Improper burial rites are tied to the creation of many species of vampires, such as the Callicantzaro of Greece, the Mrart of Australia, the Chindi of the Navajo, the Doppelsauger of Germany, the Langsuir of Malaysia, the Nelapsi of Czechoslovakia, the Tenatz of Bosnia, the Kathakano of Crete, and the Pret, Churel, and Gayal of India.
Burial customs take two forms: those that honor the dead and those that protect the living against the dead. Most folks are familiar with the former, but the latter procedures are even more crucial, especially in areas where vampirism has been known to flourish. Preventative steps include:
• binding the limbs of a corpse so that it cannot move.
• burying a corpse upside-down so that it faced hell rather than heaven. (Very likely this came about when it was generally viewed that the world was flat and that heaven and hell were physical places. Otherwise we’d have vampires tunneling through the earth to the other side. Jules Verne could have had fun with that.)
• chopping the body into pieces and wrapping each piece in a separate shroud. (Granted this seems excessive, but there are no reports of pieces rising from the grave, so take that for what it’s worth.)
• cremating the body. Fire not only purifies, it simplifies.
• driving long nails through the limbs of the dead to further immobilize it.
• filling the coffin with splinters of hawthorn or other rosewood.
• laying a sprig of holly on the throat of the corpse.
• placing sickles or scythes near the grave to frighten off the evil spirits that sought to possess the corpse. Though…how an edged farm tool was supposed to harm a noncorporeal spirit is anyone’s guess.
• placing a block of wood between the teeth to prevent the newly awakened vampire from chewing his way out…or chewing on his own flesh in order to gain enough strength to burst free from the coffin.
• placing a coin in the mouth to pay the toll across the River Styx. A very Greek practice.
• placing a wax cross and piece of pottery with the inscription “Jesus Christ conquers” in the coffin.
• placing garlic in the coffin.
• placing pictures of family members in the coffin to remind the dead of love and family honor.
• placing pictures of saints in the coffin to remind the corpse of its obligation to faith.
• putting the deceased’s shoes on the wrong feet so that they will become confused when they try to walk.
• using a metal coffin and sealing it with melted lead.
BATS OF A FEATHER…
Even though most vampires are not identical there are certain themes that pop up in different cultures—and not always in cultures where one can easily trace the flow of information through the expansion of population or the exchange of information. The sheer coincidence of these similarities makes for wonderfully creepy speculation. If vampires from the ancient culture of China and the pre–Marco Polo Europe share similarities it makes us go “Hmmmmm—how is that possible?”
For example, there are a lot of connections between vampire subtypes and counting. Vampires around the world seem to possess an obsessive compulsive need to count items found on the ground. In Europe they love to count seeds, in South America it’s straw, in China it’s rice. Go figure.
Some of these similarities are a little easier to understand, such as pallor and a foul stench, both of which are typical of dead bodies and decaying flesh.
Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century folklore influenced and was influenced by emerging pop culture. Writers of the era began tossing bloodsuckers into poems, plays, short stories, art, and novels, starting with Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s poems “The Vampire”(1748) and “Lenore” (1773); and then spreading like a literary plague with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Die Braut von Corinth” (“The Bride of Corinth,” 1797), and works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Polidori, Sheridan le Fenau, Bram Stoker, and many others.5
Most of these writers added new elements to the story—as writers will—to build mystery and suspense, to elevate the level of threat, and to set the stage for new dimensions of heroism on the part of the protagonists. As a result some of the more romantic elements of the vampire story have been either amped up or introduced to an audience who more or less viewed fiction as being directly based on reality. This genuinely confused the issue of what is and is not a vampire, particularly from the European view, and as the film industry blossomed, that view became the most common take globally.
Those vampire qualities that best suited the needs of dramatic storytelling got more play. For example, a large percentage of vampire movies and books uses a vampire’s inability to cast a reflection as a nice trick for establishing that a person is actually a vampire. Notable moments include the ballroom scene in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and the disco scene in Fright Night (1985). However, the lack of reflection is fairly rare in folklore and is usually tied to those species of vampire who are actually ghosts rather than reanimated corpses.
The connection between vampires and mirrors, though mostly fictional, is grounded in older beliefs, however. In many cultures it was believed that the soul is somehow projected out of the physical body and can be glimpsed in reflective surfaces. The superstition of bad luck resulting from a broken mirror came from the belief that breaking one’s reflection damaged one’s own soul. In some cases the soul became outraged that its physical counterpart would allow the mirror image to be broken and would punish that person with bad luck.
The ancient Romans, who were the first people to develop glass mirrors, believed that the entire human body was completely renewed every seven years; hence their attachment to the belief in seven years of bad luck for breaking the image of the current body. In other cultures the length of time varied from seven hours all the way to seven generations of the family line.
According to some of the movies, vampires cannot cross running water. The myths suggest that running water is symbolic of self-renewing purity and therefore an impure thing cannot cross it. In the Christopher Lee flick Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966), the titular count falls through a break in a patch of ice and the rushing water beneath kills him. Sounds great until you think of all the streams, rivers, and oceans that have been crossed by bandits, murderers, and whole armies of pillaging brigands. And, let’s face it, Dracula came to England by ship. Lots and lots o’ running water.
There are several vampires who actually live in water. The Kappa of Japan and the Animalitos of Spain are water-dwelling demon-vampires, as are the Green Ogresses of France.
Sunlight is one of the elements of vampirology that has almost completely emerged from pop culture. In folklore, and indeed in most vampire fiction prior to the early twentieth century, vampires were night hunters but could walk around in daylight without harm. The Upierczi of Poland, for example, rises at noon and hunts until midnight. The Bruja of Spain lives a normal life by day and only becomes a vampire at night, as do the Soucouyan of Dominica and the Loogaroo of Haiti. It wasn’t until F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, that sunlight became fatal to vampires. Thereafter it became a staple of vampire fiction to the point that people generally believe that all vampires always fear sunlight—despite the fact that Dracula strolls around in daylight in Stoker’s novel, Dracula. It’s a clear sign that more people have seen the movies than read the book.
Oddly enough, the Chiang-shih vampire of Chinese myth does fear sunlight. It’s also one of the few vampires that take the form of a wolf and cannot cross running water. In these ways this Asian monster more closely fits the pop fiction model than do the many vampires of Europe. Go figure.
On the subject of vampire strength, nearly all of the sources—from folklore to the most current direct-to-video fang flick—seem to agree: they are stronger than humans. Nearly all of them are at least twice as strong as a human, and some are a great deal stronger. The Draugr of Scandinavia, for example, is a vampiric