Vampires, Before Dracula - Mythillogical

this video is sponsored by skillshare more to come on that shortly [Music] so crofty after both of us being somewhat worse for wear in the last episode we are back from the dead so to speak to try again yes we are indeed unfortunately not resurrected to eternal life by osiris like we'd hoped no it's back to the old fashioned digging through the dirt to escape our coffins because uh in our absence our loved ones stepped in and did the decent thing and had us buried which of course we're now going to hold a grudge against them for and drain their blood yeah or i would but uh i'm having a bit of a problem with that oh well you know how normally vampires aren't supposed to be able to cross a threshold without being invited in yes when i get invited in i'm like oh no no no no no no don't don't go into any and 20 bother i wouldn't want to impose no no no one's doing any of that and so i've not actually fed since i got resurrected that's a bit of a problem what you have to just do is just like make them feel obligated to offer you just just half a pint of their blood just to get just get you started you know oh go on oh go on i use my politeness against them yeah exactly well i don't want to intrude but it would be rude of me not to drain you for everything i possibly can hello everybody welcome to mythological my name is charles i'm joined today i can't say by my ghoul sidekick crofty because he appears to have been promoted and we're here once again to ramble on about all things folklore and mythology for far far far too long well we do kind of have eternity now so exactly and what better way to spend eternity than talking about today's topic so at the end of our last episode crofty we outlined roughly what the next subject was going to be and i think we have to say we probably went down the wrong foxhole so to speak in terms of what we were intending to do yes i was asked to give a hint and on the spot my options were to mention wallachia or to hum the buffy theme and my lungs were not up to the buffy theme that day exactly so we ended up hinting that we were going to do what particular topic crafty vampires as you may have guessed from the opening to this episode indeed and we're kind of covering vampires with a little bit of a twist because almost everyone out there is going to be familiar in some fashion with the more modern idea of a vampire as a refined count or gentleman possibly also having something of a seductive element in addition to being a undead bloodsucker what we want to focus on in this particular podcast episode is the actual folklore associated with vampires because what we discovered is that basically the modern image that we have the vampire has very very little to do with actual folklore so for example in the course of our hint for the last episode we mentioned a certain vlad tepes or better known as vlad the impaler who was a prince of wallacia in uh i believe the 15th century and who i kind of affectionately referred to as vladislav the poker let's see who gets that reference and what we really discovered is that when it comes to vampire folklore that the impeller doesn't really come into things there are various bloodthirsty legends that are associated with him in the centuries after his death but from what i can tell his modern association with the figure of the vampire really didn't come into things until the more modern literary creation of the vampire which dates from the early 19th century onwards so in the course of this episode we're going to be focusing on discovering a strain of vampirism that runs both much older and much deeper than the modern bram stoker image of the vampire however crofty that decision i think leaves us in a bit of a pickle doesn't it because it turns out there are a vast number of different entities that people over time have claimed to be vampires of one vomer of another across the world yes i in particular had a similar experience here than we had with wild hunt in which i found quite a lot of references to creatures described as vampires from various countries and when looking further into it found that that connection was tenuous at best and non-existent at worst yeah i think from the way you described it to me uh when we were messaging back and forth discussing how we were going to structure this episode i had this vision in my head of like this a scooby-doo episode where you've got the the bad guy tied up at the end of episode going ha we'll rip off the mask and figure out who's really responsible and you whip off the mask you go oh it's you again colonialism and who's that assistant of yours christianity yes so uh that sounds like it's going to be an interesting experience one thing that we've done to kind of narrow down the topic a little bit is what we've done is we've gone and selected a couple of different criteria to use in order to define what we consider to be a vampire so crofty i believe you can give us those criteria yes it's two quite simple criteria one is that they must be undead and the other is that they must feed on blood we're allowing a bit of leeway in that certain creatures will feed on some sort of mysterious life force because often that does tend to get associated with blood in religion in various forms of mythology and mysticism and in terms of being undead i think in some cases we can allow very unnaturally extending life rather than dying and coming back but that might be a case-by-case basis i must admit i've also gone into some entities that don't exactly fit the mold but i think are quite useful in helping to set up some later ideas of vampirism but otherwise we've tried to be quite specific about about what we're going to cover in this episode yeah so as a spoiler a lot of my section will be and this is why this creature that is called vampire really isn't a vampire yeah so from how we've been describing it so far you can probably tell we've split up where in the world we're going to be looking for these particular creatures so the original plan was going to be that i would cover the european traditions of vampirism and possibly older traditions that may come by way of the ancient near east however in practice i largely ended up focusing almost entirely on eastern european traditions associated with vampires so that's really where i'm going to be coming from on this crofty however you're going to be focusing on basically vampiric entities or claimed vampiric entities from around the rest of the world yes it will be a bit of a whistle stop tour because a lot of these entities there's very limited amount of reliable information to go on but i've tried to be as thorough as possible i've had almost the exact opposite problem where i had so much material where i probably could have written a script that went on for you know 10 hours or something like that it really for me it was a case of pick and choose what i end up including so with that in mind it's probably a good moment for us to mention our sources for this episode because looking at how patchy in some ways my account inevitably has had to be to be of a reasonable time for a podcast people may want to go off and explore some of the threads i touch upon more in their own time so my sources for today the main source was the vampire a new history by nick groom which is a pretty authoritative account of vampires from their folkloric and ancient roots all the way through to modern concepts of the vampire in addition to this i also looked at vampires burial and death folklore and reality by paul barber which was a really good account for having some of the first-hand reports of vampire scares that i will discuss shortly alongside this i also use some sections from the book vampire forensics uncovering the origins of an enduring legend by mark collins jenkins and i use some very small sections from mummies cannibals and vampires by richard sugg and then the very last thing to mention is i did use a copy of an article called vampirism in medicine by n kluger b cribbier and b halloweak the slight problem with this article is it was entirely in french so i basically went through the google translate version because it turns out you can now drop documents into google translate and it will translate pdfs for you which is kind of cool so basically if anyone wants a copy of that hit me up on twitter and i'll send over the brute force translated version that i have and i realize i should have cleared this with you beforehand charles but for my section i am going to have to reference as i go just because as i covered the entire world and such a massive variety of creatures the references are just scattered all over the place there's things where i will be saying there's no reliable source i just kept finding mention of this without backup things like that so i will keep my references as i go we'll say where i've had to just use something that i could not find a good source for and take that bit with a pinch of salt hopefully it'll be coherent enough yeah as we've had in the past with this podcast sometimes with folklore the references can be somewhat unreliable so that's understandable and before we go on crofty i would like to take a moment just to thank this episode's sponsor this episode is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes to explore whether you're looking to get the most out of a hobby or you would like to turn your interest into a profession skillshare can provide you with classes at every skill level something i hear online a lot is people saying that they could never turn their own hobbies into a successful youtube channel so at the risk of creating more competition for crafty and myself today i'm going to highlight a skillshare course that will show you how you can do just that the tech youtuber marquez brownlee also known as mkbhd is a tech youtuber with over 15 million subscribers and 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world you'll always be able to find the engagement and inspiration you need to bring your projects to fruition and if that wasn't enough the first 1000 subscribers to put the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so you can start exploring your creativity today so before we properly get started the last thing for me to say is if you want to keep up to date with what this podcast is doing head over to twitter.com the underscore histocrat where i occasionally give updates as to what future topics for videos are going to be and just generally post anything that comes into my head in addition to this if you're listening to this podcast on the audio formats that are out there which can be found on places like spotify apple podcasts google podcast stitcher and all those good places you can also head on over to youtube.com the histocrat where usually a couple of months after the audio version came out we also have a video version with all sorts of additional images to complement our descriptions then the final thing to mention is that this podcast is supported by a small patreon so if you want to go over to patreon.com the histocrat over there you can support the channel directly and help us devote more time to focusing on future episodes so in addition to those criteria crafty what's also kind of interesting is the figures we're going to be talking about really don't have many of the traits that are associated with the modern vampire so do you want to give us some examples of those yes because it turns out bram stoker was very imaginative in some of the things that he came up with and a lot of these have replaced older vampire folklore in how we see vampires now a few of these traits do actually strangely enough pop up in little references outside of europe that we'll discover later one thing that will probably surprise some listeners is that the idea of vampires having fangs was largely a literary creation there are some people who think that this may have crossed over from the werewolves of folklore but a more likely explanation is more for the artistic image in that yes a way of creating the modern image of biting the neck which is quite often given erotic undertones or overtones in some cases doing so to keep the wounds as small and clean as possible because if one is biting the neck with regular human teeth that gets much more messy than any sort of cinema would like to have it's pretty gruesome yeah in fact as well as just the fangs pretty much any idea of a vampire being so precise and clean and civilized i guess is pretty much entirely a literary creation none of the vampires folklore that i've read about i'm sure you might prove me wrong at some point here charles but i don't think any of them really had the intellect or the civility that we see in dracula and that they're mostly driven by hunger yeah in my case i will say i probably don't have anything to contradict you with because on my end it's mostly hairy guys all the way down ah good i was expecting to instantly get it no you're wrong there moment this idea of them not being particularly intelligent and mostly driven by instinct it does also rule out the image of them sleeping in coffins or the need for them to rest in their native soil because generally folkloric vampires didn't have the presence of mind to seek out specific sleeping place yep and indeed the idea of a vampire traveling that far from his resting place is uh very much a literary idea exactly generally they are much more predators rather than intelligent creatures that also automatically rules out certain magical abilities like hypnosis or turning into a bat or dissolving into mist which are entirely from the mind of bram stoker additionally a lot of the weaknesses