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Vampires

No need to apologise - as I've said I think it is a valid point to raise. ;)

I would say if you wanted 3 books that explore the scientific studies of vampires crossing from myth to fiction to science then I'd go with:

I am Legend
www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19786

Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality
by Paul Barber
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/03000 ... ntmagaz-21

The Science of Vampires
by Katherine M. Ramsland
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/04251 ... ntmagaz-21
 
thanks for that emps. i'll look up those books, would like to read up on the subject. maybe then i can keep up with the rest of you :)
 
Morbid_Mist said:
thanks for that emps. i'll look up those books, would like to read up on the subject. maybe then i can keep up with the rest of you :)

LOL - oh don't worry about that we all know plenty of stuff other people don't ;)

Ultimately with the study of vampires it all depends on what angle you want to take on it:

  • Are you looking into the myths and folklore?

    Are you looking into modern vampires in the West? The actual vampire subculture or those killers who think they are vampires.

    Are you looking at how our take on vampires is more a relfection of us than it is of them?

In the end all these are interlinked and not so easy to seperate but there are lots of good books on them. There are plenty of massive vampire encyclopedias although a lot of them draw on Montague Summers work (which owes a big dept to Calmet's early work - both are well worth a read if youa re looking for earlier takes on things) and you can possibly pick them up through the library (inter library loans are your friend here).

Barber's book is (in my opinion) the best book on vampires out there.

Ramsland's book skips all over the place from vampire killers to BDSM to blood to the fiction to some attempts to show how science could be used in the study of real vampires (either in tracking them forensically or how they may come about). Although that last bit seemed like reaching she does cover a lot of ground combining her two interests (forensics and vampires - she has written books on CSI and Anne Rice as well as the vampire sub-culture).

Although Ramsland is dismissive of it (pos. for some kind of political reasons) if you are looking for something that examines how they are more like a mirror we hold up to ourselves then you can try:

Our Vampires, Ourselves
by Nina Auerbach
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/02260 ... ntmagaz-21
 
There isn't a lot of info yet:

17-Century-Old Vampires Unearthed

Archeologists from Bulgaria's major Black Sea port of Bourgas have discovered a necropolis where 16 vampires were buried over 17 centuries ago. The peculiar finding has lately emerged during the archeological excavations in the ancient town of Deultum near the village of Debelt, Bourgas region.

The archeological were surprised to see that 16 of the skeletons in the necropolis were pinned down by 11 nails in the bones each. The earliest burial dates back to the 4th century AD. Experts believe the buried had been feared of as vampires while alive and were nailed not to escape the grave. The finding evidences for the most ancient ritual against turning vampire practiced across the Bulgarian lands.

standartnews.com/archive/2005/11/16 ... /features/
Link (to Russian site) is dead. The MIA article (in English) - quoted in full above - can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2007031...news.com/archive/2005/11/16/english/features/


I would say it'd be tricky to pin that down to vampires and not some kind of general action against the dead whcih are known back to the earliest burials.

[edit: And I've moved this out of cryptozoology where it didn't seem quite at home.]
 
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Vampires in folklore have little, direct correlation to vampires in fiction. Most of what is used in film these days is taken directly from the ideas presented by Bram Stoker.

Vampires in most legends in Europe are festering, ghoul like creatures which inhabit graveyards and supposedly feast on the dead, they do not just drink the blood and are most likely inspired by people who have been cast out of society for various reasons. Probably because they're mentally ill or had a disfiguring illness such as leperosy.
 
In Search of the Real Dracula

By Massimo Polidoro

posted: 14 April 2006
12:41 pm ET


I recently had the opportunity to travel through Europe in search of the reality behind some famous ancient legends. I was part of a team of investigators for a TV show called "Legend Detectives," which subsequently aired in December 2005 by Discovery Channel Europe.

