Welcome, everyone, to then again, a podcast of the Northeast Georgia History Center. My name is Leslie Jones, and I'm the director of archives and curation. And today we're continuing with another spooky podcast episode. But we are doing something little different. In 2021, we produced a program on the origins of vampires. It's available on our YouTube page for those who want to watch it. The interviews done in this program are stellar and I believe should be heard again. In the first interview, our director of education, Marie Bartlett, speaks to Dr. Mark Wadell of Michigan State University. Dr. Wodell studies the history of science and medicine in the early modern period. And in this interview, he explains how science, medicine, and the occult helped construct vampire folklore.

My background is in the history of science and technology and medicine, but I also study the history of the occult and magic. Most of my expertise is in the 16th and 17th centuries, and so magic, medicine, and science were really closely interconnected in that period, so my interests have kind of broadened from there.

So can you tell us a little bit about how the legend of vampire and folk beliefs in general kind of allow people to explore the natural world around them through these supernatural things?

A lot of vampire folklore is really about helping people come to grips with, as well as helping people to deal with the anxieties around death and specifically what comes after death. And, of course, this is another universal human preoccupation. So there's a couple of things, right? So when we look at the history of death and dying, one thing that happened with some frequency was people being buried alive. This was actually, surprisingly, maybe not surprisingly common, actually. So today we have sophisticated medical technologies that help us understand when someone's heart has stopped beating, when someone's brain has stopped functioning, which we interpret as death. But in the past, without those technologies, it wasn't always easy to determine if someone was actually dead. There are certain illnesses, certain substances and poisons that someone might have ingested that could cause them to fall into a state that might resemble death, where they are paralyzed, they are breathing very shallowly, their heart rate slows. And so it did happen that people were buried alive. And what's interesting is the way in which different religious groups and different human communities found and created practices to deal with that problem. So, as one example, in some religions and some cultures, it's common for people to sit with the dead for a number of days after death. And this is seen as a chance for people to say their goodbyes, to kind of just be with their loved one after they've died. But it also serves another purpose, which is if that person isn't actually dead, they're going to wake up at some point in, say, 24 to 48 hours. And so, really, a lot of these practices were evolved because people wanted to make sure that their loved ones actually were dead. There are stories from the 18th and 19th centuries of cemeteries in places like England and France where people were buried with a little bit of string coming out of their coffin and running to a bell outside. And the idea was if you woke up in your coffin and you've been buried alive, you could pull that string and it would ring that bell and someone hopefully would be waiting to make sure you were dead. So there's all these elaborate practices and so the reason I'm talking about that is because this was the experience people sometimes had of they would return to a loved one or someone who had died, they would return to their body months or maybe even years later. It was not uncommon for people because space was at a premium. It was not uncommon for the body of, say, a child or someone like that to be placed in the coffin of someone who had already died. So you would open the coffin and sometimes people would find scratch marks on the inside of the coffin because someone had been buried alive. So that sort of visceral experience we could understand, right, the horror someone would feel of did I bury my parent or my spouse or my child while they were still alive? That's a truly horrifying thought. But if we can instead reimagine this as they rose from the dead, right, they were dead, we didn't make a mistake, but that something happened to them after death that caused them to reanimate, to come back to life and that's why we find these scratch marks on the insides of coffins. There's also other kind of physiological facts about bodies, what happens to people after death that I think helped to create or to support some of this folklore. So it's not uncommon for people buried in coffins. If you return to that body some weeks or months later, the body has probably shifted and that has to do with things like gases caused that are emitted as the body begins to decompose that can change the orientation of the body. Muscles and tendons through things like rigor mortise can tighten and then loosen, meaning that sometimes you might open the coffin and the body is now lying on its side or lying in a different position than when it was originally buried. And then there's the fact that our hair and our nails continue to grow after death. And so there are stories of people again opening coffins and finding bodies with very long nails and very long hair which we would interpret as markers of life. And then so people would be wondering, well, this person has been alive all this time. Have they been leaving their coffin anyhow? So there's all of these real lived experiences around death and dying and the natural processes that happen to the bodies of those who have died that can and probably did lead to the foundation for some of these myths. The idea that some people after death don't rest, that they instead return to life in some way, and they might escape their coffin, they might go prowling around. So that's, I think, kind of interesting that there's these sort of real biological and physiological things that might have sort of spurred the creation of some of these folklores around the undead, essentially, or the risen dead. There's also one of the interesting themes in a lot of vampire folklore is this notion of infection, the idea that vampires can basically infect other people living people with this curse or this disease or whatever it is, and turn them into vampires themselves. And this idea is really common in our modern understandings of the vampire folklore. It was in Bram Stoker's Dracula. But that idea actually is very old, that the dead could somehow infect the living. And again, there are cultural practices and medical beliefs surrounding that idea. In the past, cemeteries and places where the dead were interred were always situated outside of communities. So a cemetery or a graveyard was never inside a town or a city. It was always outside. And there are reasons for that. There are practical reasons for that. Things like cemeteries didn't smell great, but there was also a prevailing medical idea that dead bodies, as they decompose, give off basically bad air. And this idea that this bad air was thought to be responsible for things like plague and cholera and other infectious diseases. And so that's why people tried to keep the bodies of the dead at a distance, because there was an actual fear that that bad air given off by those bodies could infect, could sicken living people. So there's another sort of bit there that I think explains some of the fears and anxieties around vampire folklore. And if we think about the European context specifically of vampire myths coming out of, say, Eastern Europe especially, these are areas that experienced huge amounts of epidemic disease for centuries. So things like the plague, which ripped through Europe beginning in the 14th century, actually 13th century, and killed huge amounts of people and then kept reappearing every few years, it became endemic. Those of us living through a global pandemic can probably relate to these persistent fears about infection. The idea that someone could infect you with something that would then kill you, that was such a deeply rooted part of the European psyche, I think, that also plays a role in shaping these vampire myths, this fear that the dead can somehow return to infect people who are still alive.

