The Parisian Vampire

Beneath the City of Light, a darker story has always stirred—one of desecrated graves, a vampire baroness, and the creature that still watches from the rooftops.

The cemetery of Père Lachaise rises over eastern Paris like a city within a city, its cobbled lanes winding past elaborate mausoleums and weather-worn angels. On a grey autumn afternoon, tourists wander its paths with maps unfolded, searching for the graves of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, of Chopin and Piaf. They photograph the ivy-covered stones and pause at the tomb of Abelard and Heloise, their hands tracing the carved stone as if proximity to such famous lovers might confer some small measure of immortality.

Few of them notice the wolf heads.

They are there, carved into the base of an imposing neoclassical mausoleum in the nineteenth division—stone guardians with sightless eyes, their jaws frozen mid-snarl. Above them, a carved knot joins and separates, joins and separates, like the endless loop of a story that refuses to end. The tomb belongs to Elisabeth Demidoff, born a Stroganoff into Russian nobility, died in Paris in 1818. The wolf heads guard her sleep. Or perhaps they guard something else entirely.

Because the story attached to this tomb is not the kind found in guidebooks. It is a story whispered in the darker corners of the internet, passed between vampire enthusiasts and amateur historians. It says that Elisabeth Demidoff was no ordinary noblewoman. It says she was a vampire. And it says she left a fortune to anyone brave enough to spend one year alone inside her mausoleum, where her body lies in a glass coffin within a room lined with mirrors—so that wherever you look, you see her face reflected back at you, impossibly preserved, watching.

The story first appeared in Parisian newspapers in September of 1893, though it may have originated a few years earlier in the city's boulevard press. By October, it had crossed the Atlantic. "A curious will contest, according to Paris papers, is about to be tried in the Seine courts," the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on the twenty-fifth. "Five years ago a Russian princess died, leaving a large fortune. By one of its clauses she left 5,000,000 francs to the person who would remain a year in the chapel to be erected above her grave in the Père Lachaise."

The details multiplied with each retelling. The princess lay in a crystal coffin, remarkably well-preserved. The chapel walls were lined with mirrors. Several Frenchmen had already attempted the feat and failed—one lasted nearly three weeks before losing his reason entirely, reduced to "a jabbering idiot." A servant would bring meals. Books and newspapers were permitted. One hour of walking was allowed each day, but only before dawn in summer and before eight in winter. The will made no mention of foreigners being ineligible. "There is every chance, therefore, for a strong-minded American who fears neither ghosts, ghouls nor gravestones to become rich in the short period of 365 days."

"There is every chance for a strong-minded American who fears neither ghosts, ghouls nor gravestones to become rich."

By early 1894, the story was being exposed as a hoax. Parisian authorities had been deluged with inquiries from around the world. There was no contest, no reward, no Russian princess. The supposed tomb actually belonged to a French family named De Beaujour. But the story refused to die. It attached itself instead to Elisabeth Demidoff, whose elaborate mausoleum—with its wolf heads and its location on the Chemin du Dragon, the Path of the Dragon—proved irresistible. The three eights in her death date became the symbol of infinity. The carved knot became the joining of life and death. The Path of the Dragon conjured associations with Dracula.

And somewhere along the way, the princess learned to walk at night.

The vampire of Père Lachaise was not Paris's first encounter with the undead. That distinction belongs to a very different kind of story—one not of legend but of pathology, not of noblewomen in glass coffins but of a sergeant in the French army who could not stop himself from digging up the dead.

Between the summer of 1848 and March of 1849, the cemeteries of Paris experienced a reign of terror. Each night, an unknown intruder forced open coffins, mutilated corpses, and scattered remains across the grounds. The newspapers dubbed him "The Vampire of Paris." Guards were hired, watches doubled. The figure evaded capture every time, disappearing "like a phantom" when approached. Even the dogs let loose upon him stopped short and ceased to bark, "as if they were transfixed by a charm."

The desecrations reached their horrifying peak at a suburban cemetery, where a seven-year-old girl had been laid to rest in her favorite holiday frock. The morning after her interment, her grave was found violated, her body torn from the coffin, frightfully mutilated, her heart extracted. Paris was outraged. The metropolitan clergy spoke of resorting to the exorcism rites of the Middle Ages.

