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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesThe vampire is a dangerous returning dead person who feeds on the living, appearing as a feared neighbour in reports and a seductive stranger in Gothic fiction.
Also recorded as European vampire
The widow says her husband has come back for his shoes. He has been buried for ten weeks. She leaves the village, but others cannot escape so easily: nine deaths are reported in eight days. In Calmet’s account of Kisolova, the next journey is to the grave. [1]
Read the manuscriptA vampire returns from death to threaten the living, often by feeding on their blood. The broader word revenant means a returning dead person; blood drinking does not belong to every such account. A body feared by its neighbours and a polished stranger in an English novel share a dangerous persistence, but the vampire’s familiar aristocratic manners owe much to literary invention. [1][4]
The eighteenth-century French writer Augustin Calmet surveys reports associated with Hungary, Moravia, Silesia and Poland, alongside Greek accounts under other names. His geography is that of a collector working through letters and printed testimony. The English translation used here appeared in 1850. Its villages and disturbed graves are far from the fashionable London drawing rooms in which John William Polidori introduces Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre, published in 1819. [1][2]
Calmet’s chapter XLVI gives the Kisolova episode through Rauff’s account of an imperial officer’s report. Peter Plogojovitz has been buried ten weeks when villagers accuse him of visiting sleepers and gripping their throats. Those attacked reportedly die within twenty-four hours. Nine people, young and old, are said to die in eight days. His widow’s account of the request for shoes adds a domestic encounter to the deaths. Frightened, she leaves. The remaining villagers demand that the body be dug up and burned. [1]
The officer and priest initially hesitate to grant permission. The villagers answer that they will abandon the whole place if they cannot obtain help. He goes with the priest. On opening the grave, they report a body without the expected smell of decay, fresh blood at the mouth and apparent growth of hair, beard and nails. These signs convince the villagers that the corpse has fed on those who died. They drive a stake into its breast; the report describes blood flowing from the body before it is burned to ashes. The account ends there. It supplies no subsequent investigation of the deaths and no statement that the visits stopped. [1]
Calmet does not let the formality of such testimony settle his conclusion. At the beginning of his dissertation he treats the question as a religious responsibility: if the reports are true they should be defended, and if false their dangerous effects should be exposed. In chapter LIX he rejects the alleged returns as products of fearful, prejudiced imagination. He demands witnesses able to say calmly that they have seen and questioned the revenants. The compiler who preserves the extraordinary report also disputes the standard of proof on which it depends. [1]
Polidori’s vampire enters through admiration. The wealthy young Aubrey finds Ruthven fascinating and accompanies him abroad. The nobleman’s generosity soon looks peculiar: he rewards vice while refusing deserving poverty, and at the gaming table takes pleasure in ruining the inexperienced. In Rome, warnings from Aubrey’s guardians coincide with a planned seduction. Aubrey alerts the young woman’s mother and breaks with his companion. He travels on to Athens, where he falls in love with Ianthe, the daughter of his hosts. [2]
Ianthe tells him vampire stories learned from her nurse. Their description troubles him because it resembles Ruthven, yet he smiles at her belief. Before an excursion, her family warns him against a wood after dark. He promises to return in daylight, then loses time among ancient remains. A storm overtakes him; his horse bolts and stops near a hut. A woman’s cries draw him inside. In the darkness an attacker throws him down and grips his throat. Men arriving with torches interrupt the assault, and the figure escapes. They find Ianthe dead, with blood on her neck and breast and tooth marks at her throat. A dagger lies nearby. [2]
Her parents die in their grief. Aubrey falls into a fever, calling upon Ruthven and accusing him in his delirium. Ruthven arrives and nurses him with such care that the former friendship revives. When Aubrey can no longer bear the places associated with Ianthe, they leave together. Warnings against robbers go unheeded. An ambush in a narrow pass wounds Ruthven in the shoulder; the escort surrenders, and a ransom secures shelter for the injured man. Two days later, apparently dying, he demands an oath: Aubrey must disclose neither his crimes nor his death for a year and a day, whatever happens. [2]
After Ruthven dies, the robbers carry his body to a mountain summit where the first moonlight can touch it, as he has requested. By morning the body is gone. Aubrey suspects that they have buried it to steal the clothes. Only later does another discovery sharpen his fear: among Ruthven’s belongings is a sheath matching the dagger from the hut. Returning through Rome, he learns that the young woman he tried to protect has disappeared, leaving her parents in distress. He reaches England determined to care for his sister.
