The Tennessean from Nashville, Tennessee • Page 84

New Reason Why opleSWlBelieve Arsenic Eating, Which Preserves the Corpse in Lifelike Semblance, at the Bottom of Stories of the "Undcad" Who Sleep All Day in Their Graves, Waiting for Night to Steal Forth for Their Satanic Meals I- I V-i iWf. "I 1 I I U1 TTSJ ji' CZJL TVWa i flFflffl vaf: '-iYY; I vJ IVf Above, a Photorrmph of the Only RmI Vamplr 1 -5 1 1 at It. Meal of Bloodj Thl. Little Bat. WT.Icli I.

ad -IWvJ 0A Actual Blood Sucker, Ha the Faculty of Locally vCfT JvlVH '41 a Sloping Human Victim So No W'; t'sSllWJ 4 7 iiOJJ A Medieval Drawing Illustrating the Flight -of the Vampires In this Case Witches With Grotesque Heads on a Blood-Sucking Tour. I Pain I Felt, and Then Wltn Ita folniea lonrue r-T. irrVV: i 1 Drawing: Into Itnelf Itn Meal of Blood And, Below, the Curloun Palntlnf by Maurice Hand, Called "The Werewolves," Showing the "rndead'' In the Form of Wolves Waiting for a Human Victim. 1 'S HMaHHMHIIIiaiMIBIHIHIh4IUIMHUM4ftfHMMMHII vj TV. "Good Hunting," an Etching by Goya In His Fantastic Series Entitled "Lou Caprichos," Showing the Flight of Vampires.

bodies exhumed. The army surgeons in their official report stated that they found the body of a woman named Stana, 20 years old, who had died three months before. The body of Stana. said Surgeons Flickinger, Siedel and Baumgartner, was untouched by any decomposition. When the body was opened the chest was full of fresh blood and the organs and viscera had a healthy appearance.

The skin and the nails of both hands and feet were loose and came off, but beneath this dead skin was a new skin and new nails starting to grow. But this was not all the surgeons found In the cemetery. They exhumed eight other bodies, buried from six weeks to three months, which were remarkably preserved and which the peasants. In their hysteria, had already suspected of vampirism. There are innumerable stories of vampires and their healthy-looking condition, reported by people other than doctors.

Frequently the bodies are said to have been buried for years. One hundred days was the longest reported by the Hungarian army surgeons. Why should anyone take a poison which produces neither sleep nor intoxication The answer is vanity, the same motive which makes modern girls apply rouge. Hardy mountaineers admire rosy cheeks and red lips but rouge and lip-stick are taboo. Men too.

wished to look like red-blooded he-men, with ruddy cheeks and a good "wind." Arsenic is an old remedy for anemia and according to Professor Harrar's report, gives Us addicts a ruddy, flushed appearance in life which was especially prized by the women of such provinces as Styria. In the men it was supposed to promote robustness and especially give them "more wind" for their common task of mountain climbing. The arsenic came in the crude form of arsenic sulfide, from' the iron smelters. Even today the peasant secretly spreads the yellow, butterlike substance on his bread. Though forbidden as a poi sn, it is peddled everywhere by arsenic bootleggers and la used legally in Europe to make horses plump and give them soft, silky hair.

Professor Harrar also referred to the experiments of Mr. H. G. A. Harding in 1912-14.

He began with 160 of a grain and shortly was taking 115 of a grain after meals. This is the accepted maximum dose that the human body can tolerate. Gradually, through the next two years, Harding worked up his dose until he waa taking one whole grain of arsenic at a time and finally, when he was taking one and a. half grains at a time, he thought he noticed some discomfort. Harding next tried to stop'his arsenic diet suddenly.

He found as do the natives of Styria, that he suffered ill effects and he seemed to have become an arsenic addict But then Harding realized that he might cut down the doses gradually. This he did. In a few months he was able to stop without discomfort. He is still alive in Australia and in good health some 28 years later. While Harding was eating his arsenic he found that his complexion became more ruddy and he had a small gain in weight.

He experienced the buoyant and tonic feeling which, the natives of Styria describe. His ruddy complexion remains with him today. AT LAST cornea a key to the most pux- AA zling part of the vampire myth, of Jthe "undead" who rise froni 1 their graves at night, to suck the blood of the living, who then become vampires, too. Science has not been so much puzzled over the origin of this grisly superstition which arose in prehistoric times as in why, though dying out in most other parts of the world, It is still going strong as ever in the Balkans. -Professor Norman J.

Harrar recently announced the discovery or rather re-discovery of the clue at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society, in St. Louis, Missouri. The explanation is a'chemical one which every' undertaker will understand arsenic. It seems that the vampire superstition, like that of witchcraft and others, was slowly fading away in the Balkans as elsewhere, only to be revived by a startling discovery. If bodies in a little country graveyard in America were exhumed and it was found that most had become nothing but bones, while a few retained an almost lifelike state of preservation, the reason would occur to everyone.

