- This video is sponsored by Care/of. "My dearest Jelizabeth, I've lost count of the years
it has been since you died. Time seems to have stood still the day I lowered your body into the grave, knowing it was only the
day prior that we were wed. Had I known then what I know now, perhaps I may have saved you. Every day, I grieve and
drown in my regrets, but as I gaze at your face,
this last photograph of you when you still walked this
earth alive, I remembered that you would not have
wished me to fall to despair. People are vanishing in town, young children appearing
drained of their lifeblood, and none but I can put an end to it. All my love, until undeath do us part, I won't let you nor anyone
else suffer any longer." Seems a bit dramatic, right? But for a large number of
communities in the late 1800s, this type of scenario,
where someone might set out to exhume the corpse of
their beloved family member believing they might be a vampire
terrorizing the community, wasn't really that unheard of. It was, however, considered rare and
extremely superstitious. As with any time period,
people are never a monolith, and where the vampire crazes ran rampant, so followed considerable disgust and ridicule from bystanders. But what caused these beliefs and rampages to happen in the first place,
and how did they give birth to our modern popular
idea of vampire hunting? And what the hell is up with those super-expensive
antique vampire defense kits? Come learn with me. But just a quick
disclaimer before we begin: this video will largely
focus on vampire lore from the US and Western Europe, generally because that's the realm of vampire pop culture that
I'm trying to backtrace. Vampire and vampire hunting lore appears in various forms all over the world, which I would love to
touch on in future videos, but as I only have so much
time to make this video and I've already tried
recording it three times, I don't wanna rush through
those other regions like they are an afterthought, so I'll narrow the scope for now. So with that said, let's get into it. But first, let's hear a word
from today's sponsor, Care/of. I guess you could say I'm on
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50% off your first order. Thank you so much to Care/of
for sponsoring this video, and now, let's get back to learning about the history of vampire hunting. (solemn music) For as long as vampires
have existed in folklore, people have sought ways to vanquish them. What constitutes a vampire is different depending on what part
of the world you're in. In the Caribbean, there is
the legend of the soucouyant, a female creature who slips
out of her skin at night and transforms into a
fiery specter who moves from house to house, sucking
blood from the inhabitants. In Turkish and Slavic history, vampires and witches
are often intertwined, and sometimes, even nonhuman
things can become vampires, even pumpkins or watermelons. The Philippines has the shapeshifting mandurugo and manananggal, and Chinese folklore
talks about hungry ghosts. But for our purposes today, we'll stick with the most popular
incarnation of vampires to date: that of a former human
trapped between life and death who rises at night from their grave to drink the blood of the living, a cursed, immortal state of
being which is contagious. I think it's pretty obvious for me to say that the origin of vampire
myth is, simply put, fear of death and the dead. Wayne Bartlett and Flavia Idriceanu write in "Legends of Blood": "Our fears make fantastic
stories seem true. Humanity has often believed that we share our world
with good or evil spirits, fabulous beings and strange creatures, sometimes helpful, sometimes
menacing and vengeful. For centuries, pain and
illness were thought to be caused by evil spirits, which could be summoned
by a witch or wizard, beliefs that still exist
in some parts of the world. Fear of death and of the
souls of the departed being trapped on earth was at
the origin of burial rituals. When these were not respected
and something went wrong, the dead would not find peace and would come back to punish the living." As I discussed in my video
on medieval death culture, the Middle Ages was a
time period where the idea of people rising from their
graves was immensely popular. There are folktales of bodies
coming back from the grave to do all sorts of mundane
things, like baking bread or doing laundry, but they
could also be antagonistic, too. William of Malmesbury wrote that the devil would reanimate
the bodies of evil men and compels them to act as he desires. More recognizably, William of
Newburgh wrote in the 1100s about the vampire of Alnwick Castle, a man who lived a depraved
and dishonest life and died returning from the
grave as a vengeful specter. He was seen at night walking around and spreading pestilent air,
and to save the village, a group of people with the local priest dug up his body and burned him on a pyre. This will become a trend. (laughs) What's interesting, though, is the fact that these medieval European
folk legends were limited to the peasant class and
were extremely widespread, despite the generally stationary
lives of the peasantry. This could be possibly
explained by the fact that many churches accepted
