Nevertheless, there are a few species that are hypersensitive to light and actively avoid it at all costs, including some cave dwellers that spend their lives in permanent darkness. Perhaps one of the strangest-looking creatures is the naked mole rat , which inhabits underground burrows in Africa.
Like vampires, they are pale, avoid sunlight and are known for their longevity. They also possess a colonial lifestyle, similar to ants and bees — workers acquire food, maintain the tunnel system and protect the nest of the breeding queen, akin to a vampire sire. Vampires are often depicted with heightened senses such as vision and hearing. But many animals have also evolved super senses far exceeding those of both humans and vampires.
Vampires, for example, seem to have a particularly keen sense of smell. This characteristic is mirrored in animals such as bears, which can smell food from up to 18 miles away. Although it is often stated that sharks can smell a single drop of blood from a mile away, this is an exaggeration — it is more like a single drop in a swimming pool. Nevertheless, sharks have nostrils that give them a directional sense of smell, allowing them to pin-point prey with incredible accuracy.
Their nostrils also have only one function: to detect odours. Vampires can also morph into another form, such as a bat, often behind the shroud of a cloak. Species such as the mimic octopus are similarly capable of changing shape to avoid a tricky situation. Like vampires that disappear in a puff of smoke, squid are also capable of producing clouds of ink — confusing predators and creating the illusion that they have vanished.
But what about the cloak? Nothing resembles a textbook vampire quite like the black heron. There are many animals that possess vampiric qualities, so it is likely that stories of vampires or mythical blood suckers, such as the chupacabra , are based, in part, on these characteristics.
And they all have one more thing in common, too: all can be killed with a stake through the heart. Indian folklore describes a number of nightmarish characters, including rakshasa , gargoyle-like shape-shifters who preyed on children, and vetala , demons who would take possession of recently dead bodies to wreak havoc on the living.
In Chinese folklore, corpses could sometimes rise from the grave and walk again. These k'uei were created when a person's p'o lower spirit did not pass onto the afterlife at death, usually because of bad deeds during life.
The p'o, angered by its horrible fate, would reanimate the body and attack the living at night. One particularly vicious sort of k'uei , known as the Kuang-shi or Chiang-shi , could fly and take different forms. The Kuang-shi was covered in white fur, had glowing red eyes and bit into its prey with sharp fangs. Nomadic tribes and traveling traders spread different vampire legends throughout Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
As these stories traveled, their various elements combined to form new vampire myths. In the past 1, years, vampire legends have been especially pervasive of eastern European contributions.
In the next section, we'll look at these creatures, the direct predecessors of the modern vampire. The Dracula legend, and the modern vampire legend that came out of it, was directly inspired by the folklore of eastern Europe. History records dozens of mythical vampire figures in this region, going back hundreds of years.
These vampires all have their particular habits and characteristics, but most fall into one of two general categories:. The most notable demon vampires were the Russian upir and the Greek vrykolakas.
In these traditions, sinners, unbaptized babies and other people outside the Christian faith were more likely to be reanimated after death. Those who practiced witchcraft were particularly susceptible because they had already given their soul to the devil in life. Once the undead corpses rose from the grave, they would terrorize the community, feeding on the living.
By many accounts, these undead corpses were required to return to their grave regularly to rest. When townspeople believed that someone had become a vampire, they would exhume the corpse and try to get rid of the evil spirit. They might try an exorcism ritual, but more often they would destroy the body.
This might entail cremation, decapitation or driving a wooden stake through the heart. Bodies might also be buried face down, so the undead corpses would dig deeper into the earth, rather than up into shallower ground. Some families secured stakes above the corpse so it would impale itself if it tried to escape.
The vampires in Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania now Romania were commonly called strigoi. Strigoi were almost exclusively human spirits who had returned from the dead. Unlike the upir or vrykolakas, the strigoi would pass through different stages after rising from the grave. Initially, a strigo might be an invisible poltergeist, tormenting its living family members by moving furniture and stealing food. After some time, it would become visible, looking just as the person did in life.
Again, the strigo would return to its family, stealing cattle, begging for food and bringing disease. Strigoi would feed on humans, first their family members and then anyone else they happened to come across. In some accounts, the strigoi would suck their victims' blood directly from the heart.
Initially, a strigo needed to return to the grave regularly, just like an upir. If townspeople suspected someone had become a strigo, they would exhume the body and burn it, or run spikes through it. But after seven years, if a strigo was still around, it could live wherever it pleased.
It was said that strigoi would travel to distant towns to begin new lives as ordinary people, and that these secret vampires would meet with each other in weekly gatherings. In addition to undead strigoi, referred to as strigoi mort , people also feared living vampires , or strigoi viu.
Strigoi viu were cursed living people who were doomed to become strigoi mort when they died. Babies born with abnormalities, such as a tail-like protrusion or a bit of fetal membrane tissue attached to the head called a caul , were usually considered strigoi viu.
