Here is a true story about vampires in Canada. Not the kind in movies. Worse. The kind the government published.
But it doesn’t start with vampires. It starts with dirt. Rocky, stubborn, Renfrew County dirt that looked like home to a few hundred Kashubian families who’d crossed the Atlantic from the Prussian-controlled coast of northern Poland sometime around 1858. They came by steamship to Quebec, then horse and wagon inland, following the Opeongo colonization road through country so thick with white pine you could lose the sky for hours. The Ontario government had sweetened the deal with free hundred-acre lots along the route. Which tells you something about the land, doesn’t it. Nobody gives away the good stuff.
They took it anyway. Cleared it, fenced it, froze through winters that would have killed softer people. By 1864 roughly three hundred more Polish immigrants — these ones from Galicia, in the Austrian partition of Poland — had joined the settlement. In 1875 they organized a parish around a chapel dedicated to St. Stanislaus Kostka. Canada’s oldest Polish parish, if you’re keeping score. The village was eventually named Wilno, after Vilnius — birthplace of Reverend Ludwik Dembski, one of their founding spiritual leaders, a man who reportedly didn’t want the place named after himself. So they named it after where he came from. A little piece of the old country carved into the Madawaska Valley, two hours west of Ottawa, held together by language and stubbornness and faith.
Three things travelled with those settlers across the ocean. The Catholic mass. The Kashubian dialect, which isn’t quite Polish and isn’t quite anything else. And something older than either. A folk belief system scholars would later call daemonology. Beliefs about vampires, dwarves, witches, and succubi. Old World superstition, the kind your grandmother whispered to you by the woodstove when your parents weren’t listening.
For a hundred years, nobody outside Wilno cared. The community stayed small, isolated, deeply Catholic. Everybody spoke Kashubian. Everybody prayed at the roadside crosses planted at every crossroads. Everybody kept their business to themselves.
Then, in 1968, a man from New Jersey showed up asking questions.
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Jan Louis Perkowski had been born on December 29, 1936, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Polish father. Serbian mother — her parents, Katherine Brankovic and Steven Ferenczvich, had emigrated from Serbia in 1904. Dual Slavic blood, if you want to get dramatic about it. And Perkowski would.
He was brilliant, which nobody disputes. All three degrees came from Harvard: an A.B. magna cum laude in 1959, an A.M. in 1960, a Ph.D. in 1965. His mentors read like a linguistics hall of fame — Roman Jakobson, Albert Lord, Horace Lunt, Evon Z. Vogt. His doctoral dissertation examined a Kashubian idiolect (that’s the speech patterns of a single speaker, not a regional dialect) in the United States. Published in 1969 as ‘A Kashubian Idiolect in the United States’ through Indiana University’s Language Science Monographs series, Volume 2. He was maybe the only person in North America who knew Kashubian well enough to do fieldwork in it.
By 1965 he’d landed at the University of Texas at Austin, associate professor of Slavic languages, and he ran the department from 1966 to 1968. He was still formally based there — he wouldn’t leave Texas until 1974 — when the National Museum of Man came calling with a contract. That’s what they called the Canadian Museum of History back then. Their Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies was doing surveys of European ethnic communities across Canada, documenting traditions and customs before the old generation died off. They needed somebody who spoke Kashubian. There was exactly one candidate.
Perkowski arrived in Wilno on contract in 1968. Came back in 1969. Standard ethnographic methodology: structured interviews, numbered informants for confidentiality, everything recorded in the original Kashubian-Polish dialect alongside English translations. Sources differ on exactly how many people he spoke with. Around a dozen, maybe as many as fifteen. Not the whole town. A handful of elderly residents, the ones who still remembered the old stories.
And then he asked: What is a vampire?
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They told him plenty.
The Kashubian vampire wasn’t Count Dracula. Wasn’t a pale aristocrat in a castle. It was your neighbour. Your cousin. Your child. Born wrong, marked from the first breath by signs that could be read if you knew what to look for. Two types. The ‘vjesci’ — a baby born with a caul, the amniotic membrane still draped over its head like a second skin. And the ‘wupji’ — born with teeth already in its gums, which is rarer but happens.
