The Vampire Man: The Fourth Sleep Disorder: A Research Novella

About the Author

Volker Elis Pilgrim is a German writer. He also published nonfiction under the pseudonym Ellis Dohna and (since 2009) also under Max Melbo.

Dedication

To Melbourne and Sydney, with thanks. Without them, I would not have solved the mystery or written my solution to it.

Copyright Information ©

Volker Elis Pilgrim 2023

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Ordering Information

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Pilgrim, Volker Elis

The Vampire Man

ISBN 9781638296669 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781638296676 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781638296683 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023900487

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[email protected]

+1(646)5125767

Some Remarks on The Vampire Man

I subtitle the book a research novella. Like all my books, it contains features of both categories: literature and research. The content tends toward the non-fictional, while the form has a more fictional flavor.

The book is in the tradition of women’s literature. It is an autobiographical work of non-fiction. It is interested in areas of academic research: sleep problems and difficulties with relationships. Its point of departure is the vampire myth.

As far as the style is concerned, a review in the leading German weekly DIE ZEIT described my books as a different type of literature. The research novella The Vampire Man fulfills the essentials of sciences and arts. According to Goethes’ definition, novella is a new and enormous occurrence which leads to a new and enormous relationship.

The Vampire Man gradually develops into a radical feminist protest against the exploitation – by ‘vampirical’ maleness – of the femaleness inherent in women, children, and nature.

The book was ‘lived’ and its concept developed at the beginning of my first and second phases in Australia and written during my second phase in Melbourne.

My discoveries in the areas of night and subconsciousness naturally have much to do with my experiences in Australia, the land of the Dreamtime, which constantly plays a key role in the book.

I hold the worldwide rights to the book The Vampire Man.

Summary

(Written by the author with incorrect English, because the translator is not available at the moment. Excuse me!)

The book deals about sleep disturbance, contains the discovery of the fourth sleep disorder.

Many human beings – in USA and Europe millions – suffer on not yet full-discovered sleep disturbances. These irregularities don’t relate to body diseases, psycho-problems, or environment influences which evidently cause sleep anomalies. It is a social-psycho-biographical hypersensitivity on the patent’s side.

Non-consciously per night, it happens as energy transfer between a donor and a taker. The donor is pale and weak in the morning. The taker is red and strong. The donor starts to suffer, first with sleep disturbances on nighttime, then with depressions and other negative results for body and mind on daytime. Not seldom the donor becomes alcohol or drug-addicted and seriously ill.

2. The book tries a rational explication of the vampire myth, the last myth in our history.

In the eighteenth century – the century of enlightenment – in East Europe were surprising complains in Slavian and Hungarian villages: The peasants felt vampirized by recently died relatives or acquaintances.

The Austrian Emperor sent in this region commissions of scientists to examine the cases. The dying people made precise descriptions who vampirized them. The commissions exhumed the graves of alleged vampires and found the corpses in a strange half vivid stadium.

The myth started. It plays in the Anglo-Saxon culture until now a remarkable main role, particularly in the USA. There are hundreds of vampire novels, vampire movies, and vampire TV-series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer – each year new productions!

3. After concerning these two themes, the book provides a theory of not reciprocal relationships between the taking masculinity and the giving femaleness. This not mutual relationship normally happens between the patriarchal man and the patriarchal woman, but it is not reserved in this combination. The opposite could occur. And sometimes also the phenomenon is visible in gay and lesbian love stories, sometimes in parents-children-relationships.

If a masculinity is only selfish, and if a femaleness is only sympathetic, then it is to observe an energy transfer from the femaleness in direction to the masculinity. Everybody can be both!

Introduction

Vampires lack something. They possess neither the peace of the dead nor the elan of the living. They are ghouls with a difference – no common ghosts or powerful evil spirits. There are several ways in which they differ from all other exponents of the immaterial.

They appeared on the scene right in the middle of the modern era, affected a very limited area, were a mass movement, and then disappeared again after half a century at most. Their occasional successors were so rare that they failed to arouse general public concern.

Vampires seem to be an aberration affecting the consciousness of the industrial era, a consciousness thirsting for rationality and enlightenment. They mounted a stubborn resistance to this era, using a myth which they have successfully defended right up to the present day.

