In the twenty-first century, the vampire has become a sex symbol. Audiences were repelled by the image of the monster in Nosferatu. Some women were said to faint or scream during showings of Dracula.
Today the screams of teenaged girls during vampire movies is not due to shock or fear but are prompted by the same frenzied hysteria as that earned by rock stars. The male vampires are buff and handsome; the female vampires are gorgeous and seductive. Who wouldn’t want to be bitten by these gods and goddesses and stay young and beautiful forever?
The zombie of today’s films, games, and books is gaining on the vampire as the most popular of the grotesque creatures who chase down human prey and eat their flesh. However, the zombie may be resurrected, but not as a sexy beast, buff, handsome or beautiful. And the victim of a zombie, once bitten, shuffles about with a gaping wound oozing blood that surely does not improve his or her physical attractiveness or prompt sexual urges.
The ghoul is often linked with the vampire and the werewolf in traditional folklore, but there are a number of obvious reasons why the entity has never attained the popularity achieved by the Frankenstein monsters, Draculas, and Wolfmen of the horror films. First and foremost is the nauseating fact that the ghoul is a disgusting creature that subsists on corpses, invading the graves of the newly buried and feasting on the flesh of the deceased. The very concept is revolting and offensive to modern sensibilities.
There are a number of different entities that are included in the category of ghoul. There is the ghoul that, like the vampire, is a member of the family of the undead, continually on the nocturnal prowl for new victims. Unlike the vampire, however, this ghoul feasts upon the flesh of the deceased, tearing their corpses from cemeteries and morgues. The ghoul more common to the waking world is that of the mentally unbalanced individual who engages in the disgusting aberration of necrophagia, eating or otherwise desecrating the flesh of deceased humans. Yet a third type of ghoul would be those denizens of Arabic folklore, the “ghul” (male) and “ghulah” (female), demonic “jinns” that haunt burial grounds and sustain themselves on human flesh stolen from graves.
Sgt. Bertrand, the infamous so-called werewolf of Paris, was really a ghoul, for rather than ripping and slashing the living, he suffered from the necrophilic perversion of mutilating the dead.
Ghouls are often linked to vampires and werewolves in popular culture. However, ghouls feed on the dead, not the living, invading the graves of the newly buried and feasting on the flesh of the deceased (art by Bill Oliver).
It is not difficult to envision how the legends of the ghoul and vampire began in ancient times when graves were shallow and very often subject to the disturbances of wild animals seeking carrion. Later, as funeral customs became more elaborate and men and women were buried with their jewelry and other personal treasures, the lure of easy wealth superseded any superstitious or ecclesiastical admonitions that might have otherwise kept grave robbers away from cemeteries and from desecrating a corpse’s final rest.
Then, in the late 1820s, surgeons and doctors began to discover the value of dissection. The infant science of surgery was progressing rapidly, but advancement required cadavers—and the more cadavers that were supplied, the more the doctors realized how little they actually knew about the anatomy and interior workings of the human body, and thus the more cadavers they needed. As a result, societies of grave robbers were formed called the “resurrectionists.” These men made certain that the corpses finding their way to the dissecting tables were as fresh as possible. And, of course, digging was easier in unsettled dirt. The great irony was that advancement in medical science help to perpetuate the legend of the ghoul.
Early on, the most infamous of the grave-robbers were William Hare and William Burke, who supplied Dr. John Knox of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Hare ran an inn, and his friend, Burke, a small, portly cobbler, did his business in a shop near Hare’s inn. Between them, the two men unearthed coffins from cemeteries and carried their contents from the grave to Dr. Knox’s laboratory.
Burke and Hare had hit upon a goldmine. At 10 pounds per corpse (approximately 17 dollars in present U.S. currency) the two men could get rich in very little time, because Knox went through cadavers at an incredible rate. Ten pounds was more than an average 1820s working man could earn in six months. To keep pace with their greed, Burke and Hare had added their own special wrinkle to the wholesale corpse business: The goods they pedaled were always fresh because they would not wait for a “corpse” to die.
Returning to Hare’s inn on a cold December night, the two men warmed themselves with a few tankards of grog. Burke joined his common-law wife, Helen, and Hare went to his kept mistress, Mag Laird. Together the foursome celebrated their newfound financial independence. Even though they had been in the cadaver business less than a month, their clothes had already become those of the rich.
All through the spring and into the summer of 1828, business boomed. Even though Knox had to reduce the going rate to eight pounds (approximately 13 U.S. dollars) during the hot months because of his need for ice, Burke and Hare figured that was fair enough.
With his newfound riches, Burke changed his taste in women. Helen was a bit frowsy, and, besides, he had his eye on Mary Paterson, a beautiful prostitute who had always been out of his financial class. Burke approached her as a prosperous businessman, then bought her a jug of gin. From there it was only a little jingle of coin to the home of his brother, Constantine, who collected garbage for the Edinburgh police.
Unannounced at his brother’s house, Burke informed the bewildered man that he had some business to discuss with the ample-bosomed, blond-haired beauty. The door to the bedroom had not been closed long before the door of the house opened again and in barged Helen Burke, her eyes blurred with drink and her voice screeching hatred for her husband. Someone had told her of his leaving the grog shop with the beautiful streetwalker.
Helen ran to the bedroom and jerked open the door to find a frustrated Burke and a Mary Paterson who had fainted dead away from too much drink.
To further complicate matters, Hare had followed Helen Burke to brother Constantine’s house, and, to avoid trouble, had quickly doled out a few shillings to get the man and his wife out of the way. Constantine protested, wondering what would become of Mary Paterson, but Hare assured him that all would be handled very smoothly. After promising Helen that he would see that her husband committed no unfaithful act, Hare also convinced her to leave.
The next day the medical students attending Dr. Knox’s lecture and dissection laboratory were a little stunned by the dead beauty that lay under the doctor’s knife. More than one of them had seen her before on the streets.
The medical students were not the only people who had missed the beautiful streetwalker. She had a steady friend, an Irishman named McLaughlin, who looked on himself as her protector. Though the big, burly man could not prove anything, he was sure that Mary had met with foul play, and he traced her vanishing trail right to a cobbler named Burke.
Even while McLaughlin went storming away uttering curses and promising extreme retribution if anything had happened to his Mary, Burke was suffering from further domestic problems. While trying to fulfill a special order from Dr. Knox for a 10-year-old boy and an old lady, he and Hare had unwittingly taken an idiot as a victim. The fact would have been inconsequential to Dr. Knox, but to Helen Burke, her mind clouded with drink and superstition, it was an evil omen—a curse in fact—and the two grim businessmen had all they could do to keep her from spilling the entire