Some had been embalmed, the others had not. But when this actually happened in graveyards of Balkan peasants, the explanation was not so simple, because there had been no embalming or other attempts to preserve bodies. The priest, the doctor and the school earner could not account for such cases of preservation but there were others who could, those who will still believed in the ancient vampire tradition. According to that old superstition, a person became a vampire from infection by other vampires or dealings with evil spirits. When death came to such a person and the body was laid in the grave, it did not stay dead.

The corpse came to life and re mained very much so from the last ray of sunset until the first ray of dawn, when it became helpless throughout the daylight hours. This sort of half-time immortality would last only about as long as a normal living person could go without food. Unless the vampire bestirred itself to get nourishment within that period, it would then become permanently dead. (A vampire's only food was the blood of some living creature, preferably a human being.) Therefore the vampire lost little time In extricating itself from its tomb and seeking victims. These were usually attacked in their sleep, so gently they did not awaken.

Due to this, many have supposed that the Idea originated from the vampire bat of tropical America, which draws blood from a sleeping person so painlessly that he does not know anything has happened until much later. But this theory does not account for the tradition in other continents, where there seem never to have been any vampire bats. As that old tradition has it, barred or even tightly closed windows were of no avail because a vampire could squeeze through a bedroom keyhole or crack in the wall. The most reliable protection against a vampire was wild garlic. A necklace of this smelly seasoning hung around the sleeper's neck was the best vampire-deterrent known.

But many forgot the precaution and some, especially women, so disliked scenting their boudoir this way that they took a chance. 1 1 I 1 His I Painting by Burne-Jone. Which Modernised the Vampire Idea and Inspired Kipling's "The "A Rag and a Bone and a Hank of Hair" Poem. J' pital Medical School in England, on the habit of arsenic eating. The lecturer's investigations took him to the province of Styria.

in old Austria, where the habit was prevalent then and even now. Every three or four years, the peasants of the little community dug up the bodies of everybody who had been buried during that time. This resulted, as expected, mostly in a jumble of bones but he. as well as the natives was impressed by certain startling exceptions men and women so well-preserved that everyone recognized them at a glance. Because he had been gathering statistics on which ones in the little Village were known to have been arsenic eaters, he was confronted by the fact that these were among the mysterious decay defiera.

Arsenic had been the basis for the embalming fluid of generations of undertakers and used also by taxidermists in mounting animals. The chemical would presumably have a similar effect on the arsenic saturated flesh of an addict. With that clue he was able to find that enough of the other cases had also taken It, to make it probable of all. Since the natives explained the phenomenon by "vampirism," this might account for the persistence of the superstition in that area. Further evidence lay In the fact that vampirism and arsenic eating seemed to run together through the Balkans and particularly along the banks of the Danube.

There are many records of whole communities becoming hysterical in the belief that a vampire was preying on them. At Kostartsa, Hungary, are official records that "several people died from 'vampires' in a pitifully weakened and anemic condition." The symptoms are strongly suggestive of pernicious anemia, unknown at that time. The medical evidence of suspected deaths by vampirism is rare but in the historical records at Belgrade is the signed statement of three army surgeons who attended a vampire "hunt" at the town of Meduegna In 1732. With the fearful villagers they went to the cemetery where graves were dug up and the It ended in the opening of eleven graves of the hunters' own friends and relatives. The men peered at the remains in the first ten, only to shake their heads as they reverently replaced coffin lids and earth.

But on opening the eleventh, the men cried out as one: "That is our vampire." The grave contained the body of a 20-year-old girl. They drove a stake through the chest of the body, heaped garlic upon it, went through other ceremonies and then all went home, praising heaven that they had found and destroyed the "vampire." The American Weekly's correspondent, a skeptical city man, living in Bucharest, asked how they thought they knew the right one. The vampire hunters all assured him that after six months in the grave the body had been as fresh as the day the girl committed suicide. Tlie correspondent suggested that since her grave was in one of the highest parts of the cemetery, its dryness might account for the preservation. Professor paper reveals a better explanation for her preservation as well as all the other Balkan vampires.

The chemistry professor came upon the remarkable report of one' Charles Heiach, unappreciated at the time and forgotten since the 1880's when he lectured at the Middlesex Hos- A vampire was supposed to keep coming back, night after night, as its victim grew paler and more anemic until he finally died almost bloodless. Then the victim became a vampire, too, and spent the nights producing still more vampires. a person receiving nightly visits from a vampire would be aware of what was happening and could postpone death by becoming ajjliytng vampire" that is, by renewing his loss of blood through stealing a nightly supply from others, keeping it up until caught. There is the story of a Balkan nobleman, deeply in love with his beautiful young bride, though wondering at certain peculiarities of her behavior. Nevertheless, he suspected nothing until one night he shot a wolf In the left hind leg.

The animal gave a peculiar howl and trotted away on its three uninjured ones. Returning to the castle he found his bride unaccountably shot in her left leg. This finally brought a confession that she was a "living vampire." There was nothing for the unhappy husband to do but cut off her head, bury her and drive a wooden stake through her heart. In 1938, The American Weekly printed the strange story of a vampire hunt in the little mountain village of Sarmisegetuza, Rumania. 1941, by American Weekly, Inc.

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