the idea of vampirism, and the 15th-century book
"Malleus Maleficarum" was a popular sort of
manual detailing how to hunt and take down various forms of witchcraft, which was associated with vampires. And the minute vampires
drifted from peasant folklore into the realm of Christianity, it suddenly became a convenient tool for the church to use to
reinforce its own power as they made to associate the vampire as a creature in league with the devil. The church saw these vampire
stories as a good opportunity to frighten people away from sin, as a cornerstone of medieval vampire tales is that the vampire was made so after having lived a life of sin. As a creature formed by
fear, the vampire is informed by a number of intersecting
social conditions, all of which evolve over time. I talked about this
quite a lot in my video on Bram Stoker and "Dracula,"
but throughout history, vampires are frequently,
though often subconsciously, direct stand-ins for whatever social issue people were worried about at the time. After they represented the
fear of death and decay, they represented a fear
of immigrants, queerness, Slavic people, Jewish people, women. Many vampires, especially
within the last 200 years, are coded in a markedly queer way, both in regards to gender and sexuality. Alexa Wei writes in "Adaptable Monsters: The Past, Present, and Future
of the Vampire Narrative as a Metaphor for Marginalized Groups": "In order to obliterate
gender, one must accept death, but because we live in a society that treats the gender binary, and gender as a construct in general, as a universal truth, we
cannot accept death fully. Death remains shadowy, hidden, and occult as long as we cling to illusions
of gender and immortality. That vampires often
transgress gender roles and the binary hints at the obliteration of gender that death can offer: genderless beings who simply exist, free of the constraints
gender distinctions create. They have seen death and defeated it and therefore have no
need for the false sense of security the fantasy of gender provides like a protective talisman against death." It's not really a coincidence
that as the xenophobia of the 19th century gave us "Dracula" and, whether she ever wanted
to admit it or not, the reckoning with the gay
rights movement in the '60s and '70s gave us Anne Rice's
"Interview with the Vampire," we are now amidst a social
upheaval with regards to trans rights and a reevaluation
of our gender systems, which has, as a result,
de-gendered vampires more than ever before. "Dracula" in particular
is a perfect case study in literature that represents
the Western European fear of reverse colonization. The book begins with Jonathan
Harker's observations on the backwards, uncivilized
society of Transylvania, which is quickly evolved into a story of a Transylvanian count quite
literally entering England with the intent of draining
its people of their lifeblood and starting a new race,
a clear parallel to a fear of immigrants coming in
and dirtying society, draining it of its resources and purity. But in the context of Victorian attitudes towards Eastern Europeans,
it's written extremely plainly. Eastern Europeans at the time
were seen by Western Europeans as inherently backwards and lesser. A lot of this is informed
not only by a disdain for those who live in poverty but also due to the huge population
of Jewish people and Roma who were living in and
immigrating from Eastern Europe. While it's true that Stoker
in part chose this location due to its historical vampire myths he was loosely pulling from,
it needs to be acknowledged the political climate he was
writing in, where at the time, Transylvania wasn't known in
the West for its vampires. It was known for its political
and racial struggles. Indeed, Stoker transformed
his Transylvanian vampire from, traditionally,
the bloated, red-haired, and blue-eyed, unmistakably
corpse-like moroi into a more human-looking man
with physical characteristics that would've read to Victorians as stereotypically anti-Semitic
and follows the trails of common anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories. Alexa Wei continues: "Dracula
is inherently monstrous by belonging to the vampire race, but his goal of fathering
a new vampire race in England allows vampirism
to stand in for ethnicity, even as it links the two. Stoker chose Transylvania for its history of real-life vampire
accounts and superstition but also paints Transylvania as a violent, war-torn racial melting
pot, the antithesis to the ideal of English
racial homogeneity. Therefore, he is not only monstrous because he is a literal monster but because he belongs to what Stoker and other contemporaries of
Lombroso would have viewed as a more primitive race of," quote, "'born criminals' who
lack the moral capacity of their more Western and white peers." As I tried to emphasize
in my video on "Dracula," this does not mean you
can't enjoy "Dracula" or that I'm trying to cancel Bram Stoker or say that he wrote
"Dracula" with the intention to be a xenophobic anti-Semite. I mean, for fuck's sake, I
love "Dracula" and "Carmilla" and honestly most
historical vampire fiction. What I'm saying is all of these things
