Vampire Myths from around the World

There are many different vampire myths around the world, from the traditional
'Dracula' style vampire to some more unusual folklore/tribal myths. I have attempted
to compile a page on these here, categorised alphabetically by country.
However, this is not a definitive list. If there is anything I have missed out or if I have
made any geographical errors please email me with the details. I will continue to
update this page as I find new instances of vampiric myth in my reference books.

Go To: Africa: Armenia: Albania: Australia: Babylon: Bulgaria: China: France:

Germany: Greece: Haiti: Hungary: India: Ireland: Italy: Israel: Japan: Java:
Madagascar: Malaysia: Mexico: Moldavia: Phillipines: Poland: Portugal: Romania:
Rome: Russia: Saudi Arabia: Scandinavia: Scotland: Slovakia: Slovenia: South
America: South Pacific: Thailand: Tibet
top

Africa

Adze : Sorcerers amongst the 'Ewe' tribe in southeastern Ghana and southern Togo in
Africa were often thought by the tribesfolk to be possessed by a vampire spirit known
as an 'Adze'. This vampire has the appearance of a firefly and flies around preying on
young children, drinking their blood but also drinks coconut water and palm oil. If
caught it will revert to human form.

Asasabonsam : This vampire originates from the Ashanti people of Southern Ghana and
is also found in Togo and the Ivory Coast. These vampire creatures hide in trees in
dense forests and attacks and kills anyone who walks underneath. The 'Asasabonsam'
is of human form except for its iron teeth and hooklike legs which it uses to trap its
victims.

Impundulu : Witches in the eastern Cape region keep these vampire creatures as
servants which they use to attack their enemies. The 'Impundulu' is passed down from
mother to daughter in the Witch's family and, rather like the 'Incubus', is able to
transform into handsome male and seduce its witch mistress. This vampire is thought
to possess an insatiatable appetite for blood and will drain its victim to the point of
death if allowed to do so.

Obayifo : This vampire originates amongst the Ashanti tribes living on the Gold Coast
although it does reappear under different names amongst neighbouring tribes. For
example, In Dahomean folklore it is called the 'Asiman'. The 'Obayifo' is another
example of witchraft as this 'living vampire' is the spirit of a male or female witch that
is able to leave its body and flies around at night feeding on young children. This
vampire, which has the appearance of a glowing ball of light, is also said to cause
blight in crops: as well as drinking blood, the 'Obayifo' is partial to the juice of some
fruit and vegetables and will destroy whole fields if it drinks too much of this.

Armenia
Dakhanavar : (alsocalled 'Dashnavar') This mountain spirit attacks travellers in the
night, sucking blood from the soles of their feet as they sleep. Legend tells that it was
outwitted by two men who slept with their feet under each others head. The vampire
was then confused and ran away never to be seen again.

Albania

Lugat : The 'Lugat' does not kill its victims, it will only feed briefly on them and, as
such, is relatively harmless.

Australia

Yara-Ma-Yha-Who : This vampirelike creature is found in aboriginal culture. The

'Yara-Ma-Yha-Who' has the appearance of a four foot tall red man with an
exceptionally large head and mouth. Having no teeth, this creature swallows its food
whole and uses suckers on the ends of its toes and fingers to drain its victim of blood.
This vampire, like the 'Asasabonsam' of Africa, hides in fig trees and attacks people
as they walk underneath. According to Legend if you were unlucky enough to be
attacked more than once by this creature you might gradually become shorter and
eventually become a 'Yara-Ma-Yha-Who' yourself.

Babylon (ancient)

Ekimmu : People who suffered a premature or violent death, were unfulfilled in love or
simply had an improper burial were destined to become one of the most feared
vampires in Assyria and Babylon. This ancient spirit was the result of the soul of the
recently deceased being trapped in limbo unable to find peace. It would therefore
wander the earth and attack those unfortunate enough to cross its path.

Lilitu :
(also called 'Lilith') This vampire, found in Jewish/Babylonian myth, drank the
blood of babies and young children.

