Welcome to Step Back History.
Today, to celebrate Halloween, we’re going to look at the folklore staple the vampire!
Let’s look at the spooky story of how the vampire went from medieval legend to sparkly
heartthrob.
I’m Count Tristan and this is Spooky Step Back History.
Quick content warning.
This video has some discussion about death, mutilation, and what happens to dead bodies
when they get a little…
ripe.
Just a heads up!
We suspect the origin of the vampire comes from European folklore which believed the
dead could harm the living even if buried.
A lot of what we identify as vampiric comes from how bodies decompose.
When you die, your skin dries out and shrinks.
This makes it look as if your nails or teeth have grown longer.
Your internal organs also liquify and come out of the nose and mouth.
Today we call this… ugh… purge fluid, but if you didn’t know what it was, you’d
interpret it to be blood.
If you dug up a decomposing corpse, or as I call it, cracking open a cold one.
You might see a body with long teeth and blood coming out of the mouth.
You could imagine why they’d consider that the basis for our image of the vampire.
Vampire scares were linked to disease.
Often they were triggered by plagues and in this period, people didn’t know how disease
spread.
They’d often think vampires were an evil force attacking their communities.
The vampire goes back to the legend of the revenant.
Often we ascribe this to the Slavic legends of corpses that rise from the dead to attack
the living, but that’s only a few centuries old.
This legend goes back deeper, and often these revenants have a demonic element to them.
Some claim it comes from ancient Egypt, but they seem to show up in far off places such
as the Chinese jiangshi (chong-shee) or blood drinking deities in the Tibetan book of the
dead.
So the vampire might be one of those monsters that come from our primal fears and develop
into similar creatures in different cultures.
*hiss* JUMP SCARE!
Not too long ago, a group of archaeologists unearthed a skull from 16h century Venice.
They found it alongside other plague victims, but there was one thing a little strange about
it.
You see this skull had a brick in its mouth.
The archaeologists guessed it might have fallen on the skull over the centuries, but many
more think this was a tactic to control Strega, the Italian word for vampires, and keep them
from eating people.
This is a common tactic for stopping a vampire.
Find a way to keep the corpse from getting up again.
This could mean putting heavy rocks on them or staking them down.
Yeah, that’s where the stake in the heart comes from.
We sometimes hear it has to be wood, but this isn’t universal.
In the middle-east for example, they thought we needed iron to contain vampires.
In the middle-east, they’re often conflated with Jinn, or westernized into the genie.
Containing a vampire with iron is the basis behind the containing genies with iron lamps
and such.
In northern Germany, vampires go by the name Nachzehrer, or after devourers.
These vampires didn’t so much get up and attack the living, but cause general supernatural
badness with their presence.
You could tell someone was a vampire because they would chew on their burial shrouds.
Again because of purge fluid, often burial shrouds would sag or tear around the mouth,
giving this illusion.
Their solution feels familiar to our Italian example.
It was to stop the corpse from chewing.
They accomplished this by stuffing its mouth with soil and a stone or coin just to make
sure.
They thought the creature would die of starvation with its mouth blocked and the curse on the
town would fade.
Not surprisingly, panics over these creatures erupted during plague outbreaks.
Vampire scares peppered western culture up until the scientific knowledge of disease
was widespread.
One of the last scares occurred in New England in the late 19th century.
In the spooky town of Exeter Rhode Island, Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis.
Her mother and sister had already died, and her brother Edwin was sick.
Her neighbours began to worry that the dead Brown girls were what made Edwin sick.
They opened Mary’s grave to find she had blood in her mouth, and thought vampires!
They burned Mary’s heart and made the ashes into a potion for her brother to drink.
Oh yeah, that’s apparently another remedy for this.
Yech.
It didn’t help because he died a few months later.
Throughout the 18th and 19th century you find a few vampire scares in New England.There
are two theories about where the idea came from.
The first is that they adopted superstitions from the Hessians; German mercenaries who
fought for King George during the American Revolution.
So in New England, they had the chewy vampire, not the blood sucky one.
So these were those Nachzehrers.
Another theory claims these are the Romanian vampires, evidenced by the blood in the mouth,
the burning of the heart, and giving the ashes to a sick person.
These are the signs a Romanian vampire is afoot.
Either the melting pot of America applies to the undead, or we see a mixing of folklore
here.
This was long past the heydey of the vampire.
In the mid-18th century pope Benedict XIV declared vampires were “fallacious fictions
of human fantasy”.
While these vampire panics occurred in New England, we had books in Europe like The Vampyre,
Carmilla, and Dracula on bookshelves.
These vampires drew from folklore but were the beginnings of the sexy aristocratic vampires
we think of today.
In the 20th century, vampire scares all but vanished.
One notable exception was in the 1960s when the president of the British Occult Society
Sean Manchester claimed a vampire was causing mischief in a London cemetery.
Journalists picked up the story with glee, and it became a media phenomenon.
In 1970, Manchester told the press he was going to exercise a vampire on a Friday the
13th.
Hundreds of people turned up at the Highgate cemetery to see it.
Surprise though, he wound up not doing it.
This vampire scare was recent and has more in common with say the scary clown scare than
their old counterparts.
Hype man, it’s a powerful drug.
After the big novels I mentioned in the 19th century, vampires began a new life in pop
culture.
The most famous one would be Bram Stoker’s 1897 book Dracula.
He based this vampire on the old Romanian prince Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler.
Many of us in the west consider Vlad the Impaler a model for vampire lore, but many Romanians
see him as a national hero.
He ruled during a time when Romania was under threat from the Ottoman Turks, and he tried
to defend Romania, then called Wallachia from them.
Often he’d impale Turks he captured and put them on display.
They did this in a way that kept the victims alive for several hours.
Grisly, but not supernatural.
Eastern European history man, bloody stuff.
Of course, real animals out there also drink blood.
We have everyone’s favourite blood sucking worm, the leech, blood-sucking fish called
lampreys, and who can forget the adorable vampire bat.
However, unlike vampire lore, these animals need to keep their host alive to produce more
blood.
Killing them isn’t in their interest.
And today there are people who call themselves vampires and practice a sort-of blood sucking
subculture.
They dress in gothic styles and perform bloodletting rituals after they show clean blood work.
They also don’t bite the victim but cut a fleshy part of the body with sterilized
instruments by a trained medical practitioner.
By the way, folks, don’t drink blood.
It might seem fun, but blood has a lot of iron in it, enough to cause problems with
your liver and nervous system.
Drinking blood can also spread bloodborne diseases such as HIV.
It’s just not the best idea.
What makes the vampire a special creature is they can take so many forms.
From Blade to Twilight, there is just so much lore to draw upon.
No attribute of a vampire is universal to all vampires, and so you can shape the monster
to fit any number of stories.
It's a rich folklore that’s still growing and evolving today, so have fun with it!
This video is part of a collaboration with the wecreateedu community.
A bunch of educational youtubers have made Halloween themed videos today, and you can
watch them all in the playlist down in the description.
Now to give you the real ways to stop a vampire.
First, vampires hate history, so if you click on the subscription box, and click the bell
notification, vampires will sense you are on to them and avoid you.
I can attest to this, not a single Step Back subscriber has been killed by a vampire!
The best way to avoid a vampire’s fangs, however, is to support Step Back on Patreon,
like all of these verified humans.
I’d especially like to thank Don and Kerry Johnson for their vampire protection.
Just a heads up, next week Step Back will come out on Friday rather than Thursday.
Rest in peace for now, but reanimate next week
for more Step Back.