Vampires: A Disturbing History of the Bloodythirsty

Vampires always seem to be having a moment. Maybe it’s because they’re immortal and have a reputation as cool customers, they just never go out of fashion. Legends of blood-suckers in human form have been around for thousands of years and even to this day they are mainstays in the world of literature, film and TV. But are there real stories behind the myths?

And what is this hypnotic hold they seem to have on our imaginations? For the purposes of this article we’re going to focus on the blood-sucking definition of a vampire, rather than the wider varieties that prey on psychic life forces etc. as then we’d be here all day. Got your holy water and garlic ready? Will they even work?

Let’s decode.

Forever Living Legends

You may be wondering why we’re so obsessed with vampires when the general concept of a blood-drinking undead immortal who can sometimes turn themselves into an animal seems a little far-fetched. Well, maybe it’s because they’ve literally been around forever and have been scaring humans silly the whole time. Let’s look at some of the original vampiric hall of famers and see where truth has mingled with fiction.

Sekhmet

Sekhmet was the Ancient Egyptian goddess of war and through her we can trace the beginnings of the vampire legend, or at least recorded mentions of it, to around 1500 BC. Conversely, she was also the goddess of healing but seemed to have a rage on her when she went into battle that could only be calmed by drinking copious amounts of human blood. According to one legend, her father, Ra, told her to teach humanity a lesson for being so naughty which caused her to almost wipe out the entire human race, gaining power from the spilled blood as she went.

In the end, her dad dyed a huge amount of beer red to trick her into drinking that instead, and after probably feeling a bit gassy and needing to pee every five minutes, her thirst for battle was finally quenched. This is one of the earliest known mentions of drinking blood and gaining some sort of power from it and also with her twin statuses of goddess of healing and war, or life and death, Sekhmet seems to be a good candidate for the beginning of the vampire mythos.

Lilith

If you want to go down a bit of a rabbithole, check Lilith out. Some say she was Adam’s original wife, you know, Adam, out of The Bible. In Genesis chapter 1 verse 27, it says:

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them

See, male AND female. Eve doesn’t get a look in until the next chapter when she’s made out of a bit of Adam’s rib. So, according to some folk tales especially in Jewish folklore, Lilith was the first wife but got fed up with the situation almost immediately and buggered off, making babies with an archangel as she went or she was already pregnant thanks to her incredibly shortlived marriage to Adam.

Either way, these offspring became the first incubi and succubi demons that like to molest people in their sleep. Because she had left the Garden of Eden, Lilith, whose name has been translated to mean “night monster”, was now cursed to exist as a demon. She could shapeshift, often becoming an owl, and she would prey on people by drinking their blood.

She was particularly fond of the blood of pregnant women and newborn babies, adding a dash more horror to her story. There’s no real consensus as to the year in which Adam and Eve were created, so let’s just say that this story is many centuries old. Again, we have elements of the recognizable modern-day definition of a vampire: blood sucking and shape shifting in this case.

I’ll just briefly mention here that in reading up on these historical vampires, I came across the story of “Ambrogio” from Greek mythology who was supposedly the first ever vampire. If you read this story, it hits all the modern day vampire tropes like burning up in sunlight, being injured by silver, sucking blood, sleeping in a coffin etc. but it appears that this is actually a modern story someone made up to seemingly try and retroactively create the vampire myth in one neat story. I only really mentioned this in case anyone pipes up about it in the comments.

Yes, while all myths and legends are in essence made up stories, this one is not a historical myth. I thank you.

Let’s jump forward a little in time now to a meeting of reality and fiction. It’s time for:

Vlad the Impaler

Vlad the Impaler has long been thought to be the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s eponymous “Dracula” for a few reasons. Like his literary namesake, the 15th century ruler was born in Romania and ruled over the region which included Transylvania a.k.a. where the fictional Count lived. His official name was Vlad III Dracula and his favourite method of killing his enemies was to have them impaled upon wooden stakes, hence the nickname “Vlad the Impaler”.