that we know of are all entirely literary creations for example the obvious one being being unable to cross a threshold without being invited as again requires the civility to understand what a threshold is though there is one creature that i'll mention later from elsewhere in the world that can't cross a threshold but we will see that that is for entirely practical reasons it's quite common for vampires to only be active at night which is quite logical because these stories may have come from sightings of people or creatures that scared people and that their minds created this larger-than-life image for but the idea of burning up in sun in the sunlight is again entirely fictional one weakness that does have a bit of a a bit of a grounding in folklore is the use of garlic to water away vampires but in the folklore it's less specific i mean other strong smells could be used usually it's a pungent odour is the key factor i've actually been garlic yeah so it came more from beliefs that plague was split spread by miasma and so strong smells such as garlic or spices would keep this miasma away one weakness that again does have a bit of a grounding in in real folklore the idea of crosses and christian imagery as a weakness but that is more just because any generic encounter with something evil in europe people would raise their crucifix cross themselves and recite the lord as my shepherd as a matter of course really that's not a specific to vampire's thing with that i think that's covered all of the major things that we won't be discussing for the rest of the episode and so i'll hand over to you charles okay so before we get into actual vampire folklore as i hinted before i thought it would be good for me to just kind of set the scene by very briefly mentioning some of the major bloodsuckers and undead of antiquity that existed in both the middle east and europe who may have exerted some influence on the later folk traditions that became the vampire so evil creatures that are known to prey on eye for the flesh are the blood of loving humans are probably as old as humanity itself as is the fear of the dead returning in some fashion the earliest known accounts we have of creatures that are said to subsist at least partially on the flesh of the living include figures such as the biblical lilith who in some later literature is said to have been the rebellious first wife of adam who later went on to be characterized as something of a demonic entity that was often said to prey on children so there is some argument that her name is actually based on an older tradition so it has been argued that the name lilith shares some form of origin with the sumerian and the canadian word lillu which is generally thought to mean either demon or spirit so i came across that from when i was making my gilgamesh video over on the histogram youtube channel i think in one version of the sumerian king's list gilgamesh's father is listed as a demon or a spirit and he uses that term however in recent years there have been some challenges by scholars to the idea of this connection at all so it may just be a coincidence of names going beyond these sort of figures we also have creatures such as the lamia of ancient greece who according to the earliest accounts of greek mythology was said to have been a queen of libya who had an affair with zeus there's that guy again and whose children were stolen from her by hera as a form of revenge so in despair the lameyer is then said to have snatched up and consumed any children she came across and it was through these acts that she was transformed into a monster that in most representations usually has some form of serpentine aspect the term of the lamia also later became synonymous with figures known as the mpucy these were shape-shifting beings that were quite similar to the later succuby but they were mostly marked out by having the single feature of a bronze leg in ancient greece and rome we also see demonic entities such as the strix and the striga which later became associated with the consumption of human flesh and blood so in the case of the stricts this creature was usually envisioned more as a type of bird commonly an owl of some type and whilst it was conceived by the ancient greeks as some form of monstrosity it wasn't necessarily bloodthirsty in its earliest incarnations so according to antonious liberalism metamorphoses not to be confused with ovid's metamorphosis these stricts were created when the woman poifonte and her cannibal sons who i believe had been sired by bears were turned into owlike creatures who never ate or drank but cried during the night and whose cry was an ill omen for mankind that often pretended war or plague however by the turn of the first century aed the stryx seems to have been reconceived as a bloodthirsty creature that indeed murdered children so according to an account found in one of over's other works the fast eye the strategy targeted the legendary king procas of the etruscan city of alba longa in his cradle whilst he was a baby and whilst the creatures were successfully driven off the attack left him with lifelong scars across his cheeks later on as we move through the later parts of the roman period and into the early medieval period the terms lamia strix and indeed the term striga came to be used to mean both witches and evil spirits in general so i know this term striga in particular became associated with malevolent women who were said to be able to fly and who were engaged in cannibalism so these words would continue to be used in this fashion into the early medieval period although generally there seems to have been something of an opposition by the christian church to the idea that many of these entities existed at all i think i mentioned this to you before crofty i had a bit of a coincidence whilst i was preparing for this episode because i'm currently writing a script that involves large sections of early christian ireland and in one of the early church documents from there which is known as the first synod of saint patrick belief in both the lamia and the striga and named as a potential reason for excommunication the one thing i should probably point out is that the actual translation the version i used substituted the word vampire or striga in its texts however as we're going to see later and that will become important the word vampire didn't actually exist in the latin language or the english language in any form and indeed wouldn't do until the early 18th century so moving beyond these figures we also have examples of the restless dead that are found throughout northern european folklore probably the most prominent of these are in the icelandic sagas such as gretea's saga and i did look up this name but i cannot remember how to pronounce it now a big saga the restless dead are known as drauga or barrow dwellers and largely appear both as the guardians of ancient hordes and as beings that occasionally soured forth from tombs and attacked the living these figures were said to be you know less of a case of spirits that possess dead bodies and more a case of the restless spirit of the dead individual that was motivated by both wealth and greed attempting to remain as corporeal as possible so anyone who has played the game at skyrim is probably quite aware of what the appearance of these creatures is supposed to look like because it's quite similar to that as described in the sagas so so generally drauga or whites were characterized by their combination of superhuman strength their appearance of being deaf blue or black and also some of them were said to possess magical powers to the point where they were even immune to conventional weapons i'm sort of imagining the artwork that you see of tolkien's barrow whites like the game's workshop models of tolkien's barrow whites yeah that basically matches the description that you've just given well speaking of tolkien uh i also have a quick throwaway reference to a work which he produced a translation of in his youth which is in the work beowulf the monstrous being grendel is also similarly described as being a bloodsucker and specifically is said to have cannibalized the bodies of the men he slays before his contention with beowulf so the final couple of entities i just want to mention quickly before we move on to actual vampire folklore are a couple that i hinted at earlier so in the 15th and the 16th century works of the malayas maleficarum of heinrich kramer or kramer and the demonology of king james the first and sixth of england scotland and ireland respectively would describe seductive demons known both as the incubi to the male version and the succubus so these figures were largely said to attempt to seduce innocents into engaging in sexual activity with them however there are also examples where these creatures are said to feed upon the flesh of their victims or to in other ways cause them misfortune such as ill health or even death i think there are some kind of useful parallels that can be drawn between male vampires and the traditions i'm going to talk about and the incubi in particular so in addition to these creatures that can kind of be seen as embodying some of the traits that folkloric vampires would go on to have we also probably have to take into account that around the time these stories were active in europe blood itself played some very unusual roles in the practice of both ancient and medieval medicine probably the most notable practice that we should point to is during this entire period the pseudo-scientific practice of bloodletting remained common so this practice potentially dates back to ancient egyptian times the first really concrete descriptions we have of it date to the fifth century bc when it was mentioned as a contemporary treatment by the greek physician hippocrates although from what i read he himself apparently relied more on rest and dietary treatments rather than such a practice so this theory of bloodletting was based on the then existing humoral theory which fought that the body contained four major humors which were blood phlegm yellow bile and black bile and imbalances between these four different humors often were thought to result in illness as a result many medical treatments were based around keeping these humors in proper balance and user consisted of inducing practices such as vomiting administering diuretics or of course bloodletting to keep their respective humors at an acceptable level so throughout the middle ages this practice of bloodletting was reinforced due to the influence of the writings of the second and third century ad greek physician and philosopher gallon whose ideas anatomy dominated for more than a millennium i think some of them persisted as long as the 16th century ad so gowan or galen was a subscriber to the humorial theory of more ancient greeks however he thought that in particular the blood was the most abundant of the humors and thus was the most in need of control and that in addition to removing it through the practice of bloodletting it could also become stagnant in the extremities of the body and would thus require specialized methods for its removal the result of all this was that bloodletting would remain a common treatment and would be elaborated on with blood being taken from specific parts of the body well into the 19th century and it did not actually die out until the early 20th century and what's probably useful for us is that bloodletting was as its absolute peak as a medical tool in the 17th and the 18th centuries which is when the concept of vampirism became more widely known throughout europe i will say what i also found kind of interesting and this is a little off topic was during the course of researching this i found out that bloodletting is still used in a legitimate medical fashion so it's mostly used for the treatment of specific blood disorders which result in things like an accumulation of too much iron in the blood so blood letting is in fact still technically alive and going today sounds leeching as well interestingly yeah yeah similar similar reasons yeah it turned out there was something useful there just not in the fashion it was being used yes specific reasons not just bloodlet for everything so beyond this practice of bloodletting blood was also used throughout history as a potential medical cure in itself specifically in some ways it was supposed to have rejuvenating powers so as far back as the roman period puni the elder claimed that people suffering from epilepsy would drink the blood of freshly slain gladiators in the hopes that this would result in a cure i will say that pliny is a little bit of an unreliable source not just in terms of you know the unreliability of the cure but also the report in itself so maybe just take that one with a pinch of salt in the 12th century ad sent hildegard of bingen recommended baths of menstrual blood in order to cure leprosy in a similar fashion whilst in the 15th century the occultist marcilio vicino would claim that witches frequently took part in bloodsucking writing that quote it is an ancient and common opinion that certain crohn's called witchers suck the blood of infants in order to rejuvenate themselves as best they can then why might not our elderly finding themselves all but without hope or survival suck the blood of a lad of a lad i say of star wars forces healthy cheerful well-tempered excellent blood that might be by happy chance excessive let them search then like a leech that is a bloodsucker from a slightly open vein in the skinny part of the arm an ounce or two then immediately take the same amount of syrup or wine this should be done precisely when they are hungry