Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 June 1876 — Female Vampires. [ARTICLE]

Female Vampires.

Thk New York Mercury of a recent date tells the following remarkable (If true) stories: Readers of the New York Mercury are not unfamiliar with the fact that the various abattoirs of this city are regularly frequented by persons, of both sexes, and of all ages, for the purpose of drinking the warm life blood of the ox., It is a fact—nAt so generally known, however—that this appetite for blood increases upon those who indulge in it. Women who at first quaff with repugnance and some horror a wine-glass of this warm crimson gore, gradually acquire a craving for if, and toss down a tumblerful with evident relish. Parties under this blood-spell almost invariably manifest an intense desire to try the effects of human blood. In, most instances this desire naturally remains ungratifled, but there are at least two well authenticated cases in this city where this vampire proclivity has been indulged with disastrous results.

A voung lady belonging to a respectable family suffered in health while devoting herself to her academical. studies. Her medical attendant, who vouches for the truth of the story, suggested blooddrinking. Permission and the necessary privaev were secured at a West side abattoir. Salutary effects were not long in following. The pallor left her check. Iler frame became more robust; and in ten mentbs she gained fifteen pounds in weight. From having been a pale and interesting-looking girl, she developed radiant beauty, and she married the young assistant of the medical adviser who had saved her life. Well acquainted with the means by which she had been restored, her husband encouraged her natural curiosity respecting the effects of various kinds of blood; and probably quite as much for the purpose of his own professional information as for the gratification of her own wish, he opened a small artery in his leg and permitted her to suck the vital tide. An inordinate mania for her husband’s blood forthwith supervened. He gratified the craving again and again, until disgust for her became the prominent feeling of his mind, and, after he had done himself a great amount of physical injury’, he bade her a final adieu and sailed for Peru. The wretched young wife now lies on a sick bed, and almost entirely subsists on blood brought her from an abattoir. She is a monomaniac on this subject, and, had she opportunity, would undoubtedly become a vampire, and banquet perpetually on human blood.

