---------------------Page 1--------------------The case of Petre Toma

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The authorities in Craiova, south-west Romania, opened
an
investigation against six people alleged to have impale
d the body
of a villager who, according to them "had transformed h
imself into
vampire" and "sucked blood from them during the night."
The body of Petre Toma had been unearthed six weeks lat
er by
his brother-in-law in the presence of several other mem
bers of the
family, including his widow and her grand-daughter. Acc
ording to
several testimonies, they made an incision in the chest
of Toma to
extract his heart before burning it. One report states
that, in
accordance with a local custom to protect against vampi
res, they
dissolved the ashes in water and drank it.
An autopsy carried out by the authorities in Craiova confirmed that "the heart w
as indeed
taken."
The six people explained that after the death of Toma they had felt "weakened,"
as if they did
not have "any more blood."
"One night I saw it in my room, and in the morning I could not arise; so much wa
s I
weakened", said the grand-daughter of Toma, Mirela Marinescu. According to her,
as soon as
the exorcism ritual was performed the dead body "did not come any more to haunt"
its family.
The Sunday Times reported that several villagers affirmed that this exorcism rit
ual was known
and practiced for a long time in the area, and that it each time had appeared "e
ffective
against vampires."
For centuries we have had to protect ourselves against these creatures by finding
the graves
of the undead and risking our lives by ripping out their hearts, said sixty-eight
-year-old Tita
Musca, a local farmer.
The village of the vampire slayers has become the focus of a police investigatio
n that has
highlighted not only local fears of the undead but a startling willingness to ac
t on them.

The saga began when Petre Toma, seventy-six, was buried at new year. His nephews
family
fell ill with an unexplained sickness and a few days later a witness claimed to
have seen
Toma leaving their house before sunrise as a flock of crows flew portentously ov
erhead.
He sucked the life from us so that he could live, said Mirela Marinescu. We were al
l dying,
my husband and my child, and we all saw him come to us in the same dream.
Armed with hammers and chisels and fortified with home-made schnapps, four men l
ed by
---------------------Page 2--------------------Gheorghe Marinescu, the supposed vampires brother-in-law, set out for the cemeter
y.
When we lifted the coffin lid his arms were not on his chest as we had left them
but at his
sides, said Marinescu. His head was turned to the side and his lips were stained w
ith dried
blood.
After the corpses chest had been opened with a wooden stake the heart was removed
. It
was full of fresh blood, said Marinescu. His body relaxed and we heard him sigh.
The heart was burnt over the embers of a fire and the ashes stirred into a bottl
e of water from
the village well to make a potion. The vampires victims recovered after drinking it
but
Tomas daughter called the police.
Investigators soon discovered evidence of up to twenty vampire slayings in the p
ast few
years. At the regional police station the commissioner, Gheorghe Sandu, said: Id l
ike to be
able to say this village is unique, but unfortunately I cant because I know just
how strong
belief in vampires is here.
The Daily Telegraph reported that six men were jailed for ripping out the heart
of a corpse
they believed was undead. As Monica Petrescu in Bucharest writes, to many Romani
ans,
vampires are not legend but terrifying reality.
It was just before midnight as Gheorghe Marinescu and five of his relatives crep
t into the
graveyard in the small Romanian village of Marotinul de Sus. They knew which plo
t they were
looking for a simple earth grave with a wooden cross bearing the name Petre Toma
and
quickly, but quietly, set about digging.
When they had dragged the body out, they waited. Then, at the stroke of midnight
, Marinescu
began the ritual that they had been planning for weeks, one that had passed from

generation
to generation in their family. They drove a pitchfork through Petre Toma s chest
, opened it,
drew out his heart and then put stakes through the rest of his body. They sprink
led garlic over
the mutilated corpse and then, carefully, laid it back in its grave.
They left the cemetery with the heart impaled on the end of the pitchfork and we
nt to a
crossroads where Marinescu s wife, son and daughter-in-law were waiting. There t
he group
burnt it, dissolved the ashes and then drank the solution.
The scene last July would fit readily into any number of films about vampires an
d the Dracula
legend but Gheorghe Marinescu is real. He and his five relatives Mitrica Mircea,
Popa
Stelica, Constantin Florea, Ionescu Ion and Pascu Oprea were sentenced to six mo
nths in
jail for the unlawful exhumation of the body of Toma, a former teacher and a man
they
believed had risen from the dead to drink their blood while they slept.
News of what the Marinescu family did made headlines in Romania, but in a countr
y where a
large minority of the population admit to openly believing in the undead, footba
ll bosses
employ witches to cast spells on foreign teams and a couple recently named their
newborn
son Dracula after premonitions of impending danger to him, many were unsurprised
by what
---------------------Page 3--------------------they read.
Mihai Fifor, an ethnologist at the Centre for Studies in Traditional Cultures an
d Societies in
Craiova, said, "This particular ritual is quite unique but there have been many
cases of people
claiming that they are being hunted by the dead and vampires. There are a number
of other
rituals that exist for this type of situation where people believe they need to
kill vampires."
Romania has been associated with vampires in the minds of many Westerners ever s
ince
Bram Stoker wrote his classic horror story, Dracula, in 1897. But in Romania the
belief in
vampires and the threat of the undead stretches as far back as the fifteenth cen
tury leader of
Wallachia modern-day Transylvania and other parts of Romania Vlad Tepes (Dracula
),
who was the inspiration for Stoker s novel. Stoker merged the Middle Ages belief
in vampires,
which had become entrenched in Romania and many other parts of central and easte
rn
Europe at the time, with the historically documented bloodthirstiness of Tepes s
rule. In doing
so, he created the story of Count Dracula who rose from the dead to haunt the de
ep, dark

