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1. I learned a great deal from doing my topic on vampires. I learned a lot about the history of vampires and the many different myths of vampires that I was not yet aware of.

2. Ever since I was a little, vampires facinated me and I would love to dress up as one for Halloween each year. I was interested in the supernatural abilities that vampires possessed including the ability to turn into a bat or another animal.

3. I found the documentary of Vampire island the most intriguing because I was able to observe the archeaologists examine closely of the actual corpses of what is believed to be vampires.

4. I am most likely to remember the different media outlooks of vampires presented in present day because the image vampires are portrayed as now hugely differ from what we knew them as long ago.

5. After completing this assignment as well as all of the course content, I believe the most harmful pseudoscience belief is the red flag All Natural. I believe that is most harmful because all natural ingredients doesn't guarentee perfect healing. Without seeing a doctor and relying solely on natural medicine, you could remain in a more critical state, worst case, die. The least harmful pseudoscience is the reason for belief Ideology. I believe this is least harmful because every person has a right to their own belief, no matter if the other person believe it is a right or wrong one.

6. I believe the most important thing to pass on to a family or friend from the contents of this course is the many different red flags of pseudoscience. I found it very enlightening to know what to look for when scientific knowledge was being presented and I believe a friend or family member could greatly benefit from this knowledge as I did.

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Description:
The image I have chosen is of a classic vampire look of what we all grew up believing vampires to look like, with a nice dress shirt, pale skin, red lips, black eye shadow and a cape.

Connection:
This image connects to ideology because this is what people have been set to believe on the true outlook of a vampire. For many years we think this is what a vampire is, but is this the truth? The myths of vampires go back decades, and in recent years, people have illustrated vampires to look like normal people with supernatural powers. I believe this also connects to the unexplained because the truth is we don't know for sure how vampires looked.

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Description:
The image I chose is a novel based around vampires. Many authors have wrote best-selling horrow novels that revolve around the tales of vampires.

Connection:
This image connects to the red flag Appeal to Authority because authors such as Anne Rice continue to write these chilling tales that revolve around a certain monster, (in this case, Vampires) for people to read and enjoy. For the authors, it provides them to have their own freedom to write their own story of what they believe vampires are like.

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Description:
The image I have chosen is the poster from a well known movie series, Twilight. As many would, Twilight is based around vampires and are portrayed to look like a regular person at first glance. It tells a love story between a vampire boy and a regular teenage girl and provides a twist of what we've known vampires to be like for centuries to having a vampire fit in, in modern day regular life.

Connection:
This image connects to the red flag, Appeal to Authority because the makers of this movie wanted to show vampires in a different light than what we would normally see them as. The vampire you see in the picture is portrayed to look like a regular teenage boy who appears to be in love with a human girl whereas a vampire we would be more used to would look more menacing.

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Description:
This video is a documentary explaining the scientific evidence of vampires existing. The archaeologists in the video follow a trail of Vampire victims and it speaks of who they were and what they may have looked like if they had still been alive. With the help of forensic science, they had been able to determine the cause of death which is potentially one indication of the existence of vampires.

Connection:
This video connects to Perception/Observation because throughout the video the scientiests and archeaoligists examine the corpses of the deseased vampires to try to determine cause of death and whether or not they were a vampire. They apply critical thinking by using modern knowledge and science to explain the reason why some of the corpses look vampiric which as many would know now, the body experiences natural phenonmon when it is dead. I believe this video also connects to Ancient Wisdom because many would assume in the 18th century that because a corpse looks a certain way, they must be a vampire. In modern day, we have more knowledge now.

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Description:
This video explains the history behind vampires and what might be considered to be folklore. It also speaks of the many mysterious deaths in Eastern Europe due to diseases and the possibility of the dead being vampire victims from the way their bodies had been i.e Longer hair, longer fingernails, bloated bellies, and blood in the corner of their mouths.

Connection:
This video connects to the Ancient Wisdom red flag because in the 18th century, the people would fend off a vampire attack by performing rituals such as burning of the bodies, beheadings, and staking the bodies to their coffins to prevent them from getting up. A reason for belief that relates to this video is Patternicity. From villagers digging up the deads graves and witnessing symptoms of vampires, they had assumed from the way the bodies presented itself, the patterns show sign of vampire victims. However, the cause for things such as longer hair, bloated bellies and longer finger nails were proven to be natural causes, which at the time, was not well known to people.