Utukku : This vampire spirit is another instance of a 'trapped soul', in that the 'Utukku'
was thought to be the spirit of someone who had recently died but had returned from
the grave unable to find rest. There are, however, some instances in which this
'vampire' is described as a demon so I unfortunately I cannot be more precise on this
one.

Bulgaria

Ubour : This vampire is created if the spirit refuses to leave the body after a violent
death. After forty days of burial the corpse will dig itself out of its grave and begin to
cause poltergeist-like trouble, creating sparks as it moves about, for its mourning
family and relations. This vampire is unusual in that it eats normal food and will not
attack humans to drink their blood until any other source of nourishment is gone.

Ustrel :
This vampire was believed to be the spirit of a child born on a Saturday that
had died without being baptised. On the 9th day after burial it would come out of its
grave and attack livestock to drink their blood. If more than five cattle or sheep were
attacked in any one night the owner of the herd would be forced to hire a
'Vampirdzhija' (vampire hunter) to destroy it.

China

Chiang-shih : (alsocalled 'Kiang-shi') This terrifying vampire creature is said to be

caused by either the demonic posession of a recently deceased corpse or by suicide or
some other violent death. It has been documented in two forms: In one form it is a tall
and murderous, walking corpse with green or white hair all over its body. This
vampire has long, sharp claws, serrated teeth, glowering red eyes and foul breath
which will knock you dead at twenty paces. In this form it will leap out of graves to
attack people travelling at night and can also learn to fly if it survives long enough to
mature properly. In its more usual form it can appear human and will not be
recognised as a vampire until it does something that will give it away. For example,
like the slavic vampire, it is unable to cross running water, has the ability to transform
into a wolf and is allergic to garlic.

France

Incubus : This vampire demon is the male incarnation of the well documented
'Succubus'. The 'Incubus' appears to be a form of 'energy vampire' and regularly preys
on women at night until they are drained of all physical and sexual energies. This can
occur through intensive love-making and by tormenting the victim's dreams with
terrifying nightmares. The 'Incubus' is similar in concept to the Scandinavian 'Mara'
and, like Slavic and Gypsy vampire folklore, it has the ability to father children.

Succubus : The female counterpart to the 'Incubus', this creature attacks men during
their sleep using the same methods as above.

Germany

Alp : This creature is similar in behaviour to the 'Incubus' as its victims are generally
women which it attacks at night, drinking milk from their nipples and causing them to
have horrible nightmares, athough it will also drink blood from the nipples of men
and young children. The 'Alp' is generally believed to be a demon, although there are
accounts in which they occur as spirits of recently deceased relations. There are also
instances which state that children may become an 'Alp' if the mother suffers a long
and painful childbirth and is forced to use a horse collar to ease the pain. It can also
appear in animal form, linking it with some werewolf myths, can fly like a bird and,
like the 'Mara', will ride a horse to exhaustion. Somewhat comically, the 'Alp' is said
to wear a hat in almost all of its manifestations.

Doppelsauger : This is another 'breast-obsessed' vampire (of which there are many in
Europe) and is documented in northern regions of Germany. The 'Doppelsauger' will
leech the life from its living relatives by attacking them and eating their breasts. It was
believed that these vampires were caused by a mother allowing her child to again
drink milk from her breast even though it had been weaned onto solid food: this child
would then become a 'Doppelsauger' after its eventual death.
Nachtzehrer : (alsocalled 'neuntoter' or 'nachttoter') This revenant creature was
believed to cause the death of its victims through its own psychic abilities. Whilst still
in the grave it would devour its own burial shroud and flesh causing its family and
relations to slowly waste away. The 'Nachtzehrer' is traditionally found in times of
plague epidemics and is believe to carry the pestilence about its person as it is covered
in sores and stinks of decay. It also keeps its left eye open at all times and grunts like
a pig. It was thought that if you were buried with your name still attached to your
burial clothing you might become a vampire such as this. Get your mum to remove
those school nametags NOW!!

Greece

Callicantzaros : Childrenborn between Christmas day and the New Year would
become one of these. The 'Callicantzaros' exhibited manic behaviour and had
talonlike fingernails with which it would tear is victims into shreds yet this
vampirelike creature was only active during these days of the year: the remainder of
the which it would be trapped, travelling the Netherworld.

