Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 31, 1994 TAG: 9411030042
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long
Likewise, Jan Perkowski, settling comfortably into his chair, fits the typical professor's profile: 57 years old, with graying hair, wire glasses and three degrees from Harvard.
His teeth are straight and unsharpened.
It is daylight.
But on closer inspection, the scholarly appearances take a turn into the dark. On the book shelves, some of the titles include "The Night Stalker," "The Book of Dracula," "Interview With The Vampire" and "Weird Vampire Tales."
Almost hidden away on a top shelf sits a dried and brittle ring of garlic.
Perkowski bought the garlic ring in what is now Romania, but what was once Transylvania.
The professor stands and places his jacket over his shoulders, like a cape, to demonstrate how Bela Lugosi wore his coat in portraying Transylvania's favorite son in the movies 60 years ago. Perkowski mirrors the image of Lugosi on a plastic shopping bag that he has hanging on a coat rack.
Perkowski grins a little devilishly.
At this time of year, it isn't unusual for Perkowski to find himself hosting a reporter in his Charlottesville office. His status as the country's foremost scholar on Slavic folklore and European vampirism routinely ensures such attention.
"I joke about Halloween," he said, "that it's my holiday season."
What's really odd, though, is that Perkowski doesn't believe in the very creature that has brought him such seasonal acclaim - at least not the traditional, Halloween, sleep-in-a-coffin, blood-sucking, drive-a-stake-through-the-heart variety.
They are fiction, he said, mythical figures of literature and lore.
Instead, he believes in real vampires.
Like the one he met once in Canada.
Their meeting occurred in 1967. Perkowski was a professor of linguistics and Slavic studies at the University of Texas in Austin. The Canadian government hired him one summer to help survey some of the country's ethnic groups that had migrated to Canada from Europe.
His job was to find out what customs, rituals, songs, dances or other cultural traditions had survived from the old country.
One of the groups he surveyed was the Kashubs, who were the subject of his doctoral thesis at Harvard. He knew from his studies that vampires existed in Kashub folklore. So, as part of his survey, he always asked, "What is a vampire?"
Most of the people interviewed knew little of the folklore, which originated generations earlier. "They had vague recollections of it, but it wasn't much," he said.
Until one woman at a farm house heard the question. "What is a vampire?"
"I am," she answered.
Perkowski said he took a deep breath and looked out the window to see how low the sun was in the sky.
"How do you know?" he asked the woman.
She explained that she was born with a membrane cap. A membrane cap is a part of the membrane surrounding a fetus in the womb that can sometimes stick to a baby's head during childbirth.
In Kashub folklore, children born with membrane caps, or with teeth, are destined to become vampires, Perkowski said, unless preventive steps are taken.
For children with membrane caps that means burning the membrane cap and having the child eat the ashes on his or her 12th birthday. That is what happened with the woman at the farm house in Canada.
For children born with teeth, Perkowski said the rituals are considerably more gruesome, and can't be performed until after the child grows old and dies. Then, the corpse must be dug up, the head cut off and placed at the person's feet so the head can't lead the body down the path of evil.
On further studies of the Kashubs the following summer, Perkowski found a man who secretly admitted to performing the ritual just three years before. He found others who also had vampire stories.
Most of the stories, however, didn't portray walking, talking vampires who stalked the night searching for necks to bite. Instead, the folklore portrayed their existence more mysteriously. Often, they were symbolized only by a single church bell ringing in the middle of night. Anyone who heard the bell subsequently died.
Perkowski was fascinated, but his fascination was born of opportunity more than any lifelong obsession with vampires or the occult.
Growing up in Edison, N.J., his favorite Halloween costume was Superman, not Dracula, and he said there are no vampires in the family closet, although his roots trace back to Eastern Europe.
His father, a factory worker, was Polish. His mother was Serbian.
His family background led him to linguistics, the study of languages and their development, at Harvard, where he earned a bachelor's degree, master's degree and his doctorate. He can read in 10 different languages.
He concentrated on Slavic linguistics partly to help him understand his own heritage better. "Who am I? Where do I come from? That sort of thing," he said.
He spent a year teaching at the University of California in Santa Barbara, then nine years at the University of Texas, before coming to Virginia in 1974.
As he has matured as a scholar, he said, he has moved away from basic linguistics and worked more at studying the content of the languages, the meaning behind the words, the cultural significance and folklore.
On vampires alone, he has written two books, "Vampires of the Slavs" and "The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism." He has been featured on National Public Radio and profiled by the Associated Press and Psychology Today. At UVa, he regularly teaches a class on vampires.
He first developed the course at the University of Texas as a ploy to bolster enrollment in classes offered by the Slavic studies department. Some 750 students signed up for the first class.
Today, Perkowski limits the class size to about 140. The course uses Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, ``Dracula,'' as a springboard for showing the difference between mythical vampires and the so-called real vampires of folklore.
There is another type of vampire that he also covers, those he terms psychotic vampires. They are people who aren't actually vampires, but they practice vampire rituals, such as drinking human blood.
Occasionally, he said, they make the news.
Most of his students, however, have only the mythical or fictional vampire in mind when they arrive at his class.
He understands why. The image of Dracula is deeply entrenched in our culture. From Hollywood to breakfast cereal, he said it is part of America's own folklore now.
"What I try to do is clarify the topic as best I can."
Above him, the portrait of Thomas Jefferson stares down, his expression seeming to hold back judgment. What would he think about all of this vampire business at the university he founded?
Perkowski shrugs and flashes his devilish grin again.
"Let's just say a former student here, Edgar Allan Poe, would have liked it."
Then he slips on his coat the conventional way, arms through the sleeves like a college professor again. He ponders the question more seriously as the sunshine streams through his office window. Jefferson always had an intense interest in Europe, he said.
"I think he would have been intrigued by it."
by CNB