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All among the living and undead know Count Dracula. But vampires have a long and more established pedigree than readers of Bram Stoker may recognize. These bloodsuckers have even made their ways to American shores.
In his new book, “Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire” (Running Press), Aaron Mahnke starts with the “vampire panic” of Rhode Island in the 1890s — which appears to have inspired Stoker — before diving deep into the historic and folkloric past.
Mahnke takes us to backwaters across the globe. Among the most intriguing is the town of Kisiljevo, where more than 150 years before the American vampire panic there was a Serbian one. In this little village, nine people had died from a mysterious illness. “Anyone who studies history would view this sort of story as ‘normal’ for the early 18th century,” Mahnke writes.
But the villagers added a twist: During their illness, each of the dead had sworn they were visited in their sleep by a man who tried to strangle them in their sleep: Peter Blagojević. Weirder still, Blagojević had died 10 weeks before the rash of deaths began.
The villagers of Kisiljevo took the only sensible action — they exhumed Blagojević’s corpse to make sure he was really and truly dead.
“Once dug up, they were shocked to see that the body had almost no signs of decay,” Mahnke writes. “It didn’t even smell, as a normal corpse should. Looking closer, the men could swear that Peter’s nails and hair had grown, and blood could clear be seen around his mouth.”
Their next step was logical enough.
“The villagers responded by crafting a sharpened stake, which they pounded into the corpse’s heart.”
This is a little taste of the gruesome stories that Mahnke offers in “Exhumed.”
The subtitle of “Exhumed” is a little misleading. Bloodsuckers are, indeed, a significant element in the book, and it does build toward a vampiric climax. But vampires — American or otherwise — are not really the central conceit. “Exhumed” is more about the crazy ways societies have looked at the dead and tried to reverse the effects of mortality.
Indeed, the real pleasure of “Exhumed” is found in its eccentric cast of characters who tried to defeat death. Consider, for example, the case of Luigi Galvani, the 18th-century physiologist who theorized that electrocution could revive patients suffering from death. He practiced on frogs.
Then there’s the ancient Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, who believed that severed hand of a young, dead person could heal a patient with throat diseases and other maladies. This, we can assume, found as much success as the “skull powder” — no explanation necessary — used as an ingredient in Goddard’s Drops, an extremely popular cure-all during the reign of King Charles II.
There are chapters on premature burial, mummification and state execution. Fun fact: Standardized punishments written into Ancient Greek law came from a legislator named Draco. “Draco’s code assigned the same punishment to every single crime imaginable: death.” Hence, the word Draconian.
If some of the stories — and the general esprit de campfire — sound familiar, this might be because Mahnke is the creator, producer, writer and host of the wildly successful “Lore” podcast. “Lore” is similarly fixated on urban legends and true histories of the gruesome.
The 50-year-old Mahnke grew up in a small Midwestern town near Chicago. “It was a wonderful time to be a kid,” he said. Particularly if one had the kind of interests that occupied Mahnke. He grew up watching “Unsolved Mysteries” and “The X-Files.” He showed an early mastery of the macabre. One year he wrote a Halloween story that “involved a family going to a local pumpkin patch — getting a pumpkin, coming home and finding human bones inside of the pumpkin.”
Not bad for a fifth grader — or an adult horror writer, really.
“When you’re a kid it’s a lot easier to believe” in the occult, Mahnke told The Post. “As an adult … I’m skeptical. But there’s a lot of joy in thinking it could be true.”
True or not, the reactions to the mysterious and seemingly supernatural are fascinating. “Exhumed” can read as a catalogue of inexplicable human behavior in the face of cold and misunderstood mortality, where the only viable answers come from the spirit world — or the quack-medicine world.
In 1799, the father of our nation, George Washington, fell ill with a sore throat. While Washington waited for a proper doctor to arrive, Martha Washington turned to the manager of the family estate because he was trained in bloodletting — a practice that everybody in that age knew and largely accepted.
“If Hippocrates, Galen and generations of other medical experts said bloodletting worked, then by golly it did,” Mahnke writes.
Indeed, when Washington’s actual doctor — the guy who presumably had more expertise than the person in charge of roof repair and hedge trimming at Mount Vernon — showed up, the bloodletting continued. More doctors and experts hovered over the general until half of Washington’s blood eventually drained from his body.
The first president of the United States didn’t make it — but while his cooling corpse lay on his deathbed, a final doctor arrived prescribing a different regimen: “rubbing him all over with towels to generate heat. Next, he would perform [a] tracheotomy … Oh, and one more thing: he wanted to replace all that lost blood with a transfusion.”
America’s docs continued to sway between the scientific and the absurd well into the next century. See: Mercy Brown, the Rhode Island vampire. She died at age 19 of tuberculosis after several other members of her household expired. Her brother lay perilously close to death. Months after Mercy’s departure, some locals began to worry that the deaths had a more mysterious explanation. They demanded to see the corpses of the dead family members to make sure nothing fishy was going on.
Mercy’s dead sister and mother were properly decomposed. But, as with Blagojević, Mercy was too perfectly preserved for the locals’ judgment. It had to be paranormal.
Mercy had died in January when the ground was too frozen to dig up. She had therefore been stored inside a stone outbuilding in the freezing cold. It did not occur to the villagers that this rudimentary refrigeration could have stalled her body’s decay.
No, the locals concluded that she was undead. They burned her heart and liver, turned the ashes into a powder and gifted the powder to her dying brother with the instruction to consume it as a cure. He died two months later.
“Exhumed” borrows a lot of material that Mahnke features in his podcast, and that’s largely what gives the book its breezy, conversational tone — corny throwaway lines and all. The words “pun intended” and “put not intended” appear quite a bit in this volume — but it’s difficult to get annoyed. It’s part of the banter of a good podcaster.
After many detours and scenic routes, the narrative ends where it began, with the vampires of Rhode Island. But it would be wrong to reveal too many of the jewels Mahnke buries in the text. (Pun intended.) He follows the thinking of his subjects as they grapple with what had, until relatively recently, been the mysteries of microbiology, mortality and more.
“I was amazed at how close people in the past could get to the truth,” Mahnke said. “It was like people in the dark getting their hands to the door.”
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