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admin sinfulldude · Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2006 9:58 pm Post subject: THE VAMPIRE

Belief in vampires is pervasive through cultures all over the globe. As there seems to be some version of a vampire myth in every culture, the vampire has become an archetype in every sense of the original definition by Jung. So it is not surprising that there is an abundance of fictional vampires and their fans around today. But how can we explain the origin and the persistance of the Vampire across cultures and ages

Ethymology
The word 'vampire' derives from the Slavic word 'vampir' or 'vampyr', first appearing in the 1600s in the Eastern European region in the Balkans.

'vampir' is derived from 'upir', which first appeared in print in an Old Russian manuscript from 1047 AC in which a Novgorodian prince is referred to as 'Upir Lichyj' (Wicked Vampire).

But the origin of 'upir' is even more controversial. Franz Miklosich suggested that 'upir' is derived from 'uber', a Turkish word for 'witch' whereas Andre Vaillant suggests just the opposite. Kazimierz Moszynski suggests that 'u-pir' is from a Serbo-Croatian word 'pirati' (to blow). Aleksandr Afanasev points to the Slavic 'pij' (to drink), which may have entered the Slavic language from the Greek, via Old Church Slavonic. A. Bruckner proposes Russian 'netopyr' (bat).

Diseases linked to Vampirism
Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP), meaning pigmented dry skin is a rare, often fatal genetic disorder that leaves its victims acutely vulnerable to skin and eye cancers if they are even briefly exposed to sun or any ultraviolet rays. The body fails to produce one of the enzymes necessary to make heme, the red pigment in hemeglobin. Strangely, Garlic stimulates heme production (a reason for its inclusion in many herbal blood tonics) and can turn a mild case of porphryia into a severe and painful one. There is less than 100,000 identified cases of XP nowadays but inbreeding could have stimulated the disease in the middle ages, creating pockets of it in isolated areas. Drinking blood could have been considered as a remedy in the dark ages but the human body is not made to assimilate heme directly from blood so it cannot be a cause of vampirism.

Mythology
The first Vampire was Lilith, also the first wife of Adam that she eventually left for Lucifer. In short, the bone of the quarrel was that Lilith would prefer to stand over Adam but God wanted the man to rule. Lilith is also the Queen of Death and Demons. She was and is still adored in almost all religions by magicians, sorcecers and witches.

Anne Rice is a famous author that wrote many books about modern vampires.

All Ricean vampires are related through their blood to Those Who Must Be Kept. These are their original 'parents,' Enkil and Akasha of Egypt, who were attacked by traitors who unwittingly gave a demon entrance into their victims' bodies. This turned these mortals into creatures who could no longer procreate, nor tolerate daylight, and who must take mortal blood to survive. In the course of the Vampire Chronicles, it becomes plain that all vampires are thus interrelated, because when Those Who Must Be Kept are left out in the sunlight by an elder weary of caring for them, all other vampires are burned or destroyed by the transmitted effects of the sunlight upon their parents. And at the end of 'Queen of the Damned' only a cannibalistic ritual act performed by Maharet and Mekare, an echo of the loving ritual they had once set out to perform upon their mother's body, can save the entire population of vampires from death as Akasha herself dies.

The Vampire as a negative double
The european vampire who appeared in Europe during the Dark Ages was an explanation for Death. A village suffered from a disease or death or, as is more often the case, a series of deaths. These events were mysterious, in the sense that there were no physical causes known to the villagers that could be offered to account for them.

Often times such deaths were attributed to vampires, which were corpses that came to the victims at night, attacking them, often times sucking their blood to the point of death. The way to stop the vampire was to either use various precautions to prevent it from entering the home, or to actually destroy the vampire itself. This was usually done by digging up graves, searching for corpses that showed signs of being a vampire. Although these signs varied, they usually included characteristics indicating consumption of blood and/or lack of decay (i.e. red lips, flushed cheeks, bloated figures, etc.).

A vampire corpse, once identified was disposed of in a certain prescribed way. Frequent methods used were decapitation of the corpse, removal of its heart, impaling of the heart with a special sharp object, cremation, or some combination of these acts. By these methods, the vampire was found and eliminated. Attributing the deaths to a vampire is the only thing explaining the fatalities, since there was no known physical cause at the time. By doing this, the villagers could take a course of action to stop the deaths.

If vampires did not exist, nothing would explain these deaths and people would feel helpless, since they would not have known what to do. In other words, by attributing a cause to the terrible event, a course of action could be taken to make things better. In this case, the vampire is that cause, or a scapegoat for the deaths. It is feared because of this, yet steps can be taken to destroy the vampire, and stop the deaths. Thus, in the minds of the Slavs, the vampire was an anxiety reliever since it was a scapegoat for a fearful event, which could be destroyed. Today, we have medical science to explain diseases and epidemics, and this function of the vampire is gone. We may still be afraid of having a disease, but now we turn to a doctor, not a vampire, to explain. Thus, although the image of the vampire among the Slavs remains with us, there is no room for its previous social role in our society.

With its original association with evil, disease, and death, it is surprising that this creature of the dark has garnered the appeal it has in American culture today. Indeed, our fascination with something that was once feared seems to indicate that the vampire's function in today's society is fundamentally different from that which it was originally.

Many scholars have attempted to explain the vampire's appeal in psychological terms literary scholar James Twitchell claims that psychoanalytically speaking, the vampire image is so popular because it represents a "complete condensation of problems and resolutions of preadolescence." He claims that children must deal with first time feelings of sexual energy and hostility, and that the vampire image acts out these situations, through its blood sucking and preying on the living.

Kirk J. Schneider, a faculty member of the California School of Professional Psychology, offers a vastly different explanation. He maintains that the vampire figure, specifically Dracula, is appealing because it is horrifying. Schneider states that true horror is when we are unexpectedly immersed in the infinite. Seeing this boundlessness is analogous to the boundlessness of that which is sacred, and thus dealing with the horror allows us to get a feel of what it would be like to deal with the holy. Dracula seems infinite is his power -- and the characters in the story as well as the audience must deal with that endless power. In regards to Dracula, Schneider states that "Dracula is not simply about a monster, it is about the mysterious force which permits monstrosities."

