Vampires in the News

In the News

An odd case has taken place in Transylvania. Before burying his mother,
young man plunged a silver poniard into her heart. He did this followin
the
advice of a local priest. The priest believed that the deceasedwas a
vampire
and this act would prevent from coming back to life.

According to Religia v Rossii referring to "reports from Romania,"
Nikolae
Mikhut, the son, saw that a cat had climbed into his mother's coffin.
According to Romanian folklore, this signifies that the person in the
coffin
could become a vampire. Moreover, Mikhut noticed (or it just seemed to
him)
that his mother's lips and cheeks were too pink, as if she were not
dead at
all.

For a long time, the frightened young man could not find the courage to
speak to the priest, though, when he finally did it, the priest told
him
what needed to be done.

Mikhut told the press that when he had plunged the silver poniard into
his
mother's heart, they had heard a loud sigh, and just afterwards, his
mother's face turned white. "Though, we had to do it, otherwise she
could
have returned to kill us," - he said. Is this fact or fantasy?

Anyway, mass culture's influence upon the human mind, mainly the
influence
of TV and cinema, and the spreading of so-called "white" and "black"
magicians and mystic teachings are not harmless for human psychology.

One could hardly count all the horror films devoted to vampires that
have
recently appeared, as well as a great amount of pseudo-scientific books
exaggerating this subject.

In general, myths about vampires refer to pagan period of the history.
The
vampire is present in the myths of different nations.

Of course, there is not smoke without fire. However, if vampires
(including
energy vampires) really exist, they hardly possess the eternal life
myths
ascribe to them.



VAMPIRES' ARRESTED FOR VANDALISM


DALLAS (AP) - Four teen-agers claiming to be vampires went on a drug-
crazed rampage, vandalizing dozens of cars and homes, spray-painting
racial slurs and burning a church, police say.

The fire early Thursday destroyed the office and fellowship hall at
Bethany Lutheran Church. Its outside walls were scrawled with satanic
graffiti in hot pink and white paint.

``My sadness is not for us. It is for those people who don't know the
joy of life,'' said pastor Carol Spencer, whose church is in the mostly
white, middle-class suburb of Lake Highlands.

Evidence from the fire quickly led authorities to the nearby home of a
16-year-old boy, who was not identified because he is a juvenile.

He and the others - Lucas Charles Simms, 17, Brandon Lee Ramsey, 18,
and Charles Randal Kinnard, 19 - were arrested on arson charges.

The Dallas Morning News reported that one of them told detectives the
teens believe they are vampires and that the teen-agers had marks on
their arms from sucking each other's blood. The newspaper said the
teens smoked marijuana laced with some kind of a substance before
the rampage.

They slashed car tires, broke windows and spray-painted vulgarities
on cars, homes and fences, police said. An acid used to treat swimming
pools was spread on cars.

``I expected it to be messed-up kids. But this was really bad,'' said
Elwin Setliff, one of the dozens of vandalism victims.

Investigators would not disclose the evidence that led them to the
teen-agers.
Before their arrest, some of the teens sat in lawn chairs on top of a
carport and watched as investigators went through the ruins of the
church Thursday, said Deputy Fire Chief Tom Oney.

``It appeared to me that they were savoring the fruits of the damage,''
he said. ``They were enjoying watching us look at it.''


Courtesy
of The Associated Press, September 1997.

VAMPIRE SLEUTH STAKES OUT RHODE ISLAND BLOODSUCKERS


NEWPORT, R.I. (AP) -- Rhode Islanders have been guarding themselves
for months against mosquitoes infected with a potentially deadly virus,
but Christopher Rondina (Vamptopher@aol.com) says the state's past is
filled with stories of a far scarier bloodsucker: vampires.

After 10 years of research, the 29-year-old Newport man has written
and illustrated a book, "Vampire Legends of Rhode Island"
(ISBN 0-924771-91-7 Covered Bridge Press, 1997). Last Halloween,
Rondina and two friends camped amid the cold ruins and dark shadows of
Castle Dracula in Romania. They're traveling for 18 days in the
Transylvania countryside tracking both the Dracula of history and sites
associated with the bloodsucking legend made famous by the 1897 novel
by Bram Stoker.

