Draculean vampires:

They might exist among us

by Amal HEWAVISSANTI

The blood-curdling movie scenes where the extremely handsome young man, Count Dracula sinks his devillish teeth unfelt into the neck of a beautiful lady in a silent bed room of a storm-stricken castle in the dead of night, are enough to take the viewer by sheer fright.

A baffling array of Dracula stories in different versions have mesmerised millions of fans worldwide. The mastermind behind this non-pareil thriller? He is Bram Stoker, an Irish professor of an English Drama Association who, while relaxing and enjoying himself in a popular seaside holiday resort in Scotland, captured the basic sequence of events for the world’s most widely read thriller “Dracula” which made the readers freeze with suspense to the finish.

Name-not conceptual

Christopher Lee in one of the popular Dracula series

During fifteenth century, Romania witnessed a highly oppressive rule by a semi-barbaric Prince named “Vlad de Dracule” who revelled in blood sports and savagely cruel punishment for people.

Though he was completely lacking in vampiric tendencies, Vlad de Dracule had an eerie penchant for torturing people to death until he saw human blood and this nature of the King presumably inspired Stoker to label his protagonist as Dracula. However, Romanian folktales and beliefs had an inspirational impact on Stoker when writing Dracula which resurrected the concept of blood sucking vampires.

According to Western folklore, a vampire is roughly defined as a corpse supposed to leave the grave at night to suck the blood of the living and as having a history dating far back to the earliest stages of human civilisation.

Medical explanation

Medical scientists claim that a vampire is a creature which sucks human blood out of uncontrollable impulses to pacify its limitless thirst and to support life. Ancient Mesopotamians believed that improperly buried corpses would rise from the graves and secretly kill the living to suck their blood - a concept which presumably sprang from the vampire bats which subsist on blood.

Natural historians identify vampirism as the whole world of bats which support their life by drinking blood of other animals, even of cattle! The vampire bats are proved to need about a tea spoonful of blood per day and there are shocking incidents of people being attacked by vampire bats in their dramatic bid to suck blood from people.

Medical scientists agree that the best archetype of human vampire was George Haeg who was reported to have taken the lives of four men and five women in the city of London between 1944 to 1949. The Scotland Yard found him a bafflement and had to move heaven and earth to catch him killing the ninth victim in an abandoned building.

A subsequent confession revealed that George had tasted blood for the first time, while he was sucking blood from a wound of his and it produced an irresistible thirst for human blood. He further admitted that once he killed a person, he used to pour blood of the victim in to a wine glass and sip it for hours as a symbol of purification of his soul. He added that a deadly pain came over him whenever he was without blood! This incident caused a considerable public agitation and in 1969 the London Times published a comprehensive report which said “Beware of Vampires” as the heading.

Popular belief

Vampires are thus noted for their infinite thirst for blood and it is believed that once a person falls prey to the sharp teeth of a vampire, he definitely becomes a vampire who in turn tend to support his life by secretly sucking blood from another person. As vampire stories, movies and beliefs illustrate, vampires lie at rest in a coffin by day and come nocturnally on the prowl for human blood under the blessings of moon light.

Popular vampiric legends say that vampires must return to their coffins before daybreak which rules out their full capacity of life and they are often identified with spirits of moral outcasts of earth. It is totally dramatic to note that once a coffin of a vampire is opened, his dead body is seen lying fresh and his lips coated with fresh blood. People who regained their lives after death as vampires were social outcasts who were considered maladjusted to live in a normal social setting and who painfully realised that they were so.

From throughout the world, there comes a vast array of incredible reports of uncanny happenings which involve strange persons with vampiric tendencies and proclivity to suck blood.

Countess Elizabeth Bethoreau of Hungary used to kill ladies secretly and drink their blood but for 10 years she remained unsuspected of the mysterious disappearances of young ladies. She organised workshops for ladies in her own home and by some unknown trick she managed to get a lady to her house every week on the pretext of giving extra lectures.

She had a secret room in her house and when she was finally arrested in 1610, the Police was able to identify around fifty bodies of girls in the room. As she later confessed, she had killed the girls while they were fast asleep and collected some blood in a vessel to be sipped after meals. Though she was sentenced to be hanged, the Hungarian law said that hanging an important lady like a countess was definitely beneath her dignity and that she was to be imprisoned in her mansion itself till she died.

Following her death in 1614, Hammer Film Corporation in England released a film titled “Countess Dracula”, based on the true events of her inhuman life time. Thus she becomes an archetype of vampiric humans who, for some unexplained mystery, feed on human blood.

During February 1960, in the city of Monterros, Argentina, ladies began to flock to the city police with horrified faces and distracting complaints. Their necks had been noticeably run into by an incisor and there were blood stains on the barely visible wound. During January, fifteen ladies had died mysteriously with the same blood spots on the neck.

Nocturnal

The police observed the marks of the clandestine entrance by a nocturnal stranger in to the pretty ladies’ bed rooms through open windows and desperately concluded it to be none other than a vampire in action.

Ultimately the police made the confusing but appalling discoveries! Ensconced in a coffin inside a bleak cave close to the town, they saw a human vampire, fast asleep with dried blood stains on his lips.

The man identified himself as Florencio Arthandes, a 25-year-old Stone mason but strangely enough, he was unable to offer convincing explanation for his behaviour or actions. Yet he admitted that his sole concern in life is to drink blood from beautiful ladies.Another unearthly happening was reported from France during the French Revolution. As Jessie Adelade Middleton narrates, a French viscount was ruthlessly slaughtered by some farmers as a dispute over land became more and more intense.

Premeditated

He was buried instantly. After a few days, children in the neighbouring villages mysteriously and horrifyingly died with marks of vampire incisors on their necks but nothing of the murderer or any sign of premeditated malice was within the scope of understanding.

However, a large number of children came to be slaughtered weekly for 72 years and the grandson of the viscount ultimately decided to unearth his coffin on reasonable suspicions.

He felt himself going lifeless when he saw his grandfather (Viscount) lying unruffled with fresh skin and without any sign of decay after 72 years! The above anecdotal report, beyond all doubt, is a dramatically exaggerated version of an incident involving vampiric elements.

These popular beliefs explain how a vampiric spirit should be destroyed and suggest protective shields against such spirits, i.e. holy water, holy cross, fox poison, briers and so forth.

On the other hand, people who assertively express they have had glastly experiences with vampires are virtually governed by sensationalism and what they picture to be a vampire is wholly identical with the imaginary human vampire in Stoker’s Dracula.

However, vampirism in humans is irrefutably evidenced by some vampire accounts but it is completely absurd to say that Draculean vampires, “sleeping in coffins by day” really exist in the world.

Human vampires may exist even today. But not those terrifying vampires who lie in coffins with blood in the mouth and fly like bats when they want to prey on beautiful ladies in bedrooms.

However the exaggerated concept of Draculean vampire’s might have a genuine basis because history records incidents where mysterious persons have sucked blood from the living people.

Fritz Harmoth of Germany (newspapers labelled him as “The Vampire of Handover”) had drunk blood from about 60 children whom he had strangled while they were playing in his enclosed garden.

Confessions

The dead bodies showed that he had bit their throats to suck blood and the bodies displayed the tragic and torturing death the children faced.

This tragedy occurred somewhere in 1925 and the German law required him to be beheaded with a sword following his confessions.

Thus we have logical basis to believe that vampiric persons (not at all the very personification of hideous Draculean vampire in horror novels or movies) might exist among us and be having the habit of drinking blood unnoticed.