"I covered it with kisses and pressed it wildly to my heart. All that one could enjoy with a living woman is nothing in comparison."

The Vampire was finally caught in March of 1849, after an explosive trap wounded him during an escape. He left a trail of blood, and the next day a gravedigger overheard soldiers discussing their sergeant, who had returned to the military hospital with mysterious wounds. The sergeant's name was François Bertrand.

He was, by all accounts, an unlikely suspect. He bore an excellent character, was loved for his forthrightness, and was accounted a man of gentle disposition who had once studied in a seminary. When brought before the bar of justice, pale and feeble, supported on crutches, he freely admitted his guilt. He described exhuming ten to fifteen bodies in a single night, digging with his bare hands until they bled. He described the pleasure he experienced with the body of a sixteen-year-old girl: "I covered it with kisses and pressed it wildly to my heart. All that one could enjoy with a living woman is nothing in comparison with the pleasure I experienced."

The medical community struggled to diagnose him. Some called it "monomania." Bertrand himself traced the compulsion to a moment in his childhood, passing by a cemetery and noticing gravediggers covering a body. "At this sight," he said, "horrible desires seized me: my head throbbed, my heart palpitated violently." Doctors eventually concluded that he was not responsible for his acts, though the court sentenced him to a year's imprisonment nonetheless. He died in 1878, reportedly cured, a model of gentleness and propriety. His case led to the coining of a new term: necrophilia.

A century before Bertrand dug up the dead of Père Lachaise, another Frenchman was grappling with the vampire question from a very different perspective. Dom Augustin Calmet was a Benedictine monk and a respected Bible scholar. In 1746, he published a treatise with an impossibly long title: Dissertations on the Apparitions of Angels and Spirits, and on Revenants, and Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia.

The book was a popular success, reprinted repeatedly and translated into several languages. Calmet approached the vampire phenomenon with a mixture of theological rigor and Enlightenment rationalism that was ahead of its time. While German universities had largely concluded that vampires did not exist, Calmet asked a different question: what if there is something real behind these reports? What if we are dismissing phenomena we do not yet understand?

"What if there is something real behind these reports? What if we are dismissing phenomena we do not yet understand?"

He brought the vampire debate into the Parisian salons, where it was met with characteristic French skepticism. Voltaire dismissed vampires as superstition, suggesting that the real bloodsuckers were businessmen and tax collectors. Diderot followed suit. Only Rousseau offered support for Calmet's rational approach to the evidence. But Calmet had done something important: he had preserved the accounts, asked the questions, and ensured that the vampire would not be forgotten. His work stands as a bridge between the folklore of Eastern Europe and the scholarship of the modern world.

The vampire continues to haunt Paris. In the 1850s, the photographer Charles Nègre captured an image he called "The Vampire." It shows his friend Henri Le Secq posing behind a famous gargoyle of Notre-Dame—a fantastical creature with elements of a woman and a dog, designed by Viollet-le-Duc during the cathedral's restoration. Le Secq, in a top hat, looks out over the rooftops of Paris, as if issuing a challenge to the city below. Nègre never exhibited the photograph in his lifetime, but its power to fascinate has only grown.

In 2005, a man named Jacques Sirgent opened the Musée des Vampires in a Paris suburb. Housed in a former workshop, it is open only by appointment. Visitors are led through rooms filled with artifacts: ritual kits for staking vampires, original manuscripts, antique engravings. The Irish ambassador attended the opening—a nod to the land that gave the world Dracula. In the dim light of that suburban workshop, the vampire lives on, not as a creature of fear but as a subject of endless fascination.

"To study the vampire is to study ourselves."

The skeptics will tell you there are no vampires. They will point to Bertrand's diagnosis, to the Demidoff hoax, to the rational explanations that dissolve every legend into dust. But the whispers persist. The tales endure. And in the cemeteries of Paris, in the shadows of the catacombs, on the rooftops where gargoyles keep their silent watch, something lingers. An entity that hides behind supposition and superstition. A presence that stalks the night for its next victim, following its dark path to immortality.

The line between the living and the dead is thinner than we imagine. In Paris, as in so many cities, the vampire found its perfect home.

The tomb of Elisabeth Demidoff remains in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Division 19, on the Chemin du Dragon. The Musée des Vampires is open by appointment only. François Bertrand is buried somewhere in Le Havre; the exact location has been lost to time.