I was particularly interested in the legend that was scheduled for May: Count Dracula, the world's most famous vampire. Such is the enduring power of Bram Stoker's classic horror story, first published in 1897 and never out of print, that modern-day Transylvania in Northern Romania has become a tourist Mecca.

Fans of the fictional count flock there by the coachload persuaded that in the land of mist-shrouded mountains, they will find clues to the source of the greatest vampire of them all: the Transylvanian nobleman who left his remote homeland to spread his evil plague.

For the true believer, the boundaries between Stoker's creation and historical fact have become blurred, like all great legends. Many people believe that the immortal count was based on a real person: a medieval Romanian warlord called Vlad Tepes, also know as "Vlad the Impaler" and "Vlad Dracula."

Was this famous national hero the man behind the legend? That was the first question we were going to investigate during our stay in Transylvania (I am of course referring to our TV investigation, for this and other questions have already been dealt with and answered by some good historical work done in the past by researchers such as Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally).

Son of the Devil

Bram Stoker's Dracula was by no means the first vampire story. It was the culmination of a writing tradition of Gothic horror stories that had begun nearly eighty years earlier with "The Vampyre," by John Polidori. (Was he a relative of mine, I wonder?) Others followed, like "Varney the Vampire" (1847), a serial that ran in magazines called "penny dreadfuls" for more than two years, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1871), which centered around a lesbian vampire.

But Dracula was a departure. In Stoker's hands, the vampire became all-powerful, the embodiment of evil-and a creature whose immortality was bound up in a rich cocktail of blood, sex, and death.

Ironically, though the novel was first published in English in 1893, Romania's most famous fictional resident, Count Dracula, was almost unknown there until 1992. Only with the fall of communism was Bram Stoker's classic finally translated and published in Romania.

But the question remained, could Vlad Tepes have been the model for Stoker's infamous Count?

What is known of Vlad the Impaler comes from a series of lurid stories dating back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They depict a man surrounded in corpses, a tyrant and madman, who literally drank the blood of his enemies. There are good reasons to think that Stoker was struck by this evil character and borrowed his surname, "Dracula," because he thought it meant "son of the devil," to create his own vampire. In fact, it meant "son of the dragon," and this was because Vlad's father had joined an order of knighthood called the Order of the Dragon. Dragon is written dracul in Romanian, and so Dracula literally means "son of Dracul."

But to many Romanians, Vlad is a national hero, a saviour. They reject the tales of a psychopathic tyrant as vicious propaganda promoted by Vlad's enemies. They honour him as the legendary king who, like Britain's King Arthur, will one day return to save his country.

Part of the reason for this lies in places like Sigihisoara, a town built by Germans, or better, Saxons, who had moved to Transylvania to become merchants. They took hold of the region and didn't even let Romanians enter the town-they had to pay a toll first. Vlad resented this and sided with the Romanians. In his lifetime, he also fought bravely against the Turks, who had conquered parts of Europe already, and this spread panic among the Christian kings. So Vlad was considered a crusader. Europe, then, first knew him as a hero.

However, Vlad lost his battles and was defeated by the Turks, and his legacy was set by the victors. There are still many pamphlets surviving, printed by the Germans soon after his death, in which his exploits are recounted in gory detail and he is portrayed as a devil-like figure.

It's ironic that the man whose name helped inspire one of the most famous fictional horror stories of all time, written in the nineteenth century, was also the subject of some of the very first printed horror stories in the fifteenth century. And this also shows the power of propaganda: for a brief moment, he'd been the hero of Europe; then, after his death, his enemies destroyed his reputation.

During the reign of communist dictator Nicholae Ceausescu, Vlad Dracula was again venerated as a hero. They portrayed him as a nationalist icon, a man who united and protected Romanians from their enemies, imperialist Turks and capitalist German merchants.

His brutal methods were either dismissed as enemy propaganda or, when they couldn't be explained away, as a necessary evil. In fact, Ceausescu was so enamoured of Vlad that he is even reported to have once said: "A man like me comes along only every 500 years."

