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WTF?? Vampires??

Somebody somewhere has had their leg pulled by peasants so hard that they will have trouble standing upright for weeks.
 
I thought it maybe could have been an April Fool joke, but I see it was published on March 31st. Google search tells me the same story ws published in the Miami Herald on March 26th.

I thought that vampires were as such a product of Holywood imagination? Or am I confusing vampires with Dracula who was VERY loosely based on Vlad Tepes?

There is a story about the same event from
BBC news, discussing more its social context rather than the details of the act.
 
I hope no one here is just going to write this off as typical "believer’s nonsense"?

After all there are many, many people who believe in this phenomenon of dead people rising from their grave and existing on the blood on the living or as these reports call them "vampires".

It is incredible that we aren't all on planes to Romania right now to investigate the possibility of these undead creatures. To not do so just shows how closed minded and non-sKeptical we are.

I suggest that the government should at once be pressured into providing money to fund research so we can find out all there is to know about these blood drinking vampires.

To say so many people can be so wrong without research is obviously closed minded pseudosKepticism.
 
Tanja said:

I thought that vampires were as such a product of Holywood imagination? Or am I confusing vampires with Dracula who was VERY loosely based on Vlad Tepes?
Click to expand...
I have a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula at home (the book, not the movie) so I'll go through the preface and see if it has any historical details in it. I think Bram's book was what introduced the concept of vampires to the West.
 
I'm with Darat. Here we have the opportunity to demonstrate that sKeptics aren't just close-minded scientism-flinging Randibots. We should support vampire research wholeheartedly.

Remember: It's always possible that the study of vampires will unearth a potential life-saving pharmaceutical.

~~ Paul
 
I remember watching a show on why they thought people believed in vampires...

Seems it goes back to how the body decomposes over time... the fact that fingernails and hair still grows... that blood will reliquify... etc.

When they dig up the body, it seems like it's still "living"... even the "gasp" of gas leaving the chest cavity can all act to make the corpse appear to be alive.

Just read the guy's account of burning a heart... the "squeal" is the meat hitting a hot pan.

Seems like a tradition created from misunderstanding... certainly, it's not the first.

*SNEEZE*

"Bless you"
 
Originally posted by TriangleMan
I have a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula at home (the book, not the movie) so I'll go through the preface and see if it has any historical details in it. I think Bram's book was what introduced the concept of vampires to the West.
Click to expand...

The Vampire myth is far older than Bram Stoker’s Count. The one of many 'original' versions was the ugly misshapen spirits of those that died of illness. Before we understood how diseases were transmitted, Vampires were thought to spread the disease they died from, and therefore explain why people who nursed or were close to a person who died from a disease sometimes came down with the same illness. Add to that fever dreams the ill people have of deceased relatives or friends, and bingo, you've got your vampire.

What Bram Stoker and Hollywood really introduced was the idea of the Vampire as a sort of gothic sex symbol, the ugly twisted Nosferatu is a far cry from the dapper count.

I suspect the Romanian incident was an echo back to the plague type vampire spirit belief. They believed they were stopping the spread of illness with the superstitious ceremony to quiet the spirit.
 
I once read a book titled Vampires, burial and death which can be found at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...002-9750076-3912003?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

That story is close to some of the cases covered in this book. The gist of the book was that pre-literate European cultures did not understand what happened to a body after death and attributed every possible problem to the spirit of the deceased. Not all cases in the book were about vampires. Other types of undead also showed up.

Most of the accounts were recorded by people who did not believe in vampires but described what they saw happening as best they could. The author also pointed out that contradictory evidence was often used to prove the cases of vampirism.

Different cultures had variations that reflected on their own people. Serbian vampires were tied to their grave just as Serbian peasants were unable to leave their own lands. Gypsy vampire lore has it that they are doomed to wander the earth.

Where cultures met, traditions were mixed up. One case in the book has a suicide followed by an epidemic. The suicide case was supposedly transformed into a vampire. The town attempted to end the epidemic by sticking swords into the vampire’s heart and leaving them there. Several swords later, the epidemic continued. Then an Albanian told the townspeople that the cross shape of their Christian swords was holding the spirit in the body. So they pulled those swords out and stuck in a sword without that shape. I do not recall if the epidemic ended right away.
 
TriangleMan said:

I have a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula at home (the book, not the movie) so I'll go through the preface and see if it has any historical details in it. I think Bram's book was what introduced the concept of vampires to the West.
Click to expand...

I thought I knew my vampires from my draculas, but it is actually a bit of a blur. What about warewolves, where do they come in. Are they all (vampires, dracula, warewolves) part of the same folklore, or not?
 
Tanja said:

I thought that vampires were as such a product of Holywood imagination? Or am I confusing vampires with Dracula who was VERY loosely based on Vlad Tepes?
Click to expand...

What Americans think of vampires - the fangs, transforming into a bat, silver crosses - that is all made up by Hollywood.

But there are a lot of cultures that believe in vampires.

http://www.csicop.org/si/9603/staking.html
 
Re: Re: WTF?? Vampires??

sweetkb713 said:


Is this for real or is it an April Fool's joke? I see the date is March 31st.
Click to expand...

I thought it was as well, but apparently not. In my previous post (towards the bignning of the thread) I posted links to the identical story published in Miami Herald couple of days earlier, and in BBC News, published back in February...
 
Tanja said:


I thought I knew my vampires from my draculas, but it is actually a bit of a blur. What about warewolves, where do they come in. Are they all (vampires, dracula, warewolves) part of the same folklore, or not?
Click to expand...

Werewolves are also an old concept that is really old that got new life from Hollywood. A man named Jean Grenier was tried and convicted of being a werewolf in the 1600's. If I recall correctly chrages of Lycanthropy were as common as charges of being a witch in certain parts of Europe at one time. In fact they were treated as much the same thing.
 
Nyarlathotep said:


Werewolves are also an old concept that is really old that got new life from Hollywood. A man named Jean Grenier was tried and convicted of being a werewolf in the 1600's. If I recall correctly chrages of Lycanthropy were as common as charges of being a witch in certain parts of Europe at one time. In fact they were treated as much the same thing.
Click to expand...

Some werewolves are also witches. Or wizards. I refer you to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. :D
 
sweetkb713 said:


Some werewolves are also witches. Or wizards. I refer you to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. :D
Click to expand...

Beleive it or not, I have read all the Harry Potter books, my kids got me to see the first movie which made me want to read the books. So I blame it on my kids.

In real world myth they were the same too. IIRC, Mr. Grenier supposedly got his ability to turn into a wolf from a magic spell, not from being bitten by a werewolf or anything else we may associate with lycanthropy in modern times.

Being a werewolf was something a witch was able to do, rather than being a seperate thing.
 
Tanja said:


I thought I knew my vampires from my draculas, but it is actually a bit of a blur. What about warewolves, where do they come in. Are they all (vampires, dracula, warewolves) part of the same folklore, or not?
Click to expand...

Hey Tanja, get this movie out on dvd. It might explain.
Yeah, it's a horror movie, but it's fun!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320691/
 
DangerousBeliefs said:
... the fact that fingernails and hair still grows...
Click to expand...

http://www.snopes.com/science/nailgrow.htm

Also, this is quite an interesting read .

costumed-smiley-001.gif
 
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