The other case was that of a woman of twenty-five threatened with a decline. By the advice of a physician she took, four times a day, a tablespoonful of cod-liver oil mixed in a wineglassfttl of blood. The woman was restoreu to health, but while she left off’ taking the oil she still continued the dose of blood. At this time her husband met with an accident on the staircase of their house, by which he lacerated the back of his hand and wrist with broken glass. She rushed to him in alarm to stop the flow of blood; but, instead of stemming it, she sucked it until he swooned away, and lay ghastly, exhausted and motionless as one dead. The timely arrival of the landlady prevented a fatal catastrophe. The wretched wife was alternately sucking her husband’s wrist and bewailing his misfortune in heartrending tones. Her face was smirched with blood. Her mouth literally dropped gore. The landlady at first imagined that she saw before her a terrible accident to the husband that had culminated jn the suicide of the wife. The physician who told this story to a Mercury reporter was summoned, and the horrible facts were disclosed. In the patient’s progress toward convalescence he found it necessary to administer morphine, and the landlady attended the sick and exhausted man. As for the wife she seemed in a dreamy, melancholy condition, incapable of action. One evening, four nights after the accident, the patient had sunk quietly to sleep under the influence of the narcotic. The wife lay by his side, sullen and unconcerned. An hour after,, the landlady, whose suspicions had been aroused, and who had listened, heard a significant noise and entered from a side door. The lady was kneeling beside the bed. The bandages were removed from her husband’s arm and wrist, and she was voraciously sucking the fresh blood welling from the re-opened wounds. The wretched blood-sucker is now a helpless lunatic, and her husband is sufficiently recovered to be out of doors a short time during the day. Considered in its abstract scientific aspect there does not appear to he any assignable cause why such dire results should follow. French surgeons have been devoting considerable attention to the effects of blood drinking and blood transfusion. M. Octave de Fossey, who, by the way, terms the human blood “the champagne of bloods,”relates a case that came under his personal observation where transfusion of blood was used in the case of a delicate lady. Blood from an herculean young man was infused into her veins on three separate occasions, and she regained health and vigor. But with her convalescence she acquired a masculine voice, and upon her upper lip waslleveloped a hirsute excresence which could only be designated—a mustache! She was so disgusted with her .transformation that a relapse‘followed, during which she rapidly sunk and finally died. Following on the same side, M. Mathieu A-S----sollow recounts the history of a case which is so phenomenal as to be worthy of a place among the wildest imaginings of French romancists. Nile. Therese Deyeux was the daughter of wealthy parents, who occupied a chateau on the banks qf the Adour, in the, department of the Halites Pyrenees. She contracted a surreptitious affection for a handsome young Gvpsy in the habij of making periodical transits across the Pyrenees from Spain. Finally the pair disappeared. Therese secured money and valuables, and Leonce baffled the vigilance of his companions. For three years the pair led a vagrant life, ' but in various ways the renegade Gypsy waS-’Hotitied tjiat his blood would he required whenever he crossed the path of the tribe he had dishonored. Finally: the day of reckoning arrived. Leonce. with his wife and child, were suddenly surprised by the Zangari, and a terrible hand-ffi-hand contest He - defended himself against the whole of his infuriated enemies. Posting himself on a narrow bridge that crossed the dellle, with his front to the foes, and hj.s wife and child behind him, he fought with the epergy-oLdesperation. “In one dash to the front," says the French chronicler, “and with one terrible swoop of his sword, he disarmed two of his opponents and clove the skull of a third. Still his enemies bore down on hint, until his wife expected to behold him at her feet a reeking corpse. Finally one of the women stole unobserved from the band, and taking a circuitous route, came behind the singlehanded hero, and inflicted on poor Therese a dreadful wound with a cutlass She w'as cut to the bone above and below the breast. The slashes were so large and so deep that one of her breasts was nearly severed from her body, and the motion of her lungs while she breathed was observed through the aperture between her ribs.” Help arrived at this moment, and the unequal fray vvas stayed. Therese shortly after expired, and Leonce suddenly retired with his infant daughter in his arms. Space would fail us to follow M. Assollow in the life of the hunted Romihany for tbentext two years. Oftentimes vvithoqlJdod. hia child on the point qf starvation, the infant was reared on the warm blood of the slaughtered goat, and when the chase and <• h ar-

ity alike failed, she drank existence from his own open veins. Still pursued by his band, however, the struggle for existence became impossible, burdened and weakened as he was by the incessant demands of his child. Finally an inspiration fell upon him. Leonce took his child at nightfall and laid her, tenderly wrapped in a blanket, near the public well of the small village of Beagno, in the valley of the Ebro. A peasant woman came to draw water, and beholding the desolate child looked kindly on it, and reared it as her own. The girl, who was christened Isabella, early evinced an unquenchable appetite for sucking from rabbits and young goats raw, warm blood. She was known in Beagno as the little bloodsucker, and the pet rabbits or young kids of her play fellows, when placed within her reach, were sure to be pierced by her teeth and their vital fluid exhausted. Notwithstanding her sanguinary appetite, she becamo a belle of the village: Finally she was trained for the ballet, and married a handsome young Spaniard, whose social position was superior to her own. He died in two years, in a rapid decline. She married another robust and attractive young man; he, too, speedily found a a grave, in Etienne, France, after the doctors had expressed their utmost astonr ishment at his symptoms. She married a young violinist, full of verve and promise, and seemed to dote on her husband; a year after his face was worn and haggard, and in his entire physique there were evidences of decay that told that he was not long for this earth. Subsequently she buried a husband in Greece and another in Egypt, and when last heard from, two years since, she was married in Bucharest. M. Mathieu Assollan unhesitatingly pronounces her a vampire, and believes she possesses a secret unknown to science whereby she can extract large quantities of blood from her husbands while asleep. On these considerations, which he evidently regards as facts, he pronounces the infusion of blood either into the veins by transmission, or into the stomach and system by absorption, as extremely hazardous experiments, not so much to patients as to those who may be afterwards brought into- constant- and* familiar intercourse with them.