Death of a Strigoi

Having ascertained that the real figure of Vlad Tepes was only a loose inspiration for Stoker's fiction, we wondered if local folklore provided the inspiration for his haunting descriptions of vampiric rituals.

Stories of vampires are, in fact, very old in Romania; however, they prefer to call these creatures strigoi. They are seen as ghosts, undead, immaterial things; they are usually a recently buried member of the family, who returns to haunt his relatives and drain their life forces, sometimes in dreams. In order to bring peace to the family and to the undead itself, some "rituals" need to be performed.

These are very secret practices that, I was surprised to learn, still continue today. In January 2004, one such episode became public and created a scandal.

After Petre Toma of the village of Marotinu de Sus died in a field accident in December 2003, his relatives complained that a child's illness was to blame on Toma, since some neighbors claimed they had seen him posthumously walking in his yard. Something had to be done.

Six local men then volunteered to enact the ancient Romanian ritual for dealing with a strigoi. Just before midnight, they crept into the cemetery on the edge of the village and gathered around Toma's grave.

It seems that the destruction of a strigoi has some parallels with the methods used by Stoker's heroes to destroy Dracula. But rather than drive a stake through the creature's heart, the six men dug Toma up, split his ribcage with a pitchfork, removed his heart, put stakes through the rest of his body, and sprinkled it with garlic. Then they burned the heart, put the embers in water, and shared the grim cocktail with the sick child.

For a little while, it all seemed to have worked well. Eventually, the sick girl got better again, so the ritual must have worked, or so many in the village thought.

Local police appeared to be less understanding. After Toma's daughter complained, they arrested the men and charged them with illegally exhuming the corpse. They were sentenced to six months in jail, but did not serve the time.

What really surprised me, however, was why Toma's daughter was angry at her relatives. It was not because they had desecrated the body of a dead person that deserved more respect, but because she had not been invited to the ritual!

"These are very ancient practices indeed," anthropologist Fifor Mihai, who served as a consultant during the trial, told me. "And they are about communicating with the dead, laying the dead to rest. The media and newspapers have made much of the gory aspects, but these people have been doing this sort of thing for many, many centuries, and in the past, the authorities have turned a blind eye."

These beliefs are very different from those held by people who are Dracula fans; with them, it's all about image, the immortality, and sexiness of vampires. But for the people in Romania, these are deeply held views, as strongly held as religious faiths. Whether that means customs such as digging up a body and removing its heart should somehow be preserved, I'm not so sure.

In the end, our investigation found Romania to be a country of striking contrasts and rich traditions. We've examined the character of Vlad Dracula, but found the evidence that Bram Stoker based his fictional vampire on him wanting. Certainly, he used the name. There are also some uncanny similarities, such as the use of stakes, Vlad's bloodthirstiness, and his victories against the Turks, that suggest Stoker knew something about the real Dracula, but probably little more than what was given in the tour books of his day.

And today, so long as tourists want to go to Romania, and filmmakers want to make Dracula movies, that confusion between the real and fictional Draculas will continue, and for many Romanians, that's not a bad thing.

-------------
Massimo Polidoro is an investigator of the paranormal, author, lecturer, and cofounder and head of CICAP, the Italian skeptics group. His Web site is at www.massimopolidoro.com.This article appears courtesy of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

www.livescience.com/othernews/060414_dracula.html
 
I'm sure there was an article in Video Watchdog a few years ago that exposed the myth that Dracula was based on Vlad the Impaler.
 
Mid-19th Century Spanish Vampire

This is a story I know only according to an inferior robot translation from a Spanish-language Paranormal site. Perhaps it is merely an Urban Legend and should more properly be filed there. Nevertheless, if there are any additional details I should like to learn them:

During the middle of the 19th Century the coffin of a Serbian - or perhaps Polish - nobleman was shipped to Spain for burial. The why of this, I don't know.