Perkowski claims that the figure of Dracula the Vampire functions as a symbol of evil. He states the Vampire "is a focus of fascination for forbidden, proscribed feelings and acts rife with guilt and fear, a focus for venting one's secret desires to surfeit." To support his claim, he contrasts Dracula's role with that of Santa Claus, claiming that they embody elements that make them polar opposites.

There are many reasons that vampires are so popular. The vampire has the appeal of immortality, which has been a goal of man for ages. Men built the pyramids in an attempt to gain immortality, yet it comes naturally to vampires. Vampires have the appeal of power over others, which is very alluring to someone who feels that they have no power of their own. Finally and most importantly, vampires have a sexual appeal. This sexual appeal ranges from the more normal (dominance, charming, and innuendo of oral sex) to the strange (blood fetishes, sadomasochism, and necrophilia). All claims can be justified in some way or another.

As part of Dresser's research, she asked people what they found so appealing about the vampire. The answers she reports reveal incredible diversity. Qualities mentioned include: eroticism, immortality, power, victimization, beauty, elegance, romanticism, the supernatural, mystery, and the unknown. Of these, three were mentioned most often, the first of which was sexual attraction. People found the biting and blood-sucking element of the vampire extremely sexual. They also found the fact that vampires are immortal quite appealing. This should come as no surprise, given that we live in an age where science strives to prolong lives as our population continues to age. The third major appeal of the vampire is power. The vampire's dominance in the biting of its victim was especially highlighted in this category. All three of these appeals are supported with extensive testimony by vampire fans.

With all of these interpretations of the vampire, it is clear that the image is much less threatening today than it was in Slavic society. As a result, associations are freely made with it and are much more diverse, and leave us hanging with the question of what its social role is. Many explanations have been offered, and these are well supported under the context in which they are presented. Some are scholarly and deal with it at a subliminal level, while others are openly acknowledged by vampire fans themselves. But to take any one of these and assign it as the unifying social function of the vampire, which is often done or implied, would be a mistake. Although their validity may have been proven in certain contexts, it must be remembered that these contexts are not shared by all, or even a majority of the population. Since the image, and not its associations, is what we receive today through television and the rest of the media, the context of the vampire is determined by the psyche it enters, and thus varies from individual to individual. This accounts for its diversity of interpretation that we witness today.

The Antechrist
Another interesting origin of the vampire is the negative image of the Christ. A series of oppositions can be easily described:

Blood
Blood represents life in the Christian religion and the Eucharestia is the transformation of wine into blood, bread into flesh. The vampire is the total negation of all the symbol of the Eucharestia as Dracula sucks the blood that Jesus is giving away. More interesting is the process of contamination by which the Vampire is dividing himself into new Vampires by having them drunk his own dark blood.

Eternity
As the Christ lives in Eternity, the vampire is dealing time against blood. The vampire is moving in an endless time, as the Christ will come back at the end of times.

Give / Take
Christ is the source, an energy that radiates, and a supernovae. Dracula is the end, a place where nothing comes out, and a black hole. Christ gives his life to save humanity as Dracula takes the other’s lifes to save him from returning to dust.

The Passion
Both are lying on wood before they die – Christ against a cross and Dracula in the wooden coffin. The nails of the cross correspond to the fangs of the vampire. Christ dies loosing his blood from the wounds caused by the nails on the Golgotha as Dracula sucks the blood with his fangs causing his victim’s death for his own survival.

Saints and martyrs are sometime bearing the stigmata from the Christ as the victims of the vampires are marked by the two little holes from the kiss of the vampire.

The hammer / the spear / the stake
There is a parallel between the roman soldier that put his spear into Jesus’ chest and the killing of the vampire through the perforation of his heart with a stake. On one hand Christ lives the divine escaping from his wound and on the other hand Dracula is destroyed by the world that brutally invades his body.

The dove / the moon
To the holy couple sun/dove correspond the satanic couple moon/bat.

Blood and vampirism
Vampires do not necessarily kill their victims, it seems that they need a relatively small amount of blood daily from their victims. Most time, the victim eventually dies exhausted by the constant drain of blood but only when the vampire is feeding night after night on the same body. Being evil, most vampires take pleasure in killing their victims, justifying their act by the desire to remain secret or to save their victim’s soul from being damned.

Vampires can live without feeding for long periods of time, entering a state of hibernation where they almost don’t move, sleeping or remaining in the dark without moving.

If the victim is not killed, he/she will turn into a vampire within 2 to 7 days (varying according to the stories). The master will then initiate the newborn vampire until he can survive by himself. The victim must drink the blood of the vampire. This is the act that van Helsing calls 'the vampire's baptism of blood.’ Once the victim has swallowed the vampire blood, the victim dies as for a poison to reborn as vampire. The victim is under the mental domination of the master vampire and can only exert an independent will during the daylight hours or when the master vampire consciously releases his control. Only the death of the master vampire can free the victim from its curse and only if he has not killed to sustain his blood feed.

It is not widely accepted if vampires can live on animal blood. In European folklore vampires were reported to have assaulted cattle and other domestic animals. In some regions the vampires appear to have fed mainly off the cattle and sheep herds of the peasants.

In our modern society, one could think that it would be easy to spot vampires only by following the murder cases. However, the vampire is a clever creature that can easily dispose of the body of its victims (that would account for “missing persons”) or simply buy its gallon of blood from a “Blood bank” or a hospital thus living no traces of its existence to mortals.

Blood is the vital element of the vampire; he cannot survive without feeding with fresh blood. As every myth, the vampire is related to the eternal struggle between Life and Death, Good and Evil and it is no wonder if we find a lot of parallel between the Myth of the Vampire and Christian symbols

Other theories
You may subscribe or not to these theories. They have been stated because they exist but to most of our knowledge there are no serious proofs to sustain them.