and thirsty and at the waxing of the moon so to conclude this kind of section on the supposed properties attributed to blood in both ancient and medieval times i have two notable cases where blood was used as a claimed revitalizing treatment now one of these might be based on fact the other is frequently claimed as factual but is now thought to almost certainly be based on a conspiracy and later stories that then grew up around the incident and indeed this story is frequently associated with vampires so i thought it was inappropriate to include it in the first case it is often claimed that the 5th century pope innocent viii was treated with blood on his deathbed after suffering a stroke so according to the account of stefano infesura an attempt to rejuvenate the ailing pope was made by oral administration of the collected blood of three separate youths each of whom died during the process unfortunately for the pope however these efforts were unsuccessful and he died soon after a lot of the sources i consulted in the course of the episode basically printed this account pretty much verbatim it should be pointed out however that the main source for this account was basically one of the harshest critics of this pope so it's entirely possible that he just completely fabricated this just to you know basically kick the guy whilst he was dead i also will point out that um that particular pope was a major opponent of witchcraft and practices during his lifetime so it sounds unlikely but with the state of medicine at the time it is possible i guess the second case and probably the most famous case there is of the claimed revitalizing uses of blood in history is associated with the case of countess elizabeth battori elizabeth battori and her wider family were major landowners throughout the then kingdom of hungary i think her most influential relative was king stephen bettori who was king of neighbouring poland lithuania and was also prince of transylvania though in 1610 elizabeth petori was accused by the ruling habsburg authorities of being a major serial killer who was allegedly responsible for torturing to death up to 650 of her young female servants a crime for which she was imprisoned in her castle until her death in 1614. and the later most famous piece of folklore that was attached to her is that she was specifically claimed to have bathed in the blood of her virgin victims and the hope that this would rejuvenate her appearance however it should be said again these accounts date from well after her death and it is now also fought by a good number of scholars that these claims and the resulting trial may have been a spectacle that was designed to destroy her and her family's power in the region and given that this was a region that bordered on austria this would have been an act that very much benefited the ruling habsburg dynasty uh in particular it's also said that the emperor of the time which i believe was matthias was actually in debt to the batories so that may also include a potential motive this account is also frequently linked to bram stoker's later depiction of vampires there isn't any actual evidence of this however so for example i don't think any reference to this actually appears in his known notes so this may just be a later association that's kind of been made in pop culture so the one other thing i think that should be briefly mentioned and i mean very briefly mentioned before we go into the actual folklore was that in the case of murders in medieval europe it was often thought that blood could be used in some ways to help distinguish the potential murderer so it was often said for example that colts would bleed in the presence of their killer and often this blood would be impossible to remove i haven't gone into this in a lot of detail but i will point out that this particular attribute does appear in the plays of shakespeare for example so getting into the actual folklore that surrounds vampires the major accounts of vampires in europe or more specifically the panics they inspired came out of eastern europe from the 17th and the 18th centuries onwards with the first major vampire craze so to speak occurring throughout wider europe during the 1730s however it should be noted that these accounts really only present a fairly late unified image of what constituted a vampire and in reality there is evidence that the region has had a very rich body of concerns regarding the reanimation of the dead since at least a medieval period so for an example of this in the 14th century the serbian emperor stefan dushan would issue as part of his law code a general ban on unlawful exchamation which read when it happens that by magical means people are taken out of their graves and cremated the village where that was done must pay a fine and the priest who came to the cremation must be deprived of his vocation it's from law codes such as this that you can infer that such practices of disinterring the dead who were suspected of being some form of creature may well have been endemic to the region but that is just an inference the exact origin of the english word vampire is itself an uncertain one as nick groom notes in his work it could originate from a number of different slavic words the most commonly mentioned candidates are the russian term i think of yupir or possibly the lithuanian words of vampi which is supposed to mean to drink or vamiti which apparently means barking or yammering other words for specific vampiric entities throughout the region include the strigoi of romanian folklore the vampire of serbia and croatia the albanian striga and the polish strizga ostriziga sorry this is only a small sampling of the various terms that are associated with vampires in this region i mostly want to point that many of these terms i've just mentioned there are said to be derived from the earlier roman term of striga but the exact route by which this transmission would have been made is not 100 certain it is most commonly stated however that this transmission likely came through greece and through the wider balkans further into eastern europe so in addition to this we also see terms such as the serbian term of wukolaki which is often used in overlapping fashion to mean either a vampire or a werewolf in greece and macedonia there's similarly an entity known as the vrykolakas which is commonly equated to the vampires of eastern europe although it should be pointed out that in most accounts the very colakus hungers more for human flesh and the livers rather than for blood however both the circumstances that lead to the creation of this creature and the methods that are claimed to destroy it are almost identical to those that have been claimed for other vampiric entities so i have decided to include it here so that on the whole is just a small selection of the various terms that i use throughout these regions i'm aware there are other terms also used in areas such as belarus i just wanted to give a good sampling of them here because again if i went into all the local traditions and variants of vampires i would be here for hours for the sake of this episode when it comes to describing the more general picture of an eastern european or slavic vampire i am going to largely stick to the generalities however where specific instances come up and irrelevant i will try to go into those to give a bit more of a flavor of how these figures can vary so the picture of a vampire that is derived from most eastern european folklore as we described earlier bears very little resemblance to the image of the refined long-tubed gentleman count that we see in most media today that's because instead of the long teeth as crafty said most vocaloid vampires are marked by a flushed or healthy colored or even a dark face the presence of fresh blood around their mouth and a body that is swollen from their recent feeding in addition to this unlike their literary counterparts in most of the reports that i found in the course of my research the actual vampire itself is usually encountered not when it's out and mobile but when it is resting as a corpse within its grave so in many of the reports that describe vampires throughout these regions when it comes to determining whether or not a particular corpse is in fact a vampire there usually are a number of general criteria amongst the most important of these are that there be a presence of a freshness or a lack of decomposition or stench about the body in addition the continued growth of the hair or the nails or alternatively the shedding of the nails to reveal new nails growing below were thought to be signs of a vampire in addition if a corp sheds its outer layer of skin to reveal a pale layer below then this is also considered a potential mark of vampirism so according to paul barber there is also a slavic tradition where a corpse found with an open mouth maybe a vampire he actually points to an example of in all things the novel war and peace there is an instance in there where the elder prince balonsky actually has his mouth tied shut after he dies and he attempted to argue in his work that this was done due to a fear of potential vampirism but i don't know if that actually is the case or not another commonly reported trait of both slavic and germanic vampires is the presence of a white liver within the corpse which is usually thought to be due to a deficiency of bile and finally probably the most important trait of all is the presence of either liquid blood within the corpse or within the grave or on the grave cloves so after a person died and became a vampire the newborn creature was often said to consume its own grave clothes and shroud and sometimes to even tear out its own flesh and to rip out its bowels after remaining in its coffin for a period the vampire would then leave its grave in search of victims often it was said that it would start with its own kin a male vampire in particular would often seek to have sex with his wife uh with any offspring that were conceived as a result being largely marked by having no skeleton in most of these accounts the vampire is usually male however there are a few female ones that do pop up as you mentioned before crofty where the modern image of a vampire has a vampire being unable to enter a particular residence until it's invited inside that is not found in the slavic tradition of a vampire in the slightest in fact in these traditions a vampire was capable of entering the home through any gap no matter how small and once it did so it would not in fact attempt to kill its victims by draining their blood directly and often would not even kill using its teeth instead most would instead suffocate their victim so this would be done either by actively strangling them or in areas such as bulgaria this was done by the vampire sitting on their chest until they expired and often only then would the vampire proceed to drain the victim's blood amongst the vampires that did bite their victims the area of biting often tended to vary sometimes victims will be bitten over the left breast over the heart or the nipple and sometimes even between their eyes so in addition to these disruptive activities vampires were also often considered to be general harbingers of ill women for a community often they were thought to act as vectors or illnesses such as the plague what we should probably also know is that throughout much of european history and during the time of these reports first came out of eastern europe the idea that an illness could circulate independently of any physical force wasn't really a concept so as you mentioned before crafted the idea of the being a miasma for example that would spread illness or a form of bad air was ascribed to and the idea that illness could just circulate independent of some sort of force or some form of divine retribution didn't really develop until towards the end of the 18th century so as a result it's somewhat unsurprising that a vampire would be considered a suitable agent to explain the spread of an otherwise invisible contagion so the folklorist claude lekusho who i believe we mentioned in the wild hunt episode has also attempted to argue that the emergence of vampire outbreaks in the wider european consciousness came right as the european witch hunts were dying down and as such their popularity from the 18th century onwards may have been because they provided a convenient replacement to explain the outbreak of the plague an ironic note to add to all this is that vampire blood itself was actually occasionally considered to have restorative properties despite the uh problems associated with vampires themselves and often it was specifically said that it could be used to cure someone who themselves had contracted vampirism which i will mention in the form of an example later so the exact ways in which a vampire could be created differed throughout eastern europe common reasons that were given for a person being susceptible to becoming a vampire include that they were murdered that they drowned they committed suicide that they were the victim of a plague that they suffered some form of curse in life or were placed under some form of restriction by a priest or that they were not accorded the proper burial rites often authors tend to group a lot of these reasons under the category of the vampire being someone who has some form of unfinished business in life alternatively people could be born with certain traits and supposedly marked them out as being likely to become a vampire after their death so for example amongst the polish and the kashubs of northern germany it was said that anyone who was born with quote a red cowl over their head which is usually