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Vampires: Folklore, fantasy and fact - Michael Molina

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Description:
This video explains the more dangerous bats out in the world that prey on different type of living things. It also states how many believe that all type of bats are harmful and considered to be "Vampire Bats," which as stated in the video "could not be farther from the truth."

Connection:
This video connects to Ideology because the main focus of this video talks about whether all bats drink blood and are considered vampire bats. Many people believe that because of the myths and stories they hear on bats, however, a lot of bats in the world don't drink blood and are completely harmless. A red flag that also conmects with this is Ancient Wisdom as many years ago, people thought of bats (Vampire or not) to be dangerous and ugly creatures, however, on what we know now, Vampire bats are intelligence in the sense that they behave like human beings and stay close to their friends, wrap each other in a warm embrace, and feed their fellow bretheren if they are starving. They've applied critical thinking to this topic as well by analyzing what we would lose in our world if we exterminated all vampires bats in the world. They discovered that Vampire bats have saliva that prevents their prey from having blood clots like an anti vaccine.

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Description:
This article speaks of the many believed traits of vampires. It also speaks of where the name vampire originates from, which is the Hungarian word, "Vampir." This name was given to good or most often, evil spirits who possessed the body of the deseased in the first 40 days of their death.

Connection:
This website connects to Mystical Energy because it speaks of the many supernatural abilities we think a vampire possesses such as flying, Transformations into animals, and the persuasion of humans. As of now, we have no knowledge of vampires that can actually be capable of such acts. A reason for belief that connects to the website is Ideology. Many different cultures and religions had different beliefs that revolved around vampires such as the Egyptians beliefs that improper burials can bring the dead back from death in the form that may only survive by eating human blood.

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Vampire Facts - Origins, Beliefs, Legends

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As the constant presence in history and folklore, vampires managed to infuse themselves into popular culture, becoming one of the most popular mystical evil forces that prey on the mankind. Here you can find out some of the most important facts about this legendary creature.

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Description:
The website describes corpses of what vampires look like. It also speaks of how townspeople handled the threat of vampire presence in the old days as many were stabbed through the chest with an iron rod.

Connection:
This website connects to Perception/Observations because the article explains how from the way a dead corpse looks, such as longer fangs and finger nails, it is the corpse of a vampire. Fluids would also drip from the corpses mouth, which many would mistake as blood to further indicate that the corpse had drank the blood from a living person. A red flag this website relates to is Appeal to Authority because an author by the name of Mark Collins Jenkins writes a book called Vampire Forensics, allowing people to feel they have some control over disease as the book talks of how to kill vampires and prevent them from feeding.

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The traits of modern-day vampires are pretty well established. They have fangs, drink human blood, and can't see themselves in mirrors. They can be warded off with garlic, or killed with a stake through the heart. Some, like Dracula, are aristocrats who live in castles.

But vampires didn't start out so clearly defined. Scholars suspect that the modern conception of these Halloween monsters evolved from various traditional beliefs that were held throughout Europe. These beliefs centered around the fear that the dead, once buried, could still harm the living.

Often, these legends arose from a misunderstanding of how bodies decompose. As a corpse's skin shrinks, its teeth and fingernails can appear to have grown longer. And as internal organs break down, a dark "purge fluid" can leak out of the nose and mouth. People unfamiliar with this process would interpret this fluid to be blood and suspect that the corpse had been drinking it from the living. (Read "Archaeologists Suspect Vampire Burial; An Undead Primer.")

Bloody corpses weren't the only cause for suspicion. Before people understood how certain diseases spread, they sometimes imagined vampires were behind the unseen forces slowly ravaging their communities. "The one constant in the evolution of vampire legend has been its close association with disease," writes Mark Collins Jenkins in his book Vampire Forensics. Trying to kill vampires, or prevent them from feeding, was a way for people to feel as though they had some control over disease.

Vampires of Europe

Because of this, vampire scares tended to coincide with outbreaks of the plague. In 2006, archaeologists unearthed a 16th-century skull in Venice, Italy, that had been buried among plague victims with a brick in its mouth. The brick was likely a burial tactic to prevent strega-Italian vampires or witches-from leaving the grave to eat people. (Read "'Vampire of Venice' Unmasked: Plague Victim & Witch?")