All of Earth’s cultures have stories concerning creatures who inhabit the border zone between life and death; eerie, brutal half-animal-half-human hybrids that attack humans and sometimes animals, mostly at night and from the air, bent on eating, killing or robbing them, or causing some other dire effect. At times, they resemble sphinxes, winged monsters with a grudge against humanity. They are mythical, shrunken remnants from eras of real conflict with wild animals, and in the legends, they have been blended with supernatural beings. They come from somewhere else; do not belong here. Their appearance causes fear and, in extreme cases, threatens the lives of mortal creatures.

A more harmless type of apparition is the ghost – a dead person who has not yet found peace, who no longer belongs here but who cannot find a way out and who disturbs the living in many different ways. Less complicated than evil spirits, ghosts merely give signs of their caughtness, signs which occur at the scene of their violent departure from this life, if death claimed them within venerable walls. In such places, they cause consternation with their irritating noises and miraculous appearances.

Vampires are only distantly related to ghosts and evil spirits. They have had predecessors – ill-behaved corpses who smacked their lips in their graves and gobbled up their winding sheets. Amidst the plethora of humanity’s myths, there occasionally crops up a dead person who was bent on the most extreme form of havoc-wreaking and who took possession of the bodies of the living in order to suck their blood, to slaughter them, to devour them, or in some other way to drag them after him into the border zone. These highly unpleasant instances of the intrusion of the defunct into the territory of flesh-and-blood beings remained a rarity, which until the eighteenth century had not lodged itself in the general consciousness of humanity.

The vampire proper, which people still believe in today, did not make its appearance until the eighteenth century, when it burst upon the world in a sort of epidemic of the improbable. In Eastern Europe, the belief suddenly appeared that imperfectly dead creatures were sucking peoples’ blood from them as they slept.

The sucking corpses needed the blood of the living in order to maintain their stagnant existence in the border zone between life and death.

Evil spirits are not so cowardly as vampires. They do indeed confront people by night; but their targets are in the waking state. Vampires do it during sleep. This is their specialty, their ticket to a legendary dissemination and a firm place for nearly three hundred years in the mythology of the industrial era.

Scarcely had the first instances of their activity become public when a controversy broke out between a mythically transparent Eastern Europe and the West of the Enlightenment. Chilling incidents were reported in droves, thrown up by the medieval eruptions of the east. And to counter them the West brought into play cold-water jets of reason: a profusion of academic writings in the first half of the eighteenth century, ebbing as the nineteenth century approached; then, as the dispute cooled off, the events became legend, later to be expropriated by literature and the cinema.

The facts: Starting in the late seventeenth century, Slavic village communities were thrown into turmoil by alleged mayhem on the part of the dead, by startling and terrifying post funereal goings-on affecting relatives and acquaintances. A man died, and after his death he allegedly appeared in his village to persecute his widow, his children, his relatives and his friends quite a few of whom also died. The public uproar that ensued forced the Church to grant permission for the grave of the dead somnambulist to be opened. In it lay an undecomposed, fresh corpse with a reddish tinge to its face and with fingernails and hair still growing.

Repeatedly, the Church had to give permission for the heart of an undecomposed suspected vampire to be pierced, for its head to be chopped off and occasionally for its body to be burned. When the neck was severed and the heart pierced, fresh blood came flowing out.

In the eighteenth century, science was already trying to exert a soothing influence. The deaths among the dead man’s relatives could have been the result of an infectious disease; the lack of decomposition in the grave must be due to differences in soil consistency. Some soils were alleged to have an embalming effect. Reference was made to a large number of cases over the centuries where bodies were known to have been preserved.

Every myth contains some truth, and this element of truth can be extracted from the mass of superstition that surrounds it.

First, some of the most clear-cut incidents. All of them have been recorded by officers, doctors, scientists, and politicians.

The region in which the vampire problem suddenly made its appearance as something of an epidemic was part of the sphere of influence of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Emperor Charles VI took a personal interest in the events. He established a commission of officers, judges, jurists and other academics which sent delegations to investigate the incidents on the spot.

These cases are thus not just the products of hallucinations suffered by eastern European peasants: they have been recorded in reports of the Imperial Commission.¹ Representatives of ratio have documented the irrational. This extraordinary fact should always be borne in mind when one is considering the probability and improbability of the phenomenon. Men of the period dissected and described eerie nocturnal events with a cool-headed alertness typical of and mandatory for doctors, soldiers, scientists, and politicians of the early eighteenth century.

