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VAMPIRES
BY MALCOLM BROWN

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VLAD THE IMPALER

Vlad the Impaler was the Prince of Wallachia, born in Transalvania. He is known in history a sadistic ruler who killed over 100000 ememies and for impaling them on wooden stakes. His father was known as Dracul. This is the basis for the book "Dracula" .  it is entirely "Exaggeration"  as to how this ruler, became the historic "Dracula". Vlad Tepes was considered a hero by his native people, for protecting them from Turkish invaders . Although his methods seem harsh and extreme, back itne h1400s that is how wars were won.

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Historical Vampire Stories from Around  the World

This website explains 10 historical Vampire stories from around the world. This article is an example of Proof by verbosity, as it is using the amount of stories and legends about Vampires to build a belief that because there is so much information about Vampires, they must be true. There is also Ancient wisdom, involved here as Vampires have been a part of history for hundreds of years.  Most of the Vampire stories and legends are based on uninformed Observations and the Unexplained. People of the time blamed Vampires for thousands of deathes as they did not understand plagues and diseases.

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When people think of vampires, they usually think of famous fictional bloodsuckers like Dracula or his historical counterpart, Vlad the Impaler. Perhaps younger people will think of True Blood, The Lost Boys or the sparkly vampires of Twilight. But there have been plenty of vampire tales that stemmed from real events or people, like . . .

10 Peter Plogojowitz

Peter Plogojowitz was a man from 1700s Serbia who died (don't we all?). Except-according to some-he didn't really stay dead. Within 10 weeks of his death, nine people died suddenly from a mystery illness, and prior to their deaths they all accused Peter Plogojowitz of throttling them in their dreams. Peter's own son reported seeing him in the kitchen three days after his death, demanding food-before he also died mysteriously. Peter's wife fled town after she alleged he'd shown up late one night to demand a pair of shoes.

The army was called in, and Peter's body was exhumed. It was reported that he was breathing and that his open eyes were moving. A stake was put through his heart, resulting in a Tarantino-esque gushing of blood, and his body burned. The deaths and dreams all ended abruptly.

9 The Alnwick Castle Vampire

The Alnwick Castle vampire actually predates the term "vampire." The events were recorded by an English chronicler named William of Newburgh. He reported the story of a man who returned from the dead after he died while spying on his cheating wife-he was crouched on the roof and fell. He then returned as a revenant-a walking, rotting corpse- spreading plague in his wake.

Eventually, a priest gathered some of his parishioners and found the vampire's grave. They opened it and stabbed the corpse with a shovel. Warm blood ran from the body and confirmed their suspicions that it had been drinking the blood of the living (remember this was almost 800 years before Bram Stoker's Dracula). They burned the body, and the attacks ceased.

8 Highgate Vampire

In 1969, dead animals -completely drained of blood and sporting neck wounds-began to appear in Highgate Cemetery in London. Then witnesses reported a tall, dark figure that emitted an evil aura and had a hypnotic stare. One man reported that he became confused and totally lost when trying to leave the cemetery. Suddenly, he found himself facing the Highgate Vampire-which transfixed him, gluing him to the spot. After a while, it disappeared.

Reports in the press led to the graveyard being trampled by an army of self-proclaimed vampire hunters. They dug up several graves, leading conservationists to lobby for the graveyard to be closed nights. Eventually, sightings and reports of the vampire decreased.

7 Sava Savanovic

The only thing scarier than vampires is ghosts. But imagine something scarier still: a ghost vampire. Say hello to Sava Savanovic. Sava was a Serbian vampire who lived in an old mill and fed on unwary travelers and millers who approached the mill after dark.

Savanovic wasn't killed or driven off like most of the other bloodsuckers on this list. According to locals, he simply stopped attacking villagers. Meanwhile, the mill where he lived was passed down generation after generation, each new owner too scared to repair the building until it eventually collapsed. Now locals report that he's awoken from his long slumber and roams the Serbian countryside-looking for a new home. And it's not just superstitious locals making these claims. The actual council themselves are the ones who put out the warning. Of course it's probably a publicity stunt by the area's tourist board-we hope.

6 The Vampire Of Croglin Grange

This event began in the 1800s when the Cranwell Family took up residence in Groglin Range in Cumbria. Lady Cranwell noticed strange lights in the garden below, but thought nothing of it until she woke to find the lights at her window-but they weren't lights. They were eyes.

Lady Cranwell was frozen in terror as she saw the thing outside her window remove the panes one by one before reaching a rotten hand through and opening the latch. Her brothers heard her screaming and ran in to help her, arriving just in time to see her bleeding profusely from the neck as a catlike figure darted out into the darkness.