The Hormone Theory
According to this theory, the vampire is the next step of human evolution. A genetic complex present inside our body but usually dormant get activated by a hormone brought in from an external source. The hormone transforms the victim's physical form and the new vampire will be able to inject the hormone into another victim.

The Fallen Angels Theory

This theory inspired from the Books of Enoch claims that vampires are the offspring of the union between the Watchers (Fallen Angels) and humans. When the Children of the Watchers had consumed all of the food available, they turned to mankind and began to eat their flesh and drink their blood. In another adjunct, vampires are the offspring of the daughters of Eve (female humans) and the Angel of Death sent by God on Earth. Vampires have the mission to control and thwart the demonic offspring of the fallen angels.

The Nanobot Theory

Nanobots, created either by renegade scientists or a race of reptilians, were introduced into a handful of human bodies in order to repair damaged cells. These nanobots performed so well that they rendered their hosts immortal. However, the Nanobots themselves are not immortal and must self-replicate by utilizing the iron atoms from the hemoglobin in the host's red blood cells. The result of this nanoreplication process is the constant need for sufficient supplies of blood. Unable to keep up with the demand, the host has no choice but to seek out blood from others. If the colony of Nanobots exceeds the host's ability to supply sufficient RBCs, some nanobots may migrate into another host, usually the next victim of the primary host's bite.

The Atlantis Theory

The Atlantans, in their quest to prolong life, have conducted biological and genetic experiments which end result was a new human that could live for centuries but had to drink the blood of humans in order to survive. Vampires have escaped the Great Flood as the Atlantans, not satisfied with the results, had buried them in an underground crypt.

The Alien Vampire Theory

Since H.G. Wells’ "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid" in 1894, there has been many writings and movies exploring the possibility of a space alien taking over a human body in order to live off the life energies of others. Those space aliens are some kind of parasites that control our mind and draw our vital forces. When they have exhausted the body, they look for a new host. In another adjunct, vampires do not come from outter space but from another dimension.

TYPES OF VAMPIRE;- there are 3 types of vampire

According to the classical definition that reigned in the middle-age, a vampire is an animated corpse that survives by drinking the blood of the living. It also has a demonic nature and is a servant of Satan, dedicated to spreading its evil throughout the world.

In the Chapter 18 of “Dracula” from Bram Stoker, we found an interesting description from Professor Van Helsing

The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting once. He is stronger; and being stronger, yet have more power to work evil. This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages; he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination of the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat - the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown. .

But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we became as him; “Take it, then, that the vampire, and the belief in his limitations and his cure, rest for the moment on the same base”. For, let me tell you, he is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chernosese; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even he is, and the peoples fear him at this day. He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar. So far, then, we have all we may act upon; and let me tell you that very much of the beliefs are justified by what we have seen in our own unhappy experience. The vampire lives on, and cannot die by mere passing of time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty. But he cannot flourish without his diet;

In the records are such words as 'stregoica' - witch, 'ordog,' and 'pokol' - Satan and hell; and in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as 'wampyr,' which we all understand too well. There have been from the loins of this very one great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest.

The Psychic Vampire
Psychic vampires are people who have the ability, consciously or unconsciously of draining energy from others. Wether this ability was developed through meditation, mentally altering drug usage, or inherited, it can be used by the Psychic Vampire to drain energy for its own use.

In the mid-1800s, members of The Theosophical Society theorized two types of psychic vampires. One was the 'astral vampire', described by Henry Steele Olcott as undead but able to separate his astral body from his material body and leave the grave in search of blood or energy from the living, which he would gobble up and send directly to the buried body in order to sustain its hold on life. The other was the 'magnetic vampire', described by Franz Hartmann as a living 'psychic sponge' who absorbed the energy of those around her.

Although psychic vampirism seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, legends about vampirelike beings that drain the body of its energy or 'life-force', soul or vitality, who use humans as a means of procreation, predate blood-drinking revenants by thousands of years.

The Blood Fetish Vampire
The Blood Fetish Vampire is a human that has a strange attraction to blood. Although blood induces vomiting in humans, these Blood Fetish Vampires are able to swallow it. Blood cannot be digested by humans for energy, and is no different in these Blood Fetish Vampires, which pass the blood out in their dung, urine, and sweat gland excretions. There really is no explanation as to why certain humans have these blood fetishes, but some of the afflicted actually believe they are Biological Vampires. They may bleach their skin lighter, sleep in coffins, or have their teeth capped to create fangs. Classic and Biological vampires, being immune to all forms of disease, have nothing to worry about by drinking blood. However, these Blood Fetish Vampires can contract AIDS, or any other communicable disease via the blood they ingest

Freebird · Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 3:05 pm Post subject: Vampires

Vampires

Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings that subsist on human and/or animal lifeforce. In most cases, they are reanimated corpses who feed by draining and consuming the blood of living beings. In folklore, the term usually refers to the blood-drinking humans of Eastern European legends, but the term is often applied to similar legendary creatures from other regions and cultures. The characteristics of vampires vary widely among these different traditions. Some cultures also have stories of non-human vampires, including real animals such as bats, dogs, spiders, and mythical creatures such as the chupacabra.

Vampires are a frequent subject of fictional books and films, although fictional vampires are often attributed traits distinct from those of folkloric vampires.

Vampirism is the practice of drinking blood from a person or animal. In folklore and popular culture, the term refers to a belief that one can gain supernatural powers by drinking human blood. The historical practice of vampirism can generally be considered a more specific and less commonly occurring form of cannibalism. The consumption of another's blood (or flesh) has been used as a tactic of psychological warfare intended to terrorize the enemy, and can be used to reflect various spiritual beliefs.

In zoology and botany, the term vampirism is used in reference to leeches, mosquitos, mistletoe, vampire bats, and other organisms that subsist on the bodily fluids of others.

