Right now, it's Halloween season. There's a bite in the air, the sidewalks are
covered with leaves, and in a few days neighborhoods all over the country will
be crawling with ghouls and goblins on the hunt for candy. One spectre who often
makes his appearance around this time of year is Count Dracula, a character from
an 1897 horror novel written by Bram Stoker. In the book, Dracula was a
Transylvanian nobleman who warred against the Ottoman Turks. After his death, he
transformed into a vampire- an undead being that survives on fresh blood.
Although the book 'Dracula' is a work of fiction,
vampires constitute a genuine element of Eastern European folklore. One
ethno-cultural group that traditionally believed in vampires were the Kashubs-
northern Poles descended from Pomeranian Slavs. Like many Polish people,
the Kashubs were staunch Roman Catholics. In addition to their
Catholicism, however, many of them adhered to an older folk religion- a shadowy
tapestry of folklore and superstition that they inherited from their Slavic
ancestors. In the 1850s, many Kashubs brought this old religion with them to
Germany, across the Atlantic Ocean, up the St. Lawrence River, and overland to the
Madawaska Highlands in southern Ontario, where they established Canada's first
Polish settlements. In the 1960s, a Canadian academic interviewed 15
residents of Wilno, Ontario- Canada's oldest Polish settlement- and recorded
some of their Kashubian folk tales.
During his investigation, he uncovered chilling tales of Kashub-Canadian
vampires that bore little resemblance to Bram Stoker's Dracula. These creatures
were otherwise ordinary people who bore certain marks at birth. After they were
dead and buried, their corpses would rise from their graves at midnight, wander
over to the homes of their family members, and kill their kin by sucking
out their blood. After it had dealt with its family,
the vampire would make its way to the village church and ring the church bell.
Any unfortunates who heard the bell would die within the year. Fortunately,
there were ways to prevent future vampires from rising from their graves
to torment the living. One method involved pouring sand into the vampire's
coffin. The vampire could only rise once it had counted every grain of sand, and
it could only count one grain per year. Another method was to place tiny crosses
of poplar wood under the vampire's tongue. Back in the Old Country, Kashubs used
rosary crucifixes instead. If none of these steps were taken there was but one
recourse: someone had to dig up the vampire's grave at midnight and either
drive a nail through its forehead or decapitate the corpse and place its head
between its feet. "There was a lot of that that at Wilno, in the graves," one
informant told the academic. "They had to dig it up and cut off the head while
it sat in the coffin." After the academic published his paper, there was
considerable outrage in the Wilno community. Many Kashub-Canadians
maintained that the scholar had misrepresented their beliefs. "I told him
the old wives tales," one informant told a reporter. "Things my grandmother told me.
But we don't believe these things anymore." Even if the people of Wilno,
Ontario, don't believe in vampires anymore, there are some Canadians who do-
some say with good reason. If you'd like to learn more about the vampires of
Wilno, Ontario, and other Canadian vampire stories, please check out the link in the
description. Thanks for watching, and happy Halloween!