thought to mean the amniotic membrane or who is born with two teeth is fought to become a vampire so other common traits in areas such as romania and russia include people who are born with a split lip an extra nipple a hairy chest or back or who were born with a tail like extension to the spine in particular the figure of a straziga in poland could also be marked out by being born with quote two hearts and two sets of teeth in addition to these uh predispositions towards becoming a vampire it was also commonly believed throughout much of slavic folklore that a corpse could become a vampire if either a person or an animal of some type jumped or flew across it which i believe crofty we might possibly come across that concept again when you're discussing the idea of vampire like entities in china yeah that one does briefly come up yes and then finally of course those people who were killed by a vampire were generally thought to also become vampires along with those who also ate the meat of an animal that was killed by a vampire so if those are the activities and the potential causes of vampires how might one go about ridding themselves of such a creature well as with the causes the exact methods used tend to vary somewhat throughout the regions in which vampire folklore is known however the most consistent methods of destroying a vampire were fought to be through either staking the creature through the heart or in the case of vampires found with their mouths open through the mouth or through decapitating the body so the type of wood that would be used for these stakes tended to vary between regions so in serbia hawthorne was generally used whilst in places like russia and the baltic states ash was the preferred wood as i think it was in northern germany as well after this in some cases the body would simply be reinterred or if it was judged to be necessary it would be destroyed through cremation or in some cases i think it's even mentioned that it was disposed of by being thrown into a nearby body of water such as a river sometimes the decapitated head would also be reinterred with the body or would be reinterred separately so the two could not combine again other methods also included driving nails into the body particularly the forehead or for the creature's heart to be removed and destroyed sometimes however all that was really required was for a vampire's body to be reinterred with proper funeral rites being performed other methods involve trying to prevent a freshly buried corpse from becoming a vampire so a common way of doing this was to place the body in the coffin upside down which was fought to prevent the vampire from finding its way back up to the surface or to place some object within the grave that would either remove the vampire's need to come back to life or that would simply prevent it from coming back at all a good example of this is how an item such as a pot shard or a rock might be placed inside the suspected vampire's mouth this is usually done so the creature would chew upon this rather than chewing upon its shroud or its flesh or attempting to seek out its kin in order to chew upon them alternatively a brick might be placed under the corpse's chin in order to prevent it from chewing at all which is similar to the practice of binding to the mouth that we mentioned before other practices included placing sharp objects such as the sickle in the grave so the corpse was prevented from swelling and thus becoming a vampire in some regions the sickle was instead said to be placed across the neck so the creature would decapitate itself should it try to rise or it was instead used to pierce the corpse's heart i did see like um when i was researching this i did also kind of see a theory this may be where some of the later imagery of the grim reaper may have come from but i that was just a throwaway thing i saw i had no i had not had the chance to verify it so it could be complete nonsense but it could be a small kernel of truth though often nets and stockings would also be buried with a suspected vampire in order to occupy the creature and the rationale that it would become obsessed with untying the knots there were some regions however where this generally wasn't done so this wasn't really done amongst the tubes and it also was not done amongst the greeks as they felt that this would prevent the corpse from decomposing properly so the final category i have here of these sort of methods is methods and items that were designed to ward off vampires so probably the most common method i found that was used to for these creatures was to sprinkle sand seeds or other particulate matter either in the grave of the suspected vampire itself or on the path that led to the grave so this was done because it was thought that the vampire would be forced to count each and every one of these items and in some accounts this only took place at the rate of one a year so that was thought to be a particularly effective protection wait the vampire was forced to count things yes because it was obsessed with them and it only would count them often at the rate of one a year sesame street had truth to it i'm very sorry no it's fine so a summer practice also involved people sprinkling poppy seeds in each corner of their house which again was fought to provide a measure of protection against a vampire entering the residence this was supposedly done due to of all things the poppy seeds narcotic effect on the vampire which would encourage it to sleep if you know anything about what poppies can be used to make that sort of makes sense but the actual amount of narcotic that could possibly present be present in a single seed is probably not a lot you're going to need most of a field in addition to this we also have vampires being warded off by strong smells as you noted with your comparison to garlic in our criteria at the beginning one thing that interestingly doesn't really come into folklore surrounding vampires in this region is the effects that mirrors might have on vampires so in some later versions vampires are said to have an aversion to mirrors if only because it can give away they have no shadow that does not seem to have been the case in vampire folklore although in some regions such as bulgaria it was thought that exposing a body to a mirror was an ill omen because by projecting effectively two bodies you were inviting a further death now that we've gone through kind of the generic attributes of a folkloric vampire let's move on to discuss some more specific examples of supposed vampire outbreaks now these were largely reported at the very end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century and there's a possible reason why that i will get into shortly so amongst the earliest accounts we have that of a man by the name of giogrando which occurred in 1672 so grando was a man from croatian istria who was said to have risen from the dead as what is described as a leash nam or a restless corpse 16 years after his death so after returning home he went on to sexually assault his wife and visited his neighbors by knocking on their doors at night and anyone who was said to have heard that knock that household was said to be destined to have a death so after multiple attempts to get rid of him failed which included an attempted exorcism by the local priest and multiple attempts to stake him with a hawthorne stick but i think one encounter is described where the hawthorne stick was thrown at him as he was encountered on the streets and it just bounced off his chest eventually his body was exhumed and found to be undecayed and after another attempt to stake him he was eventually decapitated at which point peace returned to the region a very detailed early 18th century report is such a creature is also given in the work of the botanist joseph piton de tonifort who described an incident with a greek recalcus on the island of mikonos so this incident which supposedly dated back to 1701 concerned an unnamed peasant who rose from the dead in tonifort's account we are told that this peasant who was said to have been a quarrelsome man in life died by the hands of unknown assailants out in the fields near the town and was buried in the chapel shortly after two days later it was made known that the same peasant had been seen out walking during the night and indeed had come into the homes of the inhabitants where he engaged in such antics as turning over the furniture extinguishing the lamps and embracing people from behind first the inhabitants were inclined to mostly see this as just harmless fun which is very strange but later some of the more respectable citizens of the town began to complain and so after a number of meetings the local town leaders and priests decided to intervene on the tenth day since the colts was buried so after saying a massive in the chapel in which the man was interred the residents had the bodies interred upon which his heart was cut out and destroyed i believe tony thought was actually present for this event and he claims that due to the great stink that arose from the corpse incense was burnt within the chapel however later some of those presents would claim that the resulting smoke came from the corpse itself as it was dissected tonif wouldn't note that later residents would also swear that the body was still warm and its blood fresh however he and his party claimed to have been situated near the corpse and according to him quote the body was quite adequately dead if you can't tell he was very skeptical about the idea that this was a vampire of some sort so at this point a crowd arrived who claimed they had been present when the body was transported for burial and that it did not become stiff upon death which is another trait attributable to vampires and as such it was definitely a true vrikalakas so despite this action the creature apparently remained active and grew only more violent people claimed that he would attack people at night destroy their property tear up their clothing and if he found any liquids have been left out he would consume them so eventually people became so terrorized that many families would leave their homes at night and bed down on pallets in the town square instead after this the villagers disinterred the body multiple times so they ended up filling its mouth with holy water they planted several swords within the grave until they realized the swords made a crude cross that were preventing the spirit or demon within the creature from escaping finally they eventually brought matters to her head by burning the body on a pyre upon which points the reports of the creature ceased so tonight for basically attributed the whole instant not to any supernatural being but claims it was an attack of mass hysteria and irrationality by the villagers and condemns the disinterment as being unlawful it is also in the early 1720s that we get the first literary account laying out the typical traits of a folkloric vampire as part of a study of the natural history of poland written by the jesuit priest father gabriel razzasinski himself drawing upon the work of a father gengo in this work we see the first known account of a russian yupir which appears to have been drawn from gengel's accounting of local superstitions and reads as follows i frequently heard from credible eyewitnesses that human bodies have been found not only incorrupt flexible and ready for a long time but moreover the head the mouth the tongue and the eyes are sometimes seen to move the winding sheet in which they are wrapped is undone and parts of the body are devoured at times it is also noted that a body of this kind rises again from the grave wanders past crossroads and houses showing himself now to one now to another and also attacks many trying to suffocate them if it is a male body it is called a up if it is a female it is called a upr zitcha as if to say a feathered one i.e a body provided with down or feathers light and agile for movement the actual widespread popularization of accounts of vampires throughout europe can be traced to two events that occurred in extension to these in the early 18th century these took place in the balkans much like the events of the early 19th century had a big effect on europe the historical context this initial popularization of vampire attacks came place immediately after the end of the austro-turkish war of 1716-1718 which ended in the treaty of passarowitz or passarovitz under the terms of this treaty the austrian habsburg empire managed to temporarily extend their territory into northern syria along with bosnia and wallacia and it is during this period of military occupation by the austrians that we get the first really heavily documented accounts of vampiric attacks that were recorded by the official authorities two accounts that receive the most publicity were related to two serbian men whose respective deaths were said to have unleashed vampiric attacks throughout their local communities so the first of these men was peter blagojevic also known as peter pogo javits who was a local of the village of kisilova who died in 1725 and whose case was investigated by the imperial proviso from bald so here is the direct report of his case it's not too long so i'm going to give a direct translation of the full report which reads after a subject by the name of peter plogger jovitz had died 10 weeks passed he lived in the village of kisilova in the ram district and had been buried according to the wrightsvien custom it was revealed that in this same village within a week nine people both old and young died also after suffering a 24-hour illness and they said publicly while they were yet alive but on their death bed