The encoffined body landed at Cartagena and was transported by highway through Alhama, Almeria, Toledo, Borax, Santillana, Comillas and Corunna.

At each stop along the way vampire deaths were reported, with bodies found exsanguinated the next morning.

At least that's the story as I know it. Anybody else come across this one?
 
Sounds almost like some of the plot to Bram Stoker's "Dracula", doesn't it?!?! When Dracula had himself (along with his coffin in which he resided during the voyage)sent to Whitby, and at night he fed upon the crew.
 
Semyaz said:
Sounds almost like some of the plot to Bram Stoker's "Dracula", doesn't it?!?!

Yes, but I was also wondering if it might be the plot of one of those Paul Naschy Spanish vampire films.
 
So with spanish vampires do you have to make them chase around a waving red cloth before staking them?
 
The story got mauled rather by a Spanish investigator - also translated -

http://elultimopeldano.blogspot.com/200 ... -luis.html

Everything begins with the arrival from a coffin to the port of Cartagena, where it was stored during a time, until it was protested in Corunna. In his trip it crossed Alhama of Murcia, Almeria, Toledo, Borox, Santillana of the sea, Comillas, until arriving at the anticipated city, taking place several cases of vampirismo in some of those cities.

Once in Corunna, she did not appear the person who demanded it, and soon after was solicitd again from Cartagena, this time by a Serbian aristocrat, who single one was able to see to him at night.

The nobleman disappeared and already never he more became to see him, burying the coffin in cemetery of Cartagena.

Jacques Fletcher argued that in Spain there have been cases of this type, but never they have attributed to vampires, being able to also occur the case that more this mystery is not than a legend.

As special guest were Javier Perez Fields, investigator of these cases, assistant director “Parapsicológicos World”, collaborator of the Web Iker Jiménez, and collaborator of several mass media, that have written articles dedicated to this enigma.

On the basis of the ideas obtained during the time that takes investigating this mystery, he exposed that one is an urban legend that to happened of mouth in mouth, since the date in which it takes place is relatively near the work “Drácula”, remembering to him to one of the scenes happened in this, and also he explained that one is a Serbian aristocrat because at that time there is a generalized fear to the stranger, coming from the outside.

..which I guess answers the question of why it was a Serb (Romania would be way too obvious).
I was in Cartagena for a bit last year - nice place.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
But you shouldn't have ignored those two strange marks on your neck.

No risk of that with the amount of garlic involved!

But this vampire has been destroyed anyway, sent back to the realms of fiction - he came from a book Las Noches Lugubres by Alfonso Sastre and had no factual basis -
http://www.cercle-v.org/Pdf/iun0111p.pdf
 
wembley8 said:
But this vampire has been destroyed anyway, sent back to the realms of fiction - he came from a book Las Noches Lugubres by Alfonso Sastre and had no factual basis -
http://www.cercle-v.org/Pdf/iun0111p.pdf

Wembley, for whatever reason I'm not able to open the pdf document. So can you supply a short precis of what it claims? Thanks!
 
Bacically it says there was a lot of 'speculations, mistakes and hoax about the pretended affair' and that it originated with the Sastre story.

The analysis (in Spanish) is fairly lengthy.
 
Thanks, Wembley. What I really have to do is to download a version of Adobe issued since the time of Christ.
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
Seems ther has been some number crunching to show that vampires are impossible but someone else has looked at the numbers again and suggested a single vampire slayer would help maintain a vampire population at around 500:

www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/ ... s_pro.html

Pity we don't know of any real life vampire hunters.

None.

The numbers would only grow impossibly out of control (if no vampire hunter is involved) if the vampire bite converts the victim into a vampire, even if they die... as suggested what happens in Buffy...!!

But if the bite does not convert (at least in every instance) then the mathematics are surely moot... although there probably would be a lot of victims assuming the vampires need regular feedings on blood!!
 