The brothers decided to slay the vampire. Some time later, they returned to the estate and set a trap. Lady Cranwell pretended to sleep in the same room the original attack happened in. When the vampire tried to come through the window again, the brothers jumped out with pistols and shot at it. It screamed and ran off into the night. The next day, the brothers gathered an angry mob and searched the graveyard until they found an open crypt. Inside were gnawed bones and an open coffin containing a rotten corpse with a recent bullet wound. Needless to say, they burned it.

5 Jure Grando

Jure Grando was a peasant from Istria, Croatia who died in 1656. He allegedly terrorized villagers in the area for 16 years after his death. Official documents from that time name him a " strigon," the local name for "vampire."

Jure Grando's case is important in vampire folklore as it was the first time in history that the word "vampire" was officially applied to a person. According to locals, he would wander the village by night and knock people's doors. Whoever's door he knocked would die. When he wasn't doing that, he was bothering his widow for sex. Eventually, people got tired of being terrorized by an undead monster, so a local priest took a stand and went out to face him. Grando was no match for the priest, who warded him off with a cross. The priest and some of the villagers chased him back to his grave, dug him up, and decapitated his corpse.

4 The Hunderprest Of Melrose Abbey

The "Hunderprest" was a nickname given to an 11th-century priest of Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders. He was given the nickname because of his favorite pastime: hunting on horseback with a pack of hunting dogs. ("Hunderprest" means "dog priest.")

The story of the vampire of Melrose Abbey is based sometime around the year 1138. In life, the Hunderprest was a bit of a bad man, so when he died, he returned as a revenant. He was forced to drink the blood of innocents and change into a bat. It's said that the monks of the abbey, displaying some impressive turn-the-other-cheekery, were content to let him run around being all undead and stuff-until he began to bother his mistress for sex.

Eventually, the frightened monks and priests banded together in order to bring him down. They laid out a watch at the Hunderprest's grave where he rose at nightfall. The monks, showing a rather un-monkish capacity for kicking butt, took him down with a well-timed blow to the head from an axe. They cremated the vampire's body and spread his ashes, ending his reign of terror. But some legends say that he still haunts the area.

3 The Vampires Of New England

There weren't many tales of vampires in America-until the dark discovery of a grave in Griswold, Connecticut in 1990. The grave contained the bodies of farmers from the 1700s. All were normal except for one. One body had been beheaded, and its skeleton was rearranged into the shape of a jolly roger.

It was decided that this wasn't just a simple grave robbery, as it had been done 10 years after death no valuables were removed. It mirrored a case in neighboring Jewett City where, around the same time, 29 bodies were exhumed postmortem and burned. This was something of a vampire epidemic. The most famous case from this time is that of Mercy Brown, a girl who died from tuberculosis. Some time later, the rest of her family started to fall ill and die one by one until Mercy's body was dug up, found to be remarkably un-corpsefied, and burned.

2 The Gorbals Vampire

This tale started with the rumor that a vampire with iron teeth was at Gorbals graveyard in Glasgow, Scotland. The vampire had apparently taken two children. Within a few hours, the graveyard was full of children with makeshift weapons like sticks and knives, hunting for the vampire.

Authorities blamed the occurrence on hysteria and the influence of American comics like Tales From The Crypt. But it's since been pointed out that there were no comics from this period featuring vampires with iron teeth. Was there some truth to the iron-toothed vampire prowling the graveyard at night and feeding on children? Was the vampire imaginary? Or had it just been scared off by the sight of dozens of armed Glaswegians excited by the prospect of beating and stabbing it back to hell?

1 Elizabeth Bathory: The Blood Countess

Elizabeth Bathory is perhaps the most famous vampire in history after Vlad the Impaler. But while Vlad wasn't really a blood-sucking vampire-merely the inspiration for one-Elizabeth Bathory may have actually fed on and bathed in blood. She was a Romanian Countess in the 16th century who found joy in torturing peasants. The torture ranged from simple beatings and stabbings to piercing fingers and lips with iron nails or dousing them in freezing cold water and letting them die in the snow.

Rumors that Elizabeth was a vampire began when it was alleged that she bathed in the blood of young maidens. It's reported that she began this to reduce the effects of aging, though some historians refute this claim as being added to the story after the fact. Eventually Bathory was walled inside her castle alive, with only enough space for her to receive air and food until she died years later.

Aaron has written a few articles for Listverse and Cracked.com. He also has a blog (where he mostly rambles about about bad movies) here.