the above mentioned plugger jovitz who had died 10 weeks earlier had come to them in their sleep laid himself on them and throttled them so they would have to give up the ghost the other subjects were very distressed and strengthened even more so in such beliefs by the fact that the dead peter pogba jovitz's wife after saying that her husband had come to her and demanded his oppanky or shoes had left the village of kisilova and gone to another and since with such people which they call vampires various signs are to be seen that is the body undecomposed the skin hair beard and nails growing the subjects resolved unanimously to open his grave and see if the above mentioned signs were really to be found on him to this end they came here to me and telling of these events asked me and the local pope or parish priest to be present at the viewing and although i at first disapproved telling them that the praiseworthy administration would first be dutifully and humbly and informed and its exalted opinion about this should be heard they did not want to accommodate themselves to this at all but rather gave this short answer i could do what i wanted if i did not accord them the viewing and the legal recognition to deal with the body according to their custom they would have to leave house and home because by the time a gracious resolution was received from belgrade perhaps the entire village and this was already supposed to have happened in turkish times could be destroyed by such an evil spirit and they did not want to wait for this since i could not hold such people from the resolution they had made either with good words or with threats i went to the village of kisilova taking with them the greatish pope and viewed the body of peter pogo jovitz just exhumed finding an accordance through truthfulness that first of all i did not detect the slightest odour that is otherwise characteristic of the dead and of the body except for the nose which was somewhat fallen away was completely fresh the hair and the beard even the nails of which the old ones had fallen away had grown on him the old skin which was somewhat whitish had peeled away and a new fresh one had emerged under it the face the hands and the feet and the whole body was so constituted they could not have been more than complete in his lifetime not without astonishment i saw some fresh blood in his mouth which according to the common observation he had sucked from the people killed by him in short all the indications were present that such people as remarked above are said to have after above the pope and i had seen the spectacle while the people grew more outraged and distressed of the subject with great speed sharpened a stake in order to pierce the corpse of the deceased within it and put this at his heart whereupon he was pierced not only did more blood completely fresh flow also through his ears and mouth but such other wild signs which i pass by out of high respect took place finally according to their usual practice they burned the off-mentioned body to ashes of which i informed the most laudable administration and at the same time would like to request obediently and humbly if a mistake was made in this matter such as to be attributed not to me but by the rabble who were beside themselves with fear so here we can see a fairly characteristic case the vampire being presented as a start of an epidemic though as paul barber noted in his work the actual vampirism exhibited basically boils down to we found a corpse that hadn't decayed as much as we thought it should have so the second major case occurred in the aftermath of all this but this was only the date of reporting so the actual investigation in this case didn't take place until several years after the fact so it took place in the village of medvedja and concerned a man by the name of arnold paul so paul was a former serbian soldier or hajduk who had returned and settled in his native village where he died in 1727 after the hey wagon he was driving on overturned and he broke his neck some 20-30 days after his death however it was reported that he rose from his grave and killed four people now where paul's case differs from the previous one is that we actually have some details of his claim behavior prior to his death so specifically he is said to have been played by a vampire himself and indeed that he went to great lengths in order to rid himself of this so it was said that this included consuming dirt from the grave of the vampire and when this did not work he attempted to cure himself by smearing himself with his blood after the deaths his body was exhumed on the 40th day since it was buried and found to be undecayed so according to the later report written by the authorities fresh blood also flowed from his eyes nose mouth ears and more blood covered his grave clothes his shroud and his coffin and his nails and skin had fallen off to expose new ones in their place judging him on this appearance to be a vampire those present drove a stake through his heart at which point he gave out an audible groan and blood poured from within him after these those present burned his body and scattered its ashes in the graves then proceeded to do the same for each of his victims to be sure however what's significant about this case is that this did not prevent a second wave of vampire attacks from breaking out some years later in 1731 and it is in fact this wave of attacks that led to the actual official investigation which was carried out by a medical team sent by the austrian authorities so according to their report which was compiled by officer johann flukinger it was claimed in addition to feeding on humans arnold paul had also fed on animals and that's in time more vampires arose due to people consuming these creatures flesh the result is over the course of several months a total of 17 people young and old passed away some of whom had shown no prior sign of illness when said expired rapidly over only two or three days so amongst these was a girl named joviza who was said to have laid down to sleep fresh and healthy only to start to wake suddenly at midnight with a terrible cry and complain that she had been throttled by the son of a local soldier named milo who had himself died nine weeks earlier after this she began to experience a great pain in her chest and gradually grew weaker until she died three days later in response to this death and others the medical team proceeded to open several of the graves of suspected vampires to examine the conditions their report notes that some of these bodies were then dissected with lukinga apparently conducting at least one dissection himself of a woman named stanna who had died during childbirth according to his report before death this woman had attempted to protect herself by again smearing her body with the blood of a known vampire but despite this her body was found to be undecayed with a large quantity of liquid blood still within her pectoral cavity in addition her body also carried many of the other hallmarks of a vampire you know eg the shedding of the nails and skin and in another instance an older woman by the name of melisa was said to have been found plump and fresh within her grave despite having been known to be very lean during life obviously all of these were taken as signs of vampirism so after the exhibitions were concluded the bodies that were judged to be vampires had their heads cut off by what the report describes as the local gypsies as in the romani which is one of the kind of first threads we kind of see of the romani people being kind of associated with later vampire law and the bodies were burned with the ashes being thrown into the river marava so as with the earlier case this account obviously carries many of the hallmarks of your typical vampire scare however if we put aside again the hearsay regarding the death of arnold paul which was not observed by the medical team what we actually have is a case of a number of people dying suddenly within a community in two separate outbreaks and a number of bodies again simply been found not to decay to the level that they would have been expected to there may be a potential explanation for this as i will go into later so these two accounts quickly became famous throughout europe in particular the arnold paul case was published in the glenya historique which was a french language journal published in the netherlands this journal basically made its name on publishing articles on vampirism in the course of 1732 and its work ended up being republished in a wide number of journals throughout austria and germany then later been translated and published in english and french the peter plogo jovitz case similarly was published in a viennese paper called vinoraich diarim in july 1725 and similarly was translated and circulated widely throughout northern and western europe 1732 also saw a large number of scholarly works being published on the topic of vampirism which uh continued in succeeding years in britain the poll case was reported in the london journal on march 11 1732 as quote a horror story from hedokin which i think is a misconception of the term for soldier in the area hey dukkhan in hungary namely of dead bodies sucking as it were the blood of the living for the latter visibly dry up whilst the former are filled with blood so this and other stories would contribute to something of a vampire mania in parts of the british upper class and it was said that this was believed by figures such as king george ii who himself was of german origin and the elector of the state of hanover it is also around this time that the word vampire seems to have entered the english language it would go on in decades to be used in a political sense and also used often in conjunction with religion so throughout the remainder of the 18th century similar claimed outbreaks of vampirism were reported so for example in croatia in 1737 the island of la stovo was struck by a severe case of dysentery that was blamed on a vampire and that would result in a number of corpses being exhumed and decapitated in the years 1754 to 56 vampire outbreaks were also reported about the regions of wallachia the banart and moravia including the case of a woman named rosina pollakin from the village of hermesdorf so upon being exhumed her body was found still have liquid blood within its veins which resulted in her family members dragging it by a hook through a hole in the local churchyard wall after which they decapitated it and burned the remains so in 1749 as part of increasing church backlash to these reports pope benedict the 14th declared vampires to be quote fallacious fictions of human fantasy and his work on the beater faction of the servants of god and on the canonization of the beatified and by the mid 1750s direct action to address these exhumations could no longer really be avoided so in 1755 the empress maria theresa herself devote catholic dispatched two doctors johannes gasser and christian fabst to investigate the outbreaks and report to her personal physician and head surgeon of the military gerard van spieten luckily vance vietnam was a frank rationalist and he would go on to write a treatise on vampires where he basically attributed it all to superstition and mass hysteria so based on the reports he received he recommended that it be decreed that those suspected of vampirism and other crimes should not be executed and that books on witchcraft and demonology be banned the result was that on march 1 1755 the empress decreed that vampires were figments of the imagination and that no evidence of supernatural activity had been found the staking and burning of corpses was banned and cases involving vampirism were removed from the jurisdiction of the regional court and of the religious courts and after resulting further decrees the appellate courts also began to throw out vampirism cases as unsubstantiated around the same time many traditional witch-hunting practices were also effectively banned meaning that both vampirism and witchcraft were effectively made visible in the official eyes of the government so over the rest of the 18th century the wave of enthusiasm for accounts of vampire outbreaks in europe would gradually die down so one factor in this was that after this initial wave of enthusiasm dissipated doctors and scholars largely started to become more skeptical of the idea of vampirism so after the initial wave of popularity there was something of an effort by various scholars to medicalize vampirism and a number of possible different definitions and lists of symptoms were banded about however over time after no clear set of symptoms were agreed upon uh reports of vampirisms increasingly became seen in light of good old-fashioned western european prejudices against eastern europe so for centuries by that point eastern europe had been characterized as a superstitious and credulous place by people in western europe a lot of this seems to be based on the fact that the orthodox church was prevalent throughout much of the region and basically between these attitudes and various governments of eastern europe putting measures in place to prevent the bodies of claimed vampires being defiled this led to a slow drop in interest in these cases until they largely died out and as a kind of closing point of my section in 1764 the writer voltaire would even lampoon the idea of vampires in his philosophical dictionary which came as part of a much longer attack on the concept so the quote i have here is if there is in this world a well-attested account it is that of the vampires nothing in lacking official reports affidavits of well-known people of surgeons of priests