Vampire Origins – Mythical Beasts

Vampires. Nightmarish mythical monsters that return from the dead to feast on human blood. The medieval vampire is quite different from this twilight image that we have of vampires. They would kill your children, they would eat your cow. They were pretty disgusting, really. Vampires suck the life force from their victims, who also become one of the undead. By drinking your blood, vampires were taking your soul. What really inspired the idea of vampires? And why were our ancestors so convinced they were real? They mutilated corpses to keep themselves safe. The stake doesn't actually kill the vampire, the stake keeps the vampire confined to its coffin. Now experts go beyond vampire tales and movies. They use new science and archaeology to finally reveal the truth behind this terrifying myth. Something incredibly strange happened here. People were dying one after another. Their mission? To uncover the reasons why the vampire legend began. Bulgaria, Eastern Europe. A land of mountains, forests, and terrifying superstitions. Here, just outside the ancient city of Hyperikon, archaeologists dig an extraordinary site. A graveyard said to contain one of the most famous monsters of all time. The vampire. We are opening at the moment 130 graves. Bodies were buried in unusual way. People believed they could be vampires. Even today, the idea of vampires is terrifying. Around the world, even as late as 2010, people were being murdered on the streets because their neighbors thought they were vampires. But where did our modern understanding of the vampire come from? This blood-sucking beast that could even change shape at will. When you think about vampires, the first idea that comes to mind, of course, is Dracula. But Dracula is more of a recent character. A clue to the origins of the myth lies with one of the earliest accounts of an attack. In 1728, the death of a Serbian man called Arnold Paule triggers a series of strange events. People start seeing Paule roaming the village at night. They claim he visits people in their bedrooms. Four end up dead. The villagers fear Paule has risen from the grave. They dig up his coffin and find Paule looking as fresh as the day he died. As they drive a stake through his heart, he lets out a terrible moan. Stories like this reveal that our ancestors believed that vampires were simply corpses that refused to die. Far removed from the bat-like creatures of Dracula films. People thought that vampires were already dead, so it was impossible to kill them. What you had to do was incapacitate them somehow. The stake doesn't kill the vampire, the stake keeps the vampire in the coffin. What inspired this belief in the undead? Modern-day vampire hunter Ivo Maiv searches for evidence that so-called vampire stakings really did take place. We expect to find some skeletons here just because this area looks like a graveyard. The ritual for anti-vampires are popular among these people here. Ivo and the team investigate the remains at a site occupied in the Middle Ages. Medieval burials from this region contain strange mutilated corpses. Excavation leader Professor Nikolai Ovcharov examines one skeleton buried 800 years ago. Nikolai uncovers evidence of just how desperate people were to pin down this corpse. He pulls out a shocking object, an iron stake. The presence of a sharp farm tool suggests that local people impaled this body in its grave. People here were terrified that this person could become a real-life vampire. But staking corpses was just one way that they hoped to protect themselves. The body in this grave was settled in that direction. Feet were here, head were here. Ivo thinks this wall was built as an added insurance against vampires. If this body is settled in that direction, obviously the wall was built over the body. This is one more guarantee that the body cannot arise. Eastern Europeans were taking no chances when it came to vampires. They had a huge tool kit to lock them in their graves. To stop vampires from walking, they tied the corpses' legs together or simply cut them off. To pin the corpse to the ground, they placed a heavy stone on the chest or hammered in a stake, and a sickle across the neck would decapitate the vampire if it reared its head. People hoped that with all these measures, the dead would definitely stay dead. Preventing a suspected vampire rising from its grave was not a job for the squeamish. But just how difficult was it to impair the corpse? Professor Sarah Hainsworth, one of the world's leading experts in forensic engineering, investigates. My research is on the forces required for stabbing with various implements that you find in stabbing events. What we're interested in is how much force was required to stake a human body. Sarah will use a drop tower to plunge a stake into a set of pork ribs. It'll analyse the average force needed to penetrate a corpse, like the one from Bulgaria. Using the pork ribs gives us a feel for what it might have been like to stake a human body. Sarah prepares the mechanism. Will the wooden stake penetrate the rib cage? It's actually hit between two ribs and it's pushed the ribs, separated the ribs, so we haven't actually penetrated into the cartilage. The wooden stake fails to travel all the