Forget everything you think you know about vampires. The creatures of folklore and history are far stranger and scarier than any suave movie monster. From unusual diets to terrifying origins, the real vampires are lurking in the shadows of history. Get ready to sink your teeth into these chilling truths!
10. Real Vampires Couldn’t Care Less About Stereotypes
For centuries, vampires were as common in Greek folklore as they were in Romanian legends. Unlike the movie versions, Greek vampires could stroll about in broad daylight. The only time they were compelled to stay in their coffins was between Saturday evening Vespers and the end of Sunday morning liturgy. It wasn’t the physical environment that mattered, but the sacred one.
As for food, forget the refined blood-drinking stereotype. One Greek interviewee in the 20th century stated, ‘No, I never heard of a vampire drinking blood…’. They might eat your liver or other organs, feed on themselves in their graves, or nearby corpses. These beliefs might stem from the grim reality of people accidentally buried alive gnawing on their own arms or corpse gases erupting. The vampire simply needed to feed on anything and wasn’t fussy.
Vampires in Greece and elsewhere might attack cattle or steal eggs and poultry. Some drank goat’s milk or were completely vegan, storing grapes, apples, and nuts in their coffins. On one occasion, six vampires were seen grazing on green beans in a field. Talk about a balanced diet!
9. Modern Vampire Fans Wouldn’t Recognize One
Real vampires looked like ordinary, often shabby, dead peasants. Far from being stylishly gaunt, they were frequently fat. Montague Summers described one British revenant from Alnwick as being of ‘frightful corpulence,’ while Greek vampires could be ‘round like a full sack’ with skin ‘stretched like the parchment of a drum.’ Corpse gases caused this bloating, giving the impression that the body wasn’t decomposing.
Instead of being pale, these corpses could be dark blue or black due to the chemistry of death. In countries where vampires drank blood, a corpse with reddened skin was especially terrifying, indicating it was feeding on the living.
Vampires could take almost any shape imaginable. Bats were rare, but sinister dogs, cats, hares, pigs, weasels, birds, and reptiles were all possibilities. At a vampire burning, any creatures fleeing the flames were forced back, lest the vampire escape in another form. In Romania, staking a moth to the wall was a low-tech vampire-staking method for the squeamish. This bewildering array of shapes stemmed from the belief that the Devil was a master of disguise, or simply that believing is seeing.
8. The Vampire Comes to Tuck You into Bed
Ever experienced sleep paralysis? Every night when we sleep, we’re temporarily paralyzed to stop us from acting out our dreams. Sometimes, people wake up in between states, terrified by being motionless and speechless. Then comes the Nightmare something slowly approaches from the corner of the room. It takes various shapes but is terrifying. It gets on the bed, onto your chest, a feeling of tremendous weight and suffocation overwhelms you, sometimes with the sense that this demon is sucking the life from you.
Scholars estimate that between 5-20% of people have experienced Sleep Paralysis and Nightmare together. The victim’s brain imposes a familiar cultural stereotype on the entity. This has yielded three demons : the witch, the vampire, and the alien abductor. Even in the most scientifically advanced countries, SP victims are often bewildered, lonely, or misunderstood. Medical science hasn’t banished the Nightmare – and may not yet understand it.
7. The Vampire Scares People to Death
In the winter of 1731-2, the village of Medvegia was gripped by a vampire panic. During these events, at least two people died of fear. A young woman named Stanacka cried out in the middle of the night, claiming she was being throttled by a deceased man. She experienced chest pain and died within three days.
Stanacka likely died of ‘voodoo death’ caused by her SP Nightmare. Across centuries, similar symptoms have been recorded. A witch, vampire, or tribal witch doctor triggers mind-over-matter, causing the victim to shut down and die within days. Shelley Adler found something similar among Hmong refugees in America, inspiring Wes Craven to create Nightmare on Elm Street. A man diagnosed with esophageal cancer died, but an autopsy revealed his esophagus was healthy. Like victims of the supernatural, he died of dark belief.
6. Vampire Poltergeists
Sleep Paralysis Nightmares provoked wild hysteria in Vampire Country. Vampire attacks were as good an explanation as any for a bewildering phenomenon. Everyone knew of the nocturnal assaults, and a kind of electric terror snaked through the village, causing more people to have Nightmares.
In some cases, this terror involved a poltergeist. A classic vampire poltergeist exploded on the island of Mykonos just before Christmas 1700. After a man died suddenly, something (his ghost?) began throwing furniture and grabbing people. As the terror intensified, so did the violence. The vampire-poltergeist broke doors, roofs, and windows, beat people, and shredded their clothes. Whole families fled their houses. Finally, the islanders carved up the dead man and burned his corpse on a separate island on January 1, 1701.
Stress worsens poltergeist attacks. In Mykonos and elsewhere, rituals of destruction calmed the stress and stopped the Nightmares or poltergeist assaults. If so, such supposedly irrational behavior had a certain value. And if you are really being besieged by a poltergeist, it is probably more rational to admit it than to let your scientific side try to talk you out of it.
5. When the Undead Were Simply NOT Dead…
The intensity of vampire terror is clear in cases where the supposedly dead had been buried alive. This was a serious risk throughout history, as seen in corpses found to have gnawed their own arms. The problem was worse in vampire country because of the belief that corpses must be buried while still warm. And if a dead person did suddenly rise up out of coma, matters got much nastier.