of magistrates the judicial proof is most complete and with all that who is there who believes in vampires the end result of all of this was that the first popular wave of interest in vampire folklore largely died out in europe by the end of the 18th century and it would take the later literary reinvention of the vampire in the 19th century by authors such as john william polidori with his short story the vampire and of course the works of bram stoker to revive it so inevitably one question that you ask yourself whilst you're reading about these sort of vampire outbreaks and folklore is are there some possible explanations for these supposed incidents that go beyond simple superstition and figments the imagination of the people reporting them well there have been various attempts by scholars and even medical professionals to explain the events that may lead to potential vampire outbreaks in particular a lot of scholars are pointed to the poor understanding of the processes of decomposition as they were known in europe during the time and in particular how these processes can vary in speed so obviously the race at which a body decomposes can vary quite widely depending on the time of year that they were buried or you know the conditions of the burial soil itself if the individual was buried in a coffin or if they were buried simply in a shroud the easiest examples point to is if someone is buried in the cooler part of the year their body is likely to stay you know fresher for longer just because of the colder conditions and for example i should point out the bodies that were exhumed during the arnold paul case were actually exhumed in winter so there's a pretty good explanation as to why some of the bodies may have been in better condition in addition to this a couple of explanations are a bit more conjecture have been pointed out so it has been claimed that bodies that are buried in hot conditions in materials such as clay sand mud or silt can undergo a process where their soft tissues are effectively converted to what is known as adipocere or cemetery grease in low oxygen conditions so normally this is a process that can take months or even years to occur but there are a few instances known of it happening quite rapidly and what it basically results in is the body is effectively turned into a cast of itself that makes it appear whole so that's a slightly more outlandish possibility for why some bodies may have been perceived in this manner it does not explain things like the fresh expulsion and appearance of blood however in addition decomposing bodies are well known to swell with gases and the releases of these gases may explain the groans that some reports noted that individuals made when they were staked or just generally reports of vampires groaning or moaning or jibbering within their graves that are sometimes found within eastern folklore in addition people have tried to link the actual physical characteristics claimed by sightings of vampires when they're out and about at their graves to people who are suffering from specific illnesses so as mentioned before vampires and folklore were often associated with the spread of the plague and there may be a little bit more basis in fact than you would think to this so as paul barbara notes in his book one of the symptoms of the pneumonic form of the plague is that the victim coughs up large amounts of blood in their saliva and this may explain the appearance of supposedly fresh bloods on the mouths of either disinterred played victims or people who are in the final throes of the plague who may be mistaken for vampires in addition to this there's been some slightly more fringe theories um one of them is that since the late 1990s there's a spanish neurologist by the name of dr juan gomez alfonso who was attempted to link the historical descriptions of vampire encounters with people suffering from the advanced stages of rabies so i don't know how familiar you are with rabies crofty but in their fine in its final stages its symptoms can include such things as delirium paranoia terror uh the presence of hallucinations a fear of water partial paralysis agitation aggressive behavior which in some cases can include biting then eventually collapse into coma and death in addition to this there's other claimed diseases that may explain some of these uh conditions so for example one claimed uh condition is that of cutaneous porphyria which most people would probably know of as a much more debilitating variant on the condition that king george the third of the united kingdom is supposedly had explained his madness however it should be noted that many of the claims that be made around the symptoms of this condition are inaccurate so a commonly repeated one is that people suffering from cutaneous porphyria have a compulsion to consume blood this is support to be completely false and the kind of final fringe theory i have is that individuals uh who are mistaken for vampires it has been claimed could be suffering from vitamin b3 deficiency which results in a condition known as pellagria or pellagra due to it resulting in their skin becoming basically intolerant to sunlight however it should be pointed out that intolerance to sunlight is not a trait associated with folkloric vampires so this seems unlikely so some of those accounts that i mentioned before literally include vampires being active between noon and sundown as a whole it's not really thought that one of these illnesses in particular can fully explain these outbreaks so it's thought that in addition to a combination of possible factors like these um there's other more mundane explanations so one possibility for example is people who you know are impoverished who have resorted to taking refuge in crips as living quarters being mistaken for vampires other possibilities include people who were accidentally buried alive who managed to claw their way out of their grave and were found in a weakened condition and the old faithful of all accounts of ghosts and demons and people suffering from and stuff like that has also been applied to vampires and that is people suffering from sleep paralysis so i during a period in my 20s did suffer from sleep paralysis occasionally where i basically had the classic uh version where i would i would seemingly wake up and i would be in my room and i would be able i would just you know i would have difficulty breathing and i'd be aware of my surroundings but i would not be able to move in any meaningful way i'd be like be able to like slump my body upwards slightly but that was it basically some people like report the feeling of a presence or even like visual hallucinations during that course uh during the course of sleep paralysis so i can 100 see that being attributed to something like people waking up and claiming they were suffocated by some entity yeah that that crops up with quite a few other creatures and pieces of folklore as well so it makes sense yeah yeah and of course one other reason maybe good old-fashioned hysteria and superstition oh it's a fun one okay crofty so after my incredibly long-winded account there of uh slavic traditions of the vampires and and how those spread further across europe let's now have a bit of a look further afield thank you charles i'd use the word thorough because you know we want to be talking positively about our own podcast yes [Laughter] and also because as thorough as i've tried to be for this next section it's a lot of small scattered references and things where there is very little information on and i really hope there are historians and folklorists out there finding more on this stuff so that in 10 years time i can read more on it so before i go into my whistle stop tour around the world i am going to reiterate the point that we made at the start in that a lot of these accounts are very heavily influenced by european colonialism i've tried to where possible find find original accounts or translations of original accounts and original mentions but these are unfortunately quite rare there will be creatures that have been described by modern writers vampires that i've missed out i've basically gone for the ones that i could find mentioned in as many modern sources as i could and then gone back into the folklore as best i can and i will often be pointing out that these things don't meet both of our criteria that we mentioned at the start so with all of those disclaimers i'm going to start with vampiric creatures in africa and i will say that all vampires in africa were wiped out in 1982 when toto blessed the reigns down in africa was it what sad sad day for vampire kind and if that joke gets me fired for being terrible worth it so serious face serious vampire face yeah so in africa the main creatures that i've been able to find that have been described as having vampiric traits are clustered around western africa particularly from the folklore of the ashanti tribe in the region around what's now ghana one of these creatures which european writers have described as a blood drinking witch is known as the obayifo by the people of ghana and also by the name the asaman these witches were humans who were living in the community who had gained the ability to leave their body and travel at night as a glowing light and in this form they would attack children and drink their blood usually this will be done quite gradually so as not to be noticeable and according to some sources this was done in a way that the victim felt pain but never showed any physical mark of the attack some of these witches were also said to suck out the heart scholars have attributed this these abilities to explanations for slow acting poisons or to diseases such as tuberculosis these witches were also thought to be able to preserve their bodies in death and inhabit their dead body so it does actually meet both of our criteria yeah it technically can yes technically correct the best type of correct yep and i realized i went through all that disclaimer and then the first one does actually meet the criteria i'm off to a great start as well as this these witches could raise the dead as their servants or familiars through dysenterying the body cutting out the tongue and driving a peg into its brain and it would bind these creatures to them as a ghoul-like creature that was known as an isthan taylor or an impundulu which was also thought to either drink blood or eat the flesh of dead humans the ashanti tribes do also have legends of a more monstrous creature that has been described as a vampire which is known as either the asan bosam or the sasa bonsam the first descriptions in english of these creatures were by the anthropologist mary kingsley in 1899 when she supposedly encountered one near the ogoway river in gabon in west central africa she described the creature as walking towards them down the forest path and her local companion upon seeing it jumped into the bushes in order to give the figure a wide berth the figure had a humanoid form with one side diseased and rotting and the other side imperfect health and kingsley stated that it all depends on which side you brush against him whether you see the dawn again or no coins heard due to the narrowness of the paths in these places it was impossible in some places to pass by without brushing against the sassabonson and as they they were only out at night you couldn't often see which side was the rotting side and so if you touch the rotting side it would then carry you away to its lair and eat you this is also backed up by an earlier reference in her book where she describes blood on the ground as having been said to be left there by a sassabonsam which was dragging its victim to the underworld to feast on it the anthropologist and barrister robert sutherland rattray who himself quoted kingsley's description in his book religion and art in ashanti describes the sasabansam as having long hair large bloodshot eyes and hooked long feet that it dangles from trees in order to grab unsuspecting victims rattray says that the name is derived from sasa meaning spirit surviving after death and lon sam which is a male witch however while kingsley and rattray's descriptions of the sasuban sum folks as an evil predatory creature this is our first example of a european and christian modification of a creature that had a much different role in the original folklore according to the folklorist genevieve nerenza who is a research fellow at the university of ghana's institute for african studies she gives a similar physical description to rat tray long-haired tall humanoid hooked feet also mentioning that it uses these feet to hang upside down like a bat and mentions pointed bat-like ears and a mouth full of sharp iron teeth she says that it stalks its prey through the trees often playing with its prey like a cat until it finally strikes from the trees lifting its prey into the branches biting their neck draining their blood and eating their flesh so crawdy for your first few major things that you've managed to pick despite talking about how so few of them were kind of pure vampires you've described stuff that sounds incredibly vampiric so far yes but the next part about this particular creature oh changes things slightly don't worry i'm going to prove myself wrong or right yes i lost my own kind of thought so as you have just said charles we have seen the finally seen the vampiric trait of blood drinking in this particular creature however according to norenza the akan people of which the ashanti tribe were apart believed that the sasan bosam was actually a guardian rather than an undead monster it was created by the ashanti goddess assassina who was the goddess of land