How to reverse vampirism

In the article The Romanian Folkloric Vampire by Jan Perkowski which was published in the September, 1982 issue of the journal Eastern European Quarterly, there is the following anecdote recorded in 1935 at the village of Izbecini in the Romananti district of the Romanian province of Oltenia, formerly an eastern part of Wallachia:

“A dead person becomes a pricolici and he feeds on his relatives. When he is exhumed his rump is facing upwards and he has blood on his lips. You have to take some of that blood and feed it to the person at home who is suffering from the pricolici. In this way the relative regains his health.”

In the version of the infamous case of Arnaud Paole (Arnold Paul) given by Dom Augustine Calmet in Chapter 11 of his Treatise on Vampires and Revenants, it is written:

“It was then remembered that Arnold Paul had frequently told a story of his having been tormented by a Turkish vampire, in the neighborhood of Cassova, upon the borders of Turkish Serbia (for the notion is that those who had been passive vampires in their life-time become active ones after their death) but that he had been cured by eating some of the earth upon the vampire’s grave, and by rubbing himself with his blood.”

Also, in Chapter 13, Calmet wrote, concerning the ravages of the ouipire of Poland and Russia:

” This reviving being, or ouipire, comes out of his grave, or a demon in his likeness, goes by night to hug and embrace violently his near relations or his friends, and sucks their blood so much as to weaken andr attenuate them, and at last cause their death. This persecution does not stop at one single person; it extends to the last person in the family, if the course cannot be interrupted by cutting off the head or opening the heart of the revenant, whose corpse is found in the coffin, yielding flexible , swollen, and robicund, although he may have been date for some time. Their proceeds from his body a great quantity of blood, which some mix with flour to make bread of; and that bread eaten in the usual manner protects them from being tormented by the spirit, which returns no more.”

In the Romanian journal of folklore and folk art, Ion Creanga vol. vii (1914), p. 165, there begins an article by the Romanian folklorist N. I. Dumitrascu which contains accounts he recorded concerning the detection, destruction, and disposal of vampires. In three of these, the heart (and, in two of these, also the liver) of the vampire is cremated, the resulting ashes are then mixed with water, and this mixture is then drunk by the vampire’s victims.

The first of these cases is from the village of Amarasti in the north of the Dolj, district, in the southeastern corner of Romania. The incidents occurred around 1899. An old woman died and after that the children of her eldest son, Dinu Gheorgita, began to die one after another. Then the same began to occur to the children of her youngest son.

Dinu and his brother exhumed their dead mother, cut her corpse in two, and then reburied it. The deaths still continued. So, they dug the woman up again and found that her body had become whole again without even a wound. This time, they disemboweled her and also cut out the heart, from which blood was flowing.

They cut the heart into four pieces and burned these pieces over hot cinders. “They took the ashes of the heart and gave them to drink to the children with water.” Next, they burned the remaining parts of the body and scattered the ashes. After that, the illness and deaths ceased.

The second case occurred some twenty or thirty years before 1914. An unmarried man, a cripple, died in the Cusmir region, in the south of the Mehedenti district in Romania. Shortly after that, his relations began to die or fall ill. “They complained a leg was drying up.”

After some discussion, they exhumed the cripple on a Saturday night. They found the corpse to be stark red and curled up into a corner of the grave. “They cut him open and took the customary measures. They took out the heart and liver, burned them on red-hot cinders and gave the ashes to his sister and other relations who were ill to drink with water and regain their health.”

The third case is from the same region as the last:

“In the Cusmir, another family began to show frequent deaths, and suspicion fell on an old man, dead long ago. When they dug him up, they found him sitting up like a Turk and as red as red, just like fire; for had he not eaten up the whole of a family….they…cut out his heart and liver, burnt them, and gave them to the sick folk to drink. They drank and regained their health. The old man was buried and the deaths ceased.”

These quotations from Ion Creanga can be found in the article by Agnes Murogi The Vampire in Romania published in the December, 1926 issue of the journal Folk-Lore, and also in The Vampire in Europe by Montague Summers.