Ruthven’s pale face is beautiful in outline, but his grey eyes seem dead. Polidori gives the fashionable stranger an appearance that attracts notice without requiring him to display a corpse. The uneasiness of watching him is part of his appeal to people who want an unusual guest. [2]
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, makes recognition arrive during an ordinary task. Jonathan Harker is shaving in the Count’s castle when a hand touches his shoulder. He has seen the whole room reflected behind him, but no one approaching. Startled, he cuts himself. Looking again, he sees the Count over his shoulder and still no reflection. At the sight of blood Dracula lunges for his throat. His hand touches the beads holding Harker’s crucifix, and the fury abruptly passes. He blames the mirror, wrenches open the window and throws it onto the courtyard stones. Harker’s next concern is how he will shave with only a watch-case or the metal bottom of his shaving-pot. [3]
Later in Stoker’s novel, Professor Van Helsing gives the hunters a set of limits to exploit. The vampire grows stronger on blood and can assume forms including a wolf, a bat and mist. Entry into a dwelling first requires an invitation from someone in the household; after that, he can return. Daylight restricts his powers and opportunities to change shape. It does not make him burst into flame in this explanation. Garlic, the crucifix and other sacred things repel him, while a wild-rose branch placed on his coffin can prevent him from moving out. [3]
At Drawsko in northwestern Poland, the relevant landscape is a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cemetery. Archaeologists identified six burials with unusual protective arrangements among the ordinary graves. Five had a sickle across the throat or abdomen; two had stones beneath their chins. The researchers interpret these as measures intended to prevent the dead from rising or biting. Men, women and younger people received this treatment, and their graves were not isolated in a separate enclosure. These objects mark suspicion within the community’s burial ground. [6]
In 2014, Lesley A. Gregoricka and colleagues tested the immigrant hypothesis: had outsiders attracted this treatment? Tooth enamel from five of the six individuals had strontium signatures consistent with local childhood origins. The sixth could not be tested because she had lost her teeth before death. The result challenges that particular explanation of suspicion. It does not identify why these people were selected, and the authors’ suggestion that some may have died early in disease outbreaks remains a hypothesis. [6]
Ruthven enjoys almost the opposite protection: his social standing helps make an accurate accusation unbelievable. Aubrey’s guardians and physician are trying to care for him, but each protective intervention leaves his sister more exposed. Polidori makes the household’s mistaken kindness part of the disaster. Ruthven needs their confidence as much as he needs Aubrey’s promise. [2]
Folklorist Juliette Wood distinguishes medieval English returning-dead accounts from the blood-drinking figure of later fiction. In the accounts she discusses, a walking corpse need not be a vampire in the familiar literary sense. Wood’s examples include William of Newburgh’s accounts of corpses whose visits stop after burning and Walter Map’s accounts of exorcism. Those remedies answer bodily return without the blood-drinking courtship that drives Ruthven’s plot. [4]
Wood reads Polidori as a selective adapter of vampire material whose villain also carries the fascination of a Byronic hero. Literary scholar Roger Luckhurst places Stoker’s novel amid late-Victorian anxieties about immigration, sexuality and empire. His British Library essay points to the Count’s house on Piccadilly, near Buckingham Palace: the intruder reaches the heart of the capital in the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Luckhurst also identifies the novel’s use of hostile stereotypes of foreigners, including Eastern European Jews. In this reading, the vampire exposes the fears beneath imperial confidence. [4][5]
The Drawsko study leaves a human question open. The five tested people appear local, but tooth enamel cannot tell us who accused them, what relationships they had with their neighbours or what was said at their funerals. The sickles and stones survive; the individual reasons for placing them there do not. Archaeology can make a proposed explanation less likely without recovering the name and story of every person beneath it. [6]
Calmet supplies the translated Kisolova report and his own sceptical conclusion. Polidori’s complete tale carries the journey from fascination to fatal disclosure. Stoker’s mirror scene and Van Helsing’s explanation are selected episodes. Wood and Luckhurst examine literary change; the Drawsko paper tests childhood origins rather than supernatural return. [1][2][3][4][5][6]
Augustin Calmet · Richard Bentley / Project Gutenberg · 1850 · English translation of French
Dissertation II, Preface, pp. 243–246; chapter XLVI, pp. 341–343; chapter LIX, pp. 374–376
The Kisolova report is read through Rauff’s account as reproduced by Calmet in English translation; the officer’s original document was not separately consulted.
Checked 2026-10-11
John William Polidori · Sherwood, Neely, and Jones / Project Gutenberg · 1819 · English
Complete The Vampyre narrative, after introduction and before following Byron letter
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑At his sister’s first court reception, Ruthven reappears and whispers that Aubrey must remember his oath. A second encounter places the supposed dead man beside the sister. Aubrey’s alarm becomes increasingly incoherent to those around him; guardians and a physician confine him as mentally unwell. He counts the days until his promise expires. On the last day of the year he learns that his sister will marry the Earl of Marsden the next morning. The name initially reassures him. Then he opens her locket and sees Ruthven’s face. [2]
Ruthven has inherited the title and won the sister through apparent concern for her brother. An embassy gives him an excuse to hurry the marriage. Aubrey begs for a delay, but his guardians hear only returning illness. He writes to his sister; the physician intercepts the letter to spare her distress. On the wedding morning he escapes his room while the servants are distracted. Ruthven seizes him and forces him away, whispering the reminder and a threat against his sister’s honour. Aubrey collapses with a burst blood vessel. The marriage proceeds, and the couple leave London. [2]
At midnight, released from the oath, Aubrey summons the guardians and tells his story coherently. He dies immediately afterwards. They hurry to protect the bride, but arrive too late: Ruthven has vanished and she has become his victim. The explanation finally reaches people willing to act, after every opportunity to prevent the marriage has passed. [2]
Bram Stoker · Project Gutenberg · 1897 · English
Chapters II and XVIII, selected passages
Chapters II and XVIII are used for the mirror scene and Van Helsing’s explanation, rather than for a complete account of the novel.
Checked 2026-10-10
Juliette Wood · Juliette Wood author-hosted paper · English
PDF pp. 1–4
The discussion draws on the opening four pages, covering returning-dead comparisons, Polidori and the beginning of the Carmilla analysis.
Checked 2026-10-10
Roger Luckhurst · British Library · English
Sections Gothic revival and What is Dracula about?; author byline
Checked 2026-10-10
Lesley A. Gregoricka; Tracy K. Betsinger; Amy B. Scott; Marek Polcyn · PLOS ONE · 2014-11-26 · English
9(11), e113564; abstract, Apotropaic Practices at Drawsko, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion
Checked 2026-10-10