and fertility and it would only hunt people who broke the taboo of entering the forest on a thursday this day was a sacred day to assassina and on her sacred day humans were expected to leave the forest to replenish itself and to allow the spirits and the deities to roam freely so assassin bonsam in its role as a define as a divine protector would punish those who broke the taboo disturbed the replenishment of the land or try to hunt or gather within the forest i will also briefly mention while we're in africa that there are scattered mentions in by modern writers that describe the egyptian goddess sekhmet supposedly the first vampire story and while sekhmet does at one point go on a rampage and drink a lot of blood that's part of a much larger story of her role as a goddess that is way too complex to go into here probably deserves its own episode but is very much related to her history as a goddess and so we really can't count as a vampire here because they say we've got the blood sucking we haven't got the undead component yeah it's not even blood sucking so much as a lot of blood getting spilled and then drinking it after the fact so it does seem to be very much modern writers clutching at straws for an ancient origin of vampires here moving on and heading up to india there are a few creatures in hindu mythology that have been described by modern writers as vampiric the first and oldest of these are the rakshasas which are found cannibalistic creatures that according to legend inhabited in india before the migration of the proto-indo-iranian people which were precursors to the vedic civilization in the second and third millennium bc and these are mentioned in various encyclopedias of vampires by folklorists such as aubry sherman and theresa bane on looking into this however these ones don't seem to meet either of the criteria of the vampire and looked and found sections of the rigveda one of the earliest vedic texts which describes them as demons in this it describes wars between the gods and by the rakshasas and their demonic masters particularly in the stories of the god rama and the rakshasa king ravana this text does mention cannibalism and describe the right shots as cannibals but never refers to them drinking blood the only references to blood drinking i can find are mentions of artwork depicting rakshasas but i can't even find those particular paintings to actually see the images so can't really say say they are blood drinkers if you want to give a western comparison ogre would be a much more appropriate one yeah in fact some of the descriptions put them is quite similar to the japanese oni which are also described as ogre-like yep covered handily in our episode on yokai go watch it yeah two other creatures um that have been described as vampires in indian folklore that do fit the undead description are the butter and the vatala the butter are described as the deceased forms of people who went insane or who were killed suddenly in accidents they were thought to be found in ruins and thoughts that feed on the flesh of corpses and much like other vampires they were quite often blamed for drought for famine or disease the vitala were thought to be variants of the butter and both of these are described by the late 19th century folklorist william crook as often approximates to the vampire as we meet him in western folklore he says that the vettala is a vitalized corpse that the visitor from the other world that comes to trouble mankind often subject to human appetites constantly endowed with more than human strength and malignity so the pauses because i just realized how bad his grammar was yeah i had that a few times of the report that i was reading verbatim beforehand they put commas in strange places yeah or just slightly odd word order the major story about a vitality that i can find is when it forms part of the frame story for the collection called the baital pachise or vitala tales which is an 11th century collection similar to the 1001 knights in which a frame story is given and a character within the frame story then tells several other other tales in this story king vikramaditya or king vikram who is described as a figure of indian legend similar to our king arthur is sent by a sorcerer to capture a vitala who is living in a tree in a graveyard who is inhabiting bodies and terrorizing locals however on each attempt the vetala makes a bargain with king vikram in which he will tell king vikram a story that will end in a riddle if vikram cannot answer the riddle the vitala will remain captive if vikram knows the answer but keeps silent his head shall explode and if vikram answers the riddle correctly the vittala may escape 24 times king vikram successfully answers the riddle but on the 25th attempt vikram is unable to answer of course if you have 25 tries you're gonna win yeah even though technically by by winning the vitala loses because he agrees oh yeah that's good he agrees if he can stump king vikram vikram gets to keep him captive it's an odd one yeah i imagine there is some larger significance that i can't find in in the summaries that i found because the main english translation or adaptation rather of this was quite heavily edited into vikram and the vampire written by sir richard francis burton so i think i think in that version of the text a lot was lost in translation yeah um perhaps thanks to a pair of scissors to conclude the story of vikram on the way returned to take the vatella back to the sorcerer the vatella tells vikram his story in that he was one of a pair of twins who were born after his parents who could not conceive made a bargain with a sorcerer in which the sorcerer's condition was that he would educate the sons the vittala was badly mistreated by the sorcerer while his brother was treated well and the vitala learned that the sorcerer intended to sacrifice him in order to complete a spell in order to gain immortality and rule the world vikram then learns from the vitala that the sorcerer intends to complete the spell by sacrificing him instead after destroying the reanimated vitala and so vikram tricks the sorcerer into exposing his neck and beheading him as payment for saving his unlife as it were the vitala promises king vikram his aid whenever it's needed stories such as this one or mentions of the butter being people who died in accidents or died because of madness do show a more sympathetic view of vampire-like creatures that western authors generally didn't have when writing about the folklore and it sort of acknowledges really that the fate of the vampire was or the vampiric creature was as bad or as worse than that of their victims however i will say i can't find reference to this vitala drinking any blood at any point certainly fits one of our two criteria with that we carry on further into asia and head into china chinese folklore does have quite a unique variety of vampiric creature the zhang shi which english writers refer to as the hopping vampire this is the only type of undead that i've ever heard of where riga mortis actually sets in because the jiangxi have quite a distinctive image of a stiff body in a burial shroud with its arms permanently outstretched and it's only able to move by hopping it was thought to kill people by absorbing their chi or their life force which as we mentioned before we will allow a bit of leeway when we have mystical life forces rather than blood however i will also note that one meaning of chi is quite literally life air or life breath and there are two stories one called living dead and one called spraying water in which the method of absorbing the life force of the victims was to steal their breath either through blowing away all of the air surrounding the victim or through spraying them with enough water to drown them there were several reasons that a corpse could return to life in this form according to the 18th century scholar joe shaolin which included absorption of yang energy it included the po which was a part of the soul which contains a person's animalistic instincts remaining with the body after death it included a improper burial or a burial away from the person's home soil or resurrection through the actions of a sorcerer the folklorist theresa bain does also list a few which might sound familiar from earlier on including a cat jumping over the corpse i can't find any older reference to that so it might be a migration from the european accounts yeah i do know there was a general thought in european vocal that cats needed to be kept away from courses because they would try to attack them that came up during the course of my research but obviously i'm not i'm pretty certain those two are not connected if it's coming from china yeah i say either either this did evolve independently in china or the the two have been mixed together by modern writers possibly i say i don't i don't have an older source unfortunately there are scattered mentions of methods of stopping the jiangxi though again these i can't find any older or more reliable sources for so can't confirm how many of them are actually part of the original folklore one that i've found quite commonly is sticking a taoist paper talisman to its forehead which is quite commonly seen in chinese and korean cinema as methods of defeating evil spirits one method i've seen again similar to something you've mentioned is the jiangxi being defeated by mirrors as it fears its own reflection i mentioned earlier about one vampire creature that cannot cross a threshold the jiangxi was thought to be unable to cross the threshold but for practical reasons in that thresholds in old chinese houses were about six to ten centimeters high oh yes because it couldn't physically hop over them yeah exactly if you're unable to bend your legs hopping over that small distance wasn't really possible and also gives a nice slapstick image of a vampire chasing someone only to trip over and being able to get up i was going to say i had a humorous account my own involving vampires i never got to mention but in eastern european folklore there's a like a tradition of vegetables and objects being turned into vampires as well so that just only made me think of that where it's like this is supposed to be a scary supernatural entity and my image of it is abbott and costello meet you know meet frankenstein and one final weakness which is where i had originally intended to make my account von count impression is that supposedly if you drop coins on the floor the jiangshi must stop and count them so i was going to mention it developing a bad bell lugosi voice but yeah i've already dropped that earlier this superstition may actually stem from a much older belief that was based on a real ritual practice in which taoist priests would temporarily resurrect and bind a person's body if they had died far from their homeland in all the chinese beliefs burial in the soil of their homeland was an important part of how a person would pass on to the afterlife and so if person died far from home potentially because they were they were serving in war or had traveled far from home for work they needed to be returned there were quite a lot of superstitions about corpses bringing ill fortune particularly looking upon a corpse and so this meant that most people were quite reluctant to transport corpse by regular means without a large fee and so taoist priests would be hired in order to walk the corpse home the belief was that the priest would use a spell in order to temporarily resurrect the corpse they would bind its feet together and bind its arms outstretched for balance so it could only hop along the priest would then usually lead quite a long procession of corpses in their ritual shrouds from village to village with a second priest bringing up the rear of the procession they would only travel at night and the priests would ring bells in order to warn passers-by of their approach in order to ensure that nobody looked upon the corpse in reality these corpses would actually be tied at the arms to two bamboo poles which were carried on the shoulders by a priest at each end and so the hopping motion would be from the rising and falling of the bamboo poles with the priest's footsteps and also the image of the arms outstretched based on how they were tied together this practice actually continued as late as the 1950s oh wow yeah a first-hand account of this was given in a book called the corpse walker real life stories of china from the bottom up by lao yiwu please forgive the pronunciation he interviews a person who in the early 1950s met two priests who were transporting a corpse by this point it was a rare enough practice that the priests were transporting a single corpse rather than an entire procession for this method of transport one priest would carry the corpse on his back with the shroud covering the entire body and covering his own face and so the other priest led and used the bell in order to guide the priest who was carrying the body this practice finally ended during the crackdown on traditional superstitious practices in the early days of chairman mao's regime and so i think that account is one of the very last written accounts and with that we will leave china and head southeast to the philippines to indonesia and malaysia which i'll be covering as a single group because they have quite a lot of crossover in their folklore so across this area of southeast asia there's quite a bit of folklore on a broadly similar group of vampiric creatures which also includes the only creature i can find that is explicitly described as a vampire by an indigenous writer a filipino folklorist by the name of maximo ramos who studied at the university