ENIGMASinvention. The validity of the various
vampire reports, he insisted, merited
careful consideration.
He documented many accounts of
those who claimed to see the dead that
“come back to earth, talk, walk, infest
villages, ill use both men and beasts,
suck the blood of their near relations,
destroy their health, and finally cause
their death.” These undead, he wrote,
“are called by the name of vampires.”Serbian Tales
One of the most famous cases in
Calmet’s collection came from Austri-
an army surgeon Johann Flückinger.
The doctor described the case ofA valuable repository for vampire lo-
re, Calmet’s two-volume supernatural
survey, Dissertations Upon the Appari-
tions of Angels, Daemons, and Ghosts,
and Concerning the Vampires of Hungary,
Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, was pub-
lished in 1746. The author carefully col-
lected and examined numerous reports
of vampire attacks that were emerging
from eastern Europe in the late 17th and
early 18th centuries. These accounts
triggered an intense scholarly debate
as philosophers and physicians alike
sought to resolve the disconnect between
the reports’ fantastic details and their
reputable sources.
Calmet acknowledged in his preface
that the academic study of supernat-
ural forces might invite criticism and
derision, but he insisted that the tes-
timonies from such reliable witnesses
were too detailed and consistent to
dismiss as pure delusion or outrightB
ram Stoker’s original manu-
script of Dracula included a
preface that was cut before the
novel was published in 1897.
In this outtake, the creator of
the world’s most famous vampire believed
that he was not writing pure fiction: “I am
quite convinced that there is no doubt
whatever that the events here described
really took place, however unbelievable
and incomprehensible they might appear
at first sight. And I am further convinced
that they must always remain to some ex-
tent incomprehensible.”
Count Dracula was the literary culmi-
nation of two centuries of a resolute belief
in the undead who walked among, and
attacked, the living in eastern Europe. One
of the strongest influences on Stoker, and
other 19th-century authors, was the work
of 18th-century Benedictine monk and
distinguished biblical scholar Antoine
Augustin Calmet.HAVING BEEN pierced
through the heart with
a stake, the body of a
suspected vampire is
“finished off” with a gunshot
in a Transylvanian cemetery.
19th-century engraving
WHITE IMAGES/SCALA, FLORENCEBNFSUPERSTITION UNDER STUDY
AN 1850 EDITION OF CALMET’S WORK was edited by English
scholar Rev. Henry Christmas. He believed none of the
accounts, but he thought they had value beyond enter-
tainment: “[T]hey have their philosophical value; they
have a still greater historical value; and they show how
far even upright minds may be warped by imperfect
education, and slavish deference to authority.”Legends of
the Vampire
In the 17th and 18th centuries, vampire mania swept
through eastern Europe, and a French cleric collected all
the tales he could find. His work inspired not only scholarly
debate but also the first works of vampire fiction.A.A. CALMET (DETAIL), IN AN 18TH-CENTURY FRENCH ENGRAVING