forests and castles of Transylvania, preying on young victims and drinking their
blood.
But while Dracula and vampires are just a fascinating legend to most people outs
ide the
country, to many Romanians, mostly in rural areas, they are a terrifying reality
. After his
arrest, Marinescu said: "If we hadn t done anything, my wife, my son and my daug
hter-in-law
would have died. That is when I decided to "unbury" him. I ve seen these kinds o
f things
before.
"When we took him out of the grave, he had blood around his mouth. We took his h
eart and
he sighed when we stabbed him. We burned it, dissolved the ash into water and th
e people
who had fallen sick drank it. They got better immediately. It was like someone t
ook away all
their pain and sickness.
"We performed a ritual that is hundreds of years old. We had no idea we were com
mitting a
crime. On the contrary, we believed that we were doing a good thing because the
spirit of
Petre was haunting us all and was very close to killing some of us. He came back
from the
dead and was after us."
Marinescu explained to police when he was arrested that Toma, who he said had be
en a
respected and well-liked teacher in the village for years, had been buried on Ch
ristmas Day in
2003. But soon afterwards he had begun to appear to members of Marinescu s famil
y in
dreams as a vampire. Although he did not see the man himself, he saw his family
become
sick and they told him that Toma was not just a dream but a vampire whose spirit
had come
back from the dead.
He, like the rest of his family, had been told how to recognise vampires and how
to deal with
them by his parents who had been taught that knowledge from their own parents an
d they
from theirs. He said he had had to act quickly to save his family.
Paula Diaconu, who has lived in Marotinul de Sus for decades, praised the ritual
carried out
by Marinescu and his relatives. "It was all a good thing to take his heart out b
ecause people
were in danger. Villagers in Romania know about rituals for driving away the evi
l spirits of the
---------------------Page 4--------------------dead," he said.
Another man from the village, Dumitru Moineasa, once drank a solution containing
the ashes
of his uncle s heart. "An uncle of mine died in 1992 and a few days after we bur

ied him I
started to feel very sick," he said. "The doctor had no idea what was wrong with
me. One day,
an aunt brought me a glass of water. I drank it all. I got well almost immediate
ly. I only found
out later that it was my dead uncle s ashes."
His friend, Domnica Brancusi, said that hearts had been taken out of dead men s
chests
many times before. "There have been dozens of dead men who turned into vampires
and
were haunting us," he said. "But usually the family of the dead man who was haun
ting people
made a pact with those people and agreed not to say anything about the rituals.
Until this
case, no fuss was ever made about it."
Local police laid charges against the six men after Toma s daughter, Floarea Cot
oran, who
has since left Marotinul de Sus, complained about what happened to her father s
body. They
admitted that they were aware of similar rituals having been performed in the re
gion. A
policeman in nearby Celaru, which has jurisdiction over Marotinul de Sus, and wh
o asked not
to be named, said: "We ve known about it for years. There s never been anything
we could do
about it as no one ever complained."
Marotinul de Sus, in the south-west, is far from the only village in Romania to
take the threat
of vampires seriously. In many rural communities like it across the country, bel
ief in vampires
is pervasive and superstition often governs people s lives. "Fear and great chal
lenges in life
are sometimes met by people with rituals and superstitions, a set of rules built
over
generations which has been verified over time," said Sabina Ispas, an ethnologis
t at the
Institute for Ethnology and Folklore in Bucharest. "Rural Romania has conserved
excellently
this system of rituals and beliefs."
Deep superstition and belief in the paranormal permeates all levels of society i
n urban
Romania as well. Maria Tedescu, a twenty-one-year-old law student in Bucharest,
said: "We
all have our little superstitions, like taking three steps back if a black cat c
rosses your path to
stop something bad happening. But vampires are different. It s not something to
be taken
lightly. I know it may sound silly and I can t totally explain it, but I think t
hey exist. I always
wear a crucifix just in case."
Source:
Sunday Times (11 April 2004)
Daily Telegraph (6 February 2005)

Is It Real?: Vampires (National Geographic, 2006)

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