Empusas : (also called 'Mormolykiai') The 'Empusas' were vampire-demon attendants

of Hecate, a Goddess from Greek mythology. These demons would often manifest
themselves in human form, most commonly as Phoenician woman, and go about
attacking people at night.

Lamiai : This vampire originates from Greek myth in which the first 'Lamiai' was a
Queen of Libya who went insane following the murder of her children by Hera. In
revenge she began to travel the earth drinking blood and feeding on the flesh of
infants and, like the 'Succubus' and other such 'sexual' demons, would appear as a
beautiful woman to seduce men into lovemaking then devour them in a gruesome
fashion. After feeding, the 'Lamiai' would take out its eyes in order to rest and it was
only then that she could be destroyed.

Vrykolakas : Tales of this vampire are documented in both Greece and Macedonia.
People were generally believed to become one of these if they had commited suicide
or had suffered a violent death. Those who led an immoral life were also thought to
become a 'Vrykolaka'. Like many other common myths it was necessary for the
vampire to request entry and be admitted into the household in order to be fully able
to attack. The 'Vrykolaka' would, therefore, call the name of its intended victim at the
door of that person's home and then, once inside, would sit on the individual's chest
until they suffocated to death. In reality, the reason for the 'victim's' death was more
likely a heart-attack as the feeling of a constricted chest (and indeed of being sat
upon) is a usual symptom.

Haiti

Loogaroo :This West Indian vampire is said to go to a 'Devil Tree' each night and
remove its skin. It then flies off in search of its victims, in the form of a sulfurous ball.

Hungary
Liderc : This vampire-like being was similar in behaviour to the Incubus or Succubus
in that it could kill victims by 'loving them to death' ie. exhaustion through sexual
activity.

Nora : This unusual creature was an 'invisible' : a sprite or imp. The 'Nora' was
humanoid in appearance, but was also very small, bald and ran on all fours. This
vampire-creature attacked the breasts of women who were irreverent or known to be
immoral and would make them swell painfully. The remedy for this ailment was to
cover the affected breasts in Garlic and thus prevent the 'Nora' from 'attacking' again.
The result of this creature's attack is more likely an explanation for a sexually
transmitted disease or other illnesses caught through prostitution at the time.

India

Bhuta : It was believed that those who were physically disabled, insane or suicidal
were destined to become a 'Bhuta' following their death. These vampires inhabited
wastelands and graveyards in the form of 'willo-the-wisp' type lights or shadowy,
ghostly apparitions. The 'Bhuta' were said to cause severe illness in those it attacked
as these vampires mostly fed on the intestines and excrement of the recently buried.
They were also believed to be able to possess individuals in order to attack newly-fed
babies in an attempt to digest the milk that had drunk from their mothers.

Brahmaparush : This bloodthirsty monster took ghoulish delight in completely

consuming the people it attacked. Its method of devouring its victims was highly
ritualised: the 'Brahmaparush' would begin by drinking the blood through a hole in the
skull, following that the brain would also be consumed. This feeding ritual would not
be complete until the vampire performed a macabre dance whilst deliberately
entangled in the intestines of the corpse it had destroyed.

Churel : These vampires were believed to have once been pregnant women who died
during the festival of Divali. The 'Churel' were extremely ugly vampires with sagging
breasts, black tongues, thick, rough lips, wild hair and back-to-front feet. They were
thought to be bitter and angry due to their untimely death and as a result attacked their
families and attractive, young men.

Gayal : The 'Gayal' was a male spirit which had returned from the grave unable to rest
as the burial rites had not been correctly carried out on the deceased. This angry spirit
would attack members of his family in revenge for thier religious malpractice.

Kali : Thisvampiric Goddess possessed a terrifying countenance and was said to

appear on battlefields during long and bloody wars. Her skin was charred black in
tone, her eyes and eyebrows were blood red and she had an extremely long tongue
with which she became drunk on the blood of her victims.