It’s estimated that he impaled around 20,000 people during his reign and killed around 60,000 more. I had always thought that by impaling them he just threw people down into a pit lined with sharp stakes but apparently — and this is really grim, sorry — the poles were actually inserted into the victims via eeeeeeeeek a “hole in their undercarriages”, shall we say, and then they were pushed through until they came out of their neck, shoulder or mouth and sometimes they weren’t even sharp so the poor old victim didn’t die for quite a while. I know, sorry!!!

Vlad Dracula’s brutality and the grisliness of his killing methods gave him a fearsome reputation and makes it easy to believe some legends that say things like he dipped his bread in the blood of his enemies and held banquets among the corpses where more than animal meat may have been on the menu. So there you go, we’ve now got the name “Dracula”, blood lust if not actually blood consumption, and the introduction of wooden stakes.

Elizabeth Báthory

Elizabeth Báthory is a familiar figure to any true crime afficionado or kid with a taste for the macabre. She was a Hungarian Countess whose family controlled, where else, the region of Transylvania in the sixteenth century. Báthory was accused of torturing and murdering hundreds of girls and stories were told of how she drank and bathed in the blood of her virginal victims to keep herself looking young.

While it’s probable that the baths of blood are a wild exaggeration at the least, the whole mass murder aspect has also been questioned in modern times with some historians saying that the whole thing was a mixture of political machinations, group hysteria and plain old lies which I actually find a tad disappointing. While the Countess and some servants were reported by one source to have killed up to 650 girls over a twenty year period, no real evidence has been found to support this. Nevertheless, after hundreds of supposed witnesses spoke out against her, she was confined to her castle in 1611 and eventually died there in 1614.

She has gone down in history as the Countess who prolonged her life and beauty by bathing in the blood of her victims, tying her into the world of vampires forever. She’s even immortalised with the Guinness World Record for “Most Prolific Female Murderer” and “Most Prolific Murderer of the Western World” so I guess the evidence was good enough for them.

While Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, which was published in 1897, was not the first vampire literary creation, it was by far the most popular and basically spawned most of, if not all future versions of the vampire in twentieth century culture and beyond.

But let’s stick with history still, for a moment. Because while the vampire has long resided in our collective consciousness as a supernatural and therefore not real being, there have been plenty of cases in human history where “vampires” appeared to be the only conclusion people could come to.

Vampire Hysteria

Oh, the Middle Ages. I’m so glad I didn’t live back then. I mean, I watch things like “The Last Kingdom” and spend a lot of the time thinking how godawful everyone must have smelled.

My old boss once made the point that if you were shortsighted you were probably screwed as you wouldn’t be able to see anything. But anyway, back then, nobody really had much of a clue about how the body worked or what the heck could be causing weird things to happen to people so a lot of the time, demons, witches or vampires were blamed. Just imagine the terror of people in the 1600s, for example, when someone’s skin blistered or burned in direct sunlight, their teeth appeared longer and they started behaving in a strange manner.

Surely they must be vampires? Well, if this happened nowadays, we’d know, or at least you’d hope that a doctor would know, that the person was suffering from some form of porphyria which causes the skin to become highly sensitive to sunlight, can cause lesions and darkening of the teeth, and also gum recession which can make the teeth look longer. In fact, there are many diseases whose symptoms caused the sufferers to be wrongly outed as vampires.

Wasting diseases like tuberculosis and even rabies have stoked vampire rumours all over the world. Rabies had a special link as it’s most commonly found in animals like bats and dogs which are traditionally the animals that a vampire can change into. Plagues were also majorly intertwined with fear of vampires.

Because of the lesions and reddening eyes plague sufferers could have, it wasn’t a big leap to see them as vampires. As plagues are easily spread, it seemed that these vampires were attacking their relatives and loved ones first. Other theories posited that plague vampires chewed dying peoples’ shrouds to spread the disease, rather than drinking their blood but either way it’s pretty unsanitary.