If a strigoi mort living among humans had any children, the offspring were cursed to become undead strigoi in the afterlife. When a known strigoi viu died, the family would destroy its body to ensure that it would not rise from the grave. In other parts of eastern Europe, strigoi-type creatures were known as vampir , or vampyr , most likely a variation on the Russian upir. Western European countries eventually picked up on this name, and "vampyr" later "vampire" entered the English language.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, vampire hysteria spread through eastern Europe. People reported seeing their dead relatives walking around, attacking the living. Authorities dug up scores of graves, burning and staking the corpses. Word of the vampire scare spread to western Europe, leading to a slew of academic speculations on the creatures, as well as vampire poems and paintings. These works in turn inspired an Irishman named Bram Stoker to write his vampire novel, "Dracula.
In eastern European folklore, you could ward off a vampire by scattering seeds on the ground, either on top of the vampire's grave or outside your house.
Vampires were said to be obsessive creatures, and they were compelled to count all the seeds. If you hid a nail in the seeds, it would prick the vampire midway through the count. The vampire would then drop the seeds and have to start all over again.
Abraham Bram Stoker, a theater manager and part-time novelist, was not the first author to feature the vampire in a literary work, but his version is the one that really caught on. This is largely due to the novel's unforgettable villain, Count Dracula , as well as the foreboding setting.
Stoker arrived at both elements through extensive research. He set much of the action in the mysterious mountains of the Transylvania province of Romania, and he based his vampires on eastern European and gypsy folklore.
Selectively sampling from several versions of the vampire myth and adding some details of his own, Stoker formed the standard for the modern vampire. Unlike the vampires in the eastern European tradition, Stoker's monster loses power in the sunlight , is repelled by crucifixes and has acute intelligence. Interestingly, Stoker's vampires do not have reflections, while many earlier vampire creatures were fascinated by their own reflection.
Stoker's research also turned up a name for his villain. The original Dracula was a real person, Prince Vladislav Basarab , who ruled Wallachia in the mid s. His father was known as Vlad Dracul translated as either "Vlad the dragon" or "Vlad the devil" , in recognition of his induction into a society called The Order of the Dragon.
Vlad Jr. The real Dracula had a reputation for unfathomable brutality a reputation many Romanians claim is inaccurate , but there is not much evidence showing that people believed he was a vampire. Stoker's fictional villain is not closely modeled after the real Dracula, though they are sometimes linked in movies based on the book. Mainly, Stoker borrowed the name of the prince, as well as his social standing. Unlike the wandering, homeless strigoi, Stoker's vampire was a wealthy aristocratic type, hiding out in a grandiose castle.
In the play "Dracula," and the film adaptation that followed in , Bela Lugosi embraced this aristocratic notion, playing the count as a suave, sophisticated gentleman. This play also introduced Dracula's familiar outfit -- black formal wear and a billowing black cape. In the novel "Dracula," the count is described as a withered, ugly old man, more like Max Shreck's portrayal in the silent film adaptation, " ]Nosferatu ," than Lugosi's presentation. But the suave Dracula caught on, showing up in scores of vampire movies, television shows and cartoons.
The vampire has continued to evolve over the years, as novelists and filmmakers reinterpret and expand the mythology. In Anne Rice's popular novels, she takes vampires to the next level, giving them a conscience and a range of emotions.
The traits of modern-day vampires are pretty well established. They can be warded off with garlic, or killed with a stake through the heart. Some, like Dracula, are aristocrats who live in castles. Scholars suspect that the modern conception of these Halloween monsters evolved from various traditional beliefs that were held throughout Europe.
These beliefs centered around the fear that the dead, once buried, could still harm the living. Often, these legends arose from a misunderstanding of how bodies decompose. People unfamiliar with this process would interpret this fluid to be blood and suspect that the corpse had been drinking it from the living.
Before people understood how certain diseases spread, they sometimes imagined vampires were behind the unseen forces slowly ravaging their communities. Trying to kill vampires, or prevent them from feeding, was a way for people to feel as though they had some control over disease.
Because of this, vampire scares tended to coincide with outbreaks of the plague. In , archaeologists unearthed a 16th-century skull in Venice, Italy, that had been buried among plague victims with a brick in its mouth. The brick was likely a burial tactic to prevent strega —Italian vampires or witches—from leaving the grave to eat people. Not all vampires were thought to physically leave their grave. Again, this belief likely has to do with purge fluid, which could cause the shroud to sag or tear, creating the illusion that a corpse had been chewing it.
These stationary masticators were still thought to cause trouble aboveground, and were also believed to be most active during outbreaks of the plague. He wrote that people could stop them by exhuming the body and stuffing its mouth with soil, and maybe a stone and a coin for good measure. Without the ability to chew, the tract claimed, the corpse would die of starvation. Tales of vampires continued to flourish in southern and eastern European nations in the 17th and 18th centuries, to the chagrin of some leaders.
Still, anti-vampire efforts continued. And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, one of the last big vampire scares occurred in 19th century New England , two centuries after the infamous Salem witch trials. In , year-old Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island, died of tuberculosis, then known as consumption.
Her mother and sister were already dead, and her brother Edwin was sick.
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