the throat, are typical of the vampire, and it was perhaps something more than mere coincidence that the mode of execution should be the severing of the head from the body, since this was one of the efficacious methods of destroying a vampire.
Certainly in the extended sense of the word, as it is now so commonly used, Fritz Haarmann was a vampire in every particular.
To return to the more restricted connotation, we find that, as has been mentioned above, Dom Calmet in his famous work more than once emphasized that his great difficulty in accepting the tradition of the vampire, that is to say the vampire proper and not a mere malignant phantom, lies in the fact that it is physically impossible for a dead body to leave its grave since (he argues) if it has corporeity it cannot have subtilty, that is to say the power of passing through material objects.
Accordingly in the second volume of his great treatise he gives as the rubric to Chapter LX, Impossibilité morale, que les Revenans sortent de leurs tombeaux.[92] He commences: “I have already raised a serious objection, which is the impossibility that vampires should leave their graves, and should return thither, without any obvious disturbance of the ground, either when they are passing forth or when they are finding their way back again. Nobody has ever met this difficulty, and nobody ever will be able to meet it. To maintain that the devil subtilizes and renders unsubstantial the body of the vampire is merely an assertion which is made without any foundation and which is unsustained and untrue.
“The fluidity of the blood, the healthy red colour, and the absence of rigidity in the case of vampires are not circumstances which need cause us the slightest wonder, any more than the fact that the hair grows, and the bodies remain without dissolution. It is a matter of daily occurrence that bodies are found which do not crumble to dust and which for a very long time after death preserve the appearance of life. This is not in the least surprising in the cases of those who die suddenly without any illness, or indeed as the consequence of certain diseases which are well-known to medical men, sicknesses which do not affect the circulation of the blood or the elasticity of the body.