of the philippines in quezon city and the university of the east in manila wrote several books and papers on creatures of filipino legends and folklore and on shared folklore between the philippines indonesia and malaysia as a whole he used the term aswang as an umbrella term for several creatures that he did also list european equivalents of including witches shapeshifters and vampires so it's important to note that his use of the word vampire was intended to provide a more simple classification to quite a large range of beliefs spread across several thousand islands and several thousand ethnic groups within those islands and so to make them a bit more accessible to other english-speaking scholars and a broader audience so he describes three particular archetypes of filipino vampire the first he describes as taking on the form of a beautiful maiden who marries an unsuspecting young man and slowly feeds on a small amount of his blood each night over months or years until he dies of anemia before finding herself a new husband these vampires have a point on the tip of their tongue which they use to pierce the skin and they suck the blood through the tongue sort of like the proboscis on a mosquito hmm not pleasant the second archetype also marries a young man but instead only uses him to provide a home and instead this creature flies far away every night to feed so as not to arouse suspicion by feeding on her own husband or on the neighbors these two archetypes aren't described as undead at any point not really given the classification of undead demon or anything similar so unsure whether they can fully count the third archetype however is explicitly described as an undead or as a revenant and this archetype sleeps during the day in the forests far from human settlement and it ventures into towns at night once a week in order to drink blood but he doesn't give any more information on this particular vampire's physiology whether it's female only female and male male only but if we assume that these are variations on the same creature it's likely female only and does also then mean that the other two archetypes are undead the names for these creatures vary throughout the philippines they include the amalan higg among the west visayan people the danag among the iznik people and the mandarugo which literally translates as bloodsucker among the tagalog people there is another class of creatures that european and american writers will describe as vampires that's found in the folklore of the philippines indonesia malaysia thailand laos and cambodia under various names and which ramos describes as viscera suckers so i'm going to include them here because they show some similarities these creatures do appear quite different to the vampires that he describes in that they all share the common feature that the head or torso separates from the lower body at night often sprouts wings which it uses to fly to the houses of its victims similar to the filipino vampire it uses its tongue in order to suck blood phlegm and or internal organs from its victims accounts of these particular creatures go back at least to the 16th century where spanish missionaries made records of the customs and folklore of the filipino people these creatures also have a variety of names including the naguneg the laman luab the manangal and the srey app which is cambodian literally meaning on human excreta and the other name for them which has come into more common usage in modern writing is the penangalan which is descended from the malay word tangal meaning to detach similar to the filipino vampire it looks like an attractive woman during the daytime with the only unusual feature being its unusually long tongue it may marry a man and be provided with a home or live in the forests during the day it will go out and mark a house as its target then at night will separate from its body fly to the marked house land on the roof extend its tongue through a hole in the roof thatch elongate it and search out the mouth of the sleeping victim before proceeding down the throat to feed there are some variants particularly as i mentioned in cambodia which feed exclusively on the phlegm of sick people particularly asthmatic people or those suffering from tuberculosis of the creatures that target healthy people they will feed on the heart on the blood the liver the lungs the spleen and the entrails the weakness of this particular creature is that when it discards its legs its legs are then stuck in place it has to conceal them either beneath a bed sheet or in a closet if it's indoors or if outdoors it would supposedly conceal them in a banana grove and to defeat the creature you had to either sprinkle the legs with ashes vinegar spices or salt which would prevent it the creature from reattaching to its legs unless it can persuade a human to clean the legs with water before dawn and supposedly simply moving the legs from their original position would also defeat the creature because it would be unable to find them and would die being unable to reattach these partially fit our criteria for vampires in that there are accounts of them feeding on blood but as they also feed on organs and phlegm and aren't necessarily described as undead i think this is more just a case of modern writers again combining them with the filipino vampires that were discussed and regular listeners might notice another callback to our yokai episode yeah i was going to say they are very similarity to the new kekubi which we discussed which would detach its head pulley neck yeah yeah or or the rikurokubi i think i'm confusing two creatures i can't remember which is which either so mentioning both because what one is the extendable neck one is the removing head i forget i have the book like within reach and i finally to conclude my section we come to the americas particularly south and central america most creatures i can find here do seem to originated following the arrival of european colonists and they do quite often have catholic influences rather than being indigenous to the continent and it seem it seems to essentially be european influences combining with a indigenous bit of folklore to create something that modern writers are now calling vampires so what's possibly the most famous of these various entities is the chupacabra in mexico the name was actually first used from what i can find in a report by the governor of new galicia in 1540 in which he described an attack by a large number of small dark-scaled men carrying torches and spears and the only other attribute he described in them was their ability to cover large distances in a single leap and he called them chupacabra there is nothing here to fit any vampire criteria and the very obvious explanation is that these were warriors of an indigenous tribe and that he was a racist yeah he got beat upside some guys and decided to make up a story yes and decided yep these are clearly supernatural no i didn't get drunk and fall asleep in the graveyard it was a ghost i'm not just a terrible leader yeah it was monsters honest yeah so while this is where the name was coined it would later on get applied to quite a large number of creatures which include a fox-like animal with bat wings and cat eyes and blue skin or a type of furless canine and the only connection that causes these varieties of creature to be listed as a vampire is that the only reported victims are either livestock or pets which were found with a small bite mark and completely drained of blood i will note that this was from from the theresa bane book the encyclopedia of vampire mythology and she does mention quite a long list of creatures that she says are types of vampire but don't fit our criteria yeah the main reason i'm mentioning the chupacabra is because it is quite a well-known one yeah i expected it might show up if we end up doing like a dedicated cryptid cryptids episode or anything like that but yeah seems like we don't really need to now well if i had time to go further in into the you know more modern site more modern sightings and reports yeah you know we could probably count it in the same category as you know bigfoot mothman etc if we did a a general cryptids episode yep next we'll briefly head to brazil in which there are two creatures which get listed as vampires and again both do seem to be influenced by the catholic church one is the iara which is the resurrected form of a person who died violently died unbaptized or who was buried in the jungle this creature lures men into the jungle with its song similar to a greek siren if the victim recognizes the trap quickly enough he can recite a protective chant but if not he's hypnotized by the song the iara then transforms into a snake and drains the man of blood leaving his body by a river to be discovered the other creature is the jarakas which also takes the form of a snake but this creature attacks breastfeeding mothers putting its tail into the baby's mouth to prevent it crying while it drains the mother's milk when it can't feed on a mother it attacks men and feeds on a small amount of blood just enough to sustain itself until it can find a better victim victims whether be whether they are breastfeeding mothers or men will grow weaker as it feeds but will will recover quite easily once the dracus moves on to other prey but any mothers who it is fed on will discover that her milk has dried up the ways of driving off ageracus are either catholic prayers or the blessings of a catholic priest but it can't be killed similarly catholic prayers and crosses can ward off the iara so while the era resembles a vampire the most because of the connection with the catholic church i think it's likely that it was brought over from europe and the story merged with that of the jarakus rather than being a vampire in its own right and finally in the caribbean we have a creature called the sakuyant which appears in the folklore of african communities in dominica trinidad and guadalupe the sukuyant appears as an old woman who strips off her skin at night transforming into a ball of light which then enters the home of a victim and drinks their blood while they sleep and these are again thoughts being ported from europe with french vampire law merging with a type of african spirit known as a jumbie which appears similar to the ball of light form of the securians and with that i think that's an end to my section there are a lot of creatures that have not mentioned that there are individual references calling them a vampire that i can't really find any more information on the ones i've covered are the ones where there is at least some vague connections i can find however tenuous it might be i did better than i expected in terms of ones that do fit our criteria there were three yeah there were a few of them in there so there was something going on but i think the idea that there is like a common archetype of a supernatural undead creature that drinks blood is perhaps more of a eurocentric concept than the supposedly worldwide mythology that in some places has been claimed yeah i i think calling a lot of these things vampires really doesn't injustice to the original folklore i'd like to hope that if more people become interested in these things in the future that will actually be able to find more information on the original folklore rather than the the very westernized versions yeah so before we actually end uh this episode and leave the topic of new world possible vampires entirely there is one american example of vampirism that we've sort of glossed over in this episode because it's more rooted in my side of things the eastern european tradition of vampires and it kind of meant it didn't fit so well with crofty's episode so to avoid me repeating myself a whole bunch because a lot of the events that happened for these vampires are very similar to the ones i've described for the eastern european vampires we did not really discuss the various vampire panics has occurred in new england and america from the end of the 18th century through to the end of the 19th century we're not really going to cover this today for the sake of time we've already gone on for quite long enough if anyone else is interested in that there were a series of very similar outbreaks to the ones i described in eastern europe that occurred in new england there's an episode of the podcast the doll up i think it's episode number seven where they go into it in detail so they did like an hour and something long episode on those so if you want to hear more about different types of vampires and vampires occurring in slightly different circumstances then maybe check that out okay crofty so i think that probably brings us to the end of our exploration of vampires and i cannot help but notice the dawn light is appearing on the horizon so it is probably best that we retire back to our crypts before the start of the next episode i don't want to burst into flames no it's uh you know it's an occupational hazard yeah all right folks thank you for listening and uh we will talk to you again soon oh wait a minute wait wait wait wait wait we're supposed to give a hint aren't we for the next episode but i don't think you've picked one have you crofty no we have a few options so i'm just gonna have to say keep an eye on charles's twitter yeah exactly all right folks we'll talk to you again soon good night

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 1,817,163

Keywords: Vampire, dracula, werewolves, halloween, eastern european folklore, mythillogical, vampire podcast, horror podcast, folklore podcast

Id: pL8IeOtzLzk

Length: 126min 13sec (7573 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2022