by Sarah A. Peterson-Camacho

You can read Part 1 here.

Visalia, California, November 1916

Her theory was as shocking as it was intriguing—even for America’s foremost gossip columnist. But then again, Louella Parsons had never been one to mince words.

“Her hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa,” Parsons wrote in The Visalia Daily Times of Tuesday, November 21, 1916. “Her eyes have the cruel cunning of Lucretia Borgia … and her hands are those of the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory—who slaughtered young girls that she might bath in their life blood and so retain her beauty.

“Can it be that fate has reincarnated in Theda Bara the souls of these monsters of medieval times?”

With her long, lustrous raven tresses, large, expressive eyes, and heart-shaped, berry pout, silent screen siren Theda Bara did indeed have the face of a fallen angel—but was she really the reincarnation of a bloodthirsty 17th-century serial murderess? Well, according to experts in the occult arts, she was.

“Students of sociology and phrenology see an unusual parallel in the recorded physical characteristics of Elizabeth Bathory and Mlle. Bara,” reported The Oakland Tribune the year previous. “Will her mind … call into flaming life the smoldering desires of a soul reborn, and will the world … be given a true picture of history’s worst woman—the beautiful woman who bathed in blood until, transformed, she bore the world’s most wicked face?”

That the silver screen’s reigning femme fatale—known as the Queen of Vampires in early cinema circles—should be compared to the legendary Blood Countess was indeed fitting. The star of such silent film shockers as The Devil’s Daughter, The Vixen, and the succinctly-titled Sin, was no stranger to the dark side—at least onscreen.

But leave it to a “professional” to have the last word. “I write this with a photograph of Theda Bara before me,” phrenologist Emily H. Vaught opined in The Oakland Tribune. “Never in all my experience as a professional character reader have I gazed into a face portraying such wickedness and evil—such characteristics of the vampire and the sorceress.”

New Orleans, Louisiana Territory, 1728

A fairy tale, it was not. More like a hot, humid alien swampland.

As the young French women stepped out onto the gangplank, a muddy harbor met their sun-blinded eyes as the fledgling city of New Orleans stretched out before them. They had just endured a six-month voyage across the Atlantic, however, making even this soggy terrain preferable to that creaking, rickety ship.

Clutching small suitcases known as cassettes, the out-of-place teens—their pale cheeks already burning under the hot sun like firelit roses—followed a nun down the gangplank to the dock, where a crowd of mostly male onlookers waited to size them up. They must have seemed like fish out of water to these seasoned locals: like bedraggled ghosts, really, dressed warmly for a long, wintry voyage at sea.

Personally requested for by the founder of New Orleans himself as prospective brides for the merchants, fur trappers, and tradesmen of Louisiana Territory, these Filles à la Cassette—as they would come to be known—had been sent over by none other than King Louis XV.

The sisters of the Order of St. Ursula, hailing from an Ursuline convent in Rouen, France, had endured the six-month sea voyage the year before to prepare a home for their future charges. They welcomed these newcomers into their holy fold—at least until suitable marriages could be arranged.

Married off one-by-one, the convent-educated teens found newly wedded life difficult and lonely, with husbands often gone for long stretches of time on trades and trapping routes. And those who didn’t marry either stayed on at the convent, or found work as domestic servants or prostitutes.

And while several of the arranged matches proved to be made in Heaven, a hellish reality of poverty and domestic abuse sent many of these unhappy wives, mothers, and “ladies of the evening” back to the Ursuline convent. They then raised enough of a stink to have word sent across the Atlantic to King Louis XV, who—outraged at their ill treatment—demanded their immediate return to France.

Out came the small suitcases known as cassettes—long since bastardized to “casquettes,” and then “caskets.” The Ursuline sisters helped the young women pack for the long voyage home, then deposited the caskets in the convent’s third-floor attic until the next day’s journey.

But the following morning, the nuns discovered each and every one of the caskets empty of their contents. And they began to suspect something sinister was afoot…

Legend has it that these Casket Girls—as they would ever after be known—were actually bloodthirsty vampires responsible for a dramatic uptick in local violent crime, leaving a trail of exsanguinated bodies in their wake. So the Ursuline sisters locked them away in that third-floor attic, nailing all the windows shut with 800 silver nails blessed by the Pope himself!

Two and a half centuries passed. By 1978, the Old Ursuline Convent had been a hospital and morgue during the War of 1812, an archbishop’s residence, New Orleans’ first public school, and an early seat of the Louisiana legislature. It was now a Registered National Historic Landmark, the oldest original building in the Mississippi River Valley—and reputed to be very, very haunted by spirits and bloodsuckers alike.