informed the narrative. All horror is inherently informed by the social climate it's created in, and vampires are an especially
poignant litmus test for society's fears. There's a reason why so many
marginalized groups identify with vampires and other classic monsters. It's because society saw
us as these monsters first. So as expected, both vampire fiction and real-life vampire believers
were extremely preoccupied with the particulars of how
one might kill a vampire. Some lore began with the belief that a vampire must be vanquished
by cutting off its head and reburying it at a crossroads
or something like that so as to make it lost or confused. Later lore introduced the concept of destroying the vampire's heart with a stake or other weapon or burning it to death or
exposing it to the sunlight. And so, through every vampire scare that periodically cropped
up through history, fearful people would pick up their shovels and head to the graveyards and cemeteries to try and rid their communities of a real or imagined threat, usually what was in reality just disease but sometimes was made up altogether. They would exhume a number of bodies, looking for corpses that seemed to be either not decomposed
or not decomposed enough. If the body seemed to be bloated or had blood around the
mouth, it's a vampire. If its hair or nails seemed
much longer, vampire. If they seemed unusually
lifelike, vampire. (laughs) What we know now that people back then didn't
have the privilege of knowing is that all of this is a
natural part of decomposition. The body doesn't just stop
functioning completely the minute you die; it
continues to change. The skin recedes, giving the impression of growing hair and nails, and gas buildup in the body can give a bloated appearance. Certain diseases, especially
tuberculosis, can cause blood to leak from a dead person's
mouth up from the lungs. Disease, obviously, is the root of a lot of these folkloric symptoms. For example, in the Middle
Ages, people with porphyria would experience an aversion
to sunlight, paleness, elongated teeth, and
sometimes excess hair, and following the logic of
medieval medical theory, some of them likely tried
to drink blood as a cure. Go watch my video on ancient
artifacts to learn more about medieval blood and corpse medicine. Now, just a quick tangent here: one thing they didn't do was lock vampires into graves with iron cages. These cages that you see
in some old cemeteries were actually used to protect
the recently deceased body from being stolen by body snatchers or resurrectionists or resurrection men, they were called all number of things, to be sold to medical
schools and the doctors to be used for dissection
and anatomical study. This was a very common
thing around the 17 to 1800s because obviously scientists
wanted to learn about the body, but who the hell was gonna sell their body to science at this point? So dudes were making good money
by digging up buried bodies and selling them to schools and such. It was such a huge
problem because obviously they were only targeting
poor people's graves. So, uh, yeah. If you slap a cage over that bad boy, there's less of a chance you're gonna see your dearly departed
relative's half-dissected body floating around a medical
school the next week, so there you go. It's not vampires. Tangent over. One of the earliest accounts of a stake-in-the-heart
vampire killing comes from the 1732 story of
a Serbian man named, and I'm so sorry, I'm
probably gonna butcher this, Arnold Paole who returned
home from serving in the army in Greece. He strangely seemed uninterested in marrying his neighbor's daughter Nina but eventually did so
and later confided in her that while in Greece, he
was visited by a vampire. He destroyed it and ate some
of the dirt from its grave to try and protect himself from its curse, but he still felt like
he'd been cursed anyway. He died a few weeks later after falling off of a hay wagon and breaking his neck. After this, villagers reported seeing Arnold around
the village and claimed that he had killed four people, so four officers arrived to exhume him. They found that his body had
moved to one side of his grave, his jaw open with blood spilling out. The officers poured garlic onto his body and drove a stake through his heart, after which a horrible scream erupted from Arnold's body and blood gushed out. Arnold was never seen
outside of his grave again. For about 50 years in the 1700s, the vampire dominated
popular European discourse with regards to whether
or not they existed. Most people considered
it a ridiculous idea, but just enough people
thought it could be possible that instances of vampire
stakings occurred periodically until about 1770, when all
the excitement died out. But of course, as usual, the vampire would not stay dead for long, as it was reborn in the 1800s
in the world of fiction, reintroducing the idea to new generations, in particular the highly
superstitious fringe populations growing in the United States. (exciting music) On March 19th, 1892,
"The Providence Journal" ran a front-page headline
reading "EXHUMED THE BODIES. Testing a Horrible Superstition
in the Town of Exeter. BODIES OF DEAD RELATIVES
TAKEN FROM THEIR GRAVES." The article, of course, was
