Barcelona, February 1912. The city was growing, trading, boasting of modernity, raising beautiful façades while, just steps away, far too many people lived crowded together, sick, hungry or invisible. In that divided Barcelona, the disappearance of a child lit something more than a police investigation. It lit a legend.
The girl's name was Teresita Guitart Congost. She was five years old. On the afternoon of 10 February, her mother stopped for a moment to chat with a neighbour at her front door, on San Vicente Street, and let go of her hand thinking she would climb the stairs alone. When she got upstairs, her husband asked: "Where's the girl?" There was no girl. She had vanished in a matter of seconds.
Case File
Barcelona in the early twentieth century was a city in transformation. There was industry, money, a thriving bourgeoisie, modernist architecture, cafés, factories, politics, anarchism, and ferocious inequality. The city could look toward Europe with one hand while hiding its misery with the other. Barely three years earlier, in 1909, the Tragic Week had left deep political and social wounds. Fear of "sacamantecas" — kidnappers said to steal children for ghastly purposes — already circulated in the popular imagination, fed by real events such as the Gádor murder, which had taken place eighteen months earlier.
El Raval, at the time associated with poverty, prostitution and overcrowding, became the perfect stage for the nightmare. Not because its residents were darker than anyone else's, but because poverty has always been a convenient place to deposit monsters.
Enriqueta Martí Ripollés was born in 1868 in Sant Feliu de Llobregat. She moved to Barcelona young, working as a nursemaid before turning to prostitution, both in brothels and around the port. She married Joan Pujaló, a painter, in a stormy relationship, and later ran an herbalist's shop where she worked as a healer.
According to Teresita's own account, Enriqueta lured her with the promise of sweets, took her by the hand, and when the girl tried to turn back toward her mother, threw a black cloth over her head and carried her off completely covered.
For two weeks, all of Barcelona searched for the girl with an anguish mixed with outrage: the authorities had been extremely passive in the face of a wave of child kidnappings, and the case confirmed that popular fear had real grounds. On the night of 17 February, a neighbour named Claudina Elías happened to glance toward the interior courtyard of her stairwell and saw, through the window of Enriqueta's flat, two girls playing. One had a shaved head. Claudina had never seen that child before. She asked Enriqueta if the girl was hers. Without a word, Enriqueta shut the window.
Uneasy, Claudina mentioned what she had seen to a mattress-maker on the same street, who told a municipal guard, who informed his superior. On 27 February, ten days later, police arrived at the flat under the pretext of investigating a complaint about chickens being kept indoors — so as not to alert Enriqueta that she was under suspicion for the kidnapping — and searched the property.
Inside, they found Teresita, her head shaved because of lice, nothing more sinister. The girl said a phrase that would become famous: "Here they call me Felicidad."
There was also another girl, Angelita, who claimed to be Enriqueta's daughter. She was not. Angelita was in fact her niece: the daughter of Enriqueta's sister-in-law, whom Enriqueta had assisted during childbirth before lying to her, claiming the baby had died, and keeping the child without telling anyone.
From there, the story spiralled. Angelita claimed to have seen Enriqueta kill a boy named Pepito on the dining table. Later searches turned up bloodstained clothing, a knife, bones, jars of coagulated blood, and writings the press described as coded messages. Some newspapers spoke of a supposed "list" bearing the initials of wealthy people living on Passeig de Gràcia and Rambla de Catalunya, presumed clients for remedies made from children's remains.
With those ingredients, the press christened Enriqueta the Vampire of Raval, the Vampire of Ponent Street, the Vampire of Barcelona. The nickname was simply too good to let go. If there is one thing the sensationalist press knows how to do, it is naming the horror before checking it. The nuance can come later, if at all. How inconvenient, nuance.
More than a century later, the case remains uncomfortable because it resists a simple reading. The only thing ever legally proven was the kidnapping of Teresita Guitart. The accusation that she murdered numerous children and made ointments from their bodies was never established with solid evidence.
The bones found in her home turned out to belong to a person around twenty-five years old, not a child. As a folk healer, Enriqueta believed — in keeping with the superstition of the time — that keeping certain types of bones at home brought good luck. Researcher Elsa Plaza, author of Desmontando el caso de la Vampira del Raval, has been categorical: the only certainty is that Enriqueta kidnapped Teresita for reasons we will likely never fully know; her lawyer argued she suffered from a disorder linked to her inability to have children of her own.