What were vampires portrayed as and what they represented before the novel Dracula? Because with Dracula, we have this suave, sophisticated aristocrat. But before then, it seemed to be that it was more peasants that were portrayed as vampires and that it was just someone's family member has come back from the dead. So how does this change kind of represent the European ideas of what is dangerous or what could infect them or what they kind of represented to the culture.

Again, it varied from place to place, which is also kind of interesting. So even though the idea of vampires or people rising from the dead is pretty common, the explanations people had for why that happened tended to vary pretty widely. So in places like Poland, people believed that the bodies were themselves animated by some sort of ghost or spirit that was itself evil. And so it wasn't the actual person themselves who had returned to life. It was this sort of evil spirit that was manipulating and controlling their body. And they had specific ideas. There were specific individuals who were born at certain times or who had certain characteristics who were at risk for being possessed by these spirits. And there's actually some really cool archaeological discoveries of so called vampire burials where people in these communities presumably believed that this particular person was at risk for rising again as a vampire. So they would place certain items in their grave with them, or they would do certain things to their bodies after death to make sure that they couldn't rise again. That's one aspect of it. I think what makes the story of or the idea of vampire so horrifying is the idea of people that one knows returning after death and being fundamentally malevolent or violent. Right. The sort of idea that the people that we love or people that we know could return to us, which would be wonderful, but they've returned as a monster, essentially. And I think that is, again, a kind of deeply rooted, psychological sort of impetus for a lot of these folklores. And part of what the vampire myths were intended to address, I think, was this fear of that the people that we love might change and become harmful to us or frightening to us. And there are, again, sort of variations, regional variations, in terms of what vampires were able to do. Supposedly, sometimes they would drink blood. That was how they would sustain themselves. But that isn't by any means necessarily the rule when we look at older vampire folklore. Sometimes they might kill farm animals. Right? And again, that's a way to explain kind of disastrous and horrifying circumstances. If you find your livestock destroyed, you might think, well, what caused that? Was it wolves? Was it something or was there some sort of supernatural element to it? Yeah, I think these sorts of really deep seated anxieties about not just death, but the transformation of people that we know and love into something fundamentally kind of dark and dangerous and frightening is a really important part of these myths. Vampires were just one element of this supernatural world that people believed to exist. That also included ghosts and spirits. It often included witches. Not in the sort of fun Halloween witch that we have today, but worshippers of satan who killed babies and did all sorts of horrible, know, people who practiced magic which might be potentially harmful. These are all part of the day to day reality for most European people. And so vampires were just a part of that and not even necessarily the most frightening part of it. But what's interesting and what Stoker found when he began sort of researching this is how deeply embedded these stories are and how far back they go. And that in these little regions, towns and villages, they would elaborate on and build up these stories over time. And that's when Bram Stoker began doing his research. He had a goldmine of these traditions, these superstitions and folklore to draw on. And then, as you point out, he did something really different with it, for which he received a fair amount of criticism over the years as well.