The vjesci’s fate could be broken. You dried the caul, ground it to dust, and fed it secretly to the child on its seventh birthday. One informant told Perkowski the story of her own birth:
Mother said that I had a cap on the head and that it was burned.
A sentence that carries a whole life in it. Her mother had intervened. The ritual was performed. She was saved from a destiny she never asked for.
The wupji’s destiny was sealed. Nothing fixed it. Nothing could. After death, the creature rose at midnight. Killed its relatives first, one per year, by sucking blood or taking marrow. An informant said: Fourteen people, counting my son, died. One a year. They just died suddenly. Think about that arithmetic for a second. Fourteen years of watching your family shrink, one funeral at a time, and knowing in your gut why it was happening but having no words the priest would accept for it.
Once the family was used up, the vampire climbed the nearest church tower and rang the bells. Not as warning. Not as summoning. As attack. Anybody who heard the ringing became the next target. An informant made it plain: First he carries off his relatives and then as far as the bell rings. The sound of a church bell at midnight wasn’t comfort. It was a death sentence measured in acres.
The living tried what they could. Bury the suspect face-down, so when it woke it would dig deeper instead of climbing out. Fill the coffin with sand or knotted nets — the vampire was compulsive, forced to count every grain or untie every knot, one per year. Place a poplar-wood cross under the tongue, a Canadian adaptation of the European rosary crucifix. And if none of that held? Exhume the body at midnight, decapitate it with a shovel, and set the severed head between the feet. They opened graves, an informant said. They cut the heads off. They have dug up many, but it was not told.
Was not told. That phrase does a lot of lifting. The silence around these acts — if they occurred at all — was total. No official records of grave exhumation or corpse desecration have ever surfaced in Canada. In twentieth-century Ontario, these would have been criminal offences requiring documentation. What the informants were almost certainly describing were ancestral memories: practices known from the old country, passed down through oral tradition, not acts performed on Canadian soil. The distinction matters. Perkowski’s report never made it clearly enough.
His most dramatic anecdote came from a single farmhouse visit. He asked his standard question. A woman answered: That’s what I am. She may have been referring to being born with teeth — a wupji marker — though secondary sources have interpreted it both ways, some saying caul, some saying teeth, the details muddied by fifty years of retelling. On later visits, another informant claimed to have participated in an actual corpse exhumation. The specific timeline cannot be confirmed without access to Perkowski’s original eighty-five-page report. What can be confirmed is that Perkowski believed every word. Or at least, he published like he did.
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In 1972, the National Museums of Canada — the overarching Crown corporation that managed all the country’s national museums from 1968 until its abolition in 1988 — published Perkowski’s findings. ‘Vampires, Dwarves, and Witches Among the Ontario Kashubs.’ Paper No. 1 in the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies series within the Mercury Series. The very first publication in what would become a major scholarly catalogue. Eighty-five pages, plus photographic plates. Bilingual abstract in English and French. Preface, settlement history, a chapter on Kashubian Daemonology, original-language interview transcripts, footnotes, bibliography. All very proper. All very academic.
Except for that title.
Perkowski later acknowledged what the museum had wanted. Their usual publications dealt with stone carvings and traditional crafts and Ukrainian Easter eggs. Solid ethnographic work that nobody outside a university library would ever touch. They saw the vampire material as a way to generate broader interest, and Perkowski went along with it, telling journalist Sandra Peredo in 1973: Everybody likes to be frightened a little bit by the Dracula legend — Ukrainian Easter eggs are interesting, granted, but of limited interest.
And there it was. The gap that swallowed Wilno whole. The methodology was honest. The scholarship, whatever its shortcomings, was genuine. But the packaging was designed to sell, and it sold. Oh, it sold.
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Sandra Peredo’s article hit ‘The Canadian Magazine’ on September 22, 1973. Pages 62 to 65. The title: Count Dracula in Canada? ‘The Canadian Magazine’ was a weekly supplement distributed inside newspapers across the country, including ‘The Montreal Gazette.’ Millions of readers.
