Is There Truth Behind The Myths Of Vampires? | The Search for Dracula | Absolute History

[Music] in an age of science one tale of the supernatural continues to seduce us the legend of the vampire pale elegant aristocratic he is embodied in count dracula his bloodlust at once repulsive and irresistible [Music] by day he hides his face from the sun by night he escapes the velvet confines of his coffin and flaps off to drain helpless damsels of their lifeblood [Music] in graveyards and archives around the world scholars discover the uneasy truth about vampires and they're realizing that ancient people had compelling evidence for the belief that the dead could return to prey on the living when disease runs rampant vampires stir [Music] do not die like the bee when he stings once he is only stronger and being stronger have yet more power to work evil this vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men he is of coming more than mortal for his cunning be the growth of ages he can direct the elements the storm the fog the thunder he can command all meaner things the rat and the wolf he can grow and become small and he can at times vanish and become unknown how then are we to begin our strike against him [Applause] so wrote bram stoker in his 1897 novel dracula the story of the evil count has been thrilling millions for over a century [Music] it has spawned some 200 films all in very much the same vein [Music] stoker blended legend and history to conjure his brilliant fictional creation [Music] but to discover what new light science and history can shed on vampires one should do one's best to forget about bram stoker's count for the moment historians folklorists and scientists who pursue the real story of vampires agree fact is more compelling than fiction [Music] but they find themselves pursuing very different paths historians stalking the real dracula have more than ample evidence that he existed he was one of the world's great sadists perhaps but not a vampire [Music] for glorists on the trail of vampires are finding that for as long as human memory stretches people have been going to extraordinary and gruesome lengths to make sure the undead stay in their graves and archaeologists sometimes dig up evidence as well like this 200 year old corpse excavated on the greek isle of lesbos eight stakes have been driven through its neck and groin scholars at last are dragging vampires out of their tombs to take a good long look at them they're finding that the vampire of folklore little resembles his elegant hollywood counterpart folklorist paul barber there are terrific differences between the vampires of folklore and the vampires of fiction for one thing he's a peasant he is dark rather than pallid he is swollen rather than thin there is nothing reported about the canine teeth let alone that they grow the way they do in the movies at the time of the full moon none of that is there and there are no bats in the folklore the famed blood drinking vampire bat was named for the vampires of ancient law only in modern fiction do vampires change form so if you go looking for vampires you won't find light-fearing bat-loving caped aristocrats who are long in the tooth sometimes vampires don't even drink [Music] blood vampires are believed to be the prematurely dead who returned from the grave to bring death and disaster to family friends and neighbors [Music] though they look like ordinary people they're extraordinarily restless [Music] peace comes to the vampire only when its corpse suffers any one of a thousand gruesome mutilations so they'd go to the graveyard dig the body up and drive a stake through it or behead the body or cut it up into pieces or cremate it there are any number of ways of dealing with vampires the only one that shows up in fiction is driving a stake through it [Music] within the decaying remains of a coffin with the initials jb on the lid lies a highly unusual corpse perhaps the only known vampire skeleton yet unearthed in the americas originally from connecticut jb now resides at the national museum of health and medicine in washington dc his sorry remains came to light in 1990 when a forgotten cemetery in griswold connecticut began eroding out of a gravel pit the state archaeologist excavated two dozen normal burials from around the 18th century and one very odd one it was clear that the occupant had not rested in peace forensic anthropologist paul sledczyk was called in to take a closer look someone had gone in after the body was decomposed and jumbled the chest bones they had taken the two femora which are the upper leg bones and crossed them over the part of the lower chest and they had taken the skull and placed it in the middle part of of of the chest so you have essentially the appearance of a skull and crossbones on top of jumbled chest bones to sledzing this postmortem mutilation proves that jb was believed to be a vampire all and written accounts of such treatment are found with surprising consistency around the world but physical evidence on the scale of jb is a rare prize well when people ask me the question is jb a vampire i always ask what's your definition of a vampire if you believe in bram stoker bella lugosi then no he's certainly not if you know something about the vampire folklore of europe and america than he is sledzik's colleague rhode island state folklorist michael bell has studied the american vampire tradition his research has turned him into a vampire hunter but unlike his fictitious colleague of dracula fame dr van helsing michael bell tracks his vampires in town halls and libraries leafing through dusty tomes and turning up tragic and outwardly unbelievable stories [Music] [Music] near the time of the american revolution stupely tillinghast's life was full and fertile his rhode island farm prospering his children numbering 14 but then came the dream the one in which half of his orchard withered and died then his children began dying daughter sarah 19 and beautiful was the first to go then one by one five others fell ill and died another languished the last three had told stukley tillinghast a ghastly thing before dying at night sarah