So how has society continued with this idea of a vampire, but also, as we were just saying, it's changed a lot as well. So this kind of destructive creature that's come back from the dead, then kind of changes into this swab, sophisticated immortal and then has continued to this day with probably twilight is the most famous of the early 21st century novels. So why do you think that society continues to have this fascination with vampires?

It is a really good question because, yeah, the original idea of vampires was truly horrifying, right? These were not suave, elegant, sophisticated creatures. These were basically scavengers coming back from the dead. Yeah. And so know, Stoker gets a lot of credit and a lot of blame for creating the modern conception of the vampire story. But vampires existed in European literature before Stoker. So we can go back to the 18th century and even further to find in the 19th century these gothic romances, right, which were very common, which had elements of darkness and danger to them, as well as eroticism, which was very new for the time as a kind of literary style. And we see representations of vampires there as well. And that probably also influenced Stoker's writing too. So it was sort of evolving over time. These ideas of, and specifically male vampires preying on young women was a theme in 18th and 19th century literature that Stoker inherited to a degree. And that then, of course, continued after Stoker. And, yeah, we get into the 20th century portrayals of in particular, the figure of Dracula as this sort of sophisticated, immortal figure and then people like Anne Rice, who in the 1980s was writing interview with a vampire, right. She is often credited with really giving us the kind of late 20th century idea of vampires as young and beautiful and sexy and that in turn led all the way to Twilight and it's sparkly vampires. Right? And that, I think, is really interesting that we went from these sort of disgusting, carrion eaters, scavengers, truly horrific figures to these sort of late 20th century and 21st century vampires who were young and attractive and who will live forever. And I guess that's part of the appeal, right. The sort of idea of eternal youth and all sorts of people in terms of authors and screenwriters and so on, have tried to find ways to make vampires more palatable and more appealing. They're no longer necessarily preying on humans, right. They're subsisting on animal blood or they don't even need blood anymore or whatever. So we found ways to kind of sanitize this idea of the vampire and to turn it into just young, hot, immortal people, which is really what Twilight did. Right. So I would say it has a lot to do with our fascination with youth and the idea that you can not only be young and beautiful, but you can stay young and you can stay beautiful forever. And isn't that wonderful? I guess. Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with why it has persisted. The anxieties and the sort of fears and the interest in death and vampires seems to have really faded away, especially in the past ten or 20 years. We no longer tend to see vampires as frightening creatures or even as the undead. So that's also kind of interesting.

It seems like the vampires have kind of moved to the protagonist side of the script, if you will.

Yeah, right. I mean, we have right, vampire heroes, which would have been unthinkable right back in Bram Stoker's Day. So yeah, I do think it is really interesting how collectively we've taken these stories and we've really changed them and they've evolved in lots of different ways, which is the mark of truly something that can last. Right. I think it's really interesting that the ideas of vampires, the idea of the vampire has survived for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It's still with us. It still shows up not just every Halloween, but on all kinds of TV programs and movies and books and things like that.

Even Sesame Street has the count.

Very true. Right? Yeah. We managed to make the Count into just a sort of fun figure for little kids.

Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing such interesting insight into just humans and the history of humans and how we really aren't that different. We still have the same fears and anxieties that, well, people hundreds or thousands of years ago had, and we just try to deal with them perhaps in different ways and perhaps some in ways that are not so different.

Right? Yeah. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

Next, we're going to hear from Dr. Jill Galvin from Ohio State University. Dr. Galvin is kind of a celebrity to me in the occult history world. She's written many articles and a book about the occult, specifically in relation to Victorian literature. And my favorite article I have ever read by her is The Occult Networks and the legacy of the Indian rebellion in Bram Stoker's Dracula. In this article, she talks about the influence India had on Bram Stoker and in many ways shaped the infamous character we all know as Dracula. Here again is Marie Bartlett speaking with Dr. Galvin.

All right, well, thank you so much for being with me today to talk to us a little bit about the history of vampires. Could you please introduce yourself and tell our viewers a little bit about your work?