That is a terribly simplistic paper on the subjects listed. Still, I suppose it was supposed to be a look at "movie" ghosts, vampires etc. The zombie section was interesting though for the puffer fish story.
 
A pretty well done site:

http://www.thecovenorganization.com/
Welcome Vampires, Vampyres, Otherkin, and those interested in them! The Coven Organization has always been dedicated to the prosperity and preservation of the Vampire community and culture. Today, The Coven is an online vampire research and news portal, and a haven for all dark creatures. In short: Resources for an Esoteric Education.

This site offers many things that may be of interest to you: classic literature, essays, prose/poetry, paintings, movies, designs and other aesthetics from the Vampire community. Historical publishings and research papers published regarding vampire folklore, articles from community members addressing various present-day vampire-related issues.
 
Just this afternoon I finished reading THE EMBRACE: A TRUE VAMPIRE STORY, by Aphrodite Jones (New York: Pocket Books, 1999), the story of the "Kentucky Vampire Clan" which raised so much hell, and wholly negative news coverage, during November and December, 1996.

I'd saved a lot of newspaper coverage on young Rod Ferrell's openly blood-drinking "dark vampire army," but Ms. Jones' book goes behind those newspaper clippings and magazine tearsheets and answers most of my lingering questions.

This was the first time I've "met" Rod's mother, Sondra Gibson Ferrell. If you think Rod Ferrel was a piece of work, you should meet Mom.

One of the things I learned was that there were three or four different blood-sharing vampire "covens" operating between Eustis, Florida and Murray, Kentucky, in 1996, and that all of them seem to have been outgrowths of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS and VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE. Now I have NEVER condemned either game, but they do sometimes seem to do a job on certain highly-impressionable and already unstable individuals....by no means all of them adolescents.

As they sure as hell seem to have done in this case.
 
The thing with these games, both of which I have played quite a lot, is that they enable people with like minds to group together and engage in a shared fantasy world. They could just as easily have had a film club and run a series of vampire films and start the same way but with role playing games you act yourself as a vampire which I suppose can get them into the whole thing.
But as always...if you are that unstable already...
 
In a busy, modern World, where most thinking comes pre-packaged and pre-digested, learning to use your imagination can be dangerous.
 
I have personally witnessed deep friendships, among mature adults, of twenty or more years' duration, permanently break up over a single DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS game.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
I have personally witnessed deep friendships, among mature adults, of twenty or more years' duration, permanently break up over a single DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS game.
I can remember when every episode of Batman (the 1960s TV series, with Adam West and Burt Ward), was prefaced with warnings to remember that only Batman and Robin could climb up walls and jump off buildings and that they were only comic book characters. Apparently, a few kids were trying to do the stunts for real.

Obviously, not enough people played, 'let's pretend' and too many sat slumped passively, in front of the magic goggle box, soaking it all in by osmosis, when they were kids.
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
I can remember when every episode of Batman (the 1960s TV series, with Adam West and Burt Ward), was prefaced with warnings to remember that only Batman and Robin could climb up walls and jump off buildings and that they were only comic book characters. Apparently, a few kids were trying to do the stunts for real.

We didn't get that warning in the States.

Obviously, not enough people played, 'let's pretend' and too many sat slumped passively, in front of the magic goggle box, soaking it all in by osmosis, when they were kids.

Except that these were all adults almost encyclopaedically literate in both fantasy fiction and science fiction. One of them was in fact a published science fiction novelist.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
...

Obviously, not enough people played, 'let's pretend' and too many sat slumped passively, in front of the magic goggle box, soaking it all in by osmosis, when they were kids.

Except that these were all adults almost encyclopaedically literate in both fantasy fiction and science fiction. One of them was in fact a published science fiction novelist.
If only they'd spent more time out of the house, playing, cowboys'n'indians, soldiers, or doctors and nurses, as kids, instead of sitting indoors, ruining their eyes and filling their heads with Amazing Stories.

After all, look at what happened to Don Quixote. :(
 
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