Vampire Analogies in Ancient Cultures

Tales of the dead craving blood are found in nearly every culture around the world, including some of the most ancient ones. Vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are mentioned in early Babylonian demonology, and the even more ancient bloodsucking Akhkharu[citation needed] in Sumerian mythology. These female demons were said to roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and killing newborn babies and pregnant women. One of the demons, named Lilitu, was later adapted to Jewish demonology as Lilith.

In India, tales of vetalas, ghoul-like beings that inhabit corpses, are found in old Sanskrit folklore. A prominent story tells of King Vikramaditya and his nightly quests to capture an elusive vetala. The vetala legends have been compiled in the book Baital Pachisi. The vetala is an undead creature, who like the bat associated with modern day vampirism, hangs upside down on trees found in cremation grounds and cemeteries.

The hopping corpse is an equivalent of the vampire in Chinese tradition; however, it consumes the victim's life essence (chi or qi) rather than blood.

The Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet in one myth became full of bloodlust after slaughtering humans and was only sated after drinking alcohol colored as blood.

The strix, a nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood is mentioned in Roman tales. The Romanian word for vampires, strigoi, is derived from the word, as is the name of the Albanian Shtriga, but the myths about those creatures show primarily Slavic influence.

As an example of the prominence of similar legends in later times, it can be noted that 12th century English historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded accounts of revenants that arguably bear some resemblance to East European vampires.

Folk Beliefs in Vampires

The vampire myth as we know it is most strongly rooted in East European (particularly Slavic) folklore. Here, vampires are usually revenants of suicide victims, criminals or evil sorcerers, though in some cases a vampire could pass his vampirism onto his innocent victims. It was also thought that a victim of a cruel, untimely or violent death was susceptible to becoming a vampire. Vampires were accused of killing people, often by drinking blood, but also by throttling, or sitting on them to prevent breathing. In this folklore, a vampire could be destroyed by cutting off its head, by driving a wooden stake into its heart, or by burning the corpse.

Slavic Vampires

In Slavic lore, causes of vampirism include being born with a caul, teeth or tail, being conceived on certain days, "unnatural" death, excommunication, and improper burial rituals. Many Serbians believed that having red hair was a vampiric trait. Preventive measures included placing a crucifix in the coffin, placing blocks under the chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the same reason, putting sawdust in the coffin (so that the vampire awakens in the evening and compelled to count every grain of sawdust, which occupies the entire evening, so he will die when at dawn) or piercing the body with thorns or stakes. In the case of stakes, the general idea was to pierce through the vampire and into the ground below, pinning the body down. Certain people would bury those believed to be potential vampires with scythes above their necks, so the dead would decapitate themselves as they rose.

Evidence that a vampire was active in a given locality included death of cattle, sheep, relatives or neighbours; an exhumed body being in a lifelike state with new growth of the fingernails or hair; a body swelled up like a drum; or blood on the mouth coupled with a ruddy complexion.

Vampires, like other Slavic legendary monsters, were afraid of garlic and were compelled to count particles of grain, sawdust, and the like. Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (the Kashubs placed the head between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, sprinkling holy water on the body, or exorcism. The most famous Serbian vampire was Sava Savanovic, famous from a folklore-inspired novel by Milovan Glisic. As mentioned above, the Old Russian anti-pagan work Word of Saint Grigoriy (written in the 11th or 12th century) claims that polytheistic Russians made sacrifices to vampires.

Romanian Vampires

Tales of vampiric entities were found among the ancient Romans and the Romanized inhabitants of eastern Europe, Romanians (known as Vlachs in historical context). Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it is not surprising that Romanian and Slavic vampires are similar. Romanian vampires are called Strigoi, based on the ancient Greek term strix for screech owl, which also came to mean demon or witch.

There are different types of Strigoi. Live Strigoi are live witches who will become vampires after death. They have the ability to send out their souls at night to meet with other witches or with Strigoi, which are reanimated bodies that return to suck the blood of family, livestock, and neighbours. Other types of vampires in Romanian folklore include Moroi and Pricolici.

Romanian tradition described a myriad of ways of bringing about a vampire. A person born with a caul, an extra nipple, a tail, or extra hair was doomed to become a vampire. The same fate applied to someone born too early, someone whose mother encountered a black cat crossing her path, and someone who was born out of wedlock. Others who became vampires were those who died an unnatural death or before baptism, the seventh child in any family (presuming all of his or her previous siblings were of the same sex), the child of a pregnant woman who avoided eating salt, and a person who was looked upon by a vampire or a witch. Moreover, being bitten by a vampire meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.

The Varcolac, which is sometimes mentioned in Romanian folklore, was more closely related to a mythological wolf that could devour the sun and moon (similar to Skoll and Hati in Norse mythology), and hence later became connected with werewolves rather than vampires. (A person afflicted with lycanthropy could turn into a dog, pig, or wolf.) The vampire was usually first noticed when it attacked family and livestock, or threw things around in the house. Vampires were believed to be most active on the eve of two religious holidays, the Feast of St. George (Julian calendar, May 4-5 Gregorian calendar April 22-23) and the Feast of St. Andrew . (Julian calendar, November 23-24. Gregorian calendar, November 29-30) The explanation of two calendar dates are given because Romanians used the old Julian calendar, while as displayed in Stoker¹s novel, the modern Gregorian calendar was used. The difference in time between the two calendars was 12 days. Also, it should be noted that the lag time between the old Julian calendar and the modern Gregorian calendar increases one day every century.