Yeah, sure. I am Jill Galvin, and I'm an associate professor of English at the Ohio State University, where I've been teaching for a while. I teach Victorian literature, which is British 19th century literature. So what we're talking about today, Dracula, falls at the very end of that period in the 1890s. But my area of specialization is the whole period and also a little bit of the 20th century as well.

Yes, which includes Dracula, one of the most famous vampire books. So could you tell us a little bit about Dracula and how it reflects the times that it was written in?

So Dracula is it reflects the times in quite a few ways, in fact, innumerable ways. I would say that it's one of the narratives of the period that is most written on by literary scholars as being an allegory of something in the culture. It's one of the most, I think, proliferative texts for readings of it being an allegory of something else. And that can be something political and social. It can be something related to gender. It can be something related to science, to religion, to ethnicity. I mean, it's kind of amazing. So there are lots of different ways that you can think about the way that it reflects culture, and we can talk about some of those, but, for instance, one of them would be that in the 1890s, so Dracula is written in 1897. In the 1880s 1890s, a figure arises called the New Woman. And you can kind of think of her as a proto feminist figure who represents the desire to have different kinds of vocations for women outside of motherhood and marriage. So paid work and also a kind of figure of feminine agency and just a kind of latitude of action and sometimes also associated with feminine sexuality. For instance? And a lot of times people read Mina Harker and Lucy Westonraw in Dracula as figures of different forms of the New Woman, mina being a typist, being the working woman, and Lucy Westonraw being supposedly over sexed, and so being a figure of sexual agency that was associated with the New Woman. The narrative very much, too, reflects the fact that by the end of the 19th century, science as a profession and a kind of way of looking at the world, an empirical way of looking at the world, had really formed in the Victorian period and become professionalized by the end of the century when Stoker was writing. And if you think about the text of Dracula and the way that it's all these collated documents in order to evidence this phenomenon of Dracula and to try to investigate it, a lot of times people see the narrative as informed by that empiricist spirit that's arisen over the age. Those are just two ways I could talk about so many more, including all the technologies in the novel the camera, the codec camera, the telegraph, the typewriter, the phonograph, the railway. It's very much a kind of narrative of the times in that way, too.

As you were saying, not only is Dracula about vampires, it also features hypnotism, spiritualism, and conjurings. So why do you think that the occult during the Victorian period was so popular?

What's called the phenomenon of modern spiritualism, which was the seance craze, where people would just sit around and try to contact ghosts. And also the popularity of mesmerism, which is hypnotism, really arose mid century. So a few decades before Dracula. And that roughly it was a little bit preceding, but it roughly coincided with Darwin's discovery, or rather publicizing, of the mechanism of evolution and natural selection, which introduced what people talk about in the Victorian period as the age of doubt, right? This really fundamental existentialist challenge against religious ways of reading creation life, and particularly human life and human superiority to other animals. And so it caused a lot of consternation, at least among people who would have been reading about these scientific theories, which, at the day at the time, science was more popularized before the end of the century, when, again, as I said, it became more professionalized. But your kind of lay reader would have known about natural selection more so than, say, would be today if it were a new discovery. And so it was really confounding. It was really disturbing. And so a lot of times, what scholars say is that people reached for different ideas of continuity of human being in the afterlife, and so they reached for a kind of idea of spirituality. So that's one answer. Another answer is that the idea of Mesmerism or hypnotism had been around since, like, 100 years before Stoker. And that was where you can control somebody through trance. There was actually a figure named Mesmer at the end of the 18th century, and his theories become elaborated over the 19th century into different kind of spiritual and occult forms. And then the last reason I would give would be the rise of the different technologies that I was just mentioning. When you think about how profound a change in ideas of communication, even the telegraph would have been, right like that, you have someone in one part of the area speaking to somebody else at a distance through Morse code. That was in the 1840s. And then in the 1870s, you have the telephone, and then in the 1890s, you have the wireless telegraph, which is what we call now radio. And when you think about these at a distance forms of communication and how occult they would have seemed at the time, a lot of times people now scholars will talk about they'll trace parallels in the writings of the time between the way people talked about these at a distance technologies and the way they talk about the occult. So when you think about how mind bending it would have been for people, I think it would have made that slippage to the occult a little bit more a little bit more available.

Next year marks the 125th anniversary of the publication of Dracula. So in your opinion, what is it that makes this specific vampire story so successful?