"I personally believe that Stoker based a lot of the domestic events
>of his story on the Rhode Island legends,'' said Rondina, noting
Stoker
read newspaper clippings on New England vampire tales while researching
the book.

"One article focused on Rhode Island and reported dozens of cases over
a number of years,'' Rondina said. "It mentions Newport frequently, and
vaguely refers to a legend not far from Newport. "Unfortunately no one
has been able to pin down a vampire story in Newport -- excuse the
un.''

Tuberculosis caused the mysterious deaths once attributed to Rhode
Island vampires, including the case of Mercy Brown. Brown died in 1892
at
age 19. Her death followed those of her mother and older sister. At the
ime,
her brother, Edwin, was seriously ill and the family was desperate to
save
him. Family members attributed the deaths to a curse on the family and
decided to dig up the bodies of the women, including Mercy, who had
been
buried for about a month. When Mercy's body was exhumed, observers
noted it
appeared to have moved inside the coffin and blood was present in her
heart
and veins. Fearing she was a vampire, townspeople removed her heart and
burned it on a rock before reburying her. The family dissolved the
ashes in
medicine and gave it to Edwin, who died two months later.

Modern science may have driven the stake through the heart of local
vampire
tales but Dracula still grips Rondina's fascination. "I still enjoy the
romance of the story, the snappy wardrobe and the bats -- I love bats,"
Rondina said.




Courtesy of The New York Times, October 31 1993.

NEW ENGLANDERS "KILLED" CORPSES, EXPERTS SAY


Washington, Oct. 30 (AP) - Desperate to end what they thought were
attacks from beyond the grave, New Englanders once unearthed corpses
and performed vampire killing rituals, scientists say.

The centuries-old tale of supersticious ritual was unveiled by
scientists this week in time for Halloween.

Paul S. Sledzik, curator of the national museum of Health and
Medicine in Washington, said on friday that bodies from 18th- and
19th- century New England graves appear to have been dug up within a
few months or years of death and then mutilated or disrupted.

Journalists' accounts published as recently as 1893, he said, support
the belief that this tampering with corpses was prompted by the idea
of "killing" the dead to stop them from sucking the life
force from the living.

Dr Sledzik helped analyze corpses from a cemetery near Griswold, CT
and found one that clearly bore the signs of ritual mutilation.

The corpse, found in a coffin bearing the initials "J.B.,"
was found in the Walton family cemetary of Griswold, which had
accidently
been disturbed in a construction project.
Dr. Sledzik said when he examined J.B., it was clear the remains had
been tampered with sometime after the body had decomposed. The
skeleton, he said, had been arranged into the familiar symbol of
death: the long bones of the upper leg had been placed on the chest
as an "X" and were topped by the skull.

In the laboratory, Dr. Sledzik determined that the bones bore lesions
from tuberculosis. J.B. also had a hunched and crooked shoulder, a
crippled leg and probably a festering wound on his foot. The man
also had some missing front teeth.

"In life, J.B. could have been a frightening figure, " said Dr
Sledzik. Memories of this scary appearence could have prompted
survivors to make sure he was dead by removing the skull.

Dr Sledzik said his research shows such beliefs were common in New
England as late as 1892, particularly among families that were often
struck with tuberculosis, a disease then called consumption.

"Published vampire accounts place the folklore within the same time
frame and location as J.B.," said Dr Sledzik, who added that other
researchers have also reported finding mutilated bodies from the era.

"When someone died of consumption, it was believed they could come
back from the dead and drain the life of their living relative," Dr
Sledzik said. "In order to stop this, family members would go into
the grave and somehow attempt to kill the person again. If there was
still flesh, they would remove it and burn it. Or they would remove
the head. In the American tradition, just causing some disruption to
the body was the way to kill a vampire."

The stake-through-the-heart approach, he said, was a European
tradition not practiced by Americans.

The effects of tuberculosis on the bodies of its victims, when viewed
with imagination, supported the folklore beliefs in vampires, he
said.

"Consumption is a very physical disease," he said. "People
can actually see the person wasting away."

But consumptives would also have great burst of energy and were known
for a powerful sex drive, he said, "so it made sense to people then
that after death this desire for life would continue and the dead
would be able to drain the life force from their relatives."

