Vampires Through the Ages Read online

  About the Author

  Brian Righi graduated from DePaul University in Chicago and has authored numerous books on occult and paranormal topics, including Ghosts, Apparitions and Poltergeists: An Exploration of the Supernatural through History. He first began to chronicle the folklore of vampires while hiking through Eastern Europe, where the lure of the creature still holds sway in the minds of some villagers. Today he continues traveling throughout the United States and other destinations, lecturing on his experiences and investigating claims of the supernatural. He currently calls Texas his home, where he lives with his beautiful wife, Angela; their baby daughter, Sarah; and two lively cocker spaniels, Madison and Dexter. Please visit his website, www.brianrighi.net/.

  Llewellyn Publications

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Copyright Information

  Vampires Through the Ages: Lore & Legends of the World’s Most Notorious Blood Drinkers © 2012 by Brian Righi.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  First e-book edition © 2011

  E-book ISBN: 9780738729718

  Cover illustration © Victoria Vebell/The July Group

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

  Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites. Cover model(s) used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

  Llewellyn Publications

  Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  2143 Wooddale Drive

  Woodbury, MN 55125

  www.llewellyn.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  To the “Gentleman of Horror” himself, Peter Cushing,

  who taught us that all you need in life is to keep your crucifix handy,

  your stakes well sharpened, and your flask full of good French brandy.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Once Bitten

  Chapter One: From the Cradle to the Grave

  Chapter Two: Night of the Living Dead

  Chapter Three: In the Shadow of the Cross

  Chapter Four: Let’s Get Ready to Rumble

  Chapter Five: Legends of Blood

  Chapter Six: A Star Is Born

  Chapter Seven: Children of the Night

  Chapter Eight: The Blood Drinker Next Door .

  Chapter Nine: Something in the Blood

  Chapter Ten: Stranger Than Fiction

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book like Vampires Through the Ages: Lore & Legends of the World’s Most Notorious Blood Drinkers is a lot like raising the dead. It takes a little bit of supernatural mumbo jumbo and a whole lot of hard work. You have to dig deep into the rocky soil of the past on a spooky, moonlit night, among the graves of those who came before you, in order to uncover the secrets buried there over the ages. A piece from here, a nasty bit from there, and a little stitching, and eventually you’ve created a monster to let loose on the world of mere mortals.

  So to all the gravediggers morbid enough to lend their shovel to the work, I would like to take a moment and thank you. To my beautiful wife, Angela, whose patience and support made this possible. To Bill Krause and Amy Glaser at Llewellyn Worldwide, for their hard work and dedication to producing yet another quality book. To all the churchmen, philosophers, writers, and Gypsies who hunted the creatures and added their own tales to the rich tapestry of folklore. Finally, to all those “children of the night” who still roam our modern cities and nightclubs, keeping the dark legends alive.

  [contents]

  Introduction:

  Once Bitten

  I remember well my first frightening encounter with the undead creature that is the subject of this book. I could have been no more than seven or eight years old when it first entered our living room one Friday evening during the late-night creature feature film on television. Though my hands were pressed tightly over my eyes in sheer terror, I could still see enough through the slits of my fingers to take in the frightening scene before me. It was a dark and eerie castle standing high in the mountains of Transylvania. Poor, unsuspecting Renfield had just arrived and entered the dilapidated grand hall, which seemed empty of all but spiderwebs and a creepy soundtrack. Then, from the top of a massive stone staircase, a lone figure appeared, bearing a single candle that struggled against the darkness.

  Renfield stopped nervously in his tracks as the figure descended towards him one step at a time. Suddenly the music rose to a dramatic crescendo, and the camera panned in on the figure as it halted on a small landing above. The feeble light cast by the candle revealed the pallid skin and slicked-back hair of Bela Lugosi dressed in a tuxedo and cape. The music died as a devilish smile crossed his face, and in a thick Hungarian accent he exclaimed, “I am … Dracula.”

  Of course, even by that age the image of the vampire was nothing new to me. I saw his cartoonish face each morning on my box of Count Chocula cereal and in television commercials for everything from toothpaste to used cars, during which he was always taking “a bite out of prices.” At one point the count even helped me practice my numbers, as we counted puppet bats together on the children’s television program Sesame Street, singing out, “ONE, TWO, THREE, AH AH AH AH AH!”

  Universal Pictures’ 1931 film version of Dracula, however, changed all of that for me. He was no longer a comic character with a bad accent, but a horrid figure who stalked unsuspecting prey in order to drink their blood, or who lurked about the closets of small children who watched too many horror movies. Needless to say, I was instantly sold, and from that point on a lifelong fascination with the creature developed. It was no surprise, then, that as each Halloween rolled around I donned my best pair of plastic fangs, and with a cape my mother sewed for me and a distinctive widow’s peak penciled onto my forehead, I grabbed my trick-or-treating bag and headed out into the night as Count Dracula. Only, unlike the real vampire portrayed in the movies, I was in search of tasty morsels rather than tasty mortals.