way through the ribs. Sarah's experiment shows that several very strong blows would have been needed. This was no easy job. To do it, people must have been terrified and determined. But why were people so convinced that the dead really were rising from the grave? Historian Stephen Curtis thinks a clue may lie here in London, deep inside the Houses of Parliament. He discovers official records that suggest these fears had travelled to England. The case here talks about a man called Price in 1786. He was put in the fields and a stake driven through his body. Mary Turrell buried in the high road with a stake driven through her body in the presence of a vast concourse of people. The records suggest that fear of wandering corpses had become a widespread phenomenon. People believed that vampirism and vampires were very much a kind of Eastern European medieval notion and a lot of the superstitions around it can only really be seen in the kind of small villages you get in vampire films and literature. But actually, some of the processes were taking place in England into the 19th century. Stakings were not the hidden acts of desperate people. They were carried out in public. From 1812, the man who called himself John William was found white dead. The coroner's inquest pronounced the act self-murder. It is said he will be buried near the spot where the murders were committed and a stake driven through his body. Staking corpses became so common that the British government started to worry. It introduced legislation to ban it. It seems that in 1823, when Act of Parliament actually outlaws the ritualistic burial of people who were found to have committed suicide and outlaws the staking of the body. So why was there such fear of the undead here? Stephen finds a common link between all of the cases. In each one, the dead person had committed suicide. 1785, the man was found hanging in his cell. The coroner's inquest brought in their verdict, self-murder, and he was buried under stake driven through his body. Suicide was believed to be a sin. Those who took their own lives were buried on the fringes of society, their souls doomed to wander for eternity. Most people would be buried in a churchyard, but because the act of suicide was an act against God, you had to be buried somewhere else. Crossroads was the safest place because any returning ghost could no longer find their way back home either. Stephen believes that this idea of a lost soul is key to understanding the vampire myth. This kind of treatment of the body of suicide wasn't just condoned by the judicial process, but was demanded and expected. Ritual treatment of suicide connects things so closely to the wider vampire myth. Suicide was just one of the ways of becoming lost on the way to the afterlife. In Bulgaria, Ivo Maiv thinks that this idea of the restless soul explains some of the vampire burials at Peperikon. After death, the body separates from the soul, and the soul is free to go to the afterlife world. The body stays here. Some people buried their dead relatives with coins. They believed that a soul needed a pay for a passage to the afterlife. This coin was found in a grave in the last 10 days. They put these coins in the mouth because the mouth is where the soul can leave the body. But as in England, people believed that a troubled soul could sometimes return to a corpse and attack the living. If the soul continued to live in a dead body, it could provoke fires, natural disasters, or unknown sicknesses. Some people turned their homes into fortresses against the undead. When their loved ones died, they removed their corpses through the window and then boarded it up. Should that person turn into a vampire, they'd be unable to get back in. To protect the main entrance, people hung pungent garlic wreaths over the front door and put sharp thorny branches on the doorstep. To distract vampires who broke through the defenses, people scattered seeds around the house because they believed vampires were compelled to count them. If restless souls made corpses rise, why were the undead hungry for human blood? At the core of every vampire story is this belief that vampires can survive on human blood alone. The more blood they drink, the more powerful they become. Where did the idea of a beast that lives solely off blood come from? Comparative anatomist Dr. Joy Reitenberg searches for evidence in the animal kingdom. She knows of only one creature that fits the bill. There are lots of animals that drink blood. Mosquitoes, leeches, ticks. But there's only one mammal that does so exclusively, and that is the vampire bat. How does this creature attack its victims? They have exquisite sensors on the front of their face. These sensors can detect changes in temperature. If you have blood vessels that are really close to the skin, they radiate heat, they sense it, and they hone in to those blood vessels, those veins that are right near the surface. Then, just like a vampire, it unleashes its most terrifying weapon. If you look very carefully at the skull, you'll see it has some very big teeth. They're razor sharp, very, very sharp teeth. They make a cut, blood comes out, and they lick that up in their tongue. The vampire bat actually has some saliva with an anticoagulant, in