Dr Sledzik said it was felt that this provided an explanation for new
cases of tuberculosis and drove the living to "kill" the dead to
guard against more disease.

When people opened the coffins of recently dead consumptives, they
found bloated bodies with pale flesh, fingernails that seemed to have
grown and, often, blood at the mouth. Dr. Sledzic said there were
accounts of bodies jerking and gurgling as the remains were
mutilated.

Forensic pathologists now know that all of these effects can be
explained by normal decomposition. But in previous centuries, he
said, the superstitious who saw their loved ones wasting away from
consumption "felt they had to go into the graves and do something to
stop the process."
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Courtesy of Newsday, July 20 1995.
1995 Tom Collins

THE RUSSIAN VAMPIRE

Army service develops many character traits, but vampirism
seems to be another new one.

A 20 year old former Russian army man was arrested in Tula
outside Moscow after dragging a local drunk into the bushes,
biting through his carotid artery and drinking his blood,
Itar-Tass news agency reported yesterday.

Vampire "S" told police he developed a taste for blood in the
army and has drunk the blood of many victims.



-------------------------------------------------------------------

Courtesy of Yankee Magazine, January 1994.
Charles T Robinson

THE WORDS ON NELLY'S TOMBSTONE

The villagers of Exeter, Rhode Island, knew that farmer George Brown
had a problem. First, in 1883 his wife, Mary, succumbed to a
mysterious illness. Six months later, his 20-year-old daughter, Mary
Olive, also fell ill and died. Within the next several years, his
19-year-old daughter, Mercy, was also dead, and George's teenage son,
Edwin, a healthy lad who worked as a store clerk, became suddenly
frail and sick. The village doctor informed George that
"consumption" was taking his family. But the country folk
of Exeter had another explanation.

On a chilly March afternoon in 1892, a group of men entered Exeter's
Chesnuthill Cemetery. There they began to exhume the bodies of
George Brown's wife and two daughters. They had concluded that one
of the deceased was leaving the grave at night to suck the life out
of its relatives. Only by killing the vampire could young Edwin be
saved.

First, the men examined the bodies of Mrs. Brown and daughter Mary.
Finding them to be properly decomposed, they began to exhume Mercy
Brown. Slowly they shoveled into Mercy's grave. When they reached
the corpse, the men suddenly steped back in terror.

Mercy, who had been buried for more than two months, appeared oddly
well preserved. It seemed that her hair and nails had grown. And
when the men curiously prodded the corpse with their shovel, they
found that it was filled with fresh blood. The suspected vampire's
heart was removed and burned on a nearby rock. The ashes were added
to young Edwin's medicine. Still, the boy died less than two months
later.

To the less supersticious, there was perhaps nothing so unusual about
the well-preserved condition of Mercy's body. She had been in the
ground during the two coldest months of the year. The mysterious
wave of illness that swept George Brown's family was probably
tuberculosis.

But that did not keep Rhode Island from becoming known as the
"Vampire Capital of America". South County, whose isolated
villages resembled the lonely hamlets of Transylvania, was a hotbed of
vampire rumors between 1870 and 1900. When Bram Stoker, who wrote
Dracula in 1897, died, newspaper accounts of Mercy Brown were found in
his files.

The legend persists to this day. In Rhode Island Historical Cemetery
No.2 stands the gravestone of alleged vampire Nelly L. Vaughn of West
Greenwich, who died in 1889 at the age of 19. The grave is
supposedly cursed. One local university professor who studies
vampirism claims that "no vegetation or lichen will grow on Nelly's
grave," despite numerous attempts to plant there. And people are
still taken aback by the inscription along the bottom of Nelly's
tombstone. The curious words read, "I am waiting and watching for
you."



>-------------------------------------------

Courtesy of The Fortean Times, June 1996.


FATAL VAMPIRE ATTACK IN GERMANY

A man of 75, walking Jockel, his Dachshund, in Berlin on 4 April 1995,
was attacked by a 43-year-old man who bit him on the neck, shouting "
I am Dracula!" Passersby overpowered the attacker and handed him
over to police. He said he had been drinking. The victim went home and
died an hour later from a heart attack.