Killing the Dead

The overwhelming recurring theme in all of these reports or anecdotes is destruction of the corpse – by impaling through the navel or through the heart, by decapitating the corpse, by mutilating the corpse in various ways, by boiling it, by chopping it up and cremating it. It could be nailed to the coffin to prevent its leaving. Occasionally there is mention of millet seed or similar, designed to halt the vampire in its tracks with what we can only call obsessive-compulsive behaviour (forced to count the seeds). In one instance, a sunflower acts as a deterrent to vampires, and in several cases, carrying out the corpse from its home in a particular way prevents it from being able to enter again after death. Also mentioned is the necessity to keep the winding-sheet or burial cloth away from the mouth of the corpse, lest it chew the cloth and, by sympathetic magic, feast upon the living by so doing.

The corpse, although said to speak and laugh and move, evidently did not become sufficiently verbal to say anything startling for posterity, and lacked the ability to depart from its grave and attack its attackers who came with stakes and shovels and nails. The impression is overwhelming that the few anecdotes in which a vampire actually spoke or ran away are products of imagination or the desire of a storyteller to make the story sound even better – it is startlingly clear that the Slavic peasants did group together after dark, did exhume bodies, and did impale corpses without fearing a wrestling match.

A Slavic vampire cult recorded in Istria at the end of the 19th century dealt with a suspected vampire (kudlak) by mutilation – “they sever the tendons under his knees before they place him in his grave. They think that in this way he will no longer walk at night nor bother anyone.”⁴¹

In some regions, burying the vampire at a crossroads would prevent its rising – in others, a crossroads became a notorious half-world of evil, in which ghouls, demons and vampires would rise to torment any traveller unlucky enough to linger there. Jan L. Perkowski points out the importance of the theme of transition: “… time, place and means. Transition is between the natural and the supernatural. The most common times of transition are sunrise and sunset. Noon and midnight also occur. Crossroads serve as a place of transition. Cloth and especially its component threads serve as a means of transition, as among the Sorbs, Polabians, and Russians.” (Perkowski, p. 124)