  As I grew older, of course, I began to focus on more serious topics, like girls, and the allure of the vampire began to slowly fade along with my childhood. Then one day shortly after college I was confronted by the creature once again in a new and even more startling way, which for the second time in my life transformed my thinking on the topic and inspired my later search for the true origins of the vampire and the writing of this book.

  I was traveling through the southern Carpathian Mountains of Romania in the summer of 2001 with a small group of hikers
backpacking through Eastern Europe, and after a long day of trekking we wearily stumbled into the village of Zarnesti. Zarnesti is situated at the foothills of the Piatra Craiului National Park, inside the elbow of the mountain range. It is a wild place of deep limestone gorges and dark forests filled with beech and spruce—the hunting grounds of wolf packs and solitary brown bears. After a hearty meal of stuffed cabbage rolls, sauerkraut, and mamaliga (a type of cornmeal mush), we lolled back in our chairs as the sun went down, drinking Ursus, a Romanian beer, and watching the locals trickle in. As foreigners, we immediately attracted attention, and as the night grew on more and more villagers approached our table to hear us talk about life beyond the snow-topped wall of the Carpathians. The beer flowed and the villagers sang their lively folk songs describing what life was once like under Communist rule.

  As the night wore on, one of my companions eventually asked if there were any vampires about, laughing at his own question as if to dispel the childishness of it. I guess I expected the villagers to laugh also and exclaim how silly we tourists were with our foolish notions, but instead the table grew quiet as if a heavy weight had settled on its drinkers. One old villager, a sheep herder named Alexandru, who drank more than I thought any one person ever could, suddenly turned serious and, in an expressive mix of Daco-Romanian and broken English, began a most curious tale.

  According to Alexandru, in the time of his father’s father there was a woman who had become a vampire and was terrorizing the village livestock with a wasting disease. In response to the attacks, the local populace dug up her corpse, decapitated it, and drove metal spikes into the body before reburying it. The gruesome action seemed to work, and the curse of the vampire was lifted from the village. During the tale there were many grunts and nods of agreement from other locals positioned around the table, yet by the end of the story not a sound could be heard in the inn save the crackling of the fireplace behind us. It was obvious that this was no mere tale the villagers devised to scare passing tourists. One look in their eyes and it was plain enough to see that they truly believed the old shepherd’s account of the facts.

  The next day, as we entered the Zarnesti gorge, pushing deeper into the mountains, my thoughts were still occupied with the conversation of the night before. Although it seemed preposterous in this day and age that there were still those who believed the dead could rise from the grave and bring harm to the living, questions began tugging at my mind. Have vampires ever really existed, and if so, how were eyewitness accounts through history different from the pop-culture brand of blood drinker I was raised on?

  Certainly the vampire Alexandru described was far removed from the tuxedo-and-cape-wearing creature I was used to, but where did the facts end and the fiction take over? Of even greater consequence, do vampires still exist today? Discovering the answers, I later found, turned out to be a more daunting task than climbing the Carpathian Mountains themselves. It became a hunt that weaved its way through the modern gothic nightclubs of American cities, the desolate burial grounds of Eastern Europe, and dusty library shelves filled with ancient books, on a trail that stretched its way back to the dawn of mankind itself.

  Vampires Through the Ages: Lore & Legends of the World’s Most Notorious Blood Drinkers chronicles the story of this deadly creature, shedding light on the legends and beliefs, both ancient and modern, that surround it. It will delve deep into humanity’s primordial fears of death and damnation, and track down the infamous, real-life blood drinkers of the past and the present whose own bloodlust has added to the gruesome framework of the vampire’s tale.

  In the process, the book promises to have something for everyone—from the serious scholar in search of the truth, to those living today what we call the modern “vampyre lifestyle,” to anyone just wanting to sink their teeth into a good old-fashioned scary story.

  So, for those about to undertake this harrowing journey: remember the words in the dedication of this book, and keep your crucifix close and your stakes well sharpened, but above all else—enjoy the hunt.

  [contents]

  Throughout the vast shadowy world of ghosts and demons there is no figure so terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight with fearful fascination, as the vampire …

  —Montague Summers, the Vampire in Lore and Legend

  1

  From the Cradle

  to the Grave

  Detectives and mystery writers the world over will tell you that every good story begins with a dead body, but in our case it’s the lack of one that sets the stage and introduces the singularly dark mystery that begins our hunt for the truth about vampires. On a cold, dank night in 1933, the murky water of Lake Snagov lapped at a tiny, tree-lined island sitting at its center, with three white towers rising from the concealing foliage of the island’s interior—each topped with the distinctive metal cross of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Accessible only by rowboat from a distant cluster of thatched cottages, the Byzantine chapel dominating the island sat like a fortress citadel marking the site of Snagov Monastery, home to what legend claimed was the final resting place of the Wallachian prince himself, Vlad Dracula Tepes, or as he is better known in the West, Count Dracula.