taking about a horrific incident that happened in Exeter, Rhode Island, a small, quiet town about 30
minutes outside of Providence. It's a place crisscrossed
by old stone walls, dotted with spread-out homes, and filled with a rural expanse that I'm very much not used to. The Brown family lived
here in the late 1800s, and in 1883, the mother
of the family, Mary Eliza, passed away from
tuberculosis, or consumption, as they called it in those days. She was the wife of George Brown, a well-respected farmer,
and had a few children. Seven months later, their daughter Mary Olive
also died of consumption. Through the next few
years, their son, Edwin, began showing symptoms
of the disease, too. Panicked that he may lose another child, George sent his son to
Colorado for a change of air, but it didn't help that much,
and Edwin returned home. By the time he got home,
the last Brown daughter, 19-year-old Mercy Lena Brown, had contracted the disease as well. She passed away rapidly and was buried at Chestnut Hill Cemetery in 1892, and the people of Exeter
began to get panicked, knowing that if consumption
could wipe out one family, it could come for theirs next, and they pleaded with
George Brown to save himself and his final child by
turning to folk superstition. They believed that one of the
dead Brown women was rising from the grave to feed on the lifeblood and flesh of poor Edwin and the only way to discover if it's true
or not is to exhume them and see if any of them have blood in them. Afraid for his son's life and pressured by the increasingly anxious
neighbors and family members, George Brown finally agreed. On the morning of March 17th, a group of men went to Chestnut Hill and unearthed Mary Eliza and Mary Olive, both of whom had been dead
for years at this point, so obviously they were devoid of blood and were decomposing properly. So then they dug up Mercy,
who had now only been dead for a couple of months,
and, big shocker here, she was not fully decomposed and she still had blood in her heart. Intent on finishing the job, the men removed her heart and
liver and burnt it to ash, which they fed to Edwin
in an attempt to cure him. Unfortunately, it was all for nothing. Edwin would die only two months later. I wanted in on the action, so
I hopped on a plane to Boston and joined forces with my
college roommate and bestie Sage to go look for Mercy Brown's grave. Just about an hour and a
half drive outside of Boston, which equals, like, five
minutes LA driving time, past Providence and into the countryside, we entered the little town of Exeter, and the weather must've
known we were coming, because it was cold and rainy
and foggy, which I loved. It didn't take long to find Mercy's grave underneath this nice
tree, as it was covered in little gifts and trinkets
left for her by her visitors, which I think is really nice. So I left her a shiny nickel. I hope she appreciated
it, because that's, like, mmm, two bucks, if you calculate it for 120 years' worth of inflation. Maybe she can get herself, like, a ghost Snickers bar or something. - Aah!
- Ah! Oh, no! Your umbrella! Side note: Sage discovered that Mercy Brown's grave
is apparently a PokeStop in "Pokemon GO," so there you go. But anyway, to make any sense of the Mercy Brown vampire story, you need to understand
that when we're looking at these cases of
hyper-superstitious history, we know a massive number of vital things that these people didn't. They had never heard
of germs, most likely, and were grappling with
a notoriously confusing and irregular disease that has symptoms and postmortem displays
that fall cleanly in line with a lot of frightening folk beliefs, and honestly, death and fear of death, especially when the unknown is involved, makes people do really,
really weird things. It calls to mind for me
the unbelievable crap that people were doing
to try and avoid COVID in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when none of us knew
how this virus worked. When it seems like no one
around you has answers and you and your family could die, you kinda just start throwing
spaghetti at the wall and relying on whatever
beliefs you already have, and, well, these people in rural
New England very much believed in the power of the risen undead. I mean, it makes sense. What, logically, did they know for sure? Life comes from the blood,
the heart gives us life, disease preys upon the
innocent, et cetera. These opened up the one
theoretical possibility at saving the town from death that George Brown hadn't exhausted yet: that one of the women in
his family was a vampire. If he said no to his neighbors' pleas and still more people died, how could he live with himself? It seems clear from the
historical record we have that George Brown didn't believe
that Mercy was a vampire, but leaning towards what
little hope there was left, he didn't have much of a choice. Although I'm extending
grace and understanding towards George Brown and
the people of Exeter here, I still think it was absolutely horrific, and most other people
from that era did, too. "The Providence Journal"
went on to declare: "The shocking case of exhumation
in one of the border towns of this state last week is, after all, only a rather more than