The Feast of St. George was a very important festival in honor of St. George. Also known as the Great Martyr, George was a beloved Saint. Not only was he acknowledge as the patron of England, but many other countries as well. He was also the patron of horses, cattle, wolves, and all enemies of witches and vampires. It was on St. George¹s eve that vampires all the forces of evil were most exquisite. People would remain in their homes with continuous light throughout the night. They placed thorns across thresholds, painted crosses on their doors with tar, put thistles on windows, lit bonfires, and spread garlic everywhere they could. Through out the night, prayers would be recited repeatedly and naked blades placed beneath their pillows. If the night went well without any occurrences , the saint¹s feast was celebrated with much exuberance that day. The thorns and garlic were then replaced by Roses and other flowers. Bram Stoker, having done his research on vampire lore for his 1897 novel Dracula, included the fear of the villagers on St. George¹s Eve to warn Jonathan Harker that at midnight ³all the evil things in the world will have full sway."

The Feast of St. Andrew, accompanied with the Feast of St. George and Easter was acknowledged as one of the most feared times of the year in Romania. The Feast of St. Andrew was in honor of St. Andrew who was the patron of wolves and donor of garlic. It was on St. Andrew¹s Eve, in certain parts of Romania, that the vampire was believed to be the most active and dangerous, the vampires was also believed to continue their activity through out the winter and rest at epiphany (January). During these perilous times, it was considered wise to rub garlic on the doors and windows to protect families within the residence from any vampire attacks. Livestock was also at risk of an attack, so precautions were taken with them as well by rubbing them down with garlic.

A vampire in the grave could be discerned by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse with a red face, or with one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were identified by distributing garlic in church and observing who would refuse to eat it.

Graves were often opened three years after the death of a child, five years after the death of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for Vampirism.

Measures to prevent a person from becoming a vampire included removing the caul from a newborn and destroying it before the baby could eat it, careful preparation of dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing over the corpse, placing a thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on windows and rubbing it on cattle, especially on St George's and St Andrew's day.

To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body, followed by decapitation and placing garlic in the mouth. By the 19th century, one would also shoot a bullet through the coffin. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed with water, and administered to family members as a cure.

Greek Vampires

Belief in vampires was common in nineteenth century Greece.[20] Greek customs may have propagated this belief, notably a ritual that entailed exhuming the deceased after three years of death, and observing the extent of decay. If the body was fully decayed, the remaining bones were put in a box by relatives and wine poured over them, a priest would then read from scriptures. However, if the body had not sufficiently decayed, the corpse would be labelled a vampire.

According to Greek beliefs, vampirism could occur through various means: excommunication or desecrating a religious day, committing a great crime, or dying alone. Other more superstitious causes include having a cat jump across the grave, eating meat from a sheep killed by a wolf or having been cursed. It was also believed in more remote regions of Greece that unbaptized people would be doomed to vampirism in the afterlife.

The appearance of vampires varied throughout Greece and were usually thought to be indistinguishable from living people, giving rise to many folk tales with this theme. However, this was not the case everywhere: on Mount Pelion vampires glowed in the dark, while on the Saronic islands vampires were thought to be hunchbacks with long nails; on the island of Lesbos vampires were thought to have long canine teeth much like wolves.

Vampires could be harmless, sometimes returning to support their widows by their work. However, they were usually thought to be ravenous predators, killing their victims who would be condemned to become vampires. Vampires were so feared for their potential for great harm, that a village or an island would occasionally be stricken by a mass panic if a vampire invasion were believed imminent. Nicholas Dragoumis records such a panic on Naxos in the 1930s, following a cholera epidemic.

Varieties of wards were employed for protection in different places, including blessed bread (antidoron) from the church, crosses and black-handled knives. To prevent vampires from rising from the dead, their hearts were pierced with iron nails whilst resting in their graves, or their bodies burned and the ashes scattered. Because the Church opposed burning people who had received the myron of chrismation in the baptism ritual, cremation was considered a last resort.

Roma and Indian Vampire Beliefs

Even today, Roma frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced by the Bram Stoker's Dracula, in which the Szgany Roma served Dracula, carrying his boxes of earth and guarding him.

Traditional Romani beliefs claim that the dead soul enters a world similar to ours except that there is no death. The soul lingers next to the body and sometimes wants to return to life. The Roma legends of the living dead have indeed enriched the vampire legends of Hungary, Romania and the Slavic world.

The ancient home of the Roma, India, describes many vampire entities. The Bhut or Pret is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wanders around animating dead bodies at night, attacking the living much like a ghoul. In northern India, there is the Brahmarak Shasa, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood. Vetala and pishacha are other creatures who resemble vampires to an extent. Since Hinduism believes in reincarnation of the soul, it is supposed that leading an unholy or immoral life, sin or suicide, will lead the soul to reincarnate into such evil spirits. This kind of reincarnation does not arise out of birth from a womb, but is achieved directly, and such evil spirits' fate is predetermined as to how they shall achieve liberation from that yoni, and re-enter the world of mortal flesh in the next incarnation.

The most famous Indian deity associated with drinking blood is Kali, who has fangs, wears a garland of corpses or skulls and has four arms. Her temples are located near cremation grounds. She and the goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija who could reproduce himself from each drop of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so none was spilled, thereby winning the battle and killing him.

Sara, or the Black Goddess, is the form in which Kali survived among Roma. Some Roma believe that the three Marys from the New Testament went to France and baptised a Gypsy called Sara. They still hold a ceremony every May 24 in the French village where this is supposed to have occurred. Some refer to their Black Goddess as "Black Cally" or "Black Kali". One form of vampire in Romani folklore is called a mullo (one who is dead). This vampire is believed to return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a person (usually a relative who had caused their death, or did not properly observe the burial ceremonies, or who kept the deceased's possessions instead of destroying them as was proper). Female vampires could return, lead a normal life and even marry but would eventually exhaust the husband.

Anyone who had a horrible appearance, was missing a finger, or had appendages similar to those of an animal, was believed to be a vampire. If a person died unseen, he would become a vampire, likewise if a corpse swelled before burial. Dogs, cats, plants or even agricultural tools could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons kept in the house too long would start to move, make noises or show blood. (See the article on vampire watermelons.)

To get rid of a vampire, one could hire a Dhampir (the son of a vampire and his widow) or a Moroi to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, Gypsies drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it, as well as decapitating or burning the corpse.

