Some time ago I featured the 1863 story the Vampire; or, Pedro Pacheco and the Bruxa by William H G Kingston. This was a remarkable story because it conflated the witch and the vampire mythologies but also because it detailed the bruxa turning into a bat to feed and lull the victim to sleep with the beat of their wings. I used this as an example of pre-Stoker bat transformation and, although my interpretation has been disputed by scholar and correspondent Kevin Dodd, I stick by that interpretation.
This is another story by William H G Kingston, unearthed by Daniel Corrick for his Night’s Black Agents anthology about a bruxa (quotes are from that volume), but this was published in Ainsworth's Magazine Volume 10, in 1846. The story is different, beginning with a historical perspective of inter-dynastic marriage (between Portugal and Leon) that was opposed by the pope, who withdrew Catholic activity whilst his wishes were ignored – and let diabolic forces into Portugal as a result. The story proper, however, follows Josefa, her grand-niece Maria and Maria’s farmer husband Pedro. Pedro offends Josefa and, as a result, the old woman (who was secretly a bruxa) vows revenge.
This revenge takes the form of her tricking Maria into meeting a Muslim (in the text Mahommedan) officer with the view that he will carry her off to the Ottoman Empire and marry her. Maria sneaks out of bed for the rendezvous but has cold feet. Nevertheless, Josefa gets her to the meeting point but it is at the site of a bruxa rite and the officer is actually the devil in disguise. Maria ends up in a bigamist marriage to the devil and she finds herself inexorably drawn to the next rite and, after an orgy, is transformed:
“Maria, like the rest of the hapless sisterhood, felt herself changing into the form of a vast bird of dusky hue, claws were on her feet, her arms became wings, and her face was sharp and pointed like a bat” (p95, 2023 [1846]).
Admittedly this conflates bird and bat, but it is later referred to as “her bat-like form” (p98, 2023 [1846]) and one cannot suggest it doesn’t feed into the idea of a bat transformation. In this form she finds herself with “A thirst, and insatiable craving for blood” (p96, 2023 [1846]) and heads to her home, where she feeds upon one of her own children – eventually predating on all three. The attack is pretty darn interesting, again wings are used to fan the victim and keep him asleep and she takes “huge drafts of the life’s blood” (p96, 2023 [1846]) until “nothing remained but an emaciated form of skin and bones” (p96, 2023 [1846]) – she literally sucks the infant dry.
In this story Kingston does not use the word vampire but, as we know he explicitly drew the two forms together in his later story, this is a vampire, and vampiric attack. The transformation is into a strange hybrid but it has a bat-like face and Kingston would hone this into a pure bat shape later. This is the earliest English language version of a bat transformation that I am aware of, I do know of an earlier non-English example but that is in another scholar's pending paper, at the time of me writing this, and so my lips are currently sealed.
Edit 13/6/23: I received the following correspondence from Daniel Corrick "A little postscript to that story, it turns out that Kingston’s piece was plagiarised in the January 24th 1896 issue of Bow Bells under the title “The Vampire-Mother,” without the framing device of the Papal ban (and relocated to Spain) and with all references to “bruxa” replaced with “vampire” or “vampire witch.” Obviously fifty years on the vampire = bat idea was sufficiently embedded in popular imagination."
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