usually striking illustration of a truth which cannot be denied, that the amount of
ignorance and superstition to be found in some corners of New England is more than surprising to one who comes into contact with it for the first time. There are considerable
elements of rural population in this part of the country
upon which the forces of education and civilization have made scarcely any impression." As this article implies,
vampirism was kind of a fixation for a number of rural
New England communities in the late 1700s to 1800s. Over the course of several decades, story after story crops up where families dug up
their dead loved ones, usually the women, discovered
blood in their bodies, and burned their hearts to try
and stop the trail of death. Even as far back as the
American Revolution, there is a story of a
guy named Snuffy Stukeley who had 14 children. One night, he had a dream where half of the orchard he owned died, and shortly after this, his daughter, Sarah, died of consumption. One by one, six of his children died, and his wife said that
Sarah was visiting them every night from beyond the grave. To save his family, Snuffy
was told to exhume the bodies of his dead children, which he did. All of their hearts
were removed and burned, and when they got to Sarah's body, they found it in perfect condition, even though she had died first. So clearly she was a vampire. They burned her heart too, and then after a seventh child died, peace finally came to the family because Snuffy's prophetic
orchard dream was fulfilled. Well, unlike the Mercy Brown case, the details of this story
were totally made up by a late Victorian historian, and I mean, the family was real and the children may have
actually been exhumed on suspicion of vampirism, but
the details are super wonky. Regardless, what's interesting
is that this family, whose last name was actually Tillinghast, were related in some
capacity to the Brown family and also to another family, the Roses, who had their own fling
with vampire exhumation. These folk beliefs in vampires and how to deal with
them was easily spread through these tight-knit New
England rural communities through family ties and other
such chains of connection, and why wouldn't you believe your family if you were in their shoes? Of course New England is the
most famous American locale for vampire history, but
what you may not know is that Chicago has its own little spin with vampires, too, around the same era. The year is 1888 in Lakeview, Chicago, and I need to introduce
you to the main character of this story, who started
the craze in the first place. His name is Samuel Patton,
a longtime resident of Chatsworth, Illinois,
who was born in 1883. Patton had a wife named Nellie and was a well-respected
mechanic and inventor, having developed a
patent for a corn husker. He apparently wasn't a weirdo at first, but he served in the Union
Army in the Civil War, and judging by his letters
that he wrote to Nellie at the time, he had an
extremely rough service. He saw battle several
times, spent several months in the hospital after
drinking poisoned water, and was finally mustered
out in Chicago in 1865. He then went back to
blacksmithing in Chatsworth, but tragedy struck as all
five of his children died in either infancy or before adulthood. This loss combined with the trauma of his service took a massive toll on his mental state, which
was already not fantastic. Don't feel too bad for him, though, because judging by his letters, he was also a huge, huge,
huge, huge racist, so. Patton would somehow
end up back in Chicago, where he became obsessed
with the supernatural. Locals referred to him as a mild-mannered middle-aged gentleman with a high forehead
and a bushy brown beard, but before long, he would be revealing
some Samuel Patton lore that seemed a little bit off. According to the "Chicago Tribune," "when 10 years old, he saw a
lantern-like light in a field like a star of the first magnitude, which he watched for two hours. Patton also fought in the
war and while in the field had premonition dreams of strangers whom he later met when returning home. He had five children by
the end of Civil War, all of whom passed away at a young age. Willie Patton, the last
to die, supposedly came out of his grave a week
after he was buried. After marveling at spirit photography and experimenting with
spirit manifestations, he began experiencing pain on his forehead resulting from words being
carved in from the spirit realm. This included his dead son's signature. After a while of this, he went to wearing a silk
covering on his forehead, but the ghosts would poke through it. He learned that the spirits had tortured and killed his children and
that they were not the race of humans but made of cones and bubbles. Apparently, one would sing
to him while poking his head: 'Over there, where all is prayer, I'll sit and swear, whoora
for me, whoora for me.' After the spirits tired
of poking him and singing, they sent a vampire after him." Ah, so Samuel's vampire appears. Yes, he became convinced that
a vampire was responsible for the untimely death of his children and now was following him. He relayed all this
information one night in front of a crowd at a bookstore