According to the late Serbian ethnologist Tatomir Vukanovic, Roma people in Kosovo believed that vampires were invisible to most people, but could be seen "by a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday who wear their drawers and shirts inside out." Likewise, a settlement could be protected from a vampire "by finding a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday and making them wear their shirts and drawers inside out...This pair could see the vampire out of doors at night, but immediately after it saw them it would have to flee, head over heels."

Also, some believe that vampires may have the attributes of aliens thus some think they are not of Earth at all. They would rather be considered demons as the 13th century folklore may have suggested.

Some Common Traits of Vampires in Folklore

It is difficult to make a single description of the folkloric vampire, because its properties vary widely between different cultures.

* The appearance of the European folkloric vampire contained mostly features by which one was supposed to tell a vampiric corpse from a normal one, when the grave of a suspected vampire was opened. The vampire has a "healthy" appearance and ruddy skin, he is often plump, his nails and hair have grown and, above all, he/she is not in the least decomposed or in anyway pale.

* The most common ways to destroy the vampire are driving a wooden stake through the heart, decapitation, and incinerating the body completely. Ways to prevent a suspected vampire from rising from the grave in the first place include burying it upside-down, severing the tendons at the knees, or placing poppy seeds on the ground at the gravesite of a presumed vampire in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting. Chinese narratives about vampires also state that if a vampire comes across a sack of rice, s/he will have to count all of the grains. There are similar myths recorded on the Indian Subcontinent. South American tales of witches and other sorts of evil or mischievous spirits or beings have a similar aspect to it.

* Apotropaics, i.e. objects intended to inhibit or ward off vampires (as well as other evil supernatural creatures), include garlic (confined mostly to European legends), sunlight, a branch of wild rose, the hawthorn plant, and all things sacred (e.g., holy water, a crucifix, a rosary) or an Aloe vera plant hung backwards behind the door or near it, in South American superstition. This weakness on the part of the vampire varies depending on the tale. In stories of other regions, other plants of holy or mystical properties sometimes have similar effects. In Eastern legends, vampiric creatures are often similarly warded by holy devices such as Shinto seals.

* Vampires are sometimes considered to be shape-shifters not limited to the common bat stereotype depicted in cartoons and movies. (Rather, vampires are said to morph into a wide variety of animals such as wolves, rats, moths, spiders, and so on).

* Some Vampires in European folklore are said to cast no shadow and no reflection, perhaps arising from folklore regarding the vampire's lack of a soul. However this was not universal as the Ustrel (Poland) and Vrykolakos/Tympanios (Balkans) did supposedly cast shadows and reflections.

* Some traditions hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless invited, although they only have to be invited once after this they can come and go as they please without further permission.

* Roman Catholic tradition holds that vampires cannot enter a church or holy place, as they are servants of the devil.

Eighteenth Century Vampire Controversy

During the 18th century, there was a major vampire scare in Eastern Europe. Even government officials frequently got dragged into the hunting and staking of vampires.

The panic began with an outbreak of alleged "vampire" attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Habsburg Monarchy from 1725 to 1734. Two famous vampire cases (which were the first to be officially recorded) involved Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole from Serbia. As the story goes, Plogojowitz died at the age of 62, but came back a couple of times after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the next day. Plogojowitz soon returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood. In the other famous case, Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who allegedly was attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After his death, people began to die, and it was widely believed that Paole had returned to prey on the neighbors.

These two incidents were extremely well documented. Government officials examined (and wrote reports of) the cases and the bodies, and books were published afterwards of the Paole case and distributed around Europe. The controversy raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural epidemics of so-claimed vampire attacks, with locals digging up bodies. Many scholars said vampires did not exist, and attributed reports to premature burial, or rabies. Nonetheless, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well-respected French theologian and scholar, put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746, which was at least ambiguous concerning the existence of vampires, if not admitting it explicitly. He amassed reports of vampire incidents and numerous readers, including both a critical Voltaire and supportive demonologists, interpreted the treatise as claiming that vampires exist. In his Philosophical Dictionary,Voltaire wrote on the vampires:

These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer.

According to some recent research, and judging from the second edition of the work in 1751, Calmet was actually somewhat sceptical towards the vampire concept as a whole. He did acknowledge that parts of the reports, such as the preservation of corpses, might be true. Whatever his personal convictions were, Calmet's apparent support for vampire belief had considerable influence on other scholars at the time.

Eventually, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician, Gerhard van Swieten, to investigate. He concluded that vampires do not exist, and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies. This was the end of the vampire epidemics. By then, though, many knew about vampires, and soon authors would adopt and adapt the concept of vampire, making it known to the general public.

New England

During the late 18th and 19th centuries the belief in vampires was widespread in parts of New England, particularly in Rhode Island and Eastern Connecticut. In this region there are many documented cases of families disinterring loved ones and removing their hearts in the belief that the deceased was a vampire who was responsible for sickness and death in the family (although the word "vampire" was never used to describe him/her). The deadly tuberculosis, or "consumption" as it was known at the time, was believed to be caused by nightly visitations on the part of a dead family member (who had died of consumption him/herself). The most famous (and latest recorded) case is that of nineteen year old Mercy Brown who died in Exeter, Rhode Island in 1892. Her father, assisted by the family physician, removed her from her tomb two months after her death. Her heart was cut out then burnt to ashes. An account of this incident was found among the papers of Bram Stoker and the story closely resembles the events in his classic novel, Dracula.

Modern Belief in Vampires

Belief in vampires persists to this day. While some cultures preserve their original traditions about the immortal, most modern-day believers are more influenced by the fictional image of the vampire as it occurs in films and literature. In the 1970s, there were rumours (spread by the local press) that a vampire haunted Highgate Cemetery in London. Amateur vampire hunters flocked in large numbers in the cemetery. Several books have been written about the case, notably by Sean Manchester, a local man who was among the first to suggest the existence of the "Highgate Vampire" and who later claimed to have exorcised and destroyed a whole nest of vampires in the area. In the modern folklore of Puerto Rico and Mexico, the chupacabra (goat-sucker) is said to be a creature that feeds upon the flesh or drinks the blood of domesticated animals, leading some to consider it a kind of vampire. The "chupacabra hysteria" was frequently associated with deep economic and political crises, particularly during the mid-1990s.