other words, a chemical that keeps the blood from clotting. And guess what? It's called draculin. Why can this creature survive on blood alone when others can't? Vampire bats can exist just by drinking this blood. Because they have a special digestive tract, it has enzymes that can break down all that extra protein, and they can handle the extra iron load that comes with all that blood. What would happen if humans had a blood-only diet like vampires? If we drink blood, we'll get nauseous, and we may throw up. All of that extra iron can be poisonous at high levels. Humans can't handle a diet of blood. Europeans first encountered the vampire bat in the 16th century and named it after the vein-biting monster they feared so much. But where did this fixation with drinking blood come from? Historian Stephen Curtis thinks that a clue lies back in the Middle Ages. Unlike today, where we very rarely see blood or corpses, if you went to the butchers, you would see animals being slaughtered, you would see the blood running through the streets. It made it less of a shock to see it. Medieval people believed that blood physically contained a person's life force, the very energy that kept them alive. We can see traces of vampirism in beliefs around drinking blood in the period. In drinking it, they would get that hit of revitalising energy. The power of the life force in blood was thought to be so strong that some people believed you could get its benefits just by touching it. Stephen investigates how ordinary people went to public executions to get their hands on some. There were medieval accounts of people in Ireland and Denmark that were drinking blood directly from executed people, particularly when it comes to an execution, the idea being that that blood still has vitality because that person has been killed before their natural course, so the life energy is still contained there. Some people believed that even the blood of criminals could bring health benefits. There are accounts that this blood actually cured certain illnesses. One of the most famous examples of this blood mania took place at an execution nearly 400 years ago. This is Banking House in Whitehall in London. This whole area would have been full of crowds of people who would have come to see the single most important moment of bloodshed in the history of England. In the 17th century, an English king called Charles I was beheaded in London. People believed that the blood of a king was among the most potent of all. There would have been the atmosphere of a sports event or a music festival because executions were a public event. The moment of this that makes it so pivotal is this was the king, the reigning king, who was being executed. All the accounts suggest there was a hush, a moment of absolute shock, and then there was a huge rush towards the front. His head being held up for the crowds to see, blood spewing forth from his neck. People would be trying to get their handkerchiefs stained in that blood. Young blood was supposed to contain the greatest concentrations of life force. People believed that the life force you have in your body is used up slowly as you age. The blood of a young person being executed would have a certain amount of life force and vitality within it. You can see the vampiric links quite easily there. The regenerative force of young blood is at the heart of a gruesome 17th century tale. Elizabeth Bartory was a countess living in Hungary. Myth has it that one day a maid tugged her hair and the countess slapped her. Her nails dug into the girl's skin, spattering blood onto Bartory's face. A day later, she noticed that her skin looked younger where the blood had touched it. The countess started luring young girls to her castle and killed over 600 of them, allegedly so she could bathe in their blood and remain forever young, earning her the reputation of a real-life vampire. Contemporary thought was that the body, the soul and the spirit were linked, and that the blood was the liquid that flowed between all three. Blood was very important to vampires because by drinking someone's blood you were taking away their soul. They weren't just killing you, they were stealing your essence. But astonishingly, in medieval times, the lust for drinking blood was not confined to vampires. Biomedical scientist Sheila Hugh is an expert on human blood. She investigates how some alchemists try to distill young blood to make it easier to drink its supposed life force. In the 14th century, a French alchemist called Rupert Caesar claimed to have captured a pure version of it. He suggests retaining the blood from babies and from young men. Sheila is going to try to replicate what he did. She follows the alchemist's account and starts by heating up the blood sample until it boils to separate its components. Blood contains red cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. The plasma is the section that will start to vaporize and distill across. Once it reaches 70 degrees Celsius, the blood starts to break down and the plasma flows across. There's the first drops coming through the tube and into the collecting vessel. Today, we know this yellowish substance as pure blood plasma. But in the eyes of a medieval person, this golden elixir was concentrated