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About our Name:
When we had to select a name for our site, we decided that we did not want
the word "vampire" to be part of that name. For we wanted to have a name that
would reflect the fact that we are going to be dealing with something different from the average contemporary vampire. We are not into the type of vampire that
practically all of the other vampire sites seem to be about. Indeed, as you will find, we are into a completely different kind of vampire.
At the same time, we still wanted to have a name that had a connection with
the subject of our studies: the traditional European Vampire. So we decided to
adopt the name "Shroudeater". We were sad to find that - nowadays
- most people seem completely unaware of the interesting phenomenon of
corpses that are eating their own shrouds.
In the 17th and early 18th Century, however, those shroudeaters, and the
deadly effect which their posthumous activity was said to have on the living,
were the serious subject of heated discussions between theologians,
philosophers and scientists.
It is a weird but fascinating superstition. The American vampirologist Paul
Barber sums it up as follows: "... if any cloth touches the mouth of the
corpse, the corpse is apt to begin to chew on it, thereby bringing about the
death of the friends and relatives of the deceased through an agency that is
never really explained."
This is what Martin Böhm did write in 1601: "We have seen in times of the
plague how dead people - especially women - who have died of the plague make
smacking noises in their graves, like a pig that is eating, and that while
this smacking is going on the plague becomes much worse, usually in the same
family, and people die one after the other."
It is in the year of 1679, in the town of Leipzig, that Philipp Rohr first
publishes his study "Dissertatio Historico-Philosophica de Masticatione
Mortuorum", in which he tries to find an explanation for the existence of
these shroud eating corpses.
According to Michel Ranft's "De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulis", published
in Leipzig in 1728, it is exclusively in times of plague that these corpses
devour their own shrouds, noisily chewing on them. Their loud and uncivilised
table manners have earned them the name "Schmatzenden Todten". They are said
to grunt like pigs inside their graves. And while they are chewing away on
their shrouds - through some mysterious kind of vampirism - their surviving
relatives grow weaker and weaker until they die as well.
Obviously, these grunting chewing corpses, that do not even have to leave
their grave to vampirise on their victims, are worlds apart from well-dressed
gentlemen like Dracula or Lestat. Through fiction, "vampires" have evolved
into something quite different, in which - apart from the name "vampire" - we
find it very hard to recognise anything that even slightly resembles their
old forefather, the original kind of vampire.
However, and that is lucky for us, the old "SHROUDEATER" does very much
resemble the original European vampire which is going to be the main subject
of this site. Both of them are corpses. Real corpses that are being accused
of preying on the living. Vampire and Shroudeater are like brothers really.
Reason enough for us to have adopted the Shroudeater for our domain name.
© 2008 by Rob Brautigam - NL - Last update 10 October 2008
Photo "Grim Reaper" © 2000 by Rob Brautigam