on Clybourn near Fullerton owned by Judge Thalstrom
in September of 1888. Thalstrom eagerly agreed
with Patton's story, claiming that he too had heard
true stories of vampires. This was when Patton dropped the kicker: he had invented a clairvoyic varnish that he would coat onto
glass which could be used to see the vampire
floating through the air. The glasses he was
selling came with a card reading "PATTON'S CLAIRVOYIC
VARNISH FOR GLASS. Develops a finer sight
that enables a person, when looking through it, to see
objects which are invisible. Specimens sent by mail
on receipt of 10 cents. Address Samuel Patton, 1297 North Paulina Street,
Chicago, Illinois." The varnish apparently
became very popular, but as time went on and nobody was seeing any flying vampire, the fervor died down until
one night in November when a man named Clause
Larson went missing. A local bartender told Mrs. Larson that Clause had been at
his bar the previous night and had seemed despondent, as
if he sensed impending doom. Of course, it wasn't long before people in the neighborhood remembered
the Lakeview vampire, and people really started freaking out. Mrs. Larson went to the police, reporting that her husband
had been taken by a vampire, and people took it upon themselves to go out looking for him. A group of young boys calling
themselves the Vampire Hunters spent their Sunday creeping
around the city cemetery in what is now Lincoln Park in search of the vampire himself. A little far south, if
you ask me, but whatever. I wanted in on the action, so
I hopped on a plane to Chicago and joined forces with my
college roommate and bestie Yuna to go look for this vampire in Lincoln Park like those boys did. Here's the thing. The city cemetery of
Chicago no longer exists. It was destroyed when
Lincoln Park was created. However, one tomb still remains:
the mysterious Couch Tomb, which sits behind the
Chicago History Museum. This very well could've been a spot where those boys went
to look for the vampire. (laughing) I keep laughing
because the idea of a vampire, like, kidnapping some
guy and then going on, like, a weekend bender is
just so fucking funny to me. The idea of a vampire just going around, like, lowkey terrorizing
an entire community but, like, not actually killing anybody... He's just pestering them. I really wish I could climb in there. I like to think personally
that the vampire and Clause Larson were gay lovers and they tried to run away, but then everybody was,
like, scared about it and so then he had to go home. But that's just my headcanon. Now, the reason the
Couch Tomb is still here isn't because there's a vampire in there. It's literally because it was too heavy and expensive to move, so
they decided to leave it as a nice little reminder
of the area's history. Needless to say, despite my
very dedicated searching, I didn't find any flying vampire. Maybe it's because I didn't have the Patton clairvoyant glass with me. He's dead, I think. We did, however, stop by
the Chicago History Museum, where we did find a
bunch of haunted dolls, so there you go. Thank you, ladies. Have a good day. Well, as it turns out, our friend Clause Larson
didn't go elope with a vampire, as much as I want to believe that. He sheepishly showed up
back at home soon enough, admitting that he simply had
gotten completely sloshed at the bar and had passed out. And as for Samuel Patton, well, he lived out the rest of the days in the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC, where he died in 1912. In the end, in all these stories, there never was any vampire all along, and what makes all of these
cases a little bit confusing is actually how little they have to do with what we normally
consider to be vampires. None of these victims
had marks on their skin to denote feeding upon their blood, no one ever saw these alleged vampires outside of their graves, and the Lakeview vampire
was more so accused of just kinda floating
around and being a pest. But rather than coming to the
conclusion that in the end, these stories have nothing
to do with vampires, what we really have to
do is accept vampires as a sort of cultural spectrum. Get the images of Dracula and such out of your head and understand that as far as so-called
real-life vampires go, no two stories are exactly the same because they're all informed separately by a continuum of local folk beliefs. Michael Bell writes in
"Food for the Dead": "In the ever-changing landscape
of this danse macabre, creatures and concepts merge
and blend, divide and disperse. Ultimately, what unites the seemingly diverse folk traditions is the belief that a corpse, possibly animated by an
evil spirit, is responsible for an otherwise inexplicable
sequence of deaths. Reduced to its common denominator, the vampire is a classic scapegoat. The corpses of Rachel
Burton, Frederick Ransom, Lemuel and Elicia Ray, Nancy
Young, Sarah Tillinghast, Ruth Ellen Rose, and Mercy
Brown attracted attention at a time when consumption was threatening to decimate their communities, and they were singled out
as the cause of that crisis. In that sense, they were vampires." But I still need to address the way that people talk about Mercy Brown and other alleged vampires,
