Posthumous Humanity: A Study of Phantoms/Chapter 12

From all that I have said in the preceding chapters, as well about the living phantom as about the posthumous phantom, the conclusion is warranted that these two personages have a common origin, or, to speak more exactly, that the second is the continuation of the first. Their identity being thus established, it becomes easy to measurably assure oneself with respect to certain facts connected with the life beyond the tomb. As the fluidic being experiences, in disengaging itself from the body, but a change of environment, it must preserve something of its customs, tendencies, and prejudices which it had acquired during life. This very distinctly appears from these manifestations. Its first desire, when it has any marked desire, is connected with its sepulture. It would seem to be very jealous of receiving funereal honours according to the sect to which he belonged, and it knows how to enforce them. Unable to speak audibly, it has recourse to other acoustic processes according to local circumstances. Its favourite method is knocking upon walls or throwing of projectiles. Pliny the Younger relates a curious tale in this connection. A house at Athens was haunted by a spectre, which ​nightly made the sound of rattling chains. No one dared to live in the house, until the philosopher Athenodorus resolved to pass the night there and await the coming of the spectre. The latter soon appeared, rattling its chains, and made a sign to the philosopher to follow it. Athenodorus complied with the phantom's invitation, and was led into the courtyard of the house, where it disappeared. Some excavations having been made at this spot, there were found some human bones mingled with chains. The honours of burial were given to these relics, and quiet was restored to the house. Similar stories are to be found in other authors.

The most common yearning of the posthumous being is, it would seem, to bid the last farewell to those who are dear to it. I have given, in the first chapter, several accounts of such apparitions. A variety of examples demonstrate that it is equally accessible to ideas of vengeance. If it died the victim of assassination, it comes to set its nearest relative to avenging the outrage. In his work on "Apparitions," Morton speaks of a young man who, having been killed at London, in a brawl, appeared with his forehead all bloody to his brother at Boston, and gave him the names of the persons who had struck him, begging him to avenge his murder.

If man sometimes carries with him beyond the grave his hatreds and anger, he may also preserve the memory of his jealousies and his baffled hopes. We find an illustration of this in the archives of ​the Prefecture of Police—the record of a very singular adventure which occurred in Paris under the reign of Louis XIV. It is as follows:

A young man, desperately in love with a woman, pursued her with his attentions for three years, but without success. In despair at not being able to make her listen to him, he fell into a wasting illness, which finally carried him off. In the last interview with her who was the cause of his premature end, he vowed to her that, in revenge for her obduracy, he would persecute her after death for as long a time as she had rebuffed him. Unusual noises, which were heard immediately after his decease, in this lady's house, reminded her of the threat, to which she had at first paid no attention. There were nocturnal disturbances which changed after a certain time, and occasionally assumed very peculiar characteristics. Sometimes were heard clappings of hands, followed by sarcastic laughter; again there were sudden explosions, like the detonations of bombs or firearms. Wearied with this hubbub, and not knowing how to relieve herself from it, the mistress of the house waited upon the Lieutenant of Police to tell him what was going on in her residence, and begged him to give her some help. The latter placed at her disposal his best spies, but all their investigations were fruitless. They heard, but saw nothing. After all sorts of expedients to discover the author or authors of these mysterious ​disturbances, they were forced to confess their powerlessness and give it up. As the dying man had announced, this matter went on for three years.

The ghost of one who was unhappy in his affections is not always satisfied to signify his resentment by noisy but harmless manifestations. Father Tyrrœc, author of a remarkable work on posthumous apparitions, tells of a young man who cruelly persecuted after his death a young girl, because she had refused him her hand. She found herself daily scolded, maltreated, and beaten by the ghost of her rejected lover. What she related could not be accounted for as hallucination, for she carried on her body the bruises of the blows which she said she had received. Father Tyrrœc, who knew this young girl, was able to satisfy himself personally of the reality of the facts.

The two following circumstances, related by Dr. Passavant, and which have all the appearance of indisputable authenticity, prove that the post-humous being, as I have already had occasion to remark, sometimes likes to resume the occupations which were familiar to it. During the reign of Frederick II., a Catholic priest, who lived in the Prussian village of Quarrey, having lost his servant-maid, took another woman. Scarcely had the latter been installed at the Presbytery than she found her-self the butt of all sorts of molestations, and was forced to relinquish her employment. Her presence was, indeed, perfectly useless; for invisible ​hands lighted the fire, swept the rooms, tidied the furniture, did, in a word, the whole work of the house.^[1] The noise of this prodigy having reached the Court, the king-philosopher sent to the spot two of the officers of his Guard to verify such wonderful facts. At the moment when the commissioners are about to cross the threshold of the Parsonage, a military march is beaten before them, but without their seeing any performer. Scarcely had they entered the room when they witnessed the prodigies which had been reported to them, and which they had come to verify. One of them having exclaimed, "This is worse than the devil!" received immediately a buffet from the invisible hand which was putting the furniture in order. Frederick II., convinced by the reports of his officers that the Presbytery was haunted, ordered it to be torn down and rebuilt in another spot.