The Hungarian peasant

In 1725, ten weeks after the death of a peasant, nine people died in the space of eight days. During their illness, which lasted 24 hours, all nine stated independently of one another that they had previously been strangled in their sleep by the peasant:

The wife of the vampire left the village, because her husband had come to her and asked for his shoes. The Provisory gave in to the impetuous demands of the populace and together with the parish priest attended the exhumation, at which it was found that the body, with the exception of the nose, was quite fresh, and that the hair, beard and nails had continued to grow. Blood was seen in the corpse’s mouth. They pierced his heart with a stake, which caused blood to flow from the wound and his mouth and ears, and burned the body, whereupon calm was restored.²)

2. The Hungarian mercenary

The Emperor sent a delegation consisting of three military doctors and two officers to a Serbian village from which complaints about a case of vampirism had found their way to the Court.

The doctor in charge of the party used the incident as the basis for his on-the-spot investigations, conducted in early January 1732.

Some five years earlier, in 1726, a Hungarian mercenary had died after falling from a hay cart during the harvest at the village where he lived:

Twenty or 30 days after his death, several persons complained that they were plagued by the mercenary and indeed four person were killed by him.³)

The villagers had attempted to protect themselves by resorting to the customary recipe. They had dug up the body of the suspected vampire and found it to be undecayed and exhibiting the typical marks of a vampire: blood on the face and new nails on the hands and feet. In accordance with their custom, they drove a stake into its chest and burned the body.⁴)

The case is the first example of an aspect that was to occupy the attention of the Commission in great detail: the transmission of vampirism.

The Hungarian mercenary had claimed during his life that he had been plagued by a vampire near Gossowa in Turkish Servia, wherefore he had eaten of the earth of the vampire’s grave and had smeared himself with its blood, that he might be freed of this affliction.⁵)

Evidently, these measures were of no avail, since he is supposed to have done away vampirically with four persons directly and seventeen indirectly. The indirect vampirization is alleged to have happened as follows: The mercenary attacked not only people but also cattle, and sucked out their blood. And since people have used the flesh of these animals, there are again some vampires in these parts; altogether 17 young and old persons have been taken by death within three month, of whom several died without previous signs of illness within two or at most three days.⁶)

During their excavations, the doctors and officers also found some of the chain-vampires, in a typical, mysterious state of freshness.

Strangely, instead of turning into vampires, the animals merely became vampirism carriers – an early form of mad cow disease and swine fever?

3. The Serbian farmer’s wife

Among the indirect victims of the mercenary was a young farmer’s wife who lay down to sleep, fresh and healthy, 15 days ago, but around midnight she awoke suddenly with terrible screaming, fright and trembling and complained, that she had been seized about the neck by a 25 years old soldier, who had died nine weeks before; whereupon she felt great pain in her breast, and became sicker by the hour, until finally she died on the third day.⁷)

4. The Croatian innkeeper and his colleagues.

A soldier from Graz had been stationed in a Croatian village with his regiment and reported to his colonel on events with eerie dimensions:

As he sat at table with his host, a stranger entered and sat down with them. The host was greatly frightened, and died the next day. He then learned that the stranger was the host’s father, who had died ten years before, and that he had announced the host’s death to him, and had caused it.⁸)

The exhumation had revealed that the corpse of the innkeeper’s father had not decayed after ten years in the ground. And they found him in a condition as though he had just died, with a fresh appearance, like that of a living person.⁹)

The commander of the regiment initiated further investigations in the village and discovered two other vampire incidents.

A second man, who had died thirty years before, and of whom it was said that he had on three occasions come into his house in broad daylight and had killed first his brother, then one of his sons and finally the house servant, by sucking out their blood, was found in the same condition…

…a third, who had died sixteen years before…had, according to the inhabitants, killed his two sons.¹⁰)

Vampire 1 had been beheaded, vampire 2 had had a nail driven into his temple, and vampire 3 had been burned. Every time the story ends with calm returning to the village.

¹ Visum et repertum. Ueber die so genannten Vampirs, oder Blut-Aussauger, so zu Medvegia in Servien, an der Tuerckischen Granitz, den 7. Januarii 1732 geschehen, Nuernberg 1732. In: Dieter Sturm und Klaus Voelker (eds.), Von denen Vampiren oder Menschensaugern. Dichtungen und Dokumente Munich 1968, p. 451 ff.↩︎

² Hock, Stefan: "Die Vampyrsagen und ihre Verwertung in der deutschen