On one Greek island around 1900, a comatose man slowly ‘began to arise’ from his coffin before the entire funeral assembly. ‘Well, the people there believed he was becoming a vrikolax; in their fright they threw everything they could find at him sticks, rocks, anything.’ And killed him. From dead to undead, to dead again in a very short space of time. But this was nothing to what could happen in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century.
If you woke in your coffin in Russian Vampire Country, the best-case scenario was for hysterical gravediggers to pile on the earth double speed and leave you there. But in a village called Sooroffsky in 1890, a man actually got out and fled into a woman’s house. The horrified villagers seized him, flung him down outside, and hammered aspen stakes through his body. It was left there all day until sunset when it was thrown into a bog.
4. Vampires Are Much Older Than You Think
Revenants are possibly as old as fear itself. Take the ‘vampire skeleton’ found in Mikulovice, in the Czech Republic, in 2008. In a 4,000-year-old grave in east Bohemia, archaeologists discovered that the man’s body had been weighed down with two large stones: one on the chest, and one on the head. Head and heart have been classic locations for the seat of the soul throughout history, and the soul was the chief culprit in most vampire panics.
In other cases, people did everything they could to stop the revenant from getting out. In 2012, Bulgarian archaeologists digging in Sozopol ‘found two medieval skeletons pierced through the chest with iron rods.’ Another technique was to turn a suspect corpse over. If it tried to get out, it would dig itself further into the earth, not to the surface.
Incredibly, this was known to happen in World War One. In July 1915 in France, an officer saw two British soldiers burying a German corpse face down. And in classic vampire country, preventative burial methods may well persist to this day. In a Romanian village called Marotinu de Sus, one Petre Toma died just before Christmas. Toma’s ‘niece suffered Nightmares and appeared seriously ill. She claimed that her uncle was visiting her at night and feeding from her heart; that he was a strigoi’. Toma’s corpse was dug up, inspected, and verified as a strigoi. His heart was gouged out, spiked on a pitchfork and roasted, and charred fragments of it given to the sick girl to drink in water. She made a good recovery. All this happened in 2003-4, just before Stephenie Meyer signed her contract for Twilight.
3. Surprising Vampire Solutions
The idea that an upside-down vampire couldn’t wriggle itself over hints at another truth: the real vampires weren’t evil masterminds. They were pretty dim. In Bulgaria, ‘one could get rid of a vampire by approaching him with a warm loaf and inviting him to go to some distant place on the pretext of a fair or a wedding, and then abandoning him there. Alternatively, one could send him to get fish from the Danube, where he would fall in and be drowned’.
Numerous seeds, including millet, mustard, and poppy, might be strewn along the path to the grave, as well as left in the grave itself. Perhaps suffering an early form of OCD, the vampire must count all these and so is too busy to scare you to death. Count Dracula indeed…
Anyone disappointed by these methods might want to remember that puncturing a bloated corpse with a stake is messy. If you’re determined to burn a revenant, here’s a low-tech Bulgarian solution. A Bulgarian sorcerer would bottle the vampire using a holy icon and a bottle filled with excrement. They pursued their quarry relentlessly until it was forced into the bottle. They corked your bottle, threw it on the fire, and Goodnight Vampire! Assuming that this did happen, the vampire was invisible, and the sorcerer’s main talent was a gift for high drama.
2. You Could Inherit Vampirism
Two British army officers, St Clair and Brophy, stayed in a Bulgarian village in the 1860s. They told of how Theodore, ‘the son of a noted vampire’, was ‘doing penance during this present Lent by neither smoking, nor drinking wine or spirits, in order to expiate the sins of his father, in order to prevent himself inheriting the propensity’. Theodore’s father was a vampire-poltergeist and may well have been a genuine restless ghost. Falling in love, Theodore found himself so suspect that he was forbidden by her parents to marry her.
Some years later, Brophy and St Clair gained an update on this saga. Theodore had switched his attentions to the girl’s sister and eloped with her. They produced a child. As a result, Marynka’s house was burned, she was thrown in prison, and her vampire child was put to death.
1. The Vampires of New England
A special kind of vampirism existed in 19th-century New England. During a time when consumption ravaged the northeast, the vampire was identified as a scapegoat. When one person died of consumption and others fell sick, the first dead person was exhumed and inspected. Any sign of life indicated that this ‘vampire’ was feeding on living relatives from the grave.
Accordingly, heart or lungs might be burned, and the ashes given to the sick to drink in water. A famous New England vampire was young Mercy Brown, who died in 1892. But in Vermont around 1830, a large crowd gathered to watch a heart being burned in an iron pot. It was buried in a colossal hole and pinned under a huge granite slab. Bullock’s blood was then sprinkled on the earth.
The heart belonged to one of the Corwin family, at a time when Thomas Corwin was a US senator. At the burning were medical doctors, the Honorable Norman Williams, General Lyman Mower, and General Justus Durdick’. Perhaps the film, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has some grains of truth in it after all.
The world of real vampires is far more complex and unsettling than any fictional tale. From ancient burial rituals to bizarre medical practices, these historical accounts reveal the depth of human fear and superstition. So, next time you think of vampires, remember these chilling truths lurking in the shadows of history.
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