which they weren't. Over the years, many people
have talked about Mercy and others to the media,
adding in new spicy details that aren't part of her true story in order to further cement the idea that she was a vampire or may still be one to keep the mystery alive because that's what people want to hear. Even some of Mercy's
own family descendants have been complicit in this. Mercy was not a vampire. None of these people were. The mystery isn't open because there isn't
one in the first place. So then, given what we
know now, why did the fear of vampires and the urge
to vanquish them last well into the 20th century and beyond? (something clattering mysteriously) (eerie music) Okay. The history of real-life vampires, in particular in the West,
is absolutely inseparable from real-life disease and folk medicine. You can't have one without the other. It's no coincidence that after
Robert Koch announced in 1882 that he had discovered the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, vampire incidents declined steadily as less and less people died
of consumption in general and more and more people knew
what was actually causing it. Around the same time, chemical embalming was gaining popularity, and so it became incredibly uncommon for people to be able to look at a body and tell if it's a vampire
based on its decomposition because, well, they weren't
decomposing, on purpose. It wasn't long before the
publication of "Dracula" in 1897 and its subsequent rise to
permanent mass media stardom in baby Hollywood finally
firmly placed the vampire and its supernatural monster friends permanently in the realm of fiction. But, though, our fascination
with these old stories of alleged vampires has not
entirely been overshadowed by fiction, as is
evidenced by the prevalence in recent years of something
you may have seen before: Victorian vampire defense kits. Now, I hate to be the
bearer of bad news here. These things are bullshit. They're not real. I'm not talking about
the obviously fake ones you can buy on Etsy, which
are all just really fun, and I love those, but I'm
talking about the ones selling at auction for
thousands of dollars on the claim that they are
genuinely from the 1800s, like this one that sold
earlier this year in the UK for $15,600, allegedly
originally belonging to a certain Lord Hailey,
a British administrator to India who died in 1996, plenty of time for him to have made this after "Dracula," or these fancy sumbitches
auctioned by Sterling Associates for between $6,500 to $9,000 or this one you may have
seen on "Pawn Stars." But here's the thing:
these kits are either fake or made much later than the 1800s, usually after all these tools would've begun being associated with the vampire hunting
thing in the first place. Most people in the Victorian
era did not believe vampires were running around
in need of being hunted because all these real-life
cases, as I discussed, were almost universally addressed within the realm of folk medicine. These kits are not properly authenticated, as evidenced by Sterling
Associates' response to questioning on the matter from vamped.org admin Anthony Hogg: "We believe that the
boxes and the elements contained in the boxes to be 19th century. We are not experts on
vampire slaying kits. We are unaware of any manufacturer that fabricates these boxes, so the amount of research and the ability
to research is limited. When they were assembled
and if they were ever used to kill vampires is beyond our expertise." Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum, a notoriously trustworthy institution, has one of these kits on
display, and when asked, they said that they
couldn't find documentation of their existence earlier than the '90s. But they're definitely real,
though, guys. Don't worry. Most of the people you'll see talking about these kits
aren't even antiquarians or real historians or anything in the first place, and often, they have a vampire-related
something-or-other to sell you. In reality, these kits are a composite of various antique items and
artificially aged add-ins compiled nicely in a
constructed box together. To really put the nail
in the coffin, in 2005, a man named Michael de Winter confessed on the now-defunct
survivalarts.com message board that he made a fake vampire
hunting kit in the '70s to sell his pistol collection and the trend tumbled from there. Whether or not it's
true, we'll never know, because others have also come forward to claim that they started the trend. But regardless of who the
true origin actually is, it's undeniable that these
kits all began floating around after the publication of "Dracula," and clearly, none of
them ever saw any action. As tough as it is to accept, real-life vampire hunting
wasn't this glamorous thing. There were no real-life Van Helsings. People weren't going around stalking and destroying vampires
in the dead of night, nor did they feel the
need to defend themselves from them outside of folk superstitions. But these kits are poignant evidence of just how much fiction
has not only influenced our conceptions of historical vampires but completely overtaken them
and, even further than that, has resulted in a number of