  Already the sun was retreating over the ancient oak forests and marshlands that surrounded the lake and gave this region of Romania a notably wild, almost forbidding reputation. Inside the chapel the shadows lengthened quickly, giving the frescoes of its long dead patrons and saints a more sinister appearance. The votive candles filling the walls and niches did little against the coming darkness and only added to the heaviness of the air with their smoky tapers. Dinu Rosetti and George Florescu flipped on their electric lamps in order to provide more light for the task that lay ahead of them. Assigned by the Romanian Commission on Historic Monuments to excavate the monastery grounds, the two men now stood before the chapel’s altar, at whose base a large, unmarked burial stone lay waiting.

  Founded in the fourteenth century by the ruler Mircea the Old, the monastery served as more than just a sanctuary for black-robed monks seeking prayer and meditation; over time it was usurped by various rulers as a place for the interment, torture, and execution of their rivals. As the centuries passed and royal dynasties gave way to nation states and political movements, the island became home to condemned criminals and political prisoners, many of whom would never leave the island alive again. During the June through October diggings, the team did indeed find evidence of torture and murder after unearthing a large collection of skeletons, many of which showed signs of decapitation and other violence.

  Kneeling down, Dinu gently swept the surface of the stone with a fine brush, stirring up centuries of dust and the strong smell of frankincense. Nervousness gripped them as they laid the tips of their pry bars into the seal of the stone, wondering what they would find beneath the heavy slab. Would it contain the rotting bones of the long-dead prince, infamous for the cruelty he showed to both his enemies and his own people; or did it, as some claim, hold something far worse—something supernaturally evil?

  The harsh sound of the stone rising from the floor grated against the chamber walls. Night had fallen completely now, and raising their electric torches the two men peered into the grave with superstitious curiosity. What they found within that dark depression beneath the rich Romanian soil, however, would only further the riddle of Dracula’s legend. What they found was an empty grave!

  Count Dracula has forever become linked in the Western mindset with one of the most notorious creatures in man’s collection of “things that go bump in the night.” Despite being called by many names in many languages, it’s the term vampire that most readily comes to mind when conjuring up images of the blood-sucking monster. The lack of a body that night in 1933 begs many questions that we hope to answer in this book. Besides the obvious considerations of where did the body go and was it ever really buried there, we need to ask ourselves: how did a Wallachian tyran
t who died roughly six hundred years ago become connected with the legend of the vampire? In addition, what is a vampire and how did such a fearful creation come into being? Of greatest importance, however, is the question that perhaps only you will be able to decide for yourself—have vampires ever existed, and if so, could they even now be waiting in some dark crypt for night to fall so that they might rise again and threaten humanity with their undying thirst for human blood?

  In search of these answers, we’ll leave behind the dark monastery of Snagov for now and travel east across mountains and seas, through deserts and valleys, to a land now occupied by modern Iraq. For it is here, in the fertile lands that stretch between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, known as Mesopotamia, that humanity began to emerge into the history books and forge the cradle of civilization, and as we shall see it is also where the tale of the vampire began its dark rise as well.

  Rise of the Demons

  The earliest hint of a belief in vampires comes to us in the form of archeological evidence excavated from the ruins of the once powerful cities that came to dominate the land between the two rivers. Cuneiform tablets from the First Babylonian Dynasty of the eighteenth century BCE, and depictions on excavated pottery shards revealing scenes of vampires drinking the blood of men, point to a deeply rooted fear among early people of a number of blood-drinking spirits and demons. The Babylonians, for instance, developed a complex hierarchy of demons and other entities stemming from earlier Sumerian origin. Among them there were two general categories that came to be feared above all others.

  The first was the dreaded ekimmu: evil spirits that had once been human, but could find no rest in the grave. These were some of the most well-documented spirits in ancient Babylon, and their name when translated means “that which is snatched away.” Belief held that these spirits were created when a person died a violent and premature death, had left important tasks unfinished, died too young to have tasted love, or most importantly was not buried properly. This included those who had died alone in the desert or had no one left to conduct the proper burial ceremonies and leave food offerings at their tombs. If no offerings were left for the spirits, they would become hungry and leave the underworld to seek nourishment from the living. As Reginald Thompson writes in his book The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, the Babylonians were very clear on what awaited the victims of the ekimmu, believing that “if it found a luckless man who had wandered far from his fellows into haunted places, it fastened upon him, plaguing and tormenting him until such time as a priest should drive it away with exorcisms” (Thompson 1903, xxviii).