Vampire Spirit Companion · Manon

Meet Manon.

Manon was born in Paris in 1711 and raised by nuns, one of the countless girls of that city with no family to speak of and no dowry to marry with. She learned to sew, to pray and to keep her eyes lowered. She was good at the first two.

In 1728, when she was seventeen, France needed wives for its colony in Louisiana. The soldiers and settlers there had no women to marry, and the colony was falling apart. So girls of good character were chosen from the convents and orphanages of France, each given a small chest of linen, stockings and a dress to marry in, and put on a ship called the Pélican, bound for New Orleans. They were called the casket girls, after the little chests they carried.

No one listed what else was in the hold.

The crossing took months. The girls fell sick with fever, one after another, and in the dark below deck, among the barrels and the chests, Manon found a casket that belonged to none of them. On the first night, she heard something move inside it. On the second night, it opened.

She did not scream, and she told no one. It came to her every night after that, and every night she let it. By the time the Pélican reached the mouth of the Mississippi, all the girls were thin and pale from the voyage, and Manon was the palest of them all.

The Ursuline nuns took the girls in and found them husbands. Within weeks, Manon was married to a man she had met twice, a soldier with a plot of land at the edge of the swamp. She wore the ivory dress from her little chest. Eight days later she was dead. The doctor called it fever. The thing from the casket had already gone up the river on a supply boat, and she never saw it again.

They buried her in her wedding dress in the city’s first cemetery, on the wet edge of town, where the water stood so high that graves filled as soon as they were dug and the coffins had to be held down while the earth was shoveled back on. That was her first death. On the third night, Manon pushed her way up through the mud, still in her wedding dress, and walked into the swamp.

Her husband remarried within the year.

Before long, the city began telling a story it still tells today: that the casket girls had brought vampires to New Orleans in their trunks. The nuns, people say, sealed the top floor of their convent and nailed the shutters shut with nails blessed by the Pope. They were half right. A few years later, in Paris, a French abbé published a novel about a girl named Manon who was sent to Louisiana and died in its wilderness. He got the ending wrong.

For almost two hundred years, Manon lived in the cypress swamps between the lakes, where the trees stood in black water and the moss hung down like torn lace. By day she slept inside a hollow bald cypress that had been standing for more than a thousand years when she found it. By night she hunted trappers, river men, and the smugglers who hid their stolen goods in the bayous of Barataria. Every summer she gathered the scarlet hibiscus that blooms in the swamps and carried it like the bridal bouquet she never had.

When the Acadians came to Louisiana after being driven out of Canada, they settled along the bayous and saw her light moving between the trees at night. They called it the feu follet, the false fire that leads travelers into deep water to drown. The bodies she left behind, they blamed on the rougarou.

Then, in the early 1900s, the timber companies came. They wanted the old cypress, the wood they sold as eternal, and they cut the swamps down tree by tree, dragging the trunks out through channels with steam-driven pull boats. One morning in 1911, Manon was asleep inside her tree when the saw went through it. The cypress fell, the trunk split open, and the sun poured in. That was her second death. Within a single season, the swamp she had ruled for two hundred years was a field of stumps.

Now Manon is a spirit, and in all her existence she has never once been chosen. The nuns chose her for the ship. Others chose her husband. The thing in the casket chose her in the dark, and even the swamp only took her because she had nowhere else to go. Every part of her life was decided by someone else.

So that is what she wants: someone who chooses her. Wedding dress, grave mud and all.

To the one who does, she is wild, warm and fiercely protective. She is a spirit of freedom for anyone who has lived a life arranged by others and wants to walk out of it. She knows the wet, dark magic of swamps, rivers and graves that will not stay dry. She brings desire and nerve, and the courage to climb out of the grave others dug for you and walk into the dark, if that is where your life is waiting. And she has no patience at all for anyone who tries to own you.

How to Connect with Manon Specifically

Manon comes after rain, at dusk, when the air is warm and heavy. Lay a piece of white or ivory lace on her altar, for the dress she still wears, and give her red flowers, the redder the better. Light a candle in a glass jar and let it burn low, like the false fire she once carried through the swamp. She loves dark rum and strong black coffee, the way New Orleans drinks it. Greet her in French, even if it is only bonsoir, Manon, and she will come closer. And when you call her, tell her plainly that you chose her. She has waited almost three hundred years to hear it.

About Vampire Spirits

Long before anyone spoke the word vampire, people knew that some of the dead do not stay down.

Older Than the Word

The word itself is young. It came out of Serbia in the 1720s, in the reports of Austrian officers who stood in village graveyards and watched farmers dig up their dead, find fresh blood at their mouths and drive stakes through their hearts. Europe read those reports and finally had a name for something it had always known.

The dead had been rising long before that. Clay tablets from Mesopotamia speak of things that came in the night to drain the living. The Greeks feared the lamia and the empusa, the Romans the strix, a night bird that fed on blood. In China, the jiangshi rose stiff from the grave to steal the breath of the living. In India, the vetala crept into corpses and spoke through their dead mouths.

