VAMPIRE

Vampire are said to be humans who once cheated death by drinking the blood of others and must therefore continue to drink the blood of the living in order to remain immortal. Consequently, they are believed to have become creatures with supernatural powers, such as amazing strength and the ability to hypnotize potential victims. In some fictionalized accounts of vampires, these creatures can also fly, sometimes after turning into a bat. There has been no physical evidence that such creatures are real, and indeed most people believe that vampires are figments of the imagination whose characteristics are largely based on the vampire in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Some, however, insist that vampires are real creatures, who hunt alone or in bands that roam the streets of large cities looking for lone victims who will not be missed. These creatures, believers say, die when exposed to sunlight, cannot enter churches, and have an aversion to religious symbols such as crosses and to holy water. In addition, they are said to be repelled by garlic. (Some say that these things can kill a vampire, but others believe they only drive away a vampire.)

 During the 1970s there were several cases in London of people insisting to police that they had encountered vampires in cemeteries, and one man was so afraid of a vampire attack that he protected himself with a necklace of garlic—and accidentally choked to death when one of the garlic cloves somehow became lodged in his throat. Similar reports are still made today. Vampire lore goes back much further than the late nineteenth century, when Bram Stoker was writing, however. In ancient times, people sometimes reported seeing vampires. For example, the ancient Greeks spoke of there being numerous vampires on the island of Santorini (now Thera). Believers say that such early accounts are particularly credible because they predate vampire novels. Some scholars, however, argue that early stories about vampires—at least those that come from Western cultures—can be attributed to the fact that until modern times, people were sometimes accidentally placed in coffins before they had actually died, which resulted in documented cases of “dead” bodies rising from their coffins.