More recent academic reviews, also cited by Spanish public broadcaster RTVE under the headline "the vampire who never was," confirm there is no evidence for the multiple murders the popular legend attributed to her.
None of this makes Enriqueta innocent. We should be wary of the opposite pendulum swing, that very human habit of switching from "absolute monster" to "pure victim" as if changing hats. The proven kidnapping of Teresita is already a serious crime. The concealment of Angelita for years is another. But speaking of specific, proven offences is one thing; turning an entire life into a novel of unproven criminal witchcraft is quite another.
The real interest of the case lies precisely in that tension: Enriqueta may have been guilty of serious acts and, at the same time, the victim of a wildly disproportionate legend. Both things can be true at once. Reality, unfortunately for headlines, does not always fit into one striking sentence.
One of the most persistent elements of the legend is Enriqueta's supposed connection to wealthy clients. According to this version, she kidnapped or exploited children to satisfy the desires or superstitions of affluent people, linking the misery of Raval to the drawing rooms of bourgeois Barcelona.
Is it proven? Not conclusively. Was it plausible that child exploitation existed in a city of such extreme inequality? Unfortunately, yes: the very same week Teresita was kidnapped, a real child brothel had been uncovered in Raval, allegedly with police complicity. The responsible thing is to say it this way: the legend of wealthy clients is part of the case's imaginary, but should not be presented as established fact without firm documentation.
Enriqueta Martí died in Reina Amàlia prison on 12 May 1913, before the case could be settled through a trial capable of weighing evidence and assigning responsibility for every accusation against her. Popular legend held for decades that she had been killed by fellow inmates, or even poisoned to stop her revealing the identities of wealthy clients. Modern documentary reviews, however, confirm she died of uterine cancer.
Her death closed her life, but not the case. If anything, it freed the legend from ever having to be proven. From that moment on, the Vampire of Raval could grow unhindered by any final verdict. And grow she did: books, essays, novels, plays, a television series and urban tourist routes have returned to her again and again, reinforcing the myth in some cases and dismantling it in others.
In this case, great care is needed so that Enriqueta does not occupy the entire frame. Teresita Guitart was a real victim, and her kidnapping should not be reduced to a mere prologue to the myth. There was also a girl, Angelita, hidden away for years by her own aunt. There were poor families, exposed children, and a neighbourhood that knew fragility far too well.
The story works because it touches one of the oldest fears there is: a missing child. But it also reveals how much more vulnerable poor children were than protected ones. In an unequal city, some children were searched for with the full force of public desperation; others could disappear without anyone important lifting a finger.
The case still matters because it speaks to mechanisms that have not disappeared. It speaks to how the press can turn an accusation into a permanent public identity. It speaks to how a city manufactures monsters to avoid looking at its own structures of misery. It speaks to how easily a poor, sick woman linked to prostitution could be presented as the absolute embodiment of evil.
Because if all the city's evil was concentrated in one woman from Raval, then the city could breathe easy. She was the problem. Not structural poverty. Not the real child exploitation happening in parallel. Not institutional indifference. Not the hypocrisy of a bourgeoisie that looked away while the slums slowly burned.
An exceedingly convenient solution: pour all of a city's sins into one woman and call her a vampire.
The story of Enriqueta Martí began with a missing girl and a neighbour who happened to look through a window. That gesture, small and enormous at once, saved Teresita Guitart and opened one of the darkest chapters in Spanish criminal history.
But then came the machinery: the headlines, the nickname, the rumours of blood, bones, potions and rich clients. Came the collective need for a creature to point at. Enriqueta Martí became "the Vampire of Raval," and the label was so powerful that, even today, it is hard to separate the real woman from the character the city manufactured.
Perhaps she was a kidnapper. Perhaps she concealed and exploited a minor for years. Perhaps she committed crimes that could never be fully proven. Perhaps she was also used as a scapegoat by a society that needed to pour all its fears into one poor, marginal female body.
What is certain is that Teresita existed. The kidnapping existed. The poverty existed. The panic existed. The press existed. And the legend did what legends always do: simplify the unbearable.
Barcelona did not create Enriqueta Martí. But it did create the Vampire.
And, as so often happens, the monster said more about those who invented it than about the woman locked away in its name.