In some ways, Dracula is very much like Frankenstein in that our popular cultural pickup of the tale is different from the original tale. When you read the actual book, you find that it's very different. One thing that I would say would be that I feel like the idea of that high class vampire has been taken up in popular culture in a slightly in a very different way, actually, than it is in the book, where he and Mina Harker have a relationship, have a love affair, which never happens in the book. In fact, Mina is just one of his victims. But what we've done as a culture is to turn Dracula into kind of like Satan in Paradise Lost, into this kind of interesting sufferer who does evil, right? And we have a name for that in literary studies. It's called the Byronic Hero, which also, again, comes out of the 19th century. And I mentioned Byron before, coincidentally writes or gives the germ of the story for the vampire, or maybe not coincidentally. And the Byronic Hero is this kind of outcast, outlaw, destructive, self destructive, and other destructive sufferer that we are drawn to this kind of male figure. And I think we turned Dracula into Bat a little bit, which, again, is very different from the way he's in the book. He's just a monster in the book. Absolutely. That's all he is. But I also think it's something about to go with that idea of him us giving him a personality, his suaveness, his seductiveness, which, again, is just purely sexual, raw animal prey in the book. We've turned it into this kind of refined attractiveness in our lore. The other thing I'd say about why Dracula endures is we very much I think it's about the ambiance and the setting. When you think about our sense of Dracula, one of the immediate things you see is the and, which is only, again, if you read the book, only the very first part of the story. It is exciting. The castle is exciting in the story because Jonathan Harker gets caught in there. But much of the novel is not about it's actually in London. It's not in that Transylvanian castle. So I think the ambiance that Stoker establishes at the beginning of the novel is very important for the endurance of the text or of the figure. What Stoker is doing is a kind of a modern day at the time in that context. Right. Late Victorian spin on the epistolary novel, which the epistolary novel is a novel that's in epistles or letters and kind of strung together letters. And what he does is to do that in the form of Mina Harker takes everybody's documents and she strings them together.

Right.

And so everybody's telegrams and her own typewritten discourse, her diary, Jonathan's diary, Seward's Phonograph diary, and she collates them. She's a secretary. So I think that one of the things that people have talked about with Dracula that we haven't mentioned when we think about all these cultural allegories and influences, is really how interesting the form of the novel is as well.

The novel itself, even the way it's written, is so important to the story as well.

Yeah. And if you look, there's a little beginning there's like a little what's called an epigraph, which is the little beginning material. I think there's an epigraph before the first pages and there's also an ending postscript that. Who is it? I can't remember who writes that postscript. Is it Jonathan? Yeah, I think it's Jonathan Harker. And both of those indicate they draw the reader's attention to the documents themselves and about the authenticity of what they record. So if you look at that epigraph in the ending, you'll see a self consciousness about the form and about the form as evidence, which I think goes back to that idea of empiricism, too. The novel is very conscious of itself as documenting something as accurate and truthful, which is very kind of scientific and very of the age. Yeah. And people have written as well about the form. I think that's another area of scholarly interest as well.

Now, you mentioned the Eurocentricness of Dracula and that idea of vampires, and briefly mentioned all other cultures seem to have this idea of not necessarily a vampire, but a blood sucking creature. Is there anything that you could add about that? And for vampires and other cultures in the history or literary work of that?

Well, one of the things that I have done some research on the past is the way that Stoker may have been aware of the idea of the know that is, the Asian conjurer and been aware of Indian vampire lore, which again, would have worked differently. And I think from the white supremacist British perspective, would have looked very sinister. Right. And I think that then is transmuted into the Gothic of this novel. But once you start thinking about vampires, you can see them in other places. One fun factoid is that John Polydori, who wrote the vampires I mentioned before, was the uncle of Christina and Dante, Gabrielle Rosetti. And if you think about goblin market, this mid century text, it's got a very vampiric feel to it. Right. So. This idea of kind of seduction, which is associated with a kind of maleness right. But that kind of deprives of life. So you can think about these more figurative forms of vampirism as well.

Interesting, once you kind of have that idea, you can start to see it show up in other places.

Yes, that's yeah. Yeah.

As we heard in these interviews, vampires have been and continue to influence the world around us. Thank you so much for joining us for this fascinating episode of Then Again. And we'll see you next time.

Then again is a production of the Northeast Georgia History Center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast is edited by Andrews Gilles. Our digital and on site programs are made possible by the Ada May Ioester Education Center for join us next week for another episode of Then Again.