Not all vampires were thought to physically leave their grave. In northern Germany, the Nachzehrer, or "after-devourers," stayed in the ground, chewing on their burial shrouds. Again, this belief likely has to do with purge fluid, which could cause the shroud to sag or tear, creating the illusion that a corpse had been chewing it.

These stationary masticators were still thought to cause trouble aboveground, and were also believed to be most active during outbreaks of the plague. In the 1679 tract "On the Chewing Dead," a Protestant theologian accused the Nachzehrer of harming their surviving family members through occult processes. He wrote that people could stop them by exhuming the body and stuffing its mouth with soil, and maybe a stone and a coin for good measure. Without the ability to chew, the tract claimed, the corpse would die of starvation.

Tales of vampires continued to flourish in southern and eastern European nations in the 17th and 18th centuries, to the chagrin of some leaders. By the mid-18th century, Pope Benedict XIV declared that vampires were "fallacious fictions of human fantasy," and the Hapsburg ruler Maria Theresa condemned vampire beliefs as "superstition and fraud."

Still, anti-vampire efforts continued. And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, one of the last big vampire scares occurred in 19th century New England, two centuries after the infamous Salem witch trials.

From the Old World to the New

In 1892, 19-year-old Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island, died of tuberculosis, then known as consumption. Her mother and sister were already dead, and her brother Edwin was sick. Concerned neighbors worried that one of the recently deceased Brown women might be harming Edwin from the grave.

When they opened Mercy Brown's grave, they found blood in her mouth and her heart and took this to be a sign of vampirism (though they didn't call it that). The neighbors burned Mercy's heart and mixed the ashes into a potion for Edwin to drink-a common anti-vampire tactic. The potion was meant to heal him; instead, he died a few months later.

This wasn't an isolated incident. Folklorist and Food for the Dead author Michael Bell estimates that there are 60 known examples of anti-vampire rituals in 18th- and 19th-century New England, and several others elsewhere in the country. These rituals were most common in eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island, says Brian Carroll, a history professor at Central Washington University who is writing a book on the subject.

Carroll believes these anti-vampire rituals were "introduced as a medical procedure at the time of the American Revolution" by German doctors who worked for the Hessian forces. Because of this, he thinks the New England vampires were based on the German Nachzehrer. Unlike blood-sucking Romanian vampires, New England's vampires stayed in their grave, harming the living through "sympathetic magic" from afar, he argues.

Bell, however, believes anti-vampire practices in New England came from many places and that the suspected New England vampires were actually more akin to Romanian vampires than the Nachzehrer. Like Romanians, New Englanders "were looking for liquid blood in the vital organs, not evidence of shroud chewing," he says. The anti-vampire remedy of "cutting the heart out, burning it to ashes, and giving the ashes to the sick person or sick people" was also practiced in Romania.

Whatever the source of these beliefs in New England, they were driven by the same social concerns as those before them: a fear of disease and a desire to contain it.

Post-Vampire

During the vampire panic in New England, vampires were finding a new role in European books like The Vampyre (1819), Carmilla (1871-72), and Dracula (1897), as well as in vampire-themed plays. Though drawn from folk legends and past vampire scares, these aristocratic, sexual vampires were more like the vampires we know today.

Vampire panics died down in the 20th century as these fictional monsters replaced folk beliefs (and as medical knowledge improved); however, there was a strange resurgence in the late 1960s, when Seán Manchester, the president of the British Occult Society, said that a vampire was causing people to see strange things in London's Highgate Cemetery.

Newspapers had already covered reports of a tall figure with burning eyes and other spectral sights floating in the cemetery, and journalists quickly picked up Manchester's theory that these sightings were the work of an eastern European vampire. Newspapers even embellished his claims a bit, calling the figure a "king vampire," or writing that the vampire had practiced black magic in Romania before traveling to London in his coffin.

In 1970, Manchester told a TV news team that he planned to exercise the vampire on Friday the 13th. That night, hundreds of young people turned up at Highgate Cemetery to see him perform an exorcism (which he ended up not doing).

The Highgate panic wasn't a case of vampires being scapegoated for disease but rather a media sensation and an instance of "legend tripping" (young people going to a supposedly haunted place to test their bravery).

In the history of vampire legends, the Highgate incident is a modern phenomenon. It has less to do with the desire to control a community's health and a lot more in common with modern scares, like the creepy clown sightings that went viral this year-even if people don't believe it, they're still drawn to the hype.