One night in the autumn of ’78, a pair of intrepid paranormal investigators decided to camp outside the convent with their tape recorders to see if they could procure some supernatural evidence. But by the witching hour, both were sound asleep as the shuttered third-floor windows flew open…

By the next morning, the bodies of the two vampire hunters were found torn apart in their tent right outside the Old Ursuline Convent—drained of blood, their tape recorders blank. And the convent’s third-floor attic windows remained tightly shuttered.

The vampiric legend of New Orleans’ Casket Girls has existed at least since the early 20th century—and shows no signs of abating. And while not the earliest North American vampire myth, it introduced the European lady bloodsucker to New World folklore.

Europe/United Kingdom, 1746-1820

With the 1746 publication of French Benedictine abbot and scholar Dom. Antoine Augustin Calmet’s occult treatise Dissertations Upon the Apparitions, Eastern European vampire folklore traversed the globe in tandem with Romanticism and the rise of the Gothic novel.

Renewed interest in Greek and Roman mythology ignited inspiration in a generation of Romantic poets, particularly the archetypal figure of the evil supernatural seductress. Poems like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth” (1797) and Robert Southey’s “Thalaba the Destroyer” (1801) featured vampiric villainesses, paving the way for later poetic iterations.

But it wasn’t until a pivotal moment in Gothic literary history—a stormy June 1816 night at the Villa Diodati in Geneve, Switzerland, when English poet Percy Shelley proposed a legendary ghost story writing contest amongst his party—that the inspirational seed for the fictional lady vampire would be planted. Not only would this single night spawn Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but it would also yield John William Polidori’s Dracula precursor The Vampyre (1819).

Hot on the heels of several succubus-hued poetry classics—Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816), and John Keats’ “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1820)—a pair of dramatic productions took the stage in France and England. Charles Nodier’s Le Vampire and James R. Planche’s The Vampire both debuted in 1820, and both contributed an important addition to Polidori’s original story: each would center the narrative around the titular vampire’s beautiful brides.

Europe/United Kingdom, 1823-1838

As the 1820s progressed, fictional portrayals of female vampires became even richer and more fully embodied as the Gothic genre entered a new age.

The advent of the steam-powered printing press allowed for cheaper, mass-produced periodicals aimed at entertaining an increasingly literate working class. And to satisfy the thrill-seeking needs of an ever-expanding audience of readers, the penny presses began churning out blood-soaked serial fiction in weekly installments known as “penny bloods.”

Witches, werewolves, and vampires populated these pages alongside serial killers like Sweeney Todd and the legendary Bluebeard. Male protagonists played God in the vein of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Victor Frankenstein in a never-ending effort at resurrecting a deceased mate—usually with disastrous consequences.

In 1823’s “Wake Not the Dead,” a German dramatist spun the tragic tale of a grieving widower dabbling in necromancy to bring back his beloved wife … only to awaken an insatiable vampiress with the lovely face of his deceased Brunhilda. It would be one of the earliest vampire short stories—and one of the first written narratives to prominently feature a female bloodsucker.

Meanwhile, across the English Channel in London, Elizabeth Caroline Grey wrote of a sorcerer seeking a soulmate to resurrect from a graveyard in 1828’s The Skeleton Count; Or, The Vampire Mistress.” The earliest English-language narrative centering on a lady vampire, it follows the bloodthirsty Bertha as she drains a tiny German village dry.

“Her long black hair was shaded with a purple gloss like the plumage of the raven,” Grey wrote of Bertha. “But now her angelic countenance was livid with the pallid hue of death … her sharp teeth punctured the white skin [of her victim], and then she began to suck greedily, quaffing the vital fluid which flowed warm and quick in the maiden’s veins—and sapping her life to maintain her own!”

With the dawning of the 1830s, these fictional vampiresses would acquire minds, wills, and voices of their own. “I am come—I am come!” English poet and politician Henry Thomas Liddell’s “Vampire Bride” rhapsodized in 1833, “once again from the tomb, / In return for the ring which you gave; / That I am thine, and that thou art mine, / This nuptial pledge receive.”

Across the Atlantic in America, Edgar Allan Poe touched on vampiric feminine themes in his short stories “Morella” (1835) and “Ligeia” (1838)—in which enchantresses dabbling in dark arts resurrect through reincarnation and psychic vampirism, respectively. But it was French novelist Theophile Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse (The Dead Woman in Love) (1836) that gave the vampire literary genre its first true heroine.

