unique way, we have a better grasp of the full picture now than any previous time in history.

Answers, when we can find them, come as a relief.

It's safe to say that we don't have to fear a vampiric infection when the people around us get sick today, but there were still people at the center of these ancient stories.

Normal folk like you and me, who simply wanted to do what was right.

We might do it differently today, but it's hard to fault them for trying.

Answers don't kill every myth, though.

Vampire stories, like their immortal subjects, have simply refused to die.

In fact, they can still be found if you know where to look for them.

In the small Romanian village of Maritina de Sus, near the southwestern corner that borders Bulgaria and Serbia, authorities were called in to investigate an illegal exhumation.

But this wasn't 1704 or even 1804.

This happened just a decade ago.

Petratoma had been the clan leader there in the village, but after a lifetime of illness and hard drinking, his accidental death in the field almost came as a relief to his family and friends.

That's how they put it, at least.

So when he was buried in December of 2003, the community moved on.

But individuals from Petra's family began to get sick.

First, it was his niece, Mirella Marinescu.

She complained that her uncle had attacked her in her dreams.

Her husband made the same claim, and both offered their illness as proof.

Even their infant child was not well.

Thankfully, The elders of the village immediately knew why.

In response to her story, six men gathered together one evening in early 2004.

They entered the local graveyard close to midnight and then traveled to the burial site of Petritoma.

Using hammers and chisels, they broke through the stone slab that covered the grave and then moved the pieces aside.

They drank as they worked.

Can you really blame them?

They were opening the grave of a recently deceased member of their community.

But I think it was more than that.

In their minds, they were putting their lives in danger.

Because there, inside the grave they had just uncovered, lay the stuff of nightmares.

A vampire.

What these men did next will sound strangely familiar, but to them it was simply the continuation of centuries of tradition.

They cut open the body using a knife and a saw.

They pried the ribs apart with a pitchfork, and then cut out the heart.

According to one of the men who was there, when the heart was removed, they found it full of fresh blood.

Proof, to them at least, that Petra had been feeding on the village.

When they pulled it free, the witness said that the body audibly sighed and then went limp.

It's hard to prove something that six incredibly superstitious men, men who had been drinking all night, mind you, claimed they witnessed in a dark cemetery.

To them, it was pure, unaltered truth.

They then used the pitchfork to carry the heart out of the cemetery and across the road to a field, where they set it on fire.

Once it was burned completely, they collected the ashes and funneled them into a bottle of water.

They offered this tonic to the sick family, who willingly drank it.

It was, after all, what they had been taught to do.

And amazingly, everyone recovered.

No one died of whatever illness they were suffering from, and no one reported visits from Petratoma after that.

In their mind, the nightmare was over.

These men had saved their lives.

Maybe something evil and contagious has survived for centuries after all, spreading across borders and oceans.

It certainly left a trail of horrific events in its wake, and it's influenced countless tales and superstitions, all of which seem to point to a real-life cause.

But far from being unique to Serbia or Romania, this thing is global.

And as if that weren't enough, this horrible, ageless monster is, and always has been, right inside each of us.

Like a vampiric curse, we carry it in our blood.

But it's probably not what you'd expect.

It's fear.

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This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place: theworldoflore.com/slash now.

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And as always, thanks for listening.

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