life force. The medieval people would have been happy to pay large amounts of money in the belief that this product was going to extend their life. They believed that the color gold was related to the color of the spirit. They believed that they were actually transmitting the spirit by feeding this elixir to a patient. This medieval alchemy seemed to reinforce the belief in blood's rejuvenating powers. Even kings and academics fervently believed it. But could there be anything more than superstition behind vampires finding young blood more potent? Sheila believes that an experiment could reveal the answer. Electrophoresis is a method that we use to sort products, such as proteins, by their size. Samples of young blood and old blood are dyed blue. By running an electric charge through the samples, Sheila can separate the proteins. The more blue there is, the more protein is in the blood. In the old blood, we have some proteins. And if we move across further into the young blood, it's much darker stained, which indicates there is a lot more protein. Could these extra proteins hold the key to the centuries-old quest for everlasting youth? Young blood has been shown to improve the memory of older mice and reverse symptoms of aging. These proteins in young blood could be the proteins alchemists were looking for with life-enhancing properties. People were convinced that blood had the power to sustain a vampire forever. But what were they finding in coffins to convince them these dead bodies had been getting out of their graves to drink it? A clue lies in an 18th century Serbian tale. One night, a peasant notices a strange smoke wafting in. It transforms into his father, Peter Blagojevic, who died and is now a vampire. He demands food, which his son denies him. The next day, his son is dead. The monster doesn't stop there. He attacks people in their sleep, bites their necks, and drinks their blood. Villagers exhume Blagojevic's body. They discover that he has new skin and nails. His hair has grown, and blood is oozing from his mouth. What were people uncovering in graves here that fueled the belief in the vampire legend? Forensic anthropologist Dr. Anna Williams believes the answer lies with how bodies decay. She thinks our ancestors misinterpreted what they saw. It may look like an ordinary field, but I use it as an experimental outdoor lab for looking at how decomposition happens in a variety of conditions. Today, Anna hopes that the carcass of a piglet that died 14 days ago could shed new light on how medieval people viewed death and decomposition. This piglet died of natural causes. It was buried as soon as possible after death. We're expecting to see more advanced decomposition. The piglet has been buried 60 centimeters below the surface. You can hear my trowel scraping across its taut belly. Yep, you can smell it. Historical accounts describe how suspected vampires looked well-fed. Anna immediately notices a distinctive feature that might explain this. This one looks quite bloated in its abdominal area. Gas builds up inside the abdominal cavity, and that causes the body to swell and to bloat. It might make it look like they've had a recent meal. Could a buildup of gas also explain why some corpses were said to groan when impaled? The bacteria that are in the pig's gut and intestine, they continue working after death. Instead of digesting the food that's being sent down, they start digesting the body around it. That can create noises, and that can be misconstrued as the body still being alive. These strange effects of decay seem to suggest a living corpse. They would have terrified an 18th century observer. Things that medieval villagers might have seen when they've been digging up bodies. Frothing at the mouth, desiccation of the lips that causes exposure of the teeth. Things medieval villagers might have misinterpreted as signs of vampirism. Many vampire descriptions also talk of the fingernails on dead bodies still growing. The skin is drying and desiccating and receding away from the nail bed. That gives the impression that the nails were growing. What really happens to a body after death to cause these vampire-like symptoms? Decaying corpses undergo a natural but gruesome transformation. As the skin dries and tightens, it pushes beard stubble further out. Skin shrinks back on the hands, making fingernails seem longer, as if a corpse is growing claws. As the body tissues break down, it becomes infested with gas-producing bacteria. Pressure builds inside the bloated corpse, forcing bodily fluids from the nose and mouth. Making the corpse look like a vampire who's just feasted on blood. Anna's experiment reveals how the unexpected way a corpse decays might have been seen as proof of vampires. Medieval people who didn't understand the process of decomposition could think that the body was still alive. Evidence like this convinced people that vampires really were rising from the grave to bleed the living dry. But why did they believe these monsters could also take on the form of animals? Our classic idea of the vampire comes from horror films. The ability to change from human form to the bat and back again is one of the most striking characteristics of Count Dracula. These evil creatures were changing form