During late 2002 and early 2003, hysteria about alleged attacks of vampires swept through the African country of Malawi. Mobs stoned one individual to death and attacked at least four others, including Governor Eric Chiwaya, based on the belief that the government was colluding with vampires.

In Romania during February of 2004, several relatives of the late Toma Petre feared that he had become a vampire. They dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it.

In January 2005, rumours began to circulate that an attacker had bitten a number of people in Birmingham, England, fueling concerns about a vampire roaming the streets. However, local police stated that no such crime had been reported. This case appears to be an urban legend.

In 2006, Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi published a piece that uses geometric progression to attempt to disprove the feeding habits of vampires, stating that, if each vampire's nourishment depended on making even one other person a vampire, it would only be a matter of years before the Earth's entire population was among the undead or vampires died out (compare matrix scheme). However, the notion that a vampire's victims must themselves become vampires does not appear in all vampire folklore, and is not universally accepted by modern vampire believers. This theory also assumes that a single bite turns the victim into a vampire, which is not generally the case in most vampire lore.

In March 2007, self-proclaimed vampire hunters broke into the tomb of Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, and staked his body through the heart into the ground. Although the group involved claimed this act was to prevent Milosevic from returning as a vampire, it is not known whether those involved actually believed this could happen or if the crime was simply politically motivated.

Natural Phenomena that Propagate the Belief in Vampires

Pathology and Vampirism

Folkloric vampirism has typically been associated with a series of deaths due to unindentifiable or mysterious illnesses, usually within the same family or the same small community. The "epidemic pattern" is obvious in the classical cases of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole, and even more so in the case of Mercy Brown and in the vampire beliefs of New England generally, where a specific disease, tuberculosis, was associated with outbreaks of vampirism.

In his book, De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1725), Michaël Ranft makes a first attempt to explain folk's belief in vampires in a natural way. He says that, in the event of the death of every villager, some other person or people - much probably a person related to the first dead - who saw or touched the corpse, would eventually die either of some disease related to exposure to the corpse or of a frenetic delirium caused by the panic of merely seeing the corpse.

These dying people would say that the dead man had appeared to them and tortured them in many ways. The other people in the village would exhume the corpse to see what it had been doing. He gives the following explanation when talking about the case of Peter Plogojowitz: "This brave man perished by a sudden or violent death. This death, whatever it is, can provoke in the survivors the visions they had after his death. Sudden death gives rise to inquietude in the familiar circle. Inquietude has sorrow as a companion. Sorrow brings melancholy. Melancholy engenders restless nights and tormenting dreams. These dreams enfeeble body and spirit until illness overcomes and, eventually, death."

Some modern scholars have argued that vampire stories may have been influenced by a rare illness called porphyria. The disease is a blood disorder that disrupts the production of haem. Porphyria was thought to be more common than elsewhere in small Transylvanian villages (roughly 1000 years ago) where inbreeding probably occurred. The haem group, found in every blood cell in the human body, is excited by electrons, but in a controlled fashion. However, the haem groups in porphyria sufferers causes uncontrollable tissue, bone and skin damage, made worse when the person comes into contact with sunlight.

This would have given the porphyria sufferer a very pallid skin colour, with teeth that appear larger than normal, due to the porphyria damaging the gum tissue and causing it to recede. These people would have been very anemic, and drinking (animal) blood was a traditional treatment for anemia.

Certain forms of porphyria are also associated with neurological symptoms, which can create psychiatric disorders. However, suggestions that porphyria sufferers crave the heme in human blood, or that the consumption of blood might ease the symptoms of porphyria, are based on a severe misunderstanding of the disease.

Another disease that has been linked with vampire folklore is rabies. Dr Juan Gomez-Alonso, a neurologist at Xeral Hospital in Vigo, Spain, examined this in a report in the journal Neurology. The susceptibility to garlic and light could be due to hypersensitivity, which is a symptom of rabies. The disease can also affect portions of the brain that could lead to disturbance of normal sleep patterns (i.e., becoming nocturnal) and hypersexuality. Legend once said a man was not rabid if he could look at his own reflection, which relates to the legend of a vampire not having a reflection. Wolves and bats, which are often associated with vampires, can be carriers of rabies. The disease can also lead to a drive to bite others, and to a bloody frothing at the mouth.

Some psychologists in modern times recognize a disorder called clinical vampirism (or Renfield's Syndrome, from Dracula's insect-eating henchman, Renfield, in the novel by Bram Stoker) in which the victim is obsessed with drinking blood, either from animals or humans.

There have been a number of murderers who performed seemingly vampiric rituals upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kurten and Richard Trenton Chase were both called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the people they murdered. Similarly, in 1932, an unsolved murder case in Stockholm, Sweden, was nicknamed the "Vampire murder", due to the circumstances of the victim¹s death.

Finding "vampires" in Graves

When the coffin of an alleged vampire was opened, people sometimes found that the cadaver did not look as they thought a normal corpse should. This was often taken to be evidence of vampirism. However, corpses decompose at different speeds depending on temperature and soil composition, and some of the signs of decomposition are not widely known. This has led vampire hunters to mistakenly conclude that a dead body had not decomposed at all, or, ironically, to interpret signs of decomposition as signs of continued life.

Corpses swell as gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso and blood tries to escape the body. This causes the body to look "plump", "well-fed" and "ruddy" - changes that are all the more striking if the person was pale or thin in life. In the Arnold Paole case, an old woman's exhumed corpse was judged by her neighbours to look more plump and healthy than she had ever looked in life. It should be noted that folkloric accounts almost universally represent the alleged vampire as having ruddy or dark skin, not the pale skin of vampires in literature and film. Darkening of the skin is also caused by decomposition.

