With Halloween coming up and summer around the corner, it is time for bloodsucking beasties to come out. Insect curator Julia Kasper specialises in flies and bloodsucking insects and has a strong interest in the historical and cultural aspects of entomology. Here, she sheds a bright light on the vampire world and explains what actually caused the diseases that were blamed on – and furthered the belief in – the vampire.
Diseases helped spawn one of the most enduring and widespread monster myths in civilisation. – Dowling, 2016
Those diseases could appear without warning to cause huge pandemics and then retreat, sometimes for hundreds of years. Before the age of medical science, people were frightened and naturally turned to the supernatural to make sense of it. In the Western world, the best-known creatures that arose from those pandemics are vampires. Different cultures have other names and appearances for similar monsters, e.g., the Chinese Jiangshi, the Mexican Chorti, or the Caribbean Soucouyant.
Vampires and cholera
The origin of the word vampire is still unclear, but the beginning of the folklore lies most likely in Russia, and eastern Europe, such as the Balkan. We can still find deeply rooted evidence for the bloodsucking legend of evil returners.
In Poland during the 17th and 18th centuries, the people of Drawsko buried suspected vampires under very precautious circumstances. They had their teeth removed or had sickles across their necks and stones under their chins to prevent them rising from the dead and biting the living. But actually, those “vampires” were victims of cholera, which hit Poland during that time.
Photo via Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland Gregoricka LA, Betsinger TK, Scott AB, Polcyn M (2014) Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland. PLOS ONE 9(11): e113564.
Sligo, Ireland was hit by the disease worse than any other town in Europe: 1,500 people were killed within six weeks.
Bram Stoker processes his mother’s memory – who witnessed the horrors of the epidemic – in the novel Dracula (1897) and combines it with the Balkan mythology and with the history of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–1476), also known as Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula.
The parallels between the cholera outbreak and Stoker’s story are quite intriguing, including the use of a crucifixes as protective magic, decomposition smells associated with vampires, half dead people in graves, and a storm on the 11th of August, when the first victim was found.
Master of the Black Death
We can also find buried vampires that “arose” from other diseases, such as the plague. For instance, remains of a female “vampire” found in Venice, believed to have died from the plague which battered the people in Italy in the 16th century. She was buried with a brick between her jaws. This was most likely a precaution to prevent her feeding and causing more victims.
Another vampire story, similar to Dracula, but not quite the same, incorporated facts of epidemics with this different cause. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau created his silent vampire film Nosferatu in 1922. Count Orlok travels to Wismar, Germany, by ship via the Black Sea. A logbook says the plague was on board. Wismar is then flooded with rats from the ship and death spreads rapidly throughout the town.
The Black Death, is (still) believed to be the second pandemic of bubonic plague in the late Middle Ages (1340–1400).
At some stage, people made the connection between the plague and rats (actually the first hint can be found in the Bible). But it was only in 1894 that Alexandre Yersin, a Swiss/French physician and bacteriologist from the Pasteur Institute, discovered the Yersinia pestis bacterium. Four years later, the transmission of bacteria from rodents by flea bites was discovered by Jean-Paul Simond. Due to political rivalry around the discovery, however, this was only recognised another five years later, when the Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) was found in Sudan and described by Charles Rothschild and Karl Jordan in 1903.
The bacteria cause the production of a biofilm in the infected flea’s foregut. So, when sucking blood, the flea cannot swallow but re-injects the host’s blood back… together with the bacteria. Due to lack of food in the flea’s belly, it bites more viciously, potentially resulting in increased spreading.
The last major outbreak was recorded in Los Angeles in 1924, but the disease is still present in wild rodents.
Bloodsuckers bring Yellow Fever
New Orleans was nicknamed ‘Necropolis’ between 1817 and 1905 because during that time, approximately 10% of the city’s population would die of yellow fever during the summer months.
The virus causes fever, muscle pain, headache, shivers, and nausea in a short acute phase; and mostly that’s it. In the critical toxic phase, which often leads to death, cells of the inner organs are attacked, i.e., liver and kidneys, causing jaundice, abdominal pain, vomiting, bleeding from mouth, nose and eyes, blood in vomit and feces, and kidney failure. The blood in the vomit is responsible for the name “blood vomit” or “dark vomit” in many languages and supported vampire hysteria. And although yellow fever was dictating daily life in New Orleans, the disease was so poorly understood that myths about vampires appeared along the Mississippi.
