Hermersdorf's vampires were burned before Vienna sent a physician

The earliest letter from Maria Theresa that we found about the vampires of Hermersdorf is dated Vienna, 8 February 1755. In the text Linzbauer printed, she tells her chancellor, Count Haugwitz, to ask her physician Gerard van Swieten for a surgeon who could convince “these superstitious people” of the truth.² By then there was little left to convince them of. On 31 January, in Hermersdorf, today Svobodné Heřmanice near Bruntál in the Czech Republic, an executioner had burned nineteen of the village’s dead.⁹¹¹⁰

The papers put the doctors after the fire, not before it, and they name more people than the telling does: a church court, a village priest, a manor court, a lawyer who was fined for his part. Most of that is known only because Monika Enenklová read the church’s file in an archive for a doctoral thesis, and the rest comes from Vienna’s printed orders, a treatise printed thirteen years later, and two newspaper items.

Eight papers

The case left paper in three places. The consistory of Olomouc, the diocese’s church court, kept a file of witness hearings, medical attestations and the manor court’s report on the burning. Enenklová read it at the regional archive in Opava for her 2021 thesis at Masaryk University, and we know it only through her.¹² Vienna kept the empress’s letters and the verdict of the central office, which Franz Xaver Linzbauer printed in 1852 to 1856 in an appendix to his collection of Hungarian health law.²¹³ And a Hamburg newspaper printed two items about it in the spring of 1755.

The papers nearest the village, the attestation and the manor’s report, reach us only through Enenklová. The protocol and the treatise were written in Vienna from the file. Enenklová finds no record that van Swieten went to the village at all.²⁰

The healer of Hermersdorf

Marianna Saligerin died on 27 August 1753, aged 63, and was buried in the churchyard at Hermersdorf.²¹ She had married Wenzel Saliger, a retired soldier, in 1731, and the documents call her Richter Wenzlin.²¹ She treated the sick. Her son told the commissioners what her remedies were: crayfish eyes dissolved in water, some herbs and roots.²² In van Swieten’s reading of the file, she once told a patient, to make a cure look more mysterious, to sew four thalers into his shirt and send it to her, and the medicine would follow.²²

Nothing in the file marks her death, and the incidents the witnesses later described began in July 1754. The first surviving word, in Enenklová’s reading of the consistory’s file, is a letter of 23 September 1754 from Johann Metzner, the priest of Velké Heraltice, about night disturbances in the village. He asked leave to examine 24 bodies; the house blessings and charms he had been told to try had not worked.²³ On 30 November the village reeve, Paul Saliger, who was Marianna’s brother-in-law, wrote with two other men that for half a year everyone in the village had felt unrest at night, and asked for a visitation and an autopsy of the suspect bodies.²³ On 13 December a commission of the consistory heard the witnesses.²³

They described a weight on the chest, cats, pale figures that dragged them out of bed.²³ The commissioners offered ordinary explanations at every turn, and the transcripts run as question and answer. Marianna Blaschkin, a widow of 50, said a ghost had broken her broom and pulled her quilt off; asked whether she might have dreamt that she was awake, she said she had been awake.²³ The dean of Budišov, Joseph Schnerich, who led the commission, wrote to the consistory that he could extract nothing “reasonable or infallible” from the witnesses. He still argued that the villagers could be calmed only by taking the feared bodies out of the churchyard and handing them to the secular arm.²³

In the attestation Enenklová describes, two practitioners at Horní Benešov, Johann Tobias Vogl and Johann Peter Wabst, examined 29 bodies on 19 January 1755 and wrote down what they saw.¹⁴ The notes mix decay and survival: some bodies wholly decayed, others with a thigh or a shoulder still muscular, mostly bloodless. Rosina Polakin, who had died on 21 or 22 December 1754, was found whole, her limbs movable and her blood liquid.²⁴ According to Enenklová, the consistory handed the bodies to the secular authority on 23 January, and on 30 January twelve men met for the manor of Velké Heraltice, most of them village reeves and the rest manor officials, among them the lawyer Carl Joseph Czerný, and agreed that they knew no remedy but to give the bodies to the fire.²⁵ The manor then belonged to the monastery of Velehrad, which had bought it in 1694.²⁶

A hole in the churchyard wall

The bodies did not leave by the churchyard gate. A hole was broken in the wall, and they were pulled out through it, with their coffins, crosses and the earth that had covered them.⁹ The Vienna protocol lists the hole among the superstitions, and van Swieten mentions it too.⁹ According to the manor official’s report, as Enenklová reads it, the village remembered that bodies suspected of sorcery had always gone out that way, so the evil would not be carried through the gate to the next ones.¹⁵

Marianna’s own sons were made to drag her body out. The report says they hid in their house and refused until guards fetched them and forced them.²⁷ Van Swieten, writing in Vienna, put it in one sentence:

On the morning of 31 January the executioner was told to carry out the burning. A procession of manor officials, the bodies on a cart, the executioner and, by Enenklová’s count of the report, 120 men went to the boundary between Hermersdorf and Jakartovice, and the bodies were burned there.¹⁵ The next day the executioner and his men found bones in the ash, burned them again, crushed them and buried them.¹⁵ Van Swieten, who had the story from the file, has the fire in a wood an hour from the village, with 200 Schuh (feet) of wood, and says the sledges and tools were burned too.²⁸ Enenklová traces the name Hexenplan, “witches’ clearing”, to a village chronicle of the 1920s by the postal director Anton Rasch, and notes that no source of the time uses it.²⁹

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine or thirty

The protocol and Enenklová give nineteen burned, and van Swieten’s figures imply it; the dispatch has twenty. They disagree more on how many were dug up.