All the inhabitants of Quarrey were witnesses of these strange things, and no one was in doubt as to the personality of the invisible being which engaged their attention. It was, indeed, the phan-tom of the deceased servant, which continued to busy itself with her daily duties, and would not allow of any stranger coming to do her work. This phantom had no visible form—a very common ​thing with the posthumous being. This was not the case in the following story, which is not less significant nor strange:

In 1659 there died at Crossen, in Silesia, an apothecary's apprentice, named Christopher Monig. Some days after they perceived a phantom in the pharmacy. Every one recognized Christopher Monig. This phantom seated itself, rose, went to the shelves, seized pots, flasks, &c., and changed their places. It examined and tasted drugs, weighed them in the scales, pounded the drugs with a noise, served the persons who presented prescriptions, received the money and placed it in the drawer. No one, however, dared to speak to it. Having, doubtless, some grudge against the master, then very seriously ill, it busied itself with giving him all sorts of annoyances. One day it took a cloak which was in the pharmacy, opened the door, and went out. It walked through the streets without looking at any one, entered the houses of several of his acquaintances, gazed at them a moment without speaking a word, and withdrew. Meeting a servant-girl in the cemetery, it said to her:

"Go to your master's house and dig in the lower room; you will there find an inestimable treasure."

The poor girl, overcome with terror, fell sense-less on the ground. It stooped down and lifted her, but left on her a mark which was long visible. Returning home, and although suffering from great ​terror, she related what had happened to her. They dug at the spot indicated, and found, in an old pot, a pretty hematite (bloodstone?). It is well known that the alchemists attributed occult properties to this stone. The rumour of these prodigies having reached the ears of Princess Elizabeth Charlotte, she ordered that the body of Monig should be exhumed. It was thought that this was a case of vampirism; but nothing was found except a corpse in rather an advanced state of putrefaction. The apothecary was then advised to get rid of all the things that had belonged to Monig. The spectre reappeared no more from that time. These facts are recorded in the annals of the Academy of Leipzig, which publicly discussed them after an investigation.

Most of the manifestations by which the shades reveal themselves seem to indicate that the post-humous existence is a burden. The relatives of the deceased suppose, naturally, that his soul is in suffering, and hasten to employ the practices which, in popular belief, can abridge its sufferings or mitigate its fate. Is it necessary to say that the expiatory ceremonies vary with each country—I should say with the religions there professed—and that each cult has its formulas of conjuration and appeasement for shades in suffering? In Catholic countries they cause masses to be said; the Protestants have recourse to prayers and to alms; the followers of the Koran invoke Allah and ​his prophet, after a purification by fasting and ablutions. Useless to add that this intercession by the living in favour of the dead seems often of doubtful efficacy, even when it is not entirely useless. Certain shades are quieted as soon as they perceive that people are thinking of them; but others persist in continuing their lamentations despite all that is done to draw them out of their trouble, or they subside but very gradually and after a long time, as though they were wearied out. We find in the narratives of the theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, many stories of haunted houses that they have been forced to abandon to the spectres, although there had been exhausted on their behalf the whole arsenal of posthumous ritual—masses, prayers, exorcisms, &c.

