I’ve been writing several days before posting to give myself a running start because I’m going to be traveling and I don’t want to bring my laptop. So this is going to post on my birthday¹ and I was trying to figure out which book to post on my birthday and I had something else picked out, something full of light and joy, but it was raining this morning and I decided at the last minute to go with this sweet little vampiric analysis instead, subtitle, Folklore and Reality.

Reality.

I first encountered this book when I was working the customer service desk at a bookstore. Part of my job² there was placing special orders on behalf of customers and then calling them when their books arrived. The store was located near a university and a lot of grad students and professors ordered books from us and one of them must have ordered this.³ I don’t think I was the one who placed the order for this customer, but I think I was the one who called them to let them know it had arrived.⁴ I ordered a copy for myself – I found some of my best books from other people’s orders – and never regretted it.

I learned so many cool things from this book. This is a historical book and it quotes from a lot of original, Eastern European sources, people who said they were being haunted by vampires!

To my disappointment, vampires turned out to be much less romantic than I thought they would be.⁵ They do not dress in evening wear or black leather jackets. They do not have penetrating eyes.

First of all, they tended to have lived and died in small villages in the backwaters of Eastern Europe. They tended to be pretty cranky people while they were alive. Working people, shoemakers and such. They died suddenly, often from heart attacks or strokes.

Later, their wives or perhaps neighbors they had been feuding with, dreamt that they had returned, that they stood beside their beds at night. Or perhaps that they looked in a window or clambered around on the roof, making unsettling noises like timbers settling or ice cracking. The person who dreamt of them didn’t sleep well. They woke up gasping for breath. Perhaps they got sick. Perhaps they, too, died. The village began to panic.

Then the army was called in to keep the peace and settle the vampire’s hash. Many of the early records of vampires are actually military records or the records of people who were sent with the military to inquire into the matter, learned people like doctors. Investigations in the graveyard – or if the vampire had been particularly sinful during life, outside the graveyard – ensued. Perhaps you saw wolves or dogs near the grave, digging, as if to return to the safety of their coffin.⁶ If you listened near the grave, you heard restless noises from beneath the soil, gurglings that sounded like murmurs. Opening the grave, it appeared that the vampire had hungrily nibbled the edge of the shroud that wrapped the face, for it looked worn and frayed, decayed. Or had eaten their own intestines, leaving a pool of dissolved organs.

Then you had to figure out what to do with the vampire. You could stake it to the grave, to keep it from wandering the village and disturbing the living. You could cut off the head or remove the heart and burn it. Maybe that settled it; maybe villagers continued dying. It almost seemed the vampire outbreak was spreading like a plague⁷. Then you had to resort to cremation.

So much here to work with. I got so many ideas for new stories from this book.

If you find yourself lying in bed at night, chewing over the events of the day, what’s been going on at work, you are chewing on your shroud, like a vampire, trapped in their coffin all day, chewing angrily and uselessly at their winding sheets.

When someone died, until recently, it was traditional to cover the windows. Strictly speaking you should also have covered the mirrors and any standing cups, pools, or baths of liquid. If the corpse were to see their reflection, well, that would be bad. And, if you washed the corpse – something that rarely happens in the U.S. outside a funeral home – you should hold onto the water until your loved one is buried. Otherwise…

Shadows and reflections can hold the soul. In ancient times, I learned from this book, it was traditional to sacrifice someone to ensure that an important building was safe against earthquakes. Eventually we became civilized and, instead, snuck up behind someone and, while they were distracted, nailed their shadow to the wall through its head. Now murals of shadows take the place of actual sacrifices in earthquake-prone regions. But if you start feeling anhedonic check if your shadow is missing – and then start thinking about who might have it in for you.⁸

This book is still widely available, although I don’t like the newer cover above as much as I like the original. I tried to see if the author had written any other books but all I came up with was an article in the Skeptical Inquirer, which I’m guessing was the seed that germinated into this book.⁹

So happy birthday and enjoy a vampire on me today!

1. Happy Birthday, future me! ↩︎
2. The rest of my job, the guy Paul who trained me said, consisted of standing behind the desk (or sitting on the high stool behind the desk), waiting for people to approach me, ask where something was, or place an order, or request a refund. If it was slow, Paul said, I could sit and read. Worst OTJ training ever. The manager – who was new to the store and I had been her first hire – soon put a stop to that. ↩︎
3. Or it may have been the West Village location. ↩︎
4. Big stack of books with customer contact slips sticking out like bookmarks. “Hello, this is B. Dalton. Your order for [glance down at title] ____ has arrived and will be on-hold at the main desk until [date two weeks from now].” over and over again. “Hello, this is B. Dalton. Your order for, uh, Vampires, Burial, and Death – OH, COOL! – uh, well, it’s here and we’ll be holding it at the main desk until [date two weeks from now]. And if you don’t pick it up, I’m taking it!” ↩︎
5. Isn’t that always the case, ladies? ↩︎
6. Or perhaps for a little snack. ↩︎
7. It seems some villages just couldn’t get a break – first an outbreak of Cholera, then vampires! Then more Cholera! Then more vampires! ↩︎
8. Contrawise, if you want to get back at that annoying bully you work with, just wait until they’re not looking and step on their shadow. Go ahead. Grind it into the carpet tile. You’ll feel better and they’ll never know what hit them. ↩︎
9. Unless he is also the Paul Barber who wrote, Physical Disturbance to Foundational Macroalgal Communities on Coral Reefs Causes Rapid Changes in Use by Herbivorous Fish, which seems unlikely. ↩︎