This led to the dead being buried with things jammed in their mouths to stop them from being able to use their fangs should they rise again.

If someone was buried a bit too soon, due to being in a coma or other such state, and then they awoke in their coffin and somebody later opened that coffin, they would probably find a somewhat bloodied corpse that looked decidedly unrested. Add to that the fact that when a body decomposes, it can bloat, with blood-like liquid seepage coming out of the mouth and nose. Open that coffin and what do you see?

A nice plump corpse that looks like it’s just popped back for a nap after feasting on some blood. And conversely, in other burial conditions, the skin can wither and shrink back, making it look like the occupants’ hair is growing, their nails are growing or their teeth are now longer. Now you’ve got more than a few reasons to be a bit superstitious.

Rather than realising these were people who had reawakened or decomposed naturally, some people believed they were the dead come back to life so it became common practice in areas across Europe, especially, to stake bodies through the heart, decapitate them or put them in the coffin face down to prevent them from rising from the grave. In Bulgaria, for example, more than 100 skeletons with stakes through the heart have been discovered, including two in 2015 that are thought to be around 800 years old.

My Favourite Vampire

Everyone has a favourite type of vampire, right? Is yours the suave Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee as Dracula-type, all slick-backed hair, dramatic cloaks and that star-medal thing on a ribbon like he won a gold medal for bloodsucking? Is it the creepy Nosferatu type with his long claws, bald head and bat or rodent-like features?

How about the sparkly-skin forever-teen type of Twilight fame? I hope it isn’t that, I didn’t read the books but the films were really crap. I saw the first two and that was more than enough for me.

Oh noooo, I’ve just remembered about that awful, cringe-inducing spider monkey line from Twilight. For the love of god please don’t put a clip of it in here, nooooooo! Moving on, there’s also the sexy, alluring female vampire, usually pallid with plenty of cleavage.

Yes, it does seem that vampires usually equal sexy. Apart from Nosferatu. Sorry, lad.

Well, why wouldn’t they? In traditional tales, they enjoy biting their victims on the neck, which is pretty intimate, and the act of drinking the blood must take a bit of time so they’re on there for a while. The victim has to give in to a certain extent so the whole thing is an exercise in seduction.

I remember my first introduction to the world of vampires was through a book called “Supernatural Guides: Vampires, Werewolves and Demons”, published by Usborne. This was aimed at kids and gave you information about all sorts of scary characters from legends around the world, accompanied by many a creepy illustration. My favourite vampire from the Supernatural Guide was a bit different from the traditional nobleman type, though.

Known as the Krvoijac (kra-VOY-jac) or Obours, this Bulgarian vampire is notable for only having one nostril. It also has a barbed and pointed tongue to drink the blood of its victims. Apparently the Krvoijac doesn’t need to be bitten by another vampire to become one, it happens if someone broke a promise not to smoke or drink wine during Lent and then subsequently dies.

They stay in their coffin for 40 days before breaking free in all their one-nostriled glory although you can stop them breaking out by putting wild roses on their grave. How do you find the grave though? I’m glad you asked — apparently the best way is by getting a nude virgin teen to ride a black foal around until the foal freaks out and that’s where the grave is.

I really hope this isn’t still a pressing concern in Bulgaria. This nude teen bit wasn’t in my kids vampire book, by the way, it was only the one-nostril detail that really stuck with me. If the vampire has managed to break out already, it can only be defeated by a proper vampire hunter who can capture its spirit in a bottle and then destroy it by throwing it in a fire.

Easy!

And it’s not just the Krvoijac vampire that breaks the hot vampire mould. Have you heard of the Leyak (pronounced Lee-Ack) from Bali? While it has a human form during the day, at night it chucks off its skin suit and flies about as large, wild-eyed, befanged head, with its internal organs just dangling below in the air. It has a penchant for corpses, and newborn and fetal blood and uses them to brew elixirs to help it shapeshift.

