One clear message delivered by vampirism, real as well as fictional, is that the human body is a double-edged sword, both life-giving and lethal. A human being who is fully alive and animated with a soul, or one who is dead and crumbling into dust, presents no extraordinary danger. But, within the framework of the vampire tradition, anything in between—the ambiguous corpse—is to be feared. Even people who knew nothing of death-causing germs understood that, if one lost enough blood, one died. So, if blood itself is not the life, it must contain the essence, soul, or spirit of life. This concept, termed  “vitalism,” was carried well into the nineteenth century by physicians who viewed blood as the “paramount humor.” Vampires, eager to obtain this conveyer of life, sought out its nearest source—their living relatives.

The magical power of blood is one of the two fundamental principles upon which the vampire concept rests. And if life was in the blood, its home was the heart. According to European and European-derived folklore, the heart’s blood is the brightest red, which explains why the bright red blood from a consumptive’s lung hemorrhages (freshly oxygenated) was seen as blood from the heart. Beliefs concerning the restorative powers of both blood and the heart are ancient. By eating the blood or heart of a slain person, one could acquire his life, soul, courage, power, or other such qualities. In our folklore, the heart of anything is its essence, its center, its soul. Indeed, the heart was long supposed to be not only the seat of passion—and by logical extension, love and courage—but the locus of life itself. It was thus horrifyingly unnatural to discover “fresh” blood in the heart of an exhumed corpse. People understood that blood coagulates following death, but they apparently did not know that blood can liquefy again, depending on the circumstances of death. That blood in its liquid state proclaims the presence of life goes back at least to the Greek conception of life as the ongoing  reduction of liquid inside a person.  A corpse that has decomposed is dry, indicating that death is complete and the corpse is inert. But a corpse that has not sufficiently dried—one with liquid blood still in the heart, say—would be viewed as incompletely dead. The remedy was to remove life’s liquid by burning the heart or the entire corpse, thus consummating the drying process. As long as a corpse was a fountain of life, it retained the potential to be an instrument of death.

The second fundamental principle of the vampire concept, the belief in life after death, raises some fundamental questions that transcend time and place and, therefore, speak to what it is to be human: What is death? When is a person truly dead? Can the dead interact with the living? What is the relationship between the impermanent and the eternal aspects of a human being? In the early nineteenth century, a definition of death as the point at which the heart and lungs cease to function, termed the “cardiopulmonary standard,” began to displace the long-standing belief that putrefaction (or decomposition) was the decisive sign of death. The older conception persisted into the beginning of the twentieth century, however, as a number of medical practitioners continued to voice misgivings about their ability to objectively determine death. Thus, strangely, both vampire hunters and medical practitioners in pre-twentieth-century America were in agreement that putrefaction was the key for distinguishing death from life.

The methods used to kill the vampire exemplify the variation that is found in all folk traditions. Various combinations of the following measures are found in America’s anti-vampire arsenal: removal and burning of vital organs (particularly the heart), ingesting the ashes (perhaps with other roots or herbs) or wearing them in a box around the neck; burning the entire corpse, sometimes inhaling the smoke; turning the corpse face down and reburying it; searching for and destroying (sometimes by burning), a vine found growing from the corpse or grave; removing the shroud from the mouth of the corpse; and, perhaps (as we shall consider in more detail later), driving a wooden stake through the heart or rearranging the bones of a corpse.

The measure of positioning the legs and head of a corpse into a “skull and crossbones” pattern—which I described in Food for the Dead—needs reexamination. In 1990, I received a phone call from Nick Bellantoni, Connecticut State Archaeologist, who was excavating an unmarked family cemetery in Griswold, Connecticut. Bellantoni said that he was aware of my research on the New England vampire tradition and thought that I might be able to shed some light on one of the burials, which he characterized as “weird.” The complete skeleton of a man, the best preserved of the cemetery, had been buried in a crypt with stone slabs lining the sides and top of the coffin. On the lid of the hexagonal, wooden coffin, an arrangement of brass tacks spelled out “JB-55,” presumably the initials and age at death of this individual. When the grave was opened, J.B.’s skull and thigh bones were found in a “skull and crossbones” pattern on top of his ribs and vertebrae, which were     also rearranged. An examination of J.B.’s skeletal remains by forensic anthropologist Paul Sledzik revealed lesions on J.B.’s ribs, probably the result of tuberculosis.

The best conclusion that Bellantoni, Sledzik, and I could reach was that J.B. had been exhumed to counteract the spread of tuberculosis. At the time, no other interpretation of his unusual postmortem treatment even approached the coherence of the following scenario: An adult male, J.B., died of pulmonary tuberculosis or a similar infection interpreted as consumption by his family. Several years after the burial, one or more of his family members contracted the disease. As a last resort—to spare the lives of the family and stop consumption from spreading into the community—J.B.’s body was exhumed so that his heart could be burned. When his body was unearthed, however, J.B. was found to be in an advanced stage of decomposition. Perhaps his ribs and vertebrae were in disarray as a result of the desperate search for the remains of his heart. Finding no heart, J.B.’s skull and thigh bones were arranged in a “skull and crossbones” pattern, a practice that stretches back to ancient times throughout Europe as means to prevent the dead from returning. But after reading or hearing about my account of J.B., several Freemasons have asked if I considered the possibility that J.B. had been a Mason. My subsequent research into this question shows some intriguing similarities between J.B.’s postmortem treatment and certain burial customs of both the Masons and the Knights Templar.