Van Swieten’s 28 less his nine spared leaves 19; that subtraction is ours. Enenklová’s list has 29 entries, Marianna and 28 others, and she counts Marianna and 18 more burned, which leaves ten.⁴ The dispatch finds blood in 20 bodies, 19 adults and a child, and with the ten it spares that makes 30.⁵ Nothing we read explains the gap between 28 and 29, and van Swieten does not say whether his 28 includes Marianna.³

A letter asking for a surgeon

Vienna’s first two papers on the case are the empress’s own. On 8 February she told Haugwitz to ask van Swieten for a surgeon and to give him a daily allowance.² The next day she wrote to the Bohemian-Silesian Representation and Chamber, the provincial offices, that she wanted exact news of the incident at Hermersdorf, and that she was sending the anatomist Johannes Gosser and the field physician Christian Vabst, as the letter spells them, to look at the exhumed bodies, examine every circumstance and make out a visum et repertum, a report of what they saw.¹³ The provincial official, the Landesältester, was to go with them and hold a protocol that asked who had been troubled by the so-called vampires, how, since when and how often, in what shape they had appeared, and:

The surgeon of 8 February had become a physician and an anatomist by the 9th. The empress does not say what she had heard or from whom. Enenklová, reading Vienna’s register, finds letters to the Silesian authorities dated 6 and 8 February already forbidding the clergy to go further; we have not seen them.⁸ She writes that the sources do not say how, or by whom, the royal office at Opava was told, after which Vienna acted quickly; the empress later complained to the Silesian authorities that the manor official, Ignaz Sebastian Dworský, should have reported “much earlier”.⁷ The preface to van Swieten’s treatise, printed in 1768, says news reached Vienna on 30 January 1755, and that the empress sent the two physicians without delay.³⁰

By Enenklová’s account the commission reached Hermersdorf on 11 February, ten days after the fire.³¹ Franz Hans Zehe, the priest of Benešov, who had sat on the consistory’s commission, was questioned in seven points, in a sharp tone. Asked at whose request the inquiry had begun, he answered that it was the Hermersdorf community’s.³¹ The physicians then opened three bodies buried about the same time as the burned ones, two of them before Marianna’s death and so, on the villagers’ own logic, safe. They showed the same signs as the burned bodies, and the doctors put the night attacks down partly to imagination and fear and partly to epilepsy.³¹

What the commission found

On 17 March the Directorium, Vienna’s central office for civil and finance affairs, reported the result, and the empress approved.¹⁹³² The verdict is blunt:

It says this “on the part of the church court as of the secular court”, and calls the burning a sacrilege.³³ Of the commissioners it says that Wabst and Gasser had also opened bodies held to be above suspicion, buried with the others, and found undecayed parts in them and, in one, a little blood.³⁴ Van Swieten says the same, and adds that the two men showed the “bathers” who had testified had lied.³⁴ The protocol blames the illness the dead had died of, the heat or cold of the air and the nature of the soil for the lack of decay, and it puts the witnesses’ night frights down to dreams and to chest complaints.³⁵³³

It also names the dead woman at the centre: “Marianna Saligerin, called Richter Wenzlin, who was buried 18 weeks before”. Van Swieten says 18 months, and the register date, 27 August 1753, fits months.³⁶

The treatise the protocol keeps citing is van Swieten’s remarks on “magia posthuma”. The 1768 preface says he wrote them in French in March 1755 for the empress, and that a German translation followed in February 1756.¹⁶ Enenklová reads a manuscript of the same text in the consistory’s file, dated 22 February 1755 and signed only “Doctor vindobonen”; on another page of her thesis she gives the same document as 22 March.¹⁷ The protocol of 17 March already cites his treatise.³⁷ It was printed under his name in 1768, as an appendix to a book on ghosts published at Augsburg.¹⁶

The first body he names is Rosina Polakin’s:

Anatomists, he writes, keep bodies in open winter air for six weeks, or two months, without decay, and that winter had been unusually cold. “Welche Unwissenheit! erschreckliche Dummheit!” he writes: what ignorance, what dreadful stupidity.³⁵ He notes that the consistory’s paper speaks of certain “signs and marks” in the vampires’ bodies and describes none.³⁵ The witnesses on whose account the sentence was passed, he says, were two “bathers” who admitted to the commissioner that they had never seen an opened body.³⁸ Enenklová notes that the attestation was signed by a surgeon and a town physician, so “bathers” is van Swieten’s word for them, not their title.³⁹

