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What Exactly Are Vampires?

BatsAndCoffin Vampires are fictitious entities that have been around in folklore for many many centuries, but became very much more “popular” after Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. This is what provided the basis of our modern-day vampire legend. Since then the vampire has become a dominant figure in horror movies, horror stories, novels and of course, Halloween.

According to folklore, vampires were believed to be created by a malevolent or evil spirit possessing a corpse or by being bit by a vampire. Because of this, cultural practices started to arise that were intended to prevent a recently deceased person from supposedly turning into a vampire.

Some examples of these practices that arose were…

To bury the corpse upside-down.
Place earthly objects like sickles or scythes around the grave to ward off the demons from the corpse.
Put a coin in the corpse’s mouth to pay the toll into the underworld, so preventing evil spirits from entering the body.

As the fear of vampires rose, many elaborate rituals to identify vampires also arose. Holes appearing in the earth over a grave were believed to be an obvious sign of vampirism. One ritual for finding a vampire’s grave was to lead a virgin boy through the graveyard on a virgin stallion and if the horse shied away from the grave, then it was believed to have a vampire buried beneath.

The kind of evidence that suggested a vampire was active in a certain area included things like cattle and sheep deaths, or the sudden death of relatives and neighbours.

Vampires were also believed to engage in poltergeist-like behaviour like throwing stones on villager’s roofs, mysteriously moving objects around in the home, and the sensation of being pressed-on while people were in bed sleeping.

For protection against vampires people used to turn to such things as garlic, holy water, and wild rose and hawthorn plants. In some places it was believed that if you sprinkled the roof of your house with mustard seeds then that would keep the vampires away. Wearing a crucifix around your neck, or carrying rosary beads with you was thought to ward them away too. Fear really took over at that time and the methods of warding off vampires really did become bazaar.

Methods for destroying a suspected vampire vary from culture to culture. The most popular one is to destroy them with a stake through the heart, though in other places, it was a stake through the mouth. Other methods included pouring boiling water over the grave, or sometimes they’d completely incinerate the corpse.

Even nowadays, vampires still play a popular role in our culture, most noticeably at Halloween time. The mysterious, dark, dangerous side of the superstitions about vampires makes dressing up as a vampire a popular choice for a dark, mysterious and sinister Halloween costume.

Below is a video from the National Geographic Channel that asks the question if Vampires are real or not – it includes a real true story of what happened to a young 19 year old girl – watch it and decide for yourself whether you think vampires are real or not …

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