modern-day vampire crime cases. I won't get into this too deeply because it'll be its own video someday, but we'll do a quick overview. One good example is a case from 2005 when a Scotland man named Allan Menzies killed his friend Thomas
McKendrick and drank his blood because, he said, the vampire queen Akasha from Anne Rice's book "Queen
of the Damned" told him to. Another case just the year prior in Birmingham, England, saw reports of a vampire roaming the
streets and attacking locals. The "Birmingham Evening Mail" reported: "As the sun dips below the rooftops of sleepy terraced streets,
residents rush home, quickly gathering up playing children, because after night falls, a vampire hungry for blood stalks. Reports of a Dracula-style
attacker on the loose biting innocent people has spread terror throughout neighborhoods in Birmingham, causing many to fear
the darkness of night." Of course, there was no
Dracula-style vampire on the streets of Birmingham, but people wanted to believe there was. Modern vampire tales aren't
limited to Britain, though. Returning to Serbia, in 2007, a man named Miroslav Milosevic claimed to be a vampire hunter and drove a stake through the dead heart of the body of former Yugoslavian
dictator Slobodan Milosevic. No relation. And in a case almost
identically mirroring those of New England, in 2004, the
body of a Transylvanian man named Petre Toma was exhumed,
and his heart was cut out and burned and then fed to his niece, who since his death had claimed she was being tormented by
apparitions of her uncle. But the most famous case of
modern-day vampire hunting is arguably the case
of the Highgate Vampire in London, England. Around the '60s and '70s, people began witnessing a
creature at Highgate Cemetery, dark and animalistic with
glowing red eyes and sharp teeth but the form of a man. Two men, Sean Manchester
and David Farrant, separately took it upon themselves
to become vampire hunters and competed to vanquish
the Highgate Vampire. Manchester was a Catholic
priest on a mission to rid the world of vampire threats, and Farrant was what he called
a freelance vampire hunter and in 1993 set up the
Highgate Vampire Society in order to organize all data
regarding this vampire case. Manchester claims he
was asked to investigate by the sisters Anne and Luisa after Luisa was found to be sleepwalking. One night, Manchester followed
her as she sleepwalked towards a tomb in Highgate, where he says that a gray
haze blurred his vision and he heard a booming sound
and he quickly took Luisa home. Over the next few weeks,
a large number of reports of varying ridiculousness
cropped up one after the other, and claims of Satanic and occult activity in the cemetery grew louder. And so in March 1970, a wide
group of wannabe vampires and spectators descended upon the cemetery as Manchester went in
to exorcize the vampire. He claims that Luisa, while in a trance, led him to a particular
tomb in Lebanon Circle, where he indeed found the vampire. But rather than staking
it, he placed garlic, holy water, and a crucifix in the tomb, like that was gonna do anything. Of course, this didn't kill the vampire, and it allegedly went
into hiding in a house on nearby Crescent Road, where
Manchester later did claim that he staked and vanquished it for good. After this, no one ever saw the
Highgate Vampire ever again. Ah, jeez. It's fucking hot in here. C'mon, LA, it's October. Get your shit together. Michael Bell continues: "We derive comfort from giving tangible form to phenomena beyond our understanding. The monsters of folklore,
including vampires, put a face on our fear of the unknown and help us explain and
cope with the universe and the cycle of life and death. By personifying death and disease, we can more easily identify, objectify, and perhaps forestall one
and eradicate the other. At the very least, seeing is relieving." In the end, throughout all
nonfictional vampire mythology, there really is only one
common link: fear of the dead. The idea of what a vampire
is is always evolving based on the particulars
of the society it's in, but one thing is for certain: we don't actually want to vanquish them. If the case of false histories associated with historical
alleged vampires proves anything, it's that even when the vampire is killed, we still go to lengths
to keep them around. The vampire is here to stay,
no matter how long the hunt. Thank you for learning with me about the history of
real-life vampire hunting. I can't wait to revisit more
vampire topics in the future, so I hope you'll stick around
if you want to learn more. So until next time, wash
thy hands, wear thy mask, and don't forget to lock your window and keep a wreath of
garlic about your neck. They are always watching, always waiting. When the stars go dark and the
moon casts its pallid light across the earth, the
accursed beasts in the form of those you once called friend arise from their desecrated tombs. They crave the blood which
can never truly sustain them, for they are always wanting for more, toiling in their wicked
depravity and thirst, which can only be sated by
feasting upon the living. Good night. Sleep tight. But still on your guard,
for the vampire has awoken, and they are hungry. (laughing) Happy Halloween. (festive spooky music)