returned and pressed her hands against them as they slept [Music] when stukley's wife anna began to experience sarah's nightly life-draining visitations they knew that to save the rest of the family their dead daughter must be stopped and a god-fearing family made an ungodly decision as dusk fell stuckly tilling has set out along the two familiar path to the [Music] cemetery by light of day stoopley had already buried six of his children on the cover of darkness he dug them up again one by one and as they exhumed the bodies they found that uh they were all decomposed until they got to sarah who was the first one to die and they found that she was fresh-looking and more beautiful than ever so they cut out her heart and burned it on a nearby rock well as a result of exhuming the bodies and burning sarah's heart one more died who was too sick to recover but the rest of the children survived and the rest of the family survived so in a way it seemed to work for the family the account of the tillinghouse tragedy was not written down until almost a hundred years after the american revolution and it seemed like a dreadful fairy tale bell decided to see if he could track down the family historically and i found the records that show that sarah tilngath did die of consumption but she died in 1799 not around the time of the revolution and also that a total of four of the youngest five children died not seven but of course it makes it makes a much better story when when you have a dream that half your orchard dies and then half your children die bell has discovered more than a dozen such sorrowful tales in new england's oral and written history tales of families compelled to stop waves of death by digging up loved ones and mutilating them as a folklorist day you could call me a vampire hunter when i stumble on a practice like this that we're talking about now but i'm not the kind of vampire hunter that you might think of from bram stoker's novel dracula dr van helsing who did all of his work either in bedrooms warding off vampires or in tombs looking for vampires [Music] [Music] bell's strange new england tales do not mention bats or vampires but the american rituals closely parallel vampire accounts throughout the world the word vampire has its roots in the hungarian word vampire and the phenomenon has its cousins all over eastern europe and the balkans the upir in russia poland and czechoslovakia the vote codlach in serbia the vricholas in greece and the naxxer in germany [Music] the vampire has deep roots in antiquity the ancient romans told of evil blood-sucking ghosts called stregas and ancient greece had blood-drinking lamia a canadian student of both vampire folklore and the historical dracula benjamin leblanc points out that the phenomenon stretches even further back for example uh there is a babylonian entity we call lilith or lilitu which in the judaism judaic tradition was the first wife of adam this entity was sucking the blood of young children and babies even before that in persia archaeologists found a cup with a draw a draw on it and on this draw we can see a man fighting with a monstrous being trying to suck his blood uh we know that chinese people uh six centuries before christ had also some some kind of beliefs those kind of beliefs of supernatural beings sucking the blood of people the sanctity of blood in almost all cultures and religions seems to have given rise to a gallery of supernatural entities all dying to suck the blood of the [Music] living [Music] so [Music] in fiction the vampire lovingly sinks his teeth into the neck of his victim in european folklore however the vampire bites the person somewhere on the chest usually over the area of the heart the ways of dispatching the vampire vary from place to place the stake through the heart is traditional throughout eastern europe but sometimes cutting out the heart and burning it or burning the entire corpse or skeleton were the methods of choice vampires were sometimes buried face down with a stake wedged between the lid and the chest or a sickle blade over the neck in germany some vampires might be buried with a net of thousands of knots for vampires could not resist untying knots and would be kept busy in the grave for eternity [Applause] the question remains why have people continue to believe in the life of the undead [Music] part of the riddle can be attributed to a misunderstanding of the line between coma death and whatever comes after a line that still sometimes defies medical analysis people declared dead have come back to life in the morgue at the wake during the funeral and almost certainly after burial when there was a plague people were buried very rapidly we were burying people as fast as possible because they were contagious and sometimes we were burying people that were not were not clinically dead so there were still people alive sometimes buried and when we were opening the caves to bury other people of the same family sometimes we would find corpses that that were well conserved and covered with blood but we understand today that those people may just not have been dead and they must just have tried to to escape from their coffins [Music] sometimes the dead are restless constricting muscles in a new corpse can make the body stir or even sit up causing great consternation among witnesses [Music] in the grave decomposing bodies can shift or make noise which can be equally unsettling more recent scientific research hoped to explain away the vampire in 1986 much to the delight of the media a biochemist proposed that a chapter of vampire law may be traced to a rare blood disease there was a theory a few years ago that a disease called porphyria which affects people causing them their skin to turn a bit whitish than it would normally appear bloodshot eyes some people say will cause them to fear going out in the sun things that we associate with the vampire myth that bram stoker and bella lugosi help to set in in the american mind porphyria can cause extreme light sensitivity and depression it can also cause eyes and teeth to glow with pink fluorescent deposits and deform fingernails but the porphyria