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Blood Suckers and Night Lovers - Vampires 

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Blood Suckers and Night Lovers - Vampires 

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by Luke Young

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In this picture we see a bunch of people at a party who are blood lovers. Haematomaniacs are people with a blood fetish who love to drink and play with blood. I think there is a connection with Ancient Wisdom where in people believe the drinking of blood, human blood, will make them stronger when in truth that does not happen, if anything its an iron overload.

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In the video below we see 5 cases throughout history that have been told of vampire visits. Each case seems very mysterious and lacking in factual evidence. There seem to be a lot of Red Herrings in each story as the narrator avoids facts and sticks to explaining the details of each gruesome visit. Clearly for entertainment purpose but in no way confirms the truth about vampires existence.

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5 darkest cases of vampires throughout history

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5 Darkest Cases Of Vampires Throughout History

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5 darkest cases of vampires throughout history. In this video we countdown 5 darkest cases of vampires. Vampires originate from Easter Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries. These stories formed the basis of the vampire legend that later entered Germany and England, where they were subsequently embellished and popularised.

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In the video below the narrator explains how the first ever vampire has really been forgotten and was actually from Serbia. The locals of the area where this man grew up seem to spread his legend as to continue some sort of tradition in historic lore. These people even go as far as to believe a vampire lived among them and when is house collapsed he escaped to roam the lands and prey on people. Again there seem to be a lot of Red Herrings in this video which is a lot of information distracting from any fact that this man may have just been someone who drank blood but instead the narrator is focused on finding any information to support his biased fantasy of vampires and the documentary.

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Here is a link to the Encyclopedia Britannica on vampires. On this website we see all kinds of information surrounding the subject of vampires. Their history and origins as well as characteristics and pop culture. Most of the information here again seems to support the fantasy of vampires and all known legendary ideas behind them. I believe there is a lot of ideological support instead of fact and science behind if these creatures could really exist on this webpage but again the fantastical is more interesting then the mundane truth.

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Characteristics

Because there is a long history of walking corpses and bloodsucking ghouls in folklore, it is difficult to pin down a distinct set of characteristics consistently attributed only to vampires. Central to vampire myth, however, is the consumption of human blood or other essence (such as bodily fluids or psychic energy), followed closely by the possession of sharp teeth or fangs with which to facilitate this task. In most depictions, vampires are "undead"-that is to say, having been somehow revived after death-and many are said to rise nightly from their graves or coffins, often necessarily containing their native soil. Vampires are typically said to be of pale skin and range in appearance from grotesque to preternaturally beautiful, depending on the tale. Another frequently cited physical characteristic is the inability to cast a reflection or shadow, which often translates into an inability to be photographed or recorded on film.

A person may become a vampire in a variety of ways, the most common of which is to be bitten by a vampire. Other methods include sorcery, committing suicide, contagion, or having a cat jump over a person's corpse. Some people believed that babies born with teeth or on Christmas or between Christmas and Epiphany were predisposed to becoming vampires. While vampires usually do not die of disease or other normal human afflictions, and they are indeed often said to have faster-than-normal healing capabilities, there are various methods for their destruction. The most popular of those include a wooden stake through the heart, fire, decapitation, and exposure to sunlight. Vampires are often depicted as being repelled by garlic, running water, or Christian implements such as crucifixes and holy water. In some stories vampires may enter a home only if they have been invited, and in others they may be distracted by the scattering of objects such as seeds or grains that they are compelled to count, thereby enabling potential victims to escape.

History

Creatures with vampiric characteristics have appeared at least as far back as ancient Greece, where stories were told of creatures that attacked people in their sleep and drained their bodily fluids. Tales of walking corpses that drank the blood of the living and spread plague flourished in medieval Europe in times of disease, and people lacking a modern understanding of infectious disease came to believe that those who became vampires preyed first upon their own families. Research from the 20th and 21st centuries has posited that characteristics associated with vampires can be traced back to certain diseases such as porphyria, which makes one sensitive to sunlight; tuberculosis, which causes wasting; pellagra, a disease that thins the skin; and rabies, which causes biting and general sensitivities that could lead to repulsion by light or garlic.

