Days when vampires were a real nightmare

SWOOPING around with ghostly white skin and sucking human blood, vampires are the stuff of Gothic novels and horror films.

But scientists once thought they were real creatures infesting peasant villages in Eastern Europe.

Researchers in the 1600s and 1700s produced widely- read papers about the ‘undead’ – which were taken very seriously, according to an academic.

Nick Groom, Professor of English at Exeter University, said: ‘Vampirism was a serious subject of research: on the one hand it was a terrifying medical disorder, on the other a mass delusion fostered by wretched social conditions.’

Medical authorities in the 1670s wrote Latin treatises about ‘grave eating’ where the undead were dug up to find they had been feasting on their own bodies, he said.

Sightings of vampires were reported in journals in Poland and Russia in the 1690s. The graves of the ‘undead’ were dug up and were said to be swimming in blood. Local people advised making

‘Sucking the blood of the living’

bread from this blood to protect against ‘contracting vampirism’.

Physicians in the 1730s recorded the physical symptoms of vampire attacks, from shivering and nausea to spasms, nightmares and death. By that time the London press had reported that in Hungary there were ‘dead bodies sucking the blood of the living, for the latter visibly dry up, while the former are filled with blood’.

But as vampires failed to materialise, they gradually became a feature of novels instead, according to Professor Groom, whose research is published by Cambridge University Press as part of a project on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Professor Groom said passages in Dracula mirror the medical descriptions of vampires.

The undead then became increasingly prevalent in popular culture in the 18th century – for example political pundits described tax as a way to gratify the ‘fat gutted vampire’ that was the government.