As Hallowe’en comes round again, people will be spending a tremendous amount of time and money inviting the supernatural into their lives. But, as Durham University academic Richard Sugg reveals, it was not always that way

AS the streets and bars fill with part-time ghouls, witches, vampires and zombies, we might remind ourselves that most people, for most of history, spent a lot of time and money trying to destroy or banish witches, vampires or ghosts.

Why was this? After all, when we look at the historical records, the real witches and vampires often look relatively mundane, rather than uncanny. Vampires in particular fail to live up to the stereotypes which vampire cinema has given us. Pale, gaunt, mysterious, suave, stylish, and haughtily aristocratic? A kind of hybrid of Lugosi, Lee and Edward Pattinson? Far from it.

In Real Vampire Country, if someone like this stalked through the mud streets of your humble village, there was only one reason to be frightened of them, and that was because they must be your upper-class landlord. Cruel and bloodsucking they might be, but only in the most mundane way. The real vampires looked like shabby, ordinary corpses in peasant shrouds. Perhaps most importantly, they looked like they were still alive, and still feeding. Far from pale, gaunt and chiselled, they were often bloated with corpse gas, and their skins reddened (again, with processes of decay, but in popular belief with uncannily circulating blood).

In Real Vampire Country, vampires were not meant to be stylish or entertaining. In part, they were useful. Like witches, they were the classic scapegoats. Afflicted with deaths, disease, crop failure, or even bad weather, you would often suspect a vampire. The most likely suspect was the last person who had died. You exhumed the body and examined it. Did it look really dead? If we had been standing by the graveside, half-choked with corpse fumes, handkerchiefs against our mouths, we would often have spluttered out, ‘Yes! Very…’. But when you needed to find a vampire, your perceptions might warp accordingly. And at times, just the smallest amount of blood in the vampire’s heart was all the evidence you needed.

With both witches and vampires acting as scapegoats, we might say that the already dead vampire, with unwitting chivalry, effectively saved the lives of many women, who might otherwise have been pinpointed instead. Scapegoating, though, was not the only source of belief in vampires. Here is another.

You are lying asleep in your vampire village in Greece, Serbia or Romania. Suddenly, you wake up. You can see your room clearly, but you cannot move, and you cannot speak. And now, from a corner of the room, you see a shadowy moving presence. Shuffling and scratching noises. It comes closer. Blinding terror and doom overwhelm you.

Now, it is on your bed – first as a crushing weight on your chest, and then with its hands about your throat. You are not only horribly breathless, but feel as if your life or even soul is being sucked out. In real time the episode may last only minutes, but to the victim it feels endless. Next day you may well find that you have bruises, scratches or marks at your throat.

The basic elements of this are real. We are routinely paralysed and speechless in certain phases of sleep, to stop us shouting or acting out our dreams. But normally we are unconscious of this.

The above scenario can occur when you wake during the paralysis, and have a nightmare as well. Even modern atheists or agnostics have described such an experience as metaphysically terrifying, a kind of attack on their soul.

What did it feel like, then, in a vampire-ridden, pre-scientific culture, where the entity you saw looked like a recently dead man or woman who was trying to suck the life out of you? And when, in the morning, you found what looked like vampire bite marks on your neck? In reality these were produced by the body itself, a psychosomatic result of terror. But, in the circumstances…?

In the circumstances, you knew there must be a vampire. You told everyone else, and some of them had vampire nightmares too. With such nightmares being more common after stress and disturbed sleep, we can begin to see what a vicious whirlpool of terror soon gripped the village.

Yet you did have a solution. You exhumed the suspect. You dismembered it, burned it, staked it – possibly even gave its ashes to supposed victims to drink. And ironically, this could work. Fear had created the vampire, and relief took it away.

In some cases, admittedly, not before nightmare sufferers had actually died of fright. In 1731, for example, a young Serbian woman, Stanacka, died in around three days after a nightmare throttling by a fellow villager, Millo. This and other such cases are medically explicable. People who believe sufficiently in a supernatural terror (whether ghost, witch, witch-doctor or vampire) can die of what is termed Voodoo Death. Lest we get too superior about backward superstitions, we should be aware that people also died of Voodoo Death in 19th Century Britain – sometimes, of the very crudest ghost hoaxes.

And finally, even as we shake our heads at the terrified peasants of a vampire outbreak, we might want to bear in mind that they, beholding the artfully constructed terrors of a modern Halloween, or any given horror movie, would think we were quite, quite mad.

Richard Sugg is lecturer in English Studies at Durham University. He is the author of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, and has just completed The Real Vampires.