Vampire myths were especially popular in eastern Europe, and the word vampire most likely originates from that region. Digging up the bodies of suspected vampires was practiced in many cultures throughout Europe, and it is thought that the natural characteristics of decomposition-such as receding gums and the appearance of growing hair and fingernails-reinforced the belief that corpses were in fact continuing some manner of life after death. Also possibly contributing to this belief was the pronouncement of death for people who were not dead. Because of the constraints of medical diagnosis at the time, people who were very ill, or sometimes even very drunk, and in a coma or in shock were thought dead and later "miraculously" recovered-sometimes too late to prevent their burial. Belief in vampires led to such rituals as staking corpses through the heart before they were buried. In some cultures the dead were buried facedown to prevent them from finding their way out of their graves.

The modern incarnation of vampire myth seems to have stemmed largely from Gothic European literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, about the time vampire hysteria was peaking in Europe. Vampiric figures appeared in 18th-century poetry, such as Heinrich August Ossenfelder's "Der Vampyr" (1748), about a seemingly vampiric narrator who seduces an innocent maiden. Vampire poems began appearing in English about the turn of the 19th century, such as John Stagg's "The Vampyre" (1810) and Lord Byron's The Giaour (1813). The first prose vampire story published in English is believed to be John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819), about a mysterious aristocrat named Lord Ruthven who seduces young women only to drain their blood and disappear. Those works and others inspired subsequent material for the stage. Later important vampire stories include the serial Varney, the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1845-47) and "The Mysterious Stranger" (1853), which are cited as possible early influences for Bram Stoker's (1897), and Théophile Gautier's "La Morte amoureuse" (1836; "The Dead Lover") and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871-72), which established the vampire femme fatale.

Dracula is arguably the most important work of vampire fiction. The tale of the Transylvanian count who uses supernatural abilities, including mind control and shape-shifting, to prey upon innocent victims inspired countless works thereafter. Many popular vampire characteristics-such as methods of survival and destruction, vampires as aristocracy, and even vampires being of eastern European origin-were solidified in this popular novel and especially through its 1931 film adaptation starring Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi. The novel itself is thought by some to have been inspired in part by the cruel acts of the 15th-century prince Vlad III Dracula of Transylvania, also known as "the Impaler," and Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who was believed to have murdered dozens of young women during the 16th and 17th centuries in order to bathe in or possibly drink their blood so as to preserve her own vitality.

Dracula in turn inspired the film (1922), in which a vampire was first depicted as being vulnerable to sunlight. Other aspects of the movie, however, were so similar to Stoker's novel that his widow sued for copyright infringement, and many copies of the film were subsequently destroyed. For several decades the vast majority of vampire fiction, whether on page or stage or screen, showed the influence of Dracula. Both the novel and its film version spawned several direct sequels and spin-offs, including the film Dracula's Daughter (1936) and a number of Hammer films, including Dracula (1958; also known as Horror of Dracula), which starred Christopher Lee in the title role. Vampires became popular characters in pulp magazines and appeared in stories such as the Sherlock Holmes tale "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" (1924). In 2009 the original author's great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt published a sequel called Dracula: The Un-Dead using notes and excisions from Dracula.

In the 20th century vampires began to turn from being depicted as predominantly animalistic creatures and instead displayed a broader range of human characteristics. Ray Bradbury explored the sympathetic portrayal of what can be thought of as "monsters," including vampires, in "Homecoming" (1946), a story about a "normal" boy with a family of fantastical creatures. The popular American television soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-71) featured a lovelorn vampire, Barnabas Collins. In 1975 Fred Saberhagen published The Dracula Tape, a retelling of Stoker's story from the misunderstood villain's point of view. Vampire fiction entered a new era, however, with the sympathetic portrayal by Anne Rice in her novel Interview with the Vampire (1976). Rice's book introduced the world to vampires that were brooding and self-loathing and squabbled like humans. While Rice's vampires were more vulnerable emotionally than vampires previously had been, they were less vulnerable physically-susceptible only to daylight and fire and the death of the first of their kind-and possessed superhuman beauty, speed, and senses. Interview with the Vampire was highly popular and sparked a revival of vampire fiction that lasted into the 21st century, and subsequent vampire stories continued to use characteristics established by Rice. Rice herself wrote several more books in what subsequently became known as the Vampire Chronicles, some of which were later adapted for film.