How about the Neuntöter from Germany? Literally translating as “nine killers”, it’s said that it takes this vampire 9 days to transform into its undead form. According to the Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, “it is covered with open sores and smells like excrement.” Charming.

There are signs that can point to a heavy predisposition to becoming a Neuntöter and that is if a child is born with teeth which is creepy anyway, or an actual spoon in its mouth. I don’t know how that would ever happen but now you know, so be on the look out and keep those spoons out of your nether regions, especially if you’re pregnant.

Now we’re armed with some of these warning signs, how exactly is one supposed to deal with these undead monsters?

Vampire Slayings 101

There are several ways you can kill a vampire or at least weaken it so you can try to escape. Some of things make sense and others are a bit less obvious but let’s see what handy tips we can extract that might save our souls in the future.

Deny Entry

According to legend, you have to invite a vampire into your home otherwise they can’t come in. This seems easy but vampires often have hypnotic powers that can overcome puny human resistance so keeping one out might be harder than you think. Some theories say that the threshold symbolises a spiritual link that the occupant of the property has with the building itself so if a vampire rocks up at your country pile that’s been in the family for generations, your protection level is going to be pretty high.

If you’ve just moved into a rented flat and haven’t even unpacked your mugs yet, your inbuilt protection level is going to be almost non-existant. If you let a vampire in, it can then come back whenever it wants. In some cases invitations can be rescinded but generally this doesn’t work.

There’s sort of a moral aspect in this part of the folklore too — if you invite strangers into your home, even if they’re really sexy, (maybe especially if they’re really sexy), bad things will happen and you’ve only got yourself to blame. Lots of demons seem to get around the threshold thing by using windows or chimneys, though, so a “no solicitation” sign by your front door probably isn’t going to be enough to stop a hungry vampire. And if you have a doormat with a large “WELCOME” on it, maybe you should consider throwing it in the fire.

That’s just a tip in general, not a vampire-specific one.

Holy Symbols

As vampires are seen as demons, evil beings or unclean in some way, they’re particularly susceptible to things linked to religion. Getting some holy water on a vampire will injure it and can also serve as a protective barrier around people or things. Equally, the symbol of the crucifix will repel a vampire and can burn it if you manage to get close enough to press one onto its skin.

Even now, people will make a cross symbol with their fingers as a quick gesture to enact warding off some sort of evil presence although it’s probably done more as a joke these days like “arrrgh! Get that stinky egg sandwich away from me!” Speaking of sandwiches, there’s also the holy “host” which can be unleavened bread or a wafer symbolising the body of Christ.

This can also be used against the undead as a weapon or crumbled around to form a protective circle etc. Basically, if it’s a Christian symbol, it’s effective against vampires. I do not know if non-Christian symbols have any effect against vampires.

Presumably vampires themselves are not religious so maybe it’s just the faith and belief that the weapon-wielder puts into the weapon that makes it effective? Or maybe vampires are only susceptible to symbols from the faith they were before they died? Listen, vampires aren’t real so this whole section is just hypothesis but it only just then occurred to me that other religious symbols are never really mentioned.

It wasn’t only Christians that got spooked by the vampire idea as blood-sucking demons have appeared in cultures and countries the world over, I guess things like the Dracula novel which did rely heavily on holy wafers and crucifixes just plonked these symbols into the forefront of the narrative.

Garlic

So what about garlic? There are various reasons as to why a vampire might hate the pungent vegetable, the first of which I’ve just given away by saying “pungent”. Yes, apparently the ultra-senstive vampire nose can’t stand the smell of it so it acts as a deterrent.