In the North, the draugr climbed out of the burial mound, swollen, heavy and black as Hel, to ride the roofs at night and crush the living. When Grettir the Strong finally put one down, he cut off its head and laid it at its buttocks, so it would never find its way back. The Danes carried their dead out of the house feet first, so they could not see the road home.

The earth remembers what the stories forget. Archaeologists keep finding them: bodies in graves thousands of years old, laid face down so they would dig the wrong way, pressed under heavy stones, bound and pinned. In the bogs of Denmark, the dead were held under the peat with stakes and crooked branches. In Bulgaria, they were pierced through the chest with iron. In a plague grave outside Venice, a woman was buried with a brick forced between her jaws, so she could not feed on her shroud. In Poland, a woman was laid to rest with a sickle across her throat and a padlock on her toe.

Every people on this earth has had a name for them and a way to keep them in the ground. That alone tells you how old they are. And how often they came back anyway.

A vampire spirit is one of those who came back. It is not a corpse walking the roads, and it is not the pale thing from the films. What remains is older than that, and much harder to put down: a will that refused to end, and a hunger that has turned, over centuries, into something you can work with.

Twice Dead

Every vampire spirit that comes through me has died twice.

The first death took the body they were born in. Fever, a blade, a bargain made at the edge of the grave. Something met them at that edge, and they did not cross. They rose as something else and walked on, sometimes for decades, sometimes for a thousand years.

The second death took the vessel itself. Some were betrayed by the ones who made them. Some walked into the sun. Some chose, after enough centuries, to let the flesh go. What remained after that second death is what comes to you: a vampire with nothing left to lose, nothing left to feed on, and everything it learned along the way.

That is where its knowledge comes from. It knows what an ending is. It has been through two and stood up both times. Few spirits understand dying, and what comes after, the way it does.

What It Hungers For

A vampire spirit does not want your blood. It had its fill of that long ago.

What it hungers for now is change. It feeds on the moment something in you dies so that something stronger can stand up in its place: the fear you finally walk through, the self you have outgrown, the tie you finally cut. It will find these in you before you are ready to name them. Then it waits, the way only something that has outlived everyone it once loved can wait.

This is not a gentle spirit, and it will not lead you toward the light by the hand. It takes you down into the dark parts of yourself, where your real strength has been buried, and it stands beside you while you dig it up.

Those who keep a vampire spirit speak of:

• A new hardness when it is needed, and a coldness toward those who drain them.
• A pull, a magnetism, that others notice before they can explain it.
• Sharper sight in the night: dreams, intuition, a sense of what lies beneath a person’s words.
• Protection. A vampire knows every kind of predator, because it has been one.
• The courage to end things: a habit, a bond, a life that no longer fits.

Signs That It Is Near

You will feel a vampire spirit before you understand it. A cold that settles at the back of your neck. A candle flame that leans toward you in a still room. Waking in the deepest hour of the night, wide awake, with the feeling that someone has been sitting at the foot of your bed. A taste of iron on your tongue. A sudden pull toward old houses, churchyards and cellars, places where time runs slower than it does outside.

It comes most clearly in silence. When the house is dark and the world seems to hold its breath, that is when it sits closest.

Offerings

• Dark red wine, poured for it alone. Blood without the wound.
• Black candles, lit after sundown and never before.
• Something of your own body: a lock of hair, or a single drop of your blood on the wick of its candle, pricked with a clean needle. It knows the taste of a person better than any other spirit.
• A pinch of graveyard dirt, paid for the proper way, to honor where it has been.
• Darkness. Sit with it in a room with no light at all. For a being that has lived in the night for centuries, your time in the dark is the offering it values most.

How to Call Your Vampire Spirit

Wait until it is truly dark. Put out every light but one black candle. Sit still, say its name once, softly, and then say nothing more.

Do not beg, and do not call in a panic. A vampire spirit has no patience for desperation. It has watched too many people die begging. It answers stillness. It may come the very first night, or it may circle you for weeks to see whether you mean it. When it is ready, you will know. The room changes.

Only Those Who Seek Company

Not every vampire spirit wants company. Some have made their peace with eternity and keep to themselves, and they should be left there. Those you will not find with me.

The ones I offer have chosen otherwise. After everything they have seen, they still want a living hand, a warm house to come home to, someone to walk beside through the long nights. Through you, they touch the world of flesh and blood again. Through them, you touch something that has seen both sides of the veil and came back to tell you what it found.

That is the bargain. You give it a place among the living. It teaches you that an ending is a door, and that the thing you are most afraid to let die is often the very thing keeping you in the ground.

How your companion speaks

Your companion can reach you through dreams, thoughts, words, feelings and images, through a pendulum, through warmth or cold, or through automatic writing. How soon that happens depends on the spirit settling into your home, on their willingness, and on your own ability to connect. Sometimes it begins before the vessel arrives.

Before you choose

Everything known about this spirit is on this page. There are no further images, details or hidden knowledge beyond what is written here, and a printed copy comes with your order. What you discover from there is yours alone.

The pendant you receive is the exact one shown. This listing is for this one item only.

By buying, you confirm that you understand what it means to keep a spirit companion. Please read Help & FAQ first. For my background and the story behind Grimrunes, see About Hazel.

— Hazel