In other words… the vampire was an explanation for disaster within a community, and no further justification was needed for the reality of a vampire other than illnesses that are perfectly explicable without the need for a supernatural explanation.

There are several other aspects to be considered – a widow experiences her husband returning to her at night; villagers see a dead man walking about in the daylight. The widow’s experience is not difficult to understand. It is a combination of clinical nightmares and the working of superstition upon the imagination. Regarding the daylight visions, it is likely to be a combination of superstition, fear, and a profound wish to fasten upon a likely candidate who can bear all the blame for the misfortunes of the village. Notably the vampires “seen” are never seen by all at the same time. Instead, the experience is “Two of us see him but the other four do not”, and “showing himself now to one, now to another”. This now-on, now-off visibility is unlikely to be a manifestation of a genuinely supernatural creature, but rather the workings of imagination, and the tendency for tellers of tales to “top” the previous story told.

It’s also notable that the vampire is not always represented as sustaining its life by sucking the blood of its relatives (or even from convenient cattle) – sometimes blood does not enter into the tale at all. But when it does, the method is never explicitly stated except in terms of sympathetic magic (for example, the chewing of its own fleshy breast results in a vampire’s somehow managing to suck the blood of its relatives while still reposing in its grave, or by chewing on its graveclothes, it is imbibing the blood of others). Never – and this will be an unwelcome surprise to many who cherish the erotic fanged image of the modern vampire – never are long teeth mentioned in the Slavic folklore, and never is any biting mentioned. The first time that a vampiric bite is mentioned is actually not in Slavic literature at all… but in the English story “The Vampyre”, written by Dr John Polidori published in 1819.

Every time, in fact, in these tales that an “attack” is spoken of, it is separate from the blood-sucking. It seems likely that the attacks can be considered part of the clinical nightmare phenomenon, and that the notion of blood-sucking can be attributed to the effects of wasting diseases, pestilences, plagues, and so on.

Tomb-Raiding

If the presence of victims was a pivotal aspect in determining whether a vampire was at work, it follows that methods in determining who the vampire(s) could be would have focused upon finding a likely culprit, not upon a logical and truly unambiguous search for a genuine vampire, tried and tested and scrupulously observed. In fact, that lack of a genuine search for an evidentially proven vampire is exactly what we see in the vampire hunts in Slavic cultures, as can be seen by the extensive report below.

The excerpt is from one of the most reliable and extensive eyewitness accounts of vampire-hunting in the 18th century that we have. It comes via a Croatian translation (by Ante Liepopili, a Croatian historian) from the original Latin, and is a Dubrovnik Criminal Court vampire trial transcript covering the period 14th of October 1737 to 30th June 1738, concerning events on Lastovo Island, Yugoslavia. The testimony is elicited from both the witnesses and the accused.