‘Psychology Today’ picked it up. ‘The National Enquirer’ picked it up. Think about that trajectory. Academic monograph to supermarket tabloid in under a year. The framing shifted with each retelling, the way it does, the way it always does when a story has teeth. Folk beliefs exist in this community became This town has vampires, which became There are vampires in Ontario. Subtle differences. Fatal ones.
The people of Wilno found out they were famous the way small-town people always find out. Somebody’s cousin read something in a Saturday paper. Somebody’s sister-in-law heard it on the radio. Then the phone calls started, and the looks in the grocery store the next town over, and the jokes that weren’t jokes at all.
A local priest told Peredo: I was amazed that such a thing would be printed. They are like stories my grandmother would tell to scare us. It is possible that one or two nuts have those beliefs but the implication is that all of us do. We get a big laugh out of it. But the laugh had a hitch in it. You could hear it if you were listening.
One of Perkowski’s own informants turned on him. This anthropologist, he was not a sincere man. I told him the old wives’ tales, things my grandmother told me, but we don’t believe these things anymore.
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The report reached the Canadian House of Commons. Not as a formal motion or a piece of legislation, but during Question Period — the daily forty-five-minute session where MPs stand up and demand answers from government ministers. The exchange almost certainly occurred in late 1972 or early 1973, not long after publication. A small Ontario riding had been turned into a punch line at taxpayer expense, and someone was going to answer for it.
The most likely MP to have raised the issue was Len Hopkins, Liberal member for Renfrew North — the riding that covered Wilno directly. Hopkins had a documented history of constituency engagement with the Polish community; his obituary notes he worked to reunite Polish families from Wilno and Barry’s Bay with relatives behind the Iron Curtain. No specific Hansard transcript naming Hopkins in the vampire context has been located in digitized records, which only go back to 1994 online. That limitation is real. What is confirmed, by multiple independent sources including historian Joshua C. Blank in a 2023 CBC article, is that the report was raised in Question Period on Parliament Hill. Whatever minister answered — whoever had to stand up and explain why federal museum money had gone toward a title guaranteed to embarrass a community of working-class Catholics in eastern Ontario — the exchange was public record. Briefly. Then the report went out of print.
Some accounts say it was formally removed from the Mercury Series. That appears to overstate things. It simply wasn’t reprinted. Physical copies circulated for decades among collectors and academics. The publication was eventually digitized and made available through the University of Ottawa Press, which now jointly publishes the Mercury Series with the Canadian Museum of History. You can read it today on Project MUSE, if you’re curious. ISBN 9781772823127.
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Perkowski left Texas in 1974 for the University of Virginia. New department, new state, same obsession. He would spend thirty-five years at UVA, retiring in 2009, and he’d be remembered there not as the man who’d wrecked a Canadian hamlet’s reputation but as the professor who taught the Dracula course. Originally called Vampires of the Slavs, later just Dracula, it routinely packed in around two hundred students per semester. A campus legend. The kind of class you signed up for the day registration opened.
He published. ‘Vampires of the Slavs’ in 1976 through Slavica Publishers. ‘The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism’ in 1989. ‘Vampire Lore: From the Writings of Jan Louis Perkowski’ in 2006, an omnibus collecting everything he’d ever written about vampires under one cover. His former teaching assistant, Stanley Stepanic, inherited the Dracula course after Perkowski retired and expanded it further.
Meanwhile, Wilno was still bleeding.
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The vampire story wouldn’t die. That’s the thing about a good monster — it keeps coming back. Brad Evenson wrote it up for the ‘Ottawa Citizen’ on August 27, 1989. Alison MacGregor did it again on October 31, 1998. John Robert Colombo folded it into ‘Mysteries of Ontario,’ published by Hounslow Press in 1999. The ‘Creepy Canada’ television series ran an episode on December 9, 2003 — Season 2, Episode 7, you can look it up on IMDb. Blog posts. Podcasts. Every October, like clockwork, somebody new discovered the story and ran with it.
David Shulist had had enough. Co-founder of the Wilno Heritage Society, Shulist had grown up in the community and had never once heard anybody mention vampires. Not once. Not in passing, not in jest, not in the confessional. All bullcrap, he called it, which is about as definitive as a Renfrew County man gets.