Masani : The 'Masani' attacks travellers at night as they pass by the burial grounds in
which this female vampire hides, sleeping by day in a funeral pyre. The ash from this
pyre is what gives this vampire her black-skinned appearance.

Pisacha :
The 'Pisacha' (trans. FleshEater) was, in religious teachings, a personification
of Brahma's anger at the immorality and vices that had developed in humanity. This
grotesque deity took pleasure in the consumption of whole corpses but also had the
ability to cure diseases if approached in a respectful manner.

Rakshasa : These beautiful female vampires would appear to men and lure them to
their death but would also attack babies and pregnant women to drink their blood.
There were many legends associated with the 'Rakshasa' (trans. 'Injurer'): some
believed that if a child were forced to eat human brains then it would become one,
others believed that these vampires caused stomach sicknesses in people who had
tresspassed into their territory and that these fanged creatures dwelt in trees from
which they could spy on those travelling underneath.

Ireland

Dearg-dul : under construction

Italy

Stregoni benefici : under construction

Israel

Estrie : under construction

Japan

Kappa : under construction

Kasha : under construction

Java

Pontianak : under construction

Madagascar

Ramanga : under construction

Malaysia

Bajang : under construction

Langsuir /lansuyar: under construction

Pelesit : under construction

Penanggalan : under construction

Polong : under construction

Mexico
Cihuateteo : under construction

Tlahuelpuchi : under construction

Moldavia

Zmeu : under construction

Phillipines

Aswang : under construction

Bebarlangs : under construction

Danag : under construction

Poland

Vjeski : under construction

Upier : under construction

Portugal

Bruxsa : under construction

Romania

Moroii : (also called Muroni) under construction

Nosferatu : under construction

Strigoii vii : under construction

Strigoii mort : under construction

Varacolaci : under construction

Rome (ancient)

Striges : under construction

Russia

Eretica : under construction

Upyr: under construction

Vourdalak : under construction

vieszcy : under construction

Saudi Arabia

Algul : under construction

Scandinavia

Mara : under construction

Scotland

Baobhan-sith : under construction

Slovakia

Nelapsi : under construction

Slovenia

Pijavica : under construction

Volkodlak : under construction

South America

Asema :An old man or woman who lived in the community and took off their skin and
became a vampire at night, flying through the air as a ball of blue light and drinking
peoples blood, sometimes till they died.

Jaracacas : under construction

Lobishomen : under construction

South Pacific

Talamaur : under construction

Thailand

Phi Song Nang : Similar

to the pontianak of Java, this vampire would appear as a
beautiful woman and thus attack young men. They were caused by a person being
killed by an animal.

Tibet

The Wrathful Deities : These58 blood-drinking deities originate from Tibetan Buddhist
myth and have the heads of various animals. They do not attack individuals, but they
represent the vampiric actions committed by the recently deceased, appearing on the
eighth day (also a song by 'The Damned') after the death of the person.
Go to Top

Vampire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

For other uses, see Vampire (disambiguation).

This article deals with vampires in folklore and legends. For treatments of the
vampire legend in fiction, see Vampire fiction.

Vampires are mythical or folkloric creatures, typically held to be the re-animated

corpses of human beings and said to subsist on human and/or animal blood
(hematophagy), often having unnatural powers, heightened bodily functions, and/or
the ability to physically transform. Some cultures have myths of non-human
vampires, such as demons or animals like bats, dogs, and spiders. Vampires are often
described as having a variety of additional powers and character traits, extremely
variable in different traditions, and are a frequent subject of folklore, cinema, and
contemporary fiction.

Vampirism is the practice of drinking blood from a person/animal. Vampires are said
to mainly bite the victim's neck, extracting the blood from a main artery. In folklore
and popular culture, the term generally refers to a belief that one can gain supernatural
powers by drinking human blood. The historical practice of vampirism can generally
be considered a more specific and less commonly occurring form of cannibalism. The
consumption of another's blood (and/or flesh) has been used as a tactic of
psychological warfare intended to terrorize the enemy, and it can be used to reflect
various spiritual beliefs.