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10 Creepy Historical Vampires You've Never Heard Of - Listverse

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When people think of vampires, they usually think of famous fictional bloodsuckers like Dracula or his historical counterpart, Vlad the Impaler. Perhaps younger people will think of True Blood, The Lost Boys or the sparkly vampires of Twilight. But there have been plenty of vampire tales that stemmed from real events or people, like .

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THE BLOOD COUNTESS

Elizabeth Bathory was a Hungarian noble woman born in 1560, who was considered a Vampire. She is famous for killing young maidens to bath and feed  in their blood, to retain her youth and beauty. It is believed she killed over 650 young women and girls. She was eventually walled up inside her castle where she eventually died. This story is very possibly real, but likely Exaggerated over time. Elizabeth's belief that the blood of virgins would keep her from aging would be a red Flag belief "Confusion of correlation with causation". She believed that bathing in blood kept her young.  Today she would just be considered a serial killer.

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VAMPIRE SKULL

The Picture below is a skull that was discovered in Venice. The skull is woman who was buried in the 1500's. A rock was placed in her mouth after she was dead, as she  was suspected of being a Vampire. The stone was some how to prevent her from returning from the dead and claiming more victims. This would be an Ancient Wisdom ritual. In actual fact hundreds of people were dying every day from a plague, not from Vampires. This would also be a Simplistic explanation for uneducated people to believe.

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The Vampire Grasp
In the 1800s in New England many people were dying of an unknown  "Plague". Vampires were blamed.
Recent investigation have discovered that in New England in 1820 a man  was buried, exhumed 5 years after his death and his skull had been decapitated, rotated backwards and his bones crossed and reburied. This is the way people of the time killed a Vampire.
These beliefs would be the Red flag Ancient Wisdom and Simplicity, as people at the time did not know what  was really killing everyone. The Ancient Wisdom would be the burial rituals to prevent the Vampire from returning from the dead, such as the beheading or stake through the heart. Simplicity was, identifying that it was a  Vampire killing everyone not  a disease. This illness was most likely Consumption or Tuberculosis.

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Proof of Vampires - Paranormal Documentary

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Proof of Vampires - Paranormal Documentary Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person/being.

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HISTORY OF VAMPIRES
This short video describes a Vampire legend in Serbia. The legend from the 1700s revolves around a person named Peter Plogojowitzan and an old mill in the town of Kisolova, Serbia. Peter died but returned from the grave, to harass his relatives and prey on people of the town. Today people of Kisolova still hang garlic in their doorways and don't go into the forest surrounding the town after dark. Ancient Wisdom, Mystic Energy, Confusion of correlation with causation, are all  part of the continuing belief in Vampires in this region. This is an isolated small village, people are not as educated as in cities so it is easy and simple for them to follow old traditions and explanations for things they don't understand. Fear of the Unexplained  fuels their belief in Ancient Wisdom.

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Vampire Myths

This video discusses the quantity of vampire information, in books, movies, newspapers, and folklore. This would lead to the  red flag Proof by Verbosity.  Since there is so much information, and hundreds of years of history about Vampires, people and easily believe there must be some truth to the legends. This would also mean Ancient Wisdom holds more belief than modern day science. Although there are many cases of mutilated grave sites, there are no pictures or skeletons of Vampires with fangs. That would lead me to believe the fangs are just a Hollywood  Exaggeration of the Vampire.

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Real Life Vampires Exist

Modern day “Vampires”, are people who are living around us everyday, but mainly at night. Some Vampires dress in Gothic clothes, and consume the blood of people or animals. Some get their teeth restructured into fangs and wear light coloured contact lenses to have a “Vampire” look.  Others look the same as everyone, and may lead regular lives and have  regular jobs. These people believe they need Blood to survive, this would be an example of the Red flag Ideological support, because in fact drinking large amounts of blood can make them sick. Some Vampires feed on donors psychic energy not their blood. This would be an example of the Red flag Mystical energy .

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Vampires walk among us. But these people aren't the stuff of nightmares - far from it actually. Just sit down for a drink with one of them and ask for yourself. That's if you can find one. They aren't necessarily looking to be found.

I've spent five years conducting ethnographic studies of the real vampires living in New Orleans and Buffalo. They are not easy to find, but when you do track them down, they can be quite friendly.

"Real vampires" is the collective term by which these people are known. They're not "real" in the sense that they turn into bats and live forever but many do sport fangs and just as many live a primarily nocturnal existence. These are just some of the cultural markers real vampires adopt to express a shared (and, according to them, biological) essence - they need blood (human or animal) or psychic energy from donors in order to feel healthy.