He mocks the villagers’ stories too. A sow that grunted past a house, he says, was taken for a risen vampire.⁴⁰ He also says Marianna received the sacraments, died in the church and was buried with Christian ceremonies, “and 18 months after her death she must be a witch worthy of burning”.⁴¹

The decree

The order of 1 March 1755 is the document the telling treats as the result.¹⁸ It is a single paragraph, and the part about Hermersdorf is one sentence:

The order blames “some clergymen full of prejudice” for encouraging the people’s credulity, says the investigation afterwards found “nothing but what was natural”, and from now on forbids the clergy to take up such matters without the political authority. Every case of a ghost, witchcraft, treasure-digging or alleged possession is to be reported to the civil authority and examined with “a sensible physician”.¹⁸ It does not name van Swieten. It places the village in Moravia, where the letters of 8 and 9 February and the protocol of 17 March say Silesia.⁴²

No document we read says the order followed his remarks. If Enenklová’s date for the manuscript is right, his remarks are a week older than the order. The protocol of 17 March, which cites his treatise, treats the order as already issued.¹⁷³⁷

The protocol went on to propose what to do with the village. The Jesuit college at Troppau should send one or two clergymen for four or six weeks to talk the people out of their error, with van Swieten’s treatise to help them; a provincial physician should go to treat the sick, because the villagers’ health had suffered; and the treatise should be printed in German and Latin. Underneath the proposal the empress wrote “placet”.³² The protocol also reports that the neighbouring community of Breithensdorf had asked to be separated from the burial ground it shared with Hermersdorf, and that the sick and the pregnant had themselves carried away from the village, for fear of being infected and burned.⁴³ The Jesuits, Ignaz Zinner and Martin Baroch, arrived in mid-May. Zinner slept twice in the house of Wentzel Stoppel, a witness, where the nights were said to be restless. Metzner reported to the consistory that they kept talking to the people to calm their fear, and does not say whether it helped.⁴⁴

Who paid

On 22 March the empress wrote to the bishop of Olomouc, Cardinal Troyer. In Enenklová’s reading she called what had happened “eine große Unwissenheit”, held the bishop responsible, and asked how his consistory could have been misled by two surgeons without medical training.⁴⁵ The consistory had to repay the cost of the inquiry, 222 gulden 44 kreuzer.⁴⁶ To the Silesian Representation she named the lawyer Czerný and the manor official Dworský. Czerný lost his practice for a year; Dworský was fined 100 gulden.⁴⁷ Dworský’s plea for a pardon was refused on 4 May, and Czerný’s suspension was cut by half in November.⁴⁸

Enenklová does not fully accept the empress’s division of blame. She argues that the local clergy hesitated, trying blessings and charms before asking to open graves, and that the consistory relied on its commissioners and the surgeons’ attestation.⁴⁹ She also asks why Marianna was the one picked out, since nothing in the writing shows her defying the church. Several of the witnesses against her had ties to the reeve’s household, and the reeve, Paul Saliger, held his office until his death in 1757; his youngest daughter was born on 10 February 1755, in the middle of the case.⁵⁰ Enenklová does not settle the question, and neither can we. Of Marianna’s three sons, Enenklová found nothing after the burning.⁵⁰

Two items in a Hamburg paper

Hamburg’s Reichs-Post-Reuter printed two items on the affair. The first, on 4 April, is an unsigned dispatch “from Upper Silesia, 16 March”. It calls the dead woman “the Tyrolean doctor”, says she had told her husband to cut off her head after her death, and says thirty were dug up, ten found innocent and buried again, and the 19 adults and one child in whom blood was found beheaded, their hearts pierced and their bodies burned, “on imperial order”.⁵ Neither Linzbauer’s protocol, van Swieten nor Enenklová’s account of the church and manor files mentions beheading or staking, and the order did not come from Vienna: the consistory handed the bodies to the manor court on 23 January.⁵²⁵

The second item, printed on 6 May, is a Vienna notice dated 23 April.⁶ The empress, it says, sent a commission, which found that the whole affair came from the corrupted imagination of the peasants there, that what the newspapers had spread about it was false, and that

That leaves out the consistory, its commissioners and the manor’s court and officials, whom the empress’s letters of 22 March blame.⁶⁴⁵⁴⁷ Whether the provincial office knew in time is a separate matter, and the one place where the notice and the letter agree: she wrote that Dworský should have reported much earlier.⁷

The story against the papers

The telling is right about the outcome. After 1 March the clergy could not take up such cases on their own authority.¹⁸ What it leaves out is the order of events, and the two courts and the lawyer that carried the fire out.

The 1768 preface puts the news in Vienna on 30 January 1755, the day twelve men on the Heraltice manor voted for the fire.³⁰²⁵ Vienna’s earliest papers are dated 6 and 8 February. We found nothing that says who wrote to Vienna in the days between, or whether anyone did before the bodies were burned.