The Truth About Vampires

I heard the most intriguing theory today on the origins of the vampire “myth.”

In yonder times, often a person would grow ill and die of mysterious circumstances, keeping in mind that to these people, any illness that didn’t originate from the pointy end of a knife could be labeled “mysterious.” (Don’t believe me? Sneeze in a crowded room some time and count the “Bless you”s. That’s just a lingering superstition from the days when people believed that the common cold was a symptom of demonic possession.)  In the days or weeks following their death, other family members would also experience unexplained weakness and eventually succumb as well. (Can you say “contagion?”)

Even to their vastly inferior lack of medical knowledge (I’m pretty sure that WebMD.com hadn’t been invented yet), these events appeared to be connected. But instead of realizing that whatever killed the initial person had in fact spread to the people they were in close contact with, they jumped to the conclusion that s/he was actually reaching beyond the grave to sicken and kill their family.

Can we just stop one second and ponder the morbosity of that? Ok, second’s over.

The remaining townspeople, fearing that their lives were in danger, didn’t reach for the nearest bottle of hand sanitizer. Instead, they grabbed their torches and shovels and headed for the local cemetery. They dug up Typhoid Bob and cracked open his casket.

Guess what they found?

The corpse, which hadn’t been preserved by the modern cocktail of embalming fluids, was bloated as if it had recently gorged on a heavy meal. Dear Bob was now a pale shade of whitish gray he’d never had in life, with skin stretched thinly over dead blood vessels which stood out in sharp contrast. The casket, and sometimes the exposed skin of the dearly departed was speckled with spots or streaks of wet, viscous fluids that looked like blood. Sometimes the corpse would make moaning noises or even move, all of which can be readily explained by trapped gases. Believing that this engorged, twitching body was a vampyre, the townspeople would stake it – releasing the gasses and causing the corpse to groan and writhe as it collapsed in on itself.

Anyone who was born after 1965 or so has seen this plenty of times – on CSI. But to our bygone ancestors, this was proof positive that they’d just slain a vampire. And as with most self-fulfilling prophesies, the proof was in the …. ok I was going to say “pudding” but after that last paragraph, even I am feeling a teensy bit nauseous. And yet, if people in their village continued to sicken and die, all they had to do was dig up the another recent corpse or three and repeat the procedure, thus proving that there was an entire Nest of vamps living (or rather “unliving”) in their midst.

It makes an eerie kind of sense. It’s the same kind of logic that tells you the scratching sounds you hear at your window late at night are just from tree branches, and that the monster in your closet is just the water heater kicking on. It gives your right brain something to cling to when you’re home alone in the dark.  

You know what I think? I think it sounds like exactly the sort of malarkey that a vampire would spread so that people would stop believing in their existence – and therefore leave their crucifixes and sharped stakes at home!