Incubus

Incubus is defined in the novel as a “sexual vampire,” a form of the Undead whose violence is expressed through nocturnal sexual visitation and the wasting away of its victim. The term appears in Father Donald Callahan’s account of a Cornish girl who was believed to have been killed by an incubus, and it enlarges the book’s vampire mythology beyond physical blood-drinking: the dead can return through desire, memory, and the intimate spaces of the living.

Definition and Folkloric Context

Father Donald Callahan presents the incubus while discussing traditional protections against the rising of the Undead. He tells of a girl whose coffin was filled with wild roses and whose mouth had been propped open with a stick, then packed with garlic and wild thyme. These details are not treated as theatrical decoration but as folk remedies intended to prevent a corpse from returning. The girl’s father explained that an incubus had killed her, and Father Donald Callahan translates the term directly as “A sexual vampire.”

The account places the incubus within an older body of communal knowledge that survives even when modern observers regard it as superstition. The burial practices are associated with the church, but they also belong to local custom: the family acts on inherited knowledge before any official investigation can establish what happened. In this sense, the incubus is not merely a monster category. It is a name preserved by ritual, testimony, and the repeated fear that death may fail to remain final.

The Cornish Case

The story begins with the girl’s engagement to a young man named Bannock, who bore a large strawberry-colored birthmark on the side of his neck. Bannock was struck and killed by a car on his way home from work two weeks before the wedding. Two years later, the girl became engaged to another man, but she abruptly ended the engagement during the week before the banns were to be announced for the second time.

She told her parents and friends that John Bannock had been coming to her at night and that she had been unfaithful with him. Her present lover was more troubled by the possibility that she had become mentally unbalanced than by the possibility of demonic visitation. The narrative therefore preserves two explanations at once: the girl’s experience can be reduced to psychological disturbance, or it can be understood as an encounter with a returning dead man. Her subsequent wasting away and death give the supernatural interpretation a physical consequence, while the family’s burial precautions show that those around her considered the danger real enough to require action.

The case becomes more disturbing two months after the girl’s burial. During an early-morning walk, Father Raymond Bissonette saw a young man standing beside her grave. The figure had the same strawberry-colored birthmark associated with Bannock. Father Raymond Bissonette photographed him several times with a Polaroid camera, but by the next morning the figure had completely faded from the pictures. Only views of the local churchyard remained. The disappearing image turns the incubus story into an evidentiary problem: the supernatural presence is visible, witnessed, photographed, and then erased, leaving behind a landscape that appears ordinary.

Function in the Vampire Investigation

Father Donald Callahan tells this story while speaking about supernatural events and defending the possibility that such events may be true. He does not claim to have personally witnessed the Cornish case, but he vouches for his own belief in it and for Father Raymond Bissonette’s reliability. The anecdote gives the investigation in Jerusalem’s Lot a comparative frame. Strange deaths, altered bodies, nocturnal visitations, and the behavior of corpses need not be dismissed simply because they violate ordinary medical or psychological explanations.

The incubus also clarifies why the novel repeatedly places folklore beside medicine and mortuary procedure. Daniel Francis Glick’s records, the examination of bodies, the discovery of unusual postmortem conditions, the theft of bodies from the Cumberland County Morgue, and the investigation of Marjorie Glick all show institutions trying to describe physical evidence. Yet the incubus legend insists that bodily symptoms may be traces of an active supernatural relationship. Wasting is not necessarily an ordinary illness, a corpse is not necessarily inert, and a photograph is not necessarily stable proof.

This tension is central to the book’s larger pattern. Ben Mears considers whether the Marsten House may have absorbed the emotions spent within it and retained a kind of “dry charge,” capable of producing an active manifestation when awakened by an imaginative personality. The incubus belongs to the same imaginative and supernatural register: an apparently private experience becomes evidence of a force that crosses the boundary between past and present, death and life, and desire and violence.

Death, Desire, and the Returning Dead

The incubus makes intimacy a site of supernatural danger. Bannock’s return does not take the form of an open attack witnessed by a crowd; it comes to the girl at night, in the private sphere where memory, grief, sexual desire, and fear are difficult to separate. Her claim that she has been unfaithful with a dead former fiancé gives the haunting an emotional ambiguity that a simple attack would lack. The returned dead man is at once an object of longing, a source of shame, and a predatory presence.

The girl’s wasting away converts that ambiguity into bodily decline. Her death suggests that the incubus does not merely frighten its victim or appear as a ghostly reminder. It consumes vitality through an intimate encounter, making sexuality part of the vampire’s method of predation. The legend thus anticipates the novel’s broader concern with vampirism as infection, enthrallment, and the return of the dead, while retaining a specifically erotic form of attack.

The episode’s final image—the birthmarked figure beside the grave and his disappearance from the photographs—also gives the incubus a distinctive relation to representation. The camera records the churchyard but cannot retain the revenant. What remains is not proof in a modern evidentiary sense but a story supported by testimony, ritual response, and the fearful recognition of those who see the photographs. The incubus survives at the point where material evidence becomes unstable and communal memory supplies the missing certainty.

Narrative Significance

Within the novel’s supernatural system, Incubus functions as a specialized term that expands the meaning of vampirism. The book’s vampires are not only corpses that rise to drink blood; they are forces that enter homes, command attention, exploit trust, and turn human attachments against the living. The incubus legend makes that broader pattern explicit before the central horror is fully understood.

Its importance also lies in the way Father Donald Callahan tells it. The embedded story is neither presented as proven science nor dismissed as primitive superstition. Instead, it becomes a moral and epistemological challenge to the listeners: the possibility of the Undead must be considered because ordinary explanations have limits. The incubus therefore connects the folklore of a distant parish to the emerging catastrophe in Jerusalem’s Lot, where the town’s old memories, funerary rituals, medical observations, and supernatural testimony gradually converge on the same conclusion—that some things are worse than death, because death itself has become a passage rather than an ending.