and could morph into something else. Vampires were thought to transform into all kinds of things. Not just bats, but wolves and even mist. There's this idea of shapeshifters, human beings that have the capacity to turn into something else. They could take the form and shape of animals. But why did people believe they could change form like this? The answer may lie in the myth of another terrifying creature with hidden connections to the vampire. The tale of Peter Stump tells of a wealthy German farmer who did a deal with the devil. He received a magical belt that allowed him to turn into a werewolf. Now Stump could live out his bloodlust, killing animals and people for fun. He even slaughtered his own child and ate his brains. The wolf was the perfect disguise. Whenever Stump was in danger of getting caught, all he had to do was take off his belt. Allowing him to kill undetected for over 20 years. The werewolf and the vampire were sometimes interchangeable. In the original Serbian folklore, the same word was used for both. They were each nocturnal killers and a danger to livestock. When they died, it was thought that werewolves turned into vampires. The case of Peter Stump was just one of many reported transformations. It's thought hundreds of people were tried as werewolves across Europe. Why were there so many cases at this time? Botanist Stephen Harris thinks there might be a scientific explanation that lies in an unexpected place. Ergot is a parasite of certain types of grasses. We've got these little spurs coming out. And those little spurs are ergot. There's one particular crop that is very prone to being infected, and that's rye. The ergot fungus grew on other common grains, spreading poison throughout Europe. In years where you get a lot of humidity, then you get an infestation of this crop with ergot. Ergot is toxic to humans. If swallowed, it can induce deadly convulsions and powerful hallucinations. You've got community fields of rye being produced. They're contaminated with ergot. These are going into community mills, being ground into flour, and then that flour gets dispersed among the communities. Sorcery and witchcraft were often blamed where people suspected beast-like transformations. Belief in the ability to change shape was so strong that potions were developed that claimed to make this possible. But what happened when somebody used one? Stephen investigates. He's uncovered a recipe for a werewolf potion published in a 19th century manuscript. Stephen analyzes the ingredients. Wolfsbane, it means wolf killer. Traditionally, the roots of this plant were mashed up and used in order to control wolves. It affects your breathing, your circulatory system, your nervous system. Because wolfsbane is so toxic, Stephen must handle a dried specimen. The longer it's dried, the lower the potency is going to be. But they remain poisonous for hundreds of years. Next he finds some poppy seeds, poplar buds, and deadly nightshade. Tropa belladonna. It's a very poisonous plant, but if you apply a solution to somebody's eyes, then their pupils will dilate very quickly. When mixed together, this concoction would be highly dangerous. This ointment has a very dramatic hallucinogenic effect. People are going to start to have altered mind states. The idea of vampire and werewolf transformation fascinated our ancestors. But what happened to the body when a supposed shape-shifting potion was actually used? Werewolf ointment contains powerful drugs that mimic chemical messages inside the body. They penetrate the skin, then latch onto the nervous system, where they wreak havoc with bodily functions. Pupils dilate, causing extreme sensitivity to daylight. Body temperature skyrockets, and thirst becomes almost unquenchable. And finally, powerful hallucinations could trigger visions of turning into a blood-crazed werewolf. Joy Reidenberg investigates how a person could be convinced that they had changed into a mythical beast by using one of these potions. This is a plant called dogbane. This sap is the kind of toxic serum that people were putting into potions. How could this poison have convinced someone that they were morphing into a different creature altogether? These are scans of brains, and these little slices here show you where these cross-sections are coming from in the brain. This is a normal brain of somebody who's looking at an image. You can see that it's lighting up in this orange color to indicate there's some activity here. This brain over here is from someone who's taken LSD. It's all lit up. LSD has some of the same properties that you would see in the potion. This is sensory and motor overload. This is probably what was going on with the people who took the potion. They were imagining all kinds of hallucinogenic things. This person is not only seeing that image, they were sensing it, hearing it, smelling it. But you didn't need a hallucinogen to believe in shapeshifting monsters. Werewolves and vampires were seen as a very real threat. But why did people believe that a single dreaded bite would seal your fate? A place in a growing vampire army. According to a French monk, Augustin Calmy, vampires were out to recruit as many people to their deadly clan as possible. Five years after the case of Arnold