I haven’t really noticed that bulbs or even peeled cloves of garlic smell that much, to be honest, it’s only when cooking it that I’ve ever really noticed. There are wild garlic plants close to my house though and the flowers on those really do pong a bit so maybe it would be more effective to brandish a handful of the stalks rather than wave a three-pack of bulbs in one of those netted bags at an oncoming vampire. This ties back in to real-life vampire panics as people who contract rabies can also get a hypersensitive sense of smell so probably wouldn’t want to be around garlic too much.

In the past, if you happened across someone who may be wandering around in a confused state, drooling, baring their teeth and agitated and they recoiled at the scent of garlic, you may indeed have believed they were a vampire. Don’t cover yourself in garlic, however, as while it may repel one kind of bloodsucker, other kinds, such as leeches, are actually attracted to it although I suppose you’d need to be near to some leeches for this to be an issue.

Garlic has also been traditionally used as an antibiotic, was seen as a cure-all around the second century CE, and has been an all-star in folk medicine all over the world. This imbues it with an aura of having healing properties which a vampire might want to avoid. In the mythos, vampires are created when they’re bitten by another vampire and / or drink another vampire’s blood.

It’s an infection that turns them into the vampire so if there’s something hanging around that might cure that infection, the vampire will obviously be wary of it. Also, garlic can act as a blood thinner, meaning that your blood would be not as tasty for the undead to feast on.

The Wooden Stake

The old vampire-killing failsafe is a nice wooden stake through the heart. Actually, it’s a failsafe for killing pretty much anything but if we’re talking undead demons, it’s one of the few tried and tested methods that’s come down through the centuries. It may have started as a preventive method for keeping the dead from rising again as, as we mentioned earlier, corpses have been found staked through the heart and actually attached to the coffin so they wouldn’t be able to get out if they did reawaken.

But what makes wood the best material? Well, presumably it was just because wood was easy to get hold of. If folklore told that diamond stakes were the only way to kill vampires, I guess we’d all be undead hotties by now.

Or undead one-nostriled hotties if you live in Bulgaria. Yes, wood was everywhere so luckily it was easy to fashion into spears or stakes or you might even have some pre-sharpened things lying around already like fence posts, anything goes. Some countries give vampire-killing abilities to certain types of tree such as fruit trees, others say hawthorn is the way to go, ash is also very popular but basically if it’s sharp and pointy it will do the trick.

It doesn’t even really have to be wood, just impale that vampire on something and it’s job done.

Heads Off

The only other killing guarantee is chopping off a vampire’s head and then sometimes burning the body or parts of it like the heart for good measure. Again, this is a surefire way of killing anything and anybody but no vampire has survived this strategy. Unless you’re in a large group, have a guillotine lying around or are very handy with a sword though, it’s probably easier to try the stake through the heart method before going for this one.

It’s also worth saying that as these beings come from folk tales and legends, there are no hard and fast rules as to how they behave or what can hurt them. In the Twilight series, for example, sunlight doesn’t hurt the vampires, it just makes them all sparkly looking. Garlic has no effect on the vampire Paul in The Lost Boys. Anne Rice’s vampires aren’t affected by crosses or religious iconography at all and also had supernatural speed and senses which weren’t a particular trope before.

Basically what I’m saying is that about the only thing that holds vampires together any more is the drinking blood and immortality aspect of it. Anyone writing a vampire story today can make up whatever the heck they want. Which leads us on to:

Vampires Today

We all know that vampires are still popular characters in the world of entertainment. “Interview with the Vampire”, “Twilight”, “The Lost Boys”, “Let the Right One In”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and various spin-offs, “What We Do in the Shadows”, “Vampirina”, “Only Lovers Left Alive”, “The Vampire Diaries”, “Being Human”, “Blade”, “Underworld”, “Dracula 2000”, “Nosferatu”, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” — yes the Keanu Reeves one, “True Blood”, “Count Duckula” — and those are the ones I came up with off the top of my head. While Stoker was influenced by previous works of vampire literature, it was his Count Dracula who set the tone for what vampires were supposed to look like for decades.