Want to know more about vampires, witches, and zombies? Check out our special issue, Strange but True: Secrets of the Supernatural Revealed.

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The traits of modern-day vampires are pretty well established. They have fangs, drink human blood, and can't see themselves in mirrors. They can be warded off with garlic, or killed with a stake through the heart. Some, like Dracula, are aristocrats who live in castles. But vampires didn't start out so clearly defined.

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Description:
The website describes many folklore and movies revolving around vampires. It also highlights famous well known vampires, such as Dracula, as well as some theories that speculate where vampires originate from.

Connection:
This website connects to the Unexplained because no one truly knows when vampires originated from. People have laid down their own theories on what vampires are potentially like, but other than what we normally read in books or see in movies, it is unclear if that is an accurate portrayal of a vampire. Among other things of what we think we know about vampires, we have yet to actually establish characteristics of vampires such as vampires being weakened to garlic or vampires being unable to see their own reflection in the mirror. A red flag that connects to this website is also Ideological Support as many believe that in bad events such as dried up crops or an infectious disease would strike, many would believe the superstition of vampires having a hand in such events.

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Credit: Margaaret M. Stewart | shutterstock

Vampires are a perennial favorite around Halloween, but they can be found year-round in movies and on television, in books and on blogs. The public's thirst for vampires seems as endless as vampires' thirst for blood. Modern writers of vampire fiction, including Stephenie Meyer, Anne Rice, Stephen King and countless others, have a rich vein of vampire lore to draw from. But where did the vampires come from?

Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula has influenced how many people picture vampires.

The most famous vampire is, of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula, though those looking for a historical "real" Dracula often cite Romanian prince Vlad Tepes (1431-1476), after whom Stoker is said to have modeled some aspects of his Dracula character. The characterization of Tepes as a vampire, however, is a distinctly Western one; in Romania, he is viewed not as a blood-drinking sadist but as a national hero who defended his empire from the Ottoman Turks.

The vampires most people are familiar with (such as Dracula) are revenants - human corpses that are said to return from the grave to harm the living; these vampires have Slavic origins only a few hundred years old. But other, older, versions of the vampire were not thought to be human at all but instead supernatural, possibly demonic, entities that did not take human form.

Matthew Beresford, author of " From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth" (Reaktion, 2008), notes, "There are clear foundations for the vampire in the ancient world, and it is impossible to prove when the myth first arose. There are suggestions that the vampire was born out of sorcery in ancient Egypt, a demon summoned into this world from some other." There are many variations of vampires from around the world. There are Asian vampires, such as the Chinese jiangshi (pronounced chong-shee), evil spirits that attack people and drain their life energy; the blood-drinking Wrathful Deities that appear in the "Tibetan Book of the Dead," and many others.

While most people can name several elements of vampire lore, there are no firmly established characteristics. Some vampires are said to be able to turn into bats or wolves; others can't. Some are said not to cast a reflection, but others do. Holy water and sunlight are said to repel or kill some vampires, but not others. The one universal characteristic is the draining of a vital bodily fluid, typically blood. One of the reasons that vampires make such successful literary figures is that they have a rich and varied history and folklore. Writers can play with the "rules" while adding, subtracting or changing them to fit whatever story they have in mind.

Finding a vampire is not always easy: according to one Romanian legend you'll need a 7-year-old boy and a white horse. The boy should be dressed in white, placed upon the horse, and the pair set loose in a graveyard at midday. Watch the horse wander around, and whichever grave is nearest the horse when it finally stops is a vampire's grave - or it might just have something edible nearby; take your pick.

Interest and belief in revenants surged in the Middle Ages in Europe. Though in most modern stories the classic way to become a vampire is to be bitten by one, that is a relatively new twist. In his book " Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality" (Yale, 2008), folklorist Paul Barber noted that centuries ago, "Often potential revenants can be identified at birth, usually by some abnormality, some defect, as when a child is born with teeth. Similarly suspicious are children born with an extra nipple (in Romania, for example); with a lack of cartilage in the nose, or a split lower lip (in Russia) ... When a child is born with a red caul, or amniotic membrane, covering its head, this was regarded throughout much of Europe as presumptive evidence that it is destined to return from the dead." Such minor deformities were looked upon as evil omens at the time.