Becoming a Vampire

Their self-described nature begins to manifest around or just after puberty. It derives, according to them, from the lack of subtle energies their bodies produce - energies other people take for granted. That's the general consensus anyway. It's a condition they claim to be unable to change. So, they embrace it.

The real vampire community, like the legendary figure it emulates, knows few national boundaries, from Russia and South Africa to England and the United States. Particularly in the internet age, vampires are often well attuned to community issues.

This is more true for some than others though. I found the vampires of Buffalo to be keen to keep up to date with the global community, while those in New Orleans were often more interested in the activities of their local vampire houses (an affiliated group of vampires usually led by a vampire elder who helps his or her house members to acclimate to their vampiric nature).

The Varied Vampire Community

Some houses, and indeed whole vampire communities, as in the case of New Orleans, will combine their efforts to organize charity events, like feeding (not feeding on) the homeless. However, despite their humanitarian efforts, real vampires don't go around advertising who they are for fear of discrimination by people who simply don't understand them.

We spoke to John Edgar Browning in this episode of "It's Only Science."

Some semblance of the real vampire community has existed since at least the early to mid-1970s, but my own dealings began in 2009 when I entered the New Orleans community clinging to my digital voice recorder.

I eventually met around 35 real vampires there, but the total number in New Orleans is easily double that. They ranged in age from 18 to 50 and represented both sexes equally. They practiced sanguinarian (blood) and psychic feeding - taking energy using, for example, the mind or hands.

Blood is generally described by my study participants as tasting metallic, or "coppery" but can also be influenced by the donor's physiology, or even how well he or she is hydrated. Some psychic vampires use tantric feeding, that is through erotic or sexual encounters, while others use what could be described as astral feeding or feeding on another from afar. And others feed through emotion.

Afterwards, blood-drinking and psychic vampires feel energized or otherwise better than they would if they were to sustain themselves on regular food alone, like fruits, fish, and vegetables (which they eat too).

These vampires described themselves as atheistic, monotheistic or polytheistic. Some identified as heterosexual, some homosexual and some bisexual. Some were married, some were divorced and some were parents.

Unquestionably, I found the vampires I met to be competent and generally outwardly "normal" citizens. They performed blood-letting rituals safely and only with willing donors and participated regularly in medical exams that scarcely (if ever) indicated complications from their feeding practices.

Outside Mainstream Culture

What was perhaps most surprising about the vampires I met though was their marked lack of knowledge about vampires in popular culture. They seemed to know much less than you might expect - at least for vampires - about how their kind were depicted in books and films. By this I mean to say that the people I met with and interviewed hadn't turned to drinking blood or taking psychic energy simply because they had read too many Anne Rice novels.

In fact, the real vampire community in general seems to have appropriated very few of the trappings mainstream culture attaches to creatures of the night. Many do dress in gothic clothes but certainly not all the time, and very, very few sleep in coffins. In fact, those vampire who do dress a certain way or wear fangs do so long after realizing their desire to take blood.

This is what might be called a "defiant culture." Real vampires embrace their instinctual need to feed on blood or energy and use what mainstream culture sees as a negative, deviant figure like the vampire to achieve a sense of self-empowerment. They identify others with a similar need and have produced a community from that need.

But real vampires can also help us understand, and perhaps even shed, some of the ideological baggage each of us carries. They show us how repressive and oppressive categories can lead to marginalization. Through them, we see the dark side of ourselves.

More generally, this community shows that being different doesn't have to force you onto the margins of society. Real vampires can and do exist in both "normal" society and their own communities, and that's okay.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Top image by Tobias Arhelger/ Shutterstock

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John Edgar Browning, Georgia Institute of Technology

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Real-Life Vampires Exist, and Researchers Are Studying Them

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Vampires walk among us. But these people aren't the stuff of nightmares - far from it actually. Just sit down for a drink with one of them and ask for yourself. That's if you can find one. They aren't necessarily looking to be found.

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Vampires: Fact, Fiction and Folklore

The article from the website below, discusses the fiction about vampires, folklore about vampires and facts about vampires. There are many variations of vampires and there is folklore and myths about vampires in countries all over the world, Ancient Wisdom would be the Red flag for these historical accounts. There are many movies, TV shows  and books about fictional Vampires.  Of course Hollywood versions of vampires are very Exaggerated. As a fact there are modern day “Vampires”. These are people who are living a “Vampire” lifestyle.  Ideological support would apply to their beliefs.

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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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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.