hypothesis besides offending modern victims of this now treatable disease describes the wrong vampire the unfortunate thing is the theory doesn't hold up because what you really have to do is compare porphyria against what's against the actual vampire folklore from europe which the two have no consistency at all there's no aspect to the vampire folklore that talks about bloodshot eyes that talks about whiting of whitening of the skin and living individuals there's none of that none of that going on in in the vampire folklore from europe but a more comprehensive explanation of the real vampire law is now coming to light oh my friend our theory of glandular stimulation through electrical impulses was correct in the early 1730s a group of austrian medical officers reported witnessing a vampire execution in the serbian village of medvedja a rash of mysterious deaths in the village were being blamed on arnold powell a man who had been dead for years the villagers decided to dig him up to the surprise of the medical officers it looked like the villagers had their man when they unearthed his corpse he just didn't look dead enough in their report the medical officers described the event in detail they found that he was quite complete and undecayed and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes nose mouth and ears that the old nails on the hands and feet along with the skin had fallen off and that new ones had grown and since they saw from this that he was a true vampire they drove a stake through his heart according to their custom whereby he gave an audible groan and bled copiously dozens of such accounts survive from eastern europe in the 1700s folklorists and historians have long agreed that these documents provide a fascinating glimpse into the superstitions of the time but paul barber sees something more when i first started studying these documents one of the things that kept me from taking them seriously was that very often they told about how they got the body dug up and they drove a stake into it the body came to life and groomed and whatever else i was willing to believe i wasn't willing to believe that a body that had been in a grave for a month had come to life and groaned because somebody drove a stake into it one day i started realizing that i'd really never myself dug up a body and driven a stake into it and i started to wonder what would happen and so i went to various medical examiners and asked them and they said it would groan but what about the other outrageous details of these vampire killer accounts can a dead body get fatter its lips glistening with fresh blood can it grow new skin and nails or remain undecayed months or years after burial for paul sledzik the gory details of the vampire accounts are close to home the particular interesting features that i've found in reading them are aspects of fingernails growing after death new skin appearing hair growing teeth appearing as though they've become whiter and longer things like that and then in a decompositional frame of mind if you if you look at those things what you're actually seeing are the tissues beginning to reseed it gives the appearance as though the nails and the hair are growing the new skin is actually just the old skin sloughing away and a new kind of fresh skin appearance to the the skin underneath [Music] during decomposition the body grows fatter and gases in the lungs could force blood out of the mouth [Music] thus at night by the light of torches a decaying corpse would appear almost exactly as the vampire hunters reported if we're told that they dug up a body and it turned out to be a vampire um that's a little hard to credit so what happens is that you just throw out the whole account it turns out the descriptions in these accounts are and this is no exaggeration they're clinically the interpretations of the events aren't our interpretations namely that that indicates that the body was sucking blood from the living ironically transylvania the romanian province that has become forever linked with vampires is one of the places where the vampire did not always suck blood a suspected vampire might be staked or decapitated even if its mouth wasn't bloody uh romania got into the vampire lore mostly because of bram stoker it's not that they don't have that lore there in fact they do they just have a different version of it from say the slavs and the greeks but when bram stoker put dracula into transylvania uh this caused us to associate the vampire lure with transylvania uh in fact the model the character that he was borrowing the epithet dracula from was a character in romanian history who was a prince not account he was from wallachia rather than transylvania and he was never thought by the population to have anything to do with the vampire lore so this was strictly something that bram stoker created you can hardly blame him for that he was writing a novel he wasn't writing history but it's a rare example of a novel that many of us have taken for history stoker might be loved throughout the rest of the world but in the homeland of the historical dracula stoker's name and creation are universally seen as a blight on the reputation of a national hero in the year of our lord 1431 a boy was born here in sigiswara a town in transylvania he inherited his father's name vlad as well as the diminutive of this father's nickname the dragon in the romanian tongue dragon is dracul the sun dracula true to his name vlad dracula would grow up to be not a vampire but a ruler whose ruthlessness it is said made machiavelli catch his breath in awe vlad had many favorite punishment techniques for example he was boiling people skinning them alive cutting off noses and ears but his favorite method was impalement hence the his nickname the impaler which is uh zepesh in romanian [Music] [Music] while a teenager vlad dracula spent six painful years as a hostage to the sultan in neighboring turkey his life was an insurance policy against valachian aggression his father vlad the elder ruled an uncomfortable buffer zone between the turks ottoman empire and europe's terrified christian one [Music] in the