If the ghost has a certain perception of the present, is it the same as regards the future, I mean of the fate which time has in store for it, whose destructive action detaches one by one its constituent atoms to restore them to the universal medium; in other words, has it consciousness of its becoming? Such a question can only be solved by the rare replies that certain shades consent to give to the relatives or friends to whom they appear, and that the latter interrogate as to their situation.^[2] These ​insignificant significant or senseless answers warrant the supposition that the posthumous being has no consciousness of the future reserved for it, and that its notions are limited to a vague sense of the present and some memories of the past. The shade only talks about its personal predilections, and remains deaf to every question outside the limits it has prescribed for itself. All the colloquies that have been gathered upon this subject resemble that of Bézuel and Desfontaine (1697) reported by Dr. Brière de Boismont. They were two college comrades, two intimate friends, who had sworn to each other that the first who died should appear to the other to give him some news about himself. The following year Bézuel perceived, one day, the shade of Desfontaine, who took him by the arm to draw him aside and speak to him. The other persons present saw Bézuel talking with an invisible interlocutor, for they heard the questions and answers of the former, but not those of the latter. This fact, which has been elsewhere remarked, is something quite natural. The shade, unable to produce articulate sounds, limits itself to fluidic emissions perceptible only to the one to whom they are addressed. "I agreed with you," said Desfontaine, "that if I died first I would come and tell you. I was drowned in the Caen river, the day before yesterday, at this same hour, in company ​of Such and Such;" and he related the circumstances which had caused his death. "It was his very voice," says Bézuel. "He requested me, when his brother should return, to tell him certain things to be communicated to his father and mother. He gave me other commissions, then bade me farewell and disappeared. I soon learned that everything that he had told me was but too true, and I was able to verify some details that he had given. In our conversation he refused to answer all the questions I put to him as to his actual situation, especially whether he was in heaven, in hell, or in purgatory. One would have said that he did not hear me when I put such questions, and he persisted in talking to me of that which was upon his mind about his brother, his family, or the circumstances which had preceded his death." To sum up, one may say that the impression left upon the mind by the lamentations and the rare replies of those shades who succeed in making themselves heard is almost always a sentiment of profound sadness. I cannot do better, to convey an idea of it, than to liken the moral state of the post-sepulchral man to that of a European transplanted suddenly, without arms and clothing, to an in-hospitable district in Australia, amid an inclement nature, and who would have preserved of his reason only just enough to have the feeling of his impotence and of an eternal isolation.^[3]

​I have said that the existence of the shade is but a brief one. Its tissue disintegrates readily under the action of the physical, chemical, and atmospheric forces which constantly assail it, and re-enters molecule by molecule the universal planetary medium. Occasionally, however, it resists these destructive causes, continuing its struggle for existence beyond the tomb. We touch here upon the most curious phase of its history, for this brings us to the posthumous vampire. The first time I read this word, applied by Gorrës to spectres which leave their graves and come and drain the blood of a relative or friend, as a weasel bleeds a rabbit, I turned the page, as I had no desire to be the dupe of a mystification. But as this word, too, occurred in most of the authors whom I subsequently consulted, I was obliged, in spite of myself, to read what was said about the matter, and I was soon ​satisfied that posthumous vampirism is but too much of a reality. Several of these stories could not be rejected as doubtful, since they related to events of which whole towns were witnesses. Let me select some that, in view of the sources from which they are taken, appear to be most authentic. First let Dom Calmet speak:

"In the last century there died, at the village of Kisilova, three leagues distant from Gradisca in Sclavonia, an old man of about sixty-two years of age. Three days after his interment, he appeared at night to his son, and asked for something to eat; the latter having served him, he ate and dis-appeared. The next day, the son related to his neighbours what had occurred, but the spectre did not show himself on that day; but the third night he again appeared, and again asked for food. It is not known whether the son gave it or not; but they found him in the morning dead in his bed. The same day five or six persons fell suddenly ill in the village, and died, one after the other, a few days after. The bailiff of the place, being informed of what had happened, sent an account to the Court at Belgrade, which ordered two of its officers to go to the village, in company with the executioner, to inquire into the affair. The imperial officer, from whom the present narrative emanates, himself went there from Gradisca to personally verify a story of which so much had been heard. They had the tombs of all who had died within the previous six weeks ​opened: when they came to that of the old man, they found him with his eyes open, his complexion rosy, breathing naturally, although motionless and dead, whence they concluded that he must be an unmistakable vampire. The executioner plunged a sharpened stake through the heart. They erected a pyre, and reduced the corpse to ashes. No sign of vampirism was found in either the body of the son or in that of any of the others."

In the case I have just reported, the vampire only shows himself, so to say, by stealth. We know the object of these apparitions it is to seek nourishment; but we do not know how death is caused to the selected victim. The following facts will reveal it in its true aspect:

"In 1718, after parts of Servia and Wallachia had fallen to Austria, the Austrian government received several reports from the commanders of the troops cantoned in those countries. They stated that it was a general belief among the people that dead persons, but still living in the grave, came out under certain circumstances to suck the blood of the living, and thus sustain underground a remnant of health and strength. As early as 1720, one report announced that at Kisolova, a village situated in Lower Hungary, a certain Pierre Plogogowitz, about ten weeks after his sepulture, had appeared by night to several residents, and so squeezed their necks that they had died within twenty-four hours; so that, in the course of a week, ​nine persons, some young, some aged, had died in this manner. His widow herself had been annoyed by him, and had left the village on this account. The inhabitants demanded permission of the commandant to exhume and burn the body. The commandant having refused it, they declared that they would all leave the village unless their request was complied with. The commanding officer thereupon came to the village in company with the curé of Gradisca. He caused the coffin of Pierre to be opened, and they found his body intact, except the end of the nose, which was a little shrivelled; but it exhaled no bad odour, and seemed rather the body of a man asleep than of one dead. His hair and beard had grown, and fresh nails had replaced the old ones which had fallen off. Under the external skin, which appeared pale and dead, had formed a new living skin; the hands and feet resembled those of a man in perfect health. As they found in his mouth fresh blood, the people believed it must have been he who had sucked the blood of those who had quite recently died, and nothing could prevent their plunging into the breast of the corpse a sharpened stake. There then gushed a quantity of fresh and pure blood from the mouth and nose. The peasants threw the body upon a pyre and burned it.

"Some years later, a soldier of the frontier, who lived at Haidamac, told his regiment that, being one day at table with a guest, he saw enter a stranger, who came and sat himself down with them; that ​his guest was very much alarmed, and that he had died the next morning; that he had subsequently learned that this stranger who had died more than ten years previously, was the father of his guest, and had announced and even caused his death. Count Cabrera, a captain in the regiment, was ordered to investigate the case, and repaired to the place with several brother-officers, the auditor, and surgeon. He questioned the persons of the house, and as their testimony was confirmed by that of other inhabitants of the place, he caused the corpse to be disinterred. They found it perfectly preserved, with the lively expression of a living man. The head was out off, and the body was then restored to the grave.

Another man, who had died some thirty years before, had thrice come, as was said, in daylight to his house, and had killed, by sucking their blood, first his own brother, then one of his sons, and finally a domestic. His corpse was found in the same state, and it was re-interred after a large nail had been driven through the two temples. Cabrera had a third burned, who had died sixteen years before, and who, it was reported, had killed his two sons. He handed in a report to the commandant of his regiment, who forwarded it to the Court, after which the emperor formed a commission of officers, judges, pleaders, physicians, and men of science to thoroughly investigate these extraordinary phenomena." Dom ​Calmet cites this fact in his dissertation upon vampires.

Here are facts at once significant and incontestable. I might multiply them, for there are other countries, notably in Northern Europe, where histories of this kind are equally numerous and well authenticated; but those which I have quoted seem to me quite enough to convince the reader as to the reality of posthumous vampirism, as well as the phenomena which characterize it. These facts at the same time bring into a new and clear light the physiognomy of the posthumous being. It is one of those cases where the fluidic being, instead of abandoning the body from which death has just separated it, persists in stopping with it and in living with a new life, in which the parts are reversed; the corpse being unable to leave its last dwelling-place, it is the phantom that assumes charge of the functions which the former performed previously. Thenceforth the struggle for existence continues beyond the tomb with the same tenacity the same brutal and selfish ferocity, one might say the same cynicism, as in living nature. The spectre is seen to come as a nocturnal marauder, like a malefactor, on behalf of its old landlord; it enters a habitation, goes straight to the one selected as a victim, springs at his throat like a jaguar or a wild cat, and does not relinquish its prey until it has imbibed his blood. It is the members of its own family whom it seems to seek by preference. ​In default of these, it attacks the inhabitants of the locality, and if in great straits will satisfy itself with a sheep or some other domestic animal, as is proven by a mass of testimony which it will not profit us to collect.

Let us now examine what becomes of the blood aspired by the spectre. We find here a repetition of what we have observed several times in the preceding chapters in connection with the living phantom. Its structure is bound so intimately with that of the body of which it is the image, that all absorption of liquid by the former passes at once into the organs of the latter. It must be the same in the phenomena of posthumous vampirism, since the post-sepulchral phantom is the continuation of the living phantom. All the blood swallowed by the spectre passes instantly into the organs of the corpse which it has just left, and to which it returns as soon as its poaching work is finished. The constant arrival of this vivifying liquid, which at once disseminates itself through the circulation, prevents putrefaction, preserves in the limbs their natural suppleness, and in the flesh its fresh and reddish tint. Under this action is seen to continue a sort of vegetative life which causes the hair and nails to grow, forms a new skin as the old one dries up, and, in certain cases, favours the formation of adipose tissue, as has been proved by the exhumation of certain vampires. Persons who had known them found them ​plump and fleshy to a degree far beyond that they had at the time of their decease. Popular instinct divined that there was but one way to break this strange association of the spectre and the corpse; it was to reduce to nothing one of them. Powerless to attack the phantoms, they disinterred and burned the body. The remedy was infallible; for from that moment the vampire ceased his dreadful depredations.