Gautier’s Clarimonde is a beautiful vampire who was a Venetian courtesan in life—one who is destined to waste away and die over and over if she doesn’t feed often enough. She falls in love with a handsome young priest named Romuald on the day he is ordained, thereafter haunting his dreams. But one night he is called upon to give a young woman last rites, and he discovers that it is she.

Clarimonde dies (again), but returns to him in the flesh. He leaves the priesthood for her, becoming both her lover and blood donor, but guilt consumes him—leading the tormented Romuald to his ultimate betrayal of her.

But Clarimonde has the last word, appearing to her murderer a final time, as a mere shadow. “Unhappy man! Unhappy man! What hast thou done?” she whispers in his ear. “…what harm had I ever done thee, that thou shouldst violate my poor tomb—and lay bare the miseries of my nothingness?

“All communication between our souls and our bodies is henceforth for ever broken. Adieu! Thou wilt yet regret me!”

This tragic vampiric heroine, more than any other, would come to embody and define the doomed romance inherent in the Victorian Gothic—and would inspire art, poetry, fashion, and even outright, blatant plagiarism, in the decades to come. Little known today, Clarimonde would later inspire a pair of Gothic literary titans in the creation of their legendary fictional lady bloodsuckers.

United Kingdom/France/United States, 1847-1857

“…this other wound in the arm: she has had her teeth here too … She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart…”

So speaks Richard Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) of his sister Bertha—the mad wife that his brother-in-law has locked away in the attic. Framed as a foil to plain and pious governess heroine Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason is the sexualized lady monster stalking the shadows of Thornfield Hall in the dead of night—intent on murdering her brother; her cruel husband, Edward Rochester; and the governess her hubby has fallen in love with.

As a wealthy, beautiful mixed-race Jamaican woman whom Rochester married for her money—and whose eventual mental breakdown is given as an excuse by her husband for her involuntary incarceration—Bertha’s characterization as the novel’s vampiric villainess reeks of both misogyny and xenophobia, echoes of which would reverberate down the decades.

But the bloodsucking femme fatale of previous mythic iterations was about to take a backseat to the soul-stealing, and now wealth-absorbing, succubus, as the Poison Panic of the 1840s roiled Victorian England. A rash of black widow serial poison killings—mostly impoverished women cashing in on multiple life insurance policies with the aid of arsenic—culminated in Great Britain’s Arsenic Act of 1851, as well as a series of very public hangings.

As a result, the literary appetite for serial murderesses of yesteryear resurrected the legend of Hungarian Blood Countess Elizabeth Bathory—brought to life in fictional form as Edwin F. Roberts’ “The Vampyre Bride” of 1850. And by the very next year, as Britain’s Arsenic Act limited sales of the eponymous poison, French novelists and playwrights Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet took their sequel to John William Polidori’s 1819 The Vampyre to the Parisian stage as … Le Vampire.

And, for the first time in the history of Gothic theatre, a vampiric heroine emerged in the form of Lady Antonia, the vampire love of human hero Count Gilbert. In the end, she sacrifices herself to save her human lover, taking out Dracula prototype Lord Ruthven in the process.

1852 witnessed the debut of an English-language knockoff, Dion Boucicault’s The Vampire, on the London stage—while on the other side of the Atlantic, Kentuckian Charles Wilkins Webber cemented the staying power of the psychic vampire with the 1853 publication of his novel Spiritual Vampirism: The History of Etherial Softdown.

Growing up a neglected outcast in rural Vermont, Webber’s eponymous heroine blossoms into a powerful psychic vampire after a religious awakening. But upon marrying a humble Quaker, Etherial Softdown embarks down a darker path of metaphysical manipulation—absorbing the lives of those around her in the name of her own omnipotence.

This quintessential New England Gothic inadvertently set the stage for the so-called New England Vampire Panic in the years to come. For as the American press inherited Great Britain’s serial murderess obsession, tuberculosis outbreaks raged across the rural Northeast.

“For long periods, these female vampyres lived in the heart of a family circle,” The Buffalo (NY) Daily Republic informed its readers in 1855, “wearing the most life-like marks of goodness and kindness … while they [were] all the time calculating on the lives and purses of those nearest—and who should be—dearest to them.”

Meanwhile, local outbreaks of tuberculosis continued to decimate large swaths of New England’s pastoral population, leading some individuals to rather unorthodox alleviation methods. Thought by many old-timers to be the cause of these outbreaks, vampirism proved to be a convenient scapegoat in the absence of sound medical knowledge.