Paole, more people from the same village started dying within weeks of each other. Their mysterious deaths caused panic among the locals. Terrified of another vampire on the loose, the authorities dug up 17 bodies and burned them to make sure none of them could ever return to infect the living. At Perperikon in Bulgaria, Ivo Maiv thinks that as many as 1 in 10 graves could belong to a suspected vampire. The majority of anti-vampire graves have been made in the southern part of Bulgaria. Here we have more than officially 20. But if we are counting all deviant burials, we can talk about hundreds. We can categorically say that Bulgaria is the place with the highest concentration of vampire graves around the world. In the Middle Ages, Bulgaria was a hotspot for vampirism. But it didn't stop at the border. In the 18th century, vampire epidemics started to occur throughout Eastern Europe in alarming numbers. Stoking fear of a vampire army. Terror of the undead soon spread to the New World. In Rhode Island, folklore researcher Michael Bell investigates a story that affected people across three states. Locals were dying of something inexplicable, and they believed a wave of vampire attacks was to blame. Michael visits a graveyard in Jewett City, Connecticut, where many victims were laid to rest. Something incredibly strange happened here more than a century and a half ago. People were dying one after another. This is the gravestone of Elisha Ray. His father, Henry B. Ray, had passed away. And then Lemuel Ray had died, followed by Elisha. Another son, Henry Nelson Ray, was very ill, and it looked like he might die. With so many deaths, the Ray family wanted answers. They believed that their dead relatives were rising from the grave to feast on them. Toward the end of their lives, they would be coughing up blood. There would be blood on the corners of their mouths and on their bedclothes in the morning when the family members went in. So it looked like something was literally sucking the life, sucking the blood right out of all the family members. The family resorted to the underlying belief that it might be one of the dead family members who was causing the death. They exhumed the bodies of two brothers, Lemuel and Elisha Ray. They were looking for unnatural signs. Anything that was liquefied, any bodily fluid that was in an organ, that would be interpreted as fresh blood. And apparently they found them at least in Elisha. To try and prevent more deaths, the bodies were burned. But this family was just one of many that experienced multiple deaths in a short period. This was not an isolated incident. This happens throughout the region. It was barbaric behavior to actually come out to a cemetery and mutilate your own family members. Sometimes even eat the ashes or inhale the smoke from the burning corpses. This was basically a form of cannibalism. Michael believes a killer disease was really to blame. Some mysterious thing was killing one person after another. The doctors would call it consumption. Later they started calling it pulmonary tuberculosis. But they didn't have a cure. Even though it was discovered in 1882, it wasn't until the 1940s that there was an antibiotic that could actually deal with tuberculosis. It would have spread like wildfire. Diseases like that spread quickly between people of different generations. People probably thought that vampirism was at the cause of it. Historically, rumors and stories of vampires often followed epidemics of poorly understood illnesses. The outbreaks of plagues coincided with outbursts of narratives of monsters associated with the diseases. Vampires are a classic example of this. So when you see instances of cholera or tuberculosis, a lot of times the symptoms that were left over in the corpses were shown up in the narratives of vampires. From the gaunt, you know, white complexion and other forms that might have been left over when these plagues came through. Vampires were useful in explaining plagues and the spread of disease because people don't understand germ theory yet. They don't understand contagion in that way yet. And so you can say, well, there's these creatures running around biting people and that's how these diseases are spreading. The plague comes back and the next thing you know, people are ripping open coffins and nailing bodies to the ground because they're afraid that these people will come back to life and come and kill them. The events in New England are shocking to modern eyes. But Michael believes that these people were also trying to save their loved ones. People never blamed their dead siblings. The person's soul had been captured. It was more like there was an evil inhabiting that corpse. The vampire myth has survived into the 21st century because human beings don't have a natural predator. We need to be scared. The vampire, this terrifying creature, rose from the grave to satisfy its thirst for fresh blood. It would feed on the living, drink their blood and add to their growing army of the undead. As experts open more and more graves, the shocking extent of our ancestors' fear of vampires is finally revealed. They took extreme measures to protect themselves against corpses that refused to die and would stop at nothing to make you one of them.