The vampire as a misunderstood romantic hero picked up steam in the later part of the 20th century, particularly in the United States. In 1978 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro began publishing her series of Count Saint-Germain books, the main character of which is a vampire of moral character whose bite is an erotic experience. In many tales vampires are characterized as promiscuous, their appetite for human blood paralleling their sexual appetite. In 1991 Lori Herter published Obsession, one of the first vampire novels to be categorized as romance rather than science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a television show in which the title character has a star-crossed romance with a vampire, aired from 1997 to 2003. Vampire romances also appeared in the steamy HBO television series , based on Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse book series. Vampire romance for teens gained popularity at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, with books such as the Vampire Diaries series by L.J. Smith and the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer. The Twilight Saga, with its high-school romance and vampires that sparkle in the sun rather than bursting into flames, became a cultural sensation, ensuring a vampire trend for years to come. Vampire relationships of a different sort were explored in the novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004; Let the Right One In) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, in which the main characters are a perpetually childlike vampire and a young boy she befriends and helps fend off bullies. The book was adapted for film in Sweden in 2008 and in the United States as Let Me In in 2010.

Vampires also enjoyed popularity as unlikely action heroes. Blade, a half-vampire superhero who first appeared in comic books, was the focus of three films (1998, 2002, 2004). Another popular film series, Underworld (2003, 2006, 2009, 2012), explored an ongoing war between vampires and werewolves. Dracula himself (known instead as "Alucard"-Dracula spelled backward) even became an action hero in the Japanese manga and anime Hellsing. Angel, the vampire with a soul and the love interest of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's title character, became the star of his own spin-off television series in which he acts as a private detective (1999-2004). And the tabletop role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade (first published 1991)-which contributed words such as sire (a vampire's progenitor) and embrace (the act of making a new vampire) to the vampire lexicon-allowed players to create their own vampire worlds and pit warring vampire factions against one another.

Although vampires had by the 20th century largely become creatures of fantasy, urban myths about vampires continued to persist. As late as the early 20th century, some villages in Bulgaria still practiced corpse impaling. In the 1960s and '70s a vampire was believed to haunt Highgate Cemetery in London, and in the early 21st century rumours of vampires caused uproar in Malawi and England alike.
Alison Eldridge

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Vampire | Characteristics, History, Powers, Folklore, & Facts

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Vampire, in popular legend, a creature, often fanged, that preys upon humans, generally by consuming their blood. Vampires have been featured in folklore and fiction of various cultures for hundreds of years, predominantly in Europe, although belief in them has waned in modern times.

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This is a picture of Vlad the Impaler. Though Dracula is a fictional character, Bram Stoker named him after the real Prince of Wallachia, Vlad, or as they used to call him Prince Dracula. In the late 1400s Vlad was known to have a taste for blood and would impale his enemies upon stakes which is where killing of vampires with wooden stakes to the heart comes from as well. This photo is clearly an artistic interpretation of Vlad and the reason for belief in such a person stems from the idea surrounding his fictional blood drinking legend. I think people choose to believe in a lot of the fantasy around vampires because of Vlad and so accept the simple answer that vampires are real when in fact he wasn't a vampire but a gruesome warrior.

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Below you see a classic image of a vampire from folk lore. Images such as this have been spread like wildfire for centuries to scare and entertain people throughout. The reason for a belief in such a character I think comes from the excitement of such fantasies that people confused the correlation of death in people with the pale skin and blood pumping even after death, with the natural causation, which is these things happen to everyone when they die.

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In this video we see a person who believes themselves to be a real vampire. He drinks blood from donors and explains how their is an entire community of vampires all around the world. Respectable as they are the video also shows a darker side to the vampire community where as a woman was kidnapped and her blood was stolen without consent and drank. She believes this man to be a vampire but I think their is confusion within the simple answer that this man may be mentally ill and believe himself to be a vampire or could have a fetish like a Haematomaniac. I think that there is a relation to confirmation bias in the video because the narrator isn't going into detail about this person possibly being psychotic or a criminal but is instead looking for any reason to support the idea of a fantasy in Vampires.

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Vampires: Is It Real? | National Geographic

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In this article we see the fiction behind vampires but also the real world connections. The author goes on to explain how animals such as bats and leeches will draw blood from their prey but only enough to survive and won't kill the host. While also stating the facts of real animals, they connect with humans in explaining that are bodies were not meant to consume blood and that the iron levels could be toxic. I find this article to be very factual because they researched the lore of vampires but also the origins and facts of where these legends come from within real life blood sucking animals. They put there biases of fantasy aside to speak some truth and critically analyze where myths stem from in vampires.

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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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This article explains how in history the idea of vampires came from unexplained information on the burial of human bodies. No one could understand why hair and nails would seem to grow even after someone died when they were dug up as well as blood or black bile coming from there nose making people believe they were consuming blood before or during there sleep. This article doesn't seem to be biased an states facts with support from historic record of burials and archeological finds.

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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.