And though these clandestine vampire exhumations had been playing out since at least the late 18th century, they were now making the papers—as was the morbidly curious 1857 case of one Sophia Bauman of Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

“On Sunday last, the good people of Ephrata … were startled and shocked by the intelligence that the remains of a certain Miss Sophia Bauman—who died about nine years ago—had been exhumed,” reported The Lancaster (PA) Daily Evening Express in May of 1857. “…the young lady alluded to had died of consumption [tuberculosis], and—since her death—two of her sisters, her mother, and two brothers had died also of the same disease.

“…by the incursions of ignorance and superstition—under which the belief was seriously entertained that … the winding sheet of [Bauman’s] corpse had got into her mouth—and that by a continual suction … she had actually drawn the other five members of the family after her; and that unless this winding sheet was speedily removed from the mouth of [her] corpse, she would … cause the premature death of the whole connection!

“The hired resurrectionists commenced operations on Sunday morning,” the Evening Express continued. “The earth was removed, the coffin brought to the surface, and the lid removed … but to their utter astonishment, no winding sheet was found there—the poor deluded creatures having forgotten … that the last shred of … bleached muslin would rot away long before the expiration of nine years!”

The unearthed bones of Sophia Bauman were re-interred with little fanfare, and she became the latest in a long line of deceased young New England women suspected of vampirism—“violated after death, their bodies and graves desecrated” (Janes 292).

Particular to the case of Miss Bauman, her German ancestry may have accounted for her exhumation’s similarities to those of the German Nachzehrer—a psychic vampire who would consume its burial shroud, and then its own flesh, before consuming the life force of its surviving family.

“We trust, however, that for the sake of decency and the reputation of human nature,” concluded the Evening Express, “we will hear of no more such practical demonstrations of superstitious faith in the power of human dust and ashes to suck its living relations into premature graves.”

But, in truth, it was only just beginning.

All photos provided by Sarah A. Peterson-Camacho.

Works Cited
“The Vampire Woman.” The Fresno Morning Republican, Monday, November 15, 1915, p. 5.
“Theda Bara in ‘Sin’ at the Theatre Visalia This Evening.” The Visalia Daily Times, Tuesday, November 21, 1916, p. 4.
“Is This the Wickedest Face in the World?” The Oakland Tribune, Sunday, August 15, 1915, p.8
Vaught, Emily H. “Muscular System of a Serpent.” The Oakland Tribune, Sunday, August 15, 1915, p. 8.
“The Casket Girls of New Orleans.” https://ghostcitytours.com/new-orleans/truth-casket-girls/
“The History of the Casket Girls of New Orleans.” https://www.neworleans.com/things-to-do/history/the-casket-girls-of-new-orleans/
Grey, Elizabeth Caroline. “The Skeleton Count; Or, The Vampire Mistress.” The Casket, 1828
Dittmer, Nicole C. (ed.) Penny Bloods: Gothic Tales of Dangerous Women. London: The British Library, 2023.
Liddell, Henry Thomas. “The Vampire Bride.” The Wizard of the North, The Vampire Bride, and Other Poems. 1833.
Gautier, Theophile. La Morte Amoureuse (The Dead Woman in Love). La Chronique de Paris, 1836.
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1847.
Harford, Jenna. Veiled Victorian Vampires: What Literary Antagonists Reveal About Societal Fears of 19th Century England. Richmond, VA: University of Richmond, 2023.
“The Vampire.” The New York Evening Post, Thursday, November 2, 1820, p. 2.
“The Vampire.” The Western Times (Exeter, Devon, England), Saturday, December 27, 1851, p.5
“Madame Ursinus: The Princess of Poisoners.” The Buffalo Daily Republic (Buffalo, NY), Thursday, November 1, 1855, p. 1.
“Monstrous Superstition: A Corpse Exhumed at Ephrata.” The Lancaster Daily Evening Express (Lancaster, PA), Wednesday, May 27, 1857, p. 2.
Janes, Andrea, and Hieber, Leanna Renee. America’s Most Gothic: Haunted History Stranger Than Fiction. New York, New York: Citadel Press, 2025.
Stoddard, R.H. “The Two Brides.” The Sacramento Bee, Friday, November 27, 1857, p. 4.
www.wikipedia.com

Sarah A. Peterson-Camachois a library assistant with Fresno County Library, with a Bachelor’s in English and a Bachelor’s in Journalism from California State University, Fresno. In her free time, she makes soap and jewelry that she sells at Fresno-area craft fairs. She has written for The Clovis Roundup and the Central California Paranormal Investigators (CCPI) Newsletter.