treacherous atmosphere of the turkish court young vlad dracula learned that life was cheap and that ways of dispatching enemies were limited only by the imagination [Music] at 17 upon the assassination of his father and brother vlad was free to leave turkey and eventually fought his way back to the throne of valafia knowing that the local aristocracy or boyas had conspired in the death of his father and brother he invited them to a great feast to celebrate easter blood dracula took a quite brutal revenge upon the boyars of tilgovich for the killing of his father and his or his brother mercia uh in on easter day he impaled the older ones while taking the other to poinari which is a 50 mile trek many died in the process and the older one had to build a fortress on the argesh river for dracula the castle vlad dracula made the aristocrats build on a ridge in the carpathian is now in ruins most of the boyars who built it were worked literally to death or plummeted from the cliff in the process and vlad was free to install a new more loyal class of boyas in one of his most infamous and best documented acts vlad dracula built a banquet hall outside his capital of tegoviste and invited all of the poor old and infirm to a splendid banquet when they had eaten their fill according to the accounts vlad ordered the hall locked from the outside and set a fire [Music] according to historian eonel bauman the guests invited to vlad's banquet were not who they seemed to be we know from documents of the time and from those of vlad the impaler that those so-called lame people were actually thieves those thieves or robbers had become a public danger and were threatening commercial trade which was being developed [Music] having rid his own country of the troublesome upper and lower classes vlad turned his energies toward the infidel the turkish muslim empire had its eyes on europe and vlad stood in the way with the pope's blessing vlad made daring raids into turkish territory and captured thousands knowing that the sultan would not allow his axe to go unpunished vlad dracula ruthlessly poisoned wells and burned his own villages on the way [Music] the turks could barely scrape a living from the countryside but vlad had more tricks up his sleeve as memorialized in this 1978 romanian film vlad czech when the enormous turkish army approached tega vista bent on vengeance they were greeted by a terrible sight the carcasses of some 20 000 turkish prisoners on wooden stakes a forest of the impaled [Music] from then on the turks would call him with mixed contempt and admiration casiglu bay the lord impaler [Music] the news of dracula's monstrous cruelty to his enemies and his countrymen were spread by monks traveling from valachia to central europe dracula cut off noses ears and genitals he decapitated people or nailed their hats to their heads he supposedly ate human flesh and drank human blood forcing others to dine with him into his prisoners wounds he poured salt or honey then let animals lick them dispensing a most exquisite agony vlad dracula's name took on a second meaning dracula the dragon dracula the devil in the end not even his european allies could stomach vlad's excesses he spent 12 years imprisoned in the castle of the king of hungary later he was freed and reinstated to the throne of velachia but he was soon assassinated legend has it that his head was taken to the sultan as proof the impaler prince was truly dead [Music] he was buried here in a grave in a monastery on snagov lake in the 1930s archaeologists opened the grave in front of the altar and reported it empty today vampire fans and romanian tour brochures highlight this deliciously vampire-esque bit of trivia but to the young monk who guards his grave this is just scandal inflicted on vlad's memory by the fiction of bram stoken vlad the impaler was primarily a man who loved his country and its people a protector of the church and its ideals he impaled justly those who betrayed his country vlad the impaler is buried in front of the holy altar yes yes his body is buried here [Music] only a few years ago was bram stoker's dracula allowed to be published here in romania and only then did most romanians find out that their ancient impaler prince had been turned into a vampire through the audacity of an irish writer who in all likelihood had never set foot in romania if the historical dracula was not a vampire then could this legend have other roots the dracula we know today was not known by the romanians there is a vampire folklore in romania but quite different from what we know of bram stoker's dracula we are more talking about a monstrous vampire an undead that we fear which is not beautiful which is ugly a condition we do not envy to the dismay of romanian historians the post-communist regime has welcomed the influx of tourists clamoring to see the places where the vampire count dracula lived and ruled but in the castles and museums of romania the caretakers of prince vlad dracula's memory stand ready to disabuse them of such notions castle curator maria marco moderator figuratively it disturbs me greatly that the image of vlad the impaler also called dracula has been so misrepresented they have turned him from a fighter for law and order justly punishing those who betrayed him into a vampire a creature that does nothing but suck the blood of his fellow humans it makes us very indignant and we try to show our foreign guests the real version of vlad the impaler historian there is no connection between the historical figure of vlad the impaler and the character depicted by bram stoker the novel does have a kernel of truth in it in that there was a real historical character vlad the impaler who was a chieftain of the romanian country some of his contemporary german chroniclers described his activities but the depiction by bram stoker a vlad as a vampire is the product of his fantastic imagination in the same decade that bram stoker's fantastic imagination brought to life the immortal fictional character of dracula america was burying the last of its real vampires [Music] this is the grave site of new england's last known vampire mercy