The silent German 1922 film “Nosferatu” first came up with the supposed “rule” that sunlight killed vampires rather than weakened them as Stoker had written. Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles introduced us to vampires who were complex and emtionally intelligent rather than just bloodthirsty demons and True Blood and Being Human took a look at vampires trying to live their lives alongside the rest of us in modern day society.

Being a vampire or at least looking like one has appealed to many a moody teen over the years but what would happen if you went a step further and started indulging in actual blood sucking? Blood is our life force, after all, so it kind of makes sense that by keeping it topped up, you would gain strength and possibly extend your years. In practice though, it doesn’t work this way.

I mean, it’s pretty obvious otherwise we’d all have done it long ago. I’m sure there are many groups of people that do live some sort of vampiric existence, hopefully for fun rather than in earnest, but a word to the wise that human blood contains a lot of iron and if you consume a lot of it, or drink it regularly, you can suffer from an iron overdose a.k.a. haemochromatosis which can cause all sorts of problems to many parts of your body, including the heart and liver. There is no current cure, but ironically, one of the treatments for haemochromatosis is the regular removal of blood to reduce the amount of iron in your system.

There are some members of the animal kingdom that practice hematophagy, or the consumption of blood, such as the lamprey, the vampire finch and the well-known vampire bat, but it’s really not a good idea for humans to add this to their diets.

So, this is the end, and with a swish of my crimson-lined black cloak, I remind you that you gave permission for this article to enter your brain, and now, I can come back whenever I want.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the earliest known mention of blood-drinking and gaining power from it?

The earliest known mention of drinking blood and gaining power from it is associated with Sekhmet, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of war and healing, around 1500 BC.

Who is Lilith and what is her connection to vampire mythology?

Lilith is a figure from Jewish folklore who is sometimes considered Adam’s first wife. She is associated with vampire mythology due to her ability to shapeshift and prey on people by drinking their blood, particularly that of pregnant women and newborn babies.

What is the historical basis for the character of Dracula?

Vlad the Impaler, a 15th-century ruler from Romania, is often considered the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vlad was known for his brutal methods of killing, including impaling his enemies on wooden stakes, and his name, Vlad III Dracula, and his bloodlust are reflected in the fictional character.

Who is Elizabeth Báthory and what are her connections to vampire lore?

Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian Countess from the sixteenth century who was accused of torturing and murdering hundreds of girls. Stories suggest she drank and bathed in the blood of her virginal victims to maintain her youth and beauty, tying her into vampire mythology.

What are some real-life conditions that were mistaken for vampirism in the past?

Conditions such as porphyria, tuberculosis, and rabies, as well as the natural processes of decomposition, were often mistaken for vampirism. These conditions could cause symptoms like sensitivity to sunlight, lesions, and changes in appearance that were interpreted as signs of vampirism.

What are some traditional methods for repelling or killing vampires?

Traditional methods include denying a vampire entry to your home, using holy symbols like crucifixes and holy water, garlic, and wooden stakes through the heart. Decapitation is also considered a sure way to kill a vampire.

What are some unique vampire legends from different cultures?

Unique vampire legends include the Krvoijac from Bulgaria, which has one nostril and a barbed tongue, the Leyak from Bali, which flies around as a disembodied head with dangling organs, and the Neuntöter from Germany, which is covered with open sores and smells like excrement.

What are some modern interpretations of vampires in literature and media?

Modern interpretations of vampires include complex and emotionally intelligent characters as seen in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, vampires living alongside humans in shows like True Blood and Being Human, and various other portrayals in films and TV shows like Twilight, The Lost Boys, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

What are the potential health risks of consuming human blood?

Consuming human blood can lead to an iron overdose, known as haemochromatosis, which can cause problems for the heart, liver, and other parts of the body. There is no cure for haemochromatosis, but one treatment involves the regular removal of blood to reduce iron levels.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Vampires: A Disturbing History of the Bloodythirsty
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.