Walter Reed, a US Army physician, proved in 1896 that yellow fever was not a result from drinking river water. He was probably not aware that in 1881 Cuban epidemiologists had already proposed that a mosquito transmitted the disease by biting a human host.
In 1901, Reed confirmed this hypothesis, which allowed the resumption and completion of work on the Panama Canal (1904–1914). In 1927, researcher Adrian Stokes induced yellow fever in rhesus monkeys from India and identified the virus but died himself of it during his experiments.
Max Theiler, a South African American virologist and doctor, survived yellow fever and developed immunity. In 1937, he developed a vaccine against yellow fever and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951.
Other “evidence” for the living death
It is no surprise that people feared the undead, even if they have been buried, because when bodies decompose, they are literally all over the place. Back then, these decomposition processes have been very much misinterpreted.
It has been reported that noises can be heard from graves and that the soil looks disrupted. After reopening the graves, corpses have been found warm, blushed and swollen, which is caused by the action of microorganisms in the body, resulting in discoloration of tissue and body fluids, as well as gas production, and boating the belly. The pressure of the gas is forcing the darkened body fluids out of the mouth and nostrils, and the blood can re-liquify. This looks like the deceased has feasted on blood. The pressure of the gas is also responsible for noises, such as winds and shrieks, and even a change of position after rigor mortis has passed. And as loose soil needs a while to settle, the eruption of the corpse can de-arrange the earth. Many people still believe the myth that fingernails and hair still grow after death. This is easily explained as the skin of the deceased shrinks – even the teeth can appear longer. What is more, the pressure in the corpse can result in an erection, having led to the myth that vampires have a great lust.
Not all vampires were thought to physically leave their grave, but even then, the fiends were still thought to be dangerous as for the foul decomposition volatiles – recognised as proof of a vampire’s presence or the slightly advanced theory of the miasma being considered responsible of carrying diseases, which led to the strategy of using smelly stuff like garlic as a protection.
With the knowledge of the so-called Thanatology, we cannot only explain the changes in a decaying body, but also understand the mechanisms of insect activity on corpses. This enables us to interpret the succession of insect settlement and use this information for Forensic Entomology, which is the study of insects/arthropods in criminal investigation to estimate the post-mortem index, any change in position of the corpse, as well as the cause of death. Apart from Applied Taxonomy, many studies are necessary in order to calculate larval development timeframes effected by, e.g., temperature or chemicals.
New Zealand bloodsuckers – are you at risk of vampires?
Some of our best-known vampires might be seen in the What We Do in the Shadows (as long as you don’t use a mirror) and some of you may remember It is I, Count Homogenized, but our country’s bloodsuckers are more commonly known for just being pests, rather than pestilence.
We have 13 native mosquito species as well as some imports, and you can find out different ways to stop being bitten by them, but you might also want to take part in our mosquito census so we can get a better understanding of which species live where and how they’re spreading. This information will help us form a clearer picture of the impact of factors such as changes in land use and climate change.
References and further reading
- Champion for the Unloved, by Nikki Wright on Edge of Things
- Did Dracula really transmit the plague? The history of bloodsuckers and their diseases, Julia Kasper, (2022), Journal of Geek Studies
- Stories from the wreckage, Julia Kasper’s work as a forensic entomologist. (2013), Stuff
- Flies might be annoying, but they’re just doing their best, Shanti Mathias, The Spinoff (2024)
- Plague, CDC [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention]. (2022a)
- Yellow fever, CDC [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention]. (2022b)
- Cholera, WHO [World Health Organization], (2022a)
- How Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” was linked to Sligo’s cholera outbreak, Clancy, P. (2021), Irish Central
- How yellow fever turned New Orleans into the ‘city of the dead’, National Public Radio, CODE SW!TCH, Donella, L. (2018)
- Vampires are some of the most enduring monsters we have created. Diseases that plagued our ancestors played a part in their creation, Dowling, S. (2016), BBC Future
- Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland, Gregoricka LA, Betsinger TK, Scott AB, Polcyn M (2014), PLoS ONE,9(11): e113564
- The bloody truth about vampires, Little, B. (2016), National Geographic. (Free, sign-in required)
- Medical Vectors. An Education Guide for Border Health and Integrated Pest Management. Southern Monitoring Services, Queenstown, NZ BioSecure. (2019) [eds.: Kasper, J]
- Revenants of the Past: Vampire burial in Medieval Europe, Kennedy, J. (2015)