lena brown her story is typical of the many new england tales that folklorist michael bell has [Music] discovered members of the brown family were dying and the doctors could do nothing to stop it in desperation they went to the graveyard like the tillinghasts had done and dug up the dead members most had rotted to skeletons but mercy was undecayed her heart held fresh blood the family cut out the heart and burned it then they mixed the ashes with water and drank it the roots of this unpalatable folk remedy lie in eastern european vampire tradition where the ritual included drinking the blood of the vampire directly people believe that you could keep from being attacked by a vampire if you drank the blood of a vampire and what's so odd about this is that we have much much stronger evidence that people drank the blood of the dead than we have that the dead drank the blood of the living i think it's odd that this practice occurred in new england because the settlers here were yankees and they were english descendants and the practice is most common in eastern europe and northern europe in germany transylvania romania greece how it got here is another question and for those unfamiliar with its parallels around the world it might seem a stretch to call the stories of sarah tillinghast and mercy brown vampire stories but they clearly resonate with a definition found at the crossroads of folklore history and science the grisly notion of vampires and the more gruesome methods for dispatching them have crossed cultural and political boundaries for ages taking hold wherever they were introduced what could cause such a morbid fascination to endure paul barber believes that sometimes the living have good reason to blame the dead a vampire is a an unusual corpse that comes to light in a time of crisis which is to say usually people are dying of epidemic of some kind of epidemic and they conclude that the first person who died is causing the other deaths [Music] in europe often the epidemic was mnemonic plague but what was the disease that caused new englanders to resort to such strange and awful medicine the final clue is to be found back in washington with the jumbled bones of jb the skull and crossbones position of his disrupted corpse mark him as someone people thought of as a vampire and his rib cage marks him as a man with a disease that fits perfectly with the perceived symptoms of vampirism but what's very distinctive about his skeleton is that he had suffered from tuberculosis during his life and those lesions are observable right here near the articulation of the vertebrae are these white lesions these are very distinctive for tuberculosis the common thread that ties all of these cases together is tuberculosis because it's consumption that was killing people and it was consumption that people didn't understand and it was consumption that people wanted to stop this still leaves the puzzle of jb's skull and crossbones position in most cases a vampirism in new england it was a fresh corpse that was disinterred and disrupted not a skeleton perhaps jb was just a local variation on the folklore perhaps the people involved in jb's case had previously tried to kill his corpse but the consumption continued to take victims what's always struck me pretty strongly especially from the new england tradition is that you have fathers brothers daughters digging up the bodies of their mothers sons daughters what have you so to think that i could go in to the grave of my my mother and remove her heart and burn it and drink the ashes as an antidote from some disease that i have is completely foreign but what's very interesting about the whole tradition is it makes sense from their point of view [Music] in the end vampire folklore was not an outrageous phantasm of the illiterate imagination it was an attempt to make sense of a terrible contagion like tuberculosis in the us mnemonic plague and other diseases around the world [Music] as far as we know mercy brown was the last of her kind by the time her family had removed her heart the modern understanding of disease transmission had banished vampires to the remotest parts of the globe just as vampires seemed doomed by the arrival of medical science bram stoker's dracula had become a worldwide bestseller vampires possessed the public once again [Music] you can even reach out and club i mean touch her and she's for real and this whole thing is for real one of the vampire passion-packed motion picture starring theater barra in 1915. but these vampires scarcely resemble the historical prince vlad dracula the impaler or the vampire of folklore taking their cue from stoker's novel people bought vampire hunting manuals and vampire killing kits complete with hawthorne stakes to plunge through the hearts of the undead but the would-be vampire killers were on the lookout for pale counts and fair damsels or evil nighttime bat changelings the real vampire story and its scientific foundation still languish under that long elegant shadow cast by the fictional count [Music] dracula [Music] for some dracula may be the source of deadly inspiration but in remote parts of the world away from the hype and the hollywood image the original folklore still endures people dread not a visit from a cloaked aristocrat but from a disheveled undead neighbor or a once beloved sister or son and they still hang garlic from their doors just in case for most of us he's just the object of good scary fun once when i was giving my alphabets dracula tried to get me oh no would you do i ate him good thing i had my alphabets [Music] you

Channel: Absolute History

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Keywords: Absolute History, Netflix for history, ancient beliefs, ancient legend, ancient legends, blood lust, historical accounts, historical documentaries, historical facts, historical myths, historical truths, history exploration, legend, legend examination, science vs myth, supernatural beings, undead legends, vampire beliefs, vampire culture, vampire exploration, vampire facts

Id: b3RUdbNI804

Length: 49min 28sec (2968 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021