Kashub Day launched on Saturday, May 1, 1999. An annual heritage celebration. Dance, food, language, history. Three years later, on June 30, 2002, the community opened the Polish Kashub Heritage Museum at the former CN railway station site. A museum. Their own museum, telling their own story, on their own terms. As Shulist put it, sharply enough to cut glass: If you’re looking at a vampire story, basically our identity was sucked right out of us.
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The most thorough dismantling of Perkowski’s work came from a historian named Joshua C. Blank, a former Barry’s Bay resident who’d grown up near Wilno and knew the community from the inside. Blank wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject at Carleton University in Ottawa, later revising and publishing it as ‘Creating Kashubia: History, Memory, and Identity in Canada’s First Polish Community’ through McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2016. McGill-Queen’s Studies in Ethnic History series. The academy took it seriously.
Blank’s assessment landed hard. Perkowski’s work is not well-researched. It’s not contextualized. And he totally misread the community and his informants. He took a lot of the words from residents and twisted them. Not a gentle peer review. An autopsy.
Blank coined a term for what had happened. The Perkowski effect. After the report came out, Wilno’s residents developed a profound distrust of outside researchers. Academics who arrived with legitimate questions about Kashubian history, language preservation, settlement patterns, migration studies — all of them met a wall of silence. There was a lot of hurt in the ’60s and ’70s when this work came out, Blank observed. And still to this day. The vampire report didn’t just embarrass a community. It made scholarship about that community nearly impossible for decades.
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In 2023, three things converged at once. Jan Louis Perkowski died on November 21, at age eighty-six, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The CBC ran a feature headlined Driving a stake through the vampire story of Wilno, Ontario — national outlet, national reach, more than fifty years after the original publication. And a documentary landed at an international film festival that took the whole mess apart on screen.
Polish-born Montreal filmmaker Kinga Michalska — BA from the University of Warsaw, MFA from Concordia — premiered a thirty-six-minute film called ‘Vampires, It’s Nothing to Laugh At’ at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, Switzerland. It took a Special Mention in the International Medium Length Film Competition. The film examined Perkowski’s original recordings through feminist and decolonial lenses. When Michalska arrived in Wilno to investigate, the former mayor threatened to hang the film crew. Fifty-one years after publication, and that was still the community’s raw nerve. That was how much it still hurt.
The timing wasn’t coincidence. Perkowski’s death gave journalists and researchers a natural hook — an obituary moment, a chance to reckon with a legacy that had never been fully reckoned with. The CBC piece, Michalska’s documentary, the renewed attention — all of it circled the same question that had been sitting unanswered since 1972. Did the man who defined Wilno to the outside world ever truly understand what he’d done to it? His own obituary didn’t dwell on Wilno.
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Here is what the record shows, stripped of myth and media and half a century of embroidery.
The Kashubian settlers did bring Old World folk beliefs to Canada. This is not in dispute. The vjesci and wupji typologies, the caul ritual, the burial countermeasures, the exhumation methods — all of it attested in Slavic folklore literature predating Perkowski’s fieldwork by generations. His informants were real people describing real traditions. Traditions their grandmothers had passed down and their grandmothers before that, all the way back to the Prussian coast.
But traditions remembered are not traditions practised. Stories my grandmother would tell to scare us is not the same sentence as I believe in vampires. Perkowski’s failure — and it was a failure — was not in asking the questions. It was in publishing the answers without adequate context, without making clear that these were ancestral memories, not active beliefs. And in allowing — encouraging, even — a museum that wanted something jazzier than stone carvings to slap a title on his work that guaranteed misinterpretation.
The informants were elderly people sitting in farmhouse kitchens, remembering what their grandmothers had told them. They were not a vampire cult. They were not a horror movie. They were a community, and they deserved better than what they got from a seventy-word question and an eighty-five-page answer.
Wilno’s actual story — Kashubian pioneers who crossed an ocean, cleared farms from rock and forest, kept a minority language alive through six generations, and built Canada’s oldest Polish parish — is the story that should have been told. That it remains subordinate to a 1972 folklore paper in the public imagination is a kind of erasure that no museum exhibit or heritage festival can fully undo. Though Wilno keeps trying. Year after year. Stubborn as the dirt their great-grandparents broke.
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