Blood can often be seen emanating from nose and mouth of a decomposing corpse, which could give the impression that the corpse was a vampire who had recently been drinking blood. The staking of a swollen, decomposing body could cause the body to bleed and also force the accumulated gases to escape the body. This could produce a groan when the gases moved past the vocal chords, or a sound reminiscent of flatus when they passed through the anus.

The official reporting on the Peter Plogojowitz case speaks of "other wild signs which I pass by out of high respect". After death, the skin and gums lose fluids and contract, exposing the roots of the hair, nails, and teeth, even teeth that were concealed in the jaw. This can produce the illusion that the hair, nails, and teeth have grown. At a certain stage, the nails fall off and the skin peels away, as reported in the Plogojowitz case - the dermis and nail beds emerging underneath were interpreted as "new skin" and "new nails". Finally, decomposition also causes the body to shift or contort itself, adding to the illusion that the corpse has been active after death.

It has also been hypothesized that vampire legends were influenced by individuals being literally buried alive, due to primitive knowledge in medicine. In some cases where people reported sounds emanating from a specific coffin, it was later dug up and fingernail marks were discovered on the inside from the victim trying to escape. In other cases the person would hit their heads/noses/faces and it would appear that they had been "feeding".

Vampire Bats

Bats have become an integral part of the traditional vampire only recently, although many cultures have stories about them. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. Conversely, the Gypsies thought them lucky and wore charms made of bat bones. In English heraldic tradition, a bat means "Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos".

In South America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld. The three species of actual vampire bats are all endemic to Latin America, and there is no evidence to suggest that they had any Old World relatives within human memory. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the folkloric vampire represents a distorted presentation or memory of the bat. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with vampire bats and recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their legendary vampires. The bats were named after the folkloric vampire rather than vice versa; the Oxford English Dictionary records the folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological not until 1774. It wasn't long before vampire bats were adapted into fictional tales, and they have become one of the more important vampire associations in popular culture.

Vampires in Fiction and Popular Culture

Lord Byron arguably introduced the vampire theme to Western literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813), but it was John Polidori who authored the first "true" vampire story called "The Vampyre". Polidori was the personal physician of Byron and the vampire of the story, Lord Ruthven, is based partly on him, making the character the first of our now familiar romantic vampires. The "ghost story competition" that spawned this piece was the same competition that motivated Mary Shelley to write her novel Frankenstein, another archetypal monster story. Other examples of early vampire stories are Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel and Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire story, Carmilla.

Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive version of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common. Stoker's writings are also adapted in many later works. In modern popular culture, book series by Anne Rice, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Stephenie Meyer, as well as many other popular novels, feature vampires.

Vampires have also proved to be a rich subject for the film and gaming industries. Television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Konami's Castlevania and Crystal Dynamics' Legacy of Kain video game series, role-playing games such as Vampire: the Masquerade, and Kouta Hirano's Hellsing manga have been especially successful and influential.

Levibrawn · Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 23 Location: Usa;- NY

The Vampires of the Borders

Stories of vampirism are rife in all the countries that make up the United Kingdom. Scotland and England have very prolific stories of the vampire and that is no different for the towns that are situated on the Scottish/England border.

The Croglin Vampire case claimed that during the Victorian times a bout of vampirism occurred in a quiet village just 30 miles from the Scottish border, this has been discussed further on this website. Vampires were not restricted to Eastern Europe, as we already know but there were Vampires close to the two border towns of Berwick and Melrose.

The Canon William of Newburgh, a highly respected priest who lived during the reign of Richard I in the thirteenth century, introduced the tale of the Berwick Vampire to folklore. This was the time when plague devastated whole towns and cities in one swoop and the northern counties were no exception.

The William’s story concerns a rich merchant who was a victim of the plague but was known as a religious, thoughtful man. Only after his death did the villagers of Berwick discover that the man had lead a corrupt, sinful life and they denied his burial on consecrated land. Soon after his funeral, inexplicable and terrible incidents took place in Berwick. The merchant had begun to rise from his grave in search of human flesh and blood amongst the villagers. The demented demon would bolt through the streets looking for victims shouting “Until my body is burnt, you folk of Berwick shall have no peace!” Behind the Vampire a pack of howling dogs followed him, their loud baying keeping villagers awake.

The villagers had to end the horror of the Vampire and decided to meet. Ten young farmhands were selected to exhume the merchant’s grave and dismember the body and burn it until only ashes remained.

But tragedy would not go away, shortly after the destruction of the vampire, the plague returned to Berwick levelling half the population. Villagers claimed as they buried their dead that the sound of baying hounds and the fearful screams of the Vampire could be heard.

Canon William also introduced the similar tale of Vampirism that happened in Melrose. The vampire in this case was the “Hundeprest” a priest who enjoyed the material pleasures of life and hunting.

After the priest had died, his former mistress would complain that his loud moans and groans haunted her bedchamber. The church decided to help and sent four monks to despatch the ghost. The monks kept vigil at the priests grave to see if he would rise again. In the days before street lighting the monks sat in darkness, with only the half giving light in the autumn night. The monks expected the Hundeprest to emerge during the witching hour but the hour passed without incident. Chilled to the bone, three monks sought warmth from a nearby cottage.

No sooner had they left the Hundeprest attacked the remaining monk but in the form of a terrible monster. The monk stood his ground as the Hundeprest charged towards him. The monk side-stepped the vampire and swung his axe, driving it deep into the demon. The monster groaned and fled into the night with the brave monk in pursuit. Soon they reached the grave, where the vampire disappeared back in to its grave.

As dawn broke the other monks returned, shocked to hear what had happened, they decided to open up the grave. As they dug, blood seeped through the ground and when the corpse was finally revealed, the corpse looked fresh apart from a huge gaping, bleeding wound. The monks took the corpse away from the monastery and burned it to ashes.