The belief in vampires stems from superstition and mistaken assumptions about postmortem decay. The first recorded accounts of vampires follow a consistent pattern: Some unexplained misfortune would befall a person, family or town - perhaps a drought dried up crops, or an infectious disease struck. Before science could explain weather patterns and germ theory, any bad event for which there was not an obvious cause might be blamed on a vampire. Vampires were one easy answer to the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.

Villagers combined their belief that something had cursed them with fear of the dead, and concluded that perhaps the recently deceased might be responsible, having come back from the graves with evil intent. Graves were unearthed, and surprised villagers often mistook ordinary decomposition processes for supernatural phenomenon. For example, though laypeople might assume that a body would decompose immediately, if the coffin is well sealed and buried in winter, putrefaction might be delayed by weeks or months; intestinal decomposition creates bloating which can force blood up into the mouth, making it look like a dead body has recently sucked blood. These processes are well understood by modern doctors and morticians, but in medieval Europe were taken as unmistakable signs that vampires were real and existed among them.

A skeleton buried in the cemetery of Vecchiano in Pisa showing a similar condition to the purported "Venetian vampire."

Credit: Antonio Fornaciari

The best way to deal with vampires, of course, is to prevent them from coming back in the first place. A few centuries ago in Europe this was often accomplished by staking suspected vampires in their graves; the idea was to physically pin the vampire to the earth, and the chest was chosen because it's the trunk of the body. This tradition was later reflected in popular fiction depicting wooden stakes as dispatching vampires. There was no particular significance to using wood; according to folklore, vampires - like djinn (genies) and many other magical creatures - fear iron, so an iron bar would be even more effective than a wooden stake.

Other traditional methods of killing vampires include decapitation and stuffing the severed head's mouth with garlic or a brick. In fact, suspected vampire graves have been found with just such signs. According to a 2012 Live Science article, "The body of the woman was found in a mass grave on the Venetian island of Nuovo Lazzaretto. Suspecting that she might be a vampire, a common folk belief at the time, gravediggers shoved a rock into her skull to prevent her from chewing through her shroud and infecting others with the plague, said anthropologist Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence." Other researchers later challenged this interpretation, and suggested that the brick may not have been placed in the mouth after all, but instead was one of many bricks surrounding the body that merely fell there after burial. Whether that burial reflected an accused vampire or not, other graves are much clearer. In 2013, archaeologists in Bulgaria found two skeletons with iron rods through their chests; the pair are believed to have been accused vampires, according to an article in Archaeology magazine.

The skull of the "vampire of Venice," found in a mass grave with a brick stuck in its jaw.

Credit: Matteo Borrini

If your local villagers neglected to unearth and stake a suspected vampire and he or she has returned from the grave, there are steps you can take to protect yourself. The exact method varies around the world, but in some traditions the best way to stop a vampire is to carry a small bag of salt with you. If you are being chased, you need only to spill the salt on the ground behind you, at which point the vampire is obligated to stop and count each and every grain before continuing the pursuit. If you don't have salt handy, some say that any small granules will do, including birdseed or sand. Salt was often placed above and around doorways for the same reason.

Some traditions hold that vampires cannot enter a home unless formally invited in. This may have been an early form of the modern "stranger danger" warnings to children, a scary reminder against inviting unknown people into the house.

There are, of course, a few truly vampiric animals, including leeches, lampreys and vampire bats. And in all these cases the vampire's intent is to draw enough blood for sustenance, but not enough to kill the host.

But what about human vampires? There are certainly many self-identified vampires who participate in gothic-inspired subcultures. Some host vampire-themed book clubs or secret bloodletting rituals; others wear capes or get vampire-fang dental implants. It's all frightening and fun, but blood drinking is another matter entirely. The problem is that blood is toxic; because it is so rich in iron - and because the human body has difficulty excreting excess iron - anyone who consumes blood regularly runs a real risk of haemochromatosis (iron overdose), which can cause a wide variety of diseases and problems, including liver and nervous system damage.

In one form or another, vampires have been part of human culture and folklore in different forms for millennia, and the bloodsuckers show no signs of going away any time soon.

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Benjamin Radford, Live Science Contributor

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Vampires are a perennial favorite around Halloween, but they can be found year-round in movies and on television, in books and on blogs. The public's thirst for vampires seems as endless as vampires' thirst for blood. Modern writers of vampire fiction, including Stephenie Meyer, Anne Rice, Stephen King and countless others, have a rich vein of vampire lore to draw from.

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Made by James Wannan, working individually