Gabriele D’Annunzio was another firm believer in their existence. In his Triumph of Death, translated by Georgina Harding, we read: “What have they not done? Candia told of all the different means they had tried, all the exorcisms they had resorted to. The priest had come and, after covering the child’s head with the end of his stole, had repeated verses from the Gospel. The mother had hung up a wax cross, blessed on Ascension Day, over a door, and had sprinkled the hinges with holy water and repeated the Creed three times in a loud voice; she had tied up a handful of salt in a piece of linen and hung it round the neck of her dying child. The father had ‘done the seven nights’—that is, for seven nights he had waited in the dark behind a lighted lantern, attentive to the slightest sound, ready to catch and grapple with the vampire. A single prick with the pin sufficed to make her visible to the human eye. But the seven nights’ watch had been fruitless, for the child wasted away and grew more hopelessly feeble from hour to hour. At last, in despair, the father had consulted with a wizard, by whose advice he had called a dog and put the body behind the door. The vampire could not then enter the house till she counted every hair on its body.”
Calmet’s explanation of the spectres so much talked of in Hungary, Moravia, Poland, and elsewhere is that they are nothing but persons that are still alive in their graves, though without motion or respiration; and that the freshness and ruddy colour of their blood, the flexibility of their limbs, and their crying out when their hearts were run through with a stick, or their heads cut off, were demonstrative proofs of their being still alive. “But this,” he says, “does not affect the principal difficulty at which I stick, namely, how they come out of and go into their graves, without leaving any mark of the earth’s being removed; and how they appear to carry former clothes. If they are not really dead, why do they return to their graves again and not stay in the land of the living? Why do they suck the blood of their relations, and torment and pester persons that should naturally be true to them and never give them any offence? On the other hand, if it be nothing but a mere whim of the persons infested, whence comes it that these carcases are found in their graves uncorrupted, full of blood, with their limbs pliant and flexible, and their feet dirty, the next day after they have been patrolling about and frightening the neighbourhood, whilst nothing of this sort can be discovered in other carcases that were buried at the same time and in the same mound? Whence is it that they come no more after they are burned or impaled?”
Other writers have accepted the theory that the subjects are not really dead, but are only in a death-like condition. The Germans express this condition of apparent death and of the perfect preservation of the living body by the term scheintod, which is, perhaps, better than the English term “suspended animation.” Dr Herbert Mayo describes the special condition of vampires as a “death-trance”—a positive status, a period of repose, the duration of which is sometimes definite and predetermined, though unknown, and says that the patient sometimes awakes suddenly when the term of the death-trance has expired. During this trance-period the action of the heart, breathing, voluntary motion, as well as feeling and intelligence and the vegetable changes in the body, are said to be suspended. Two instances of the death-trance are quoted.
Cardinal Espinosa, prime minister under Philip the Second of Spain, died, as it was supposed, after a short illness. His rank entitled him to be embalmed. Accordingly, the body was opened for that purpose. The lungs and heart had just been brought into view, when the latter was seen to beat. The cardinal, awakening at the fatal moment, had still strength enough left to seize with his hand the knife of the anatomist.
On the 23rd of September 1763, the Abbé Prévost, the French novelist and compiler of travels, was seized with a fit in the forest of Chantilly. The body was found and conveyed to the residence of the nearest clergyman. It was supposed that death had taken place through apoplexy. But the local authorities, desiring to be satisfied of the fact, ordered the body to be examined. During the process the poor Abbé uttered a cry of agony. It was too late.
Among Theosophists and Continental spiritists a solution to the problem is found in their teaching concerning the astral body and the astral plane, as conveyed by Madame Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled.
It is held that so long as the astral form is not entirely separated from the body there is a liability that it may be forced by magnetic attraction to re-enter it. Sometimes it will be only half-way out when the corpse, which presents the appearance of death, is buried. In such cases the astral body voluntarily re-enters the mortal frame, and then one of two things happens—either the unhappy victim will writhe in the agonising torture of suffocation, or if he has been grossly material he becomes a vampire. It is held that this ethereal form can go wherever it pleases, and that it is possible for this astral body to feed on human victims and carry the sustenance to the corpus lying within the tomb by means of an invisible cord of connection, the nature of which is at present unknown; but psychical researchers—and these number many eminent scientists—have of late years devoted their efforts towards the elucidation of the phenomenon known as the projection of the double; and this, if scientifically and satisfactorily explained, will give the clue to many of the phenomena of vampirism.
This “double” may sometimes during life be projected unconsciously, and sometimes purposely, by means of hypnotism or provoked somnambulism. An example of the former appeared in the Journal du Magnétisme for October 1909, and the translation of the account was published in the Annals of Psychical Science for January-March 1910, and is here reproduced. The narrator is M. Antonio Salazar of Mexico.