In zoology and botany, the term vampirism is used to refer to leeches, mosquitos,
mistletoe, vampire bats, and other organisms that prey upon the bodily fluids of other
creatures. This term also applies to mythic animals of the same nature, including the
chupacabra.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Etymology
• 2 Vampires in ancient cultures
• 3 Folk beliefs in vampires
o 3.1 Slavic vampires
o 3.2 Romanian vampires
o 3.3 Roma and vampires
o 3.4 New England
• 4 Eighteenth century vampire controversy
• 5 Contemporary belief in vampires
 • 6 Traits of vampires
• 7 Natural phenomena that propagate the vampire myth
o 7.1 Pathology and vampirism
o 7.2 Finding vampires in graves
o 7.3 Vampire bats
• 8 Vampires in fiction
• 9 Sources
• 10 See also
o 10.1 Related legendary creatures
o 10.2 Other

• 11 External links
[edit]

Etymology
English vampire comes from German Vampir, in turn from early Old Polish *vąper'
(where ą is a nasal a, and both p and r' are palatalized), in turn from Old Slavic *oper
(with a nasal o) or Old Church Slavonic opiri. The Slavic word, like its cognate
netopyr' ("bat"), comes from the PIE root for "to fly". The word Upir as a term for
vampire is found for the first time in written form in 1047 in a letter to a Novgorodian
prince referring to him as 'Upir Lichyj' (Wicked Vampire). Evidence suggests that an
Upir was originally just a sort of psychopomp, a spirit which accompanies the soul of
a dead person from the grave to the afterlife [citation needed].

[edit]

Vampires in ancient cultures

Tales of the dead craving blood are ancient in nearly every culture around the world.
Vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are mentioned in early Babylonian demonology,
and the bloodsucking Akhkharu even earlier in the Sumerian mythology. These
female demons were said to roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and killing
newborn babies and pregnant women. One of these demons, named Lilitu, was later
adapted into Jewish demonology as Lilith. Lilitu/Lilith is sometimes called the mother
of all vampires. For further information, see the article on Lilith.

The Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet in one myth became full of blood lust after
slaughtering humans and was only sated after drinking alcohol colored as blood.

In Homer's Odyssey, the shades that Odysseus meets on his journey to the underworld
are lured to the blood of freshly sacrificed rams, a fact that Odysseus uses to his
advantage to summon the shade of Tiresias. Roman tales describe the strix, a
nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood. The Roman strix is the source of the
Romanian vampire, the Strigoi and the Albanian Shtriga, which also show Slavic
influence [citation needed].
In early Slavic folklore, a vampire drank blood, was afraid of (but could not be killed
by) silver and could be destroyed by cutting off its head and putting it between the
corpse's legs or by putting a wooden stake into its heart.

Medieval historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded
the earliest English stories of vampires in the 12th century.

Many vampire legends also bear similarities to legends regarding succubi or incubi.

[edit]

Folk beliefs in vampires

It seems that until the 19th century, vampires in Europe were thought to be hideous
monsters rather than the debonair, aristocratic vampire made popular by later fictional
treatments. They were usually believed to rise from the bodies of suicide victims,
criminals, or evil sorcerers, though in some cases an initial vampire thus "born of sin"
could pass his vampirism onto his innocent victims. In other cases, however, a victim
of a cruel, untimely, or violent death was susceptible to becoming a vampire. Most of
the European vampire myths have Slavic and/or Romanian origins.

[edit]

Slavic vampires

The Slavic people including most east Europeans from Russia to Serbia to Poland,
have the richest vampire folklore and legends in the world. The Slavs came from
north of the Black Sea and were closely associated with the Balts. Prior to 8th century
AD they migrated north and west to where they are now.

Christianisation began almost as soon as they arrived in their new homelands.

However, through the 9th and 10th centuries, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the
western Roman Catholic Church were struggling with each other for supremacy. They
formally broke in 1054 AD, with the Bulgarians, Russians, and Serbians staying
Orthodox, while the Poles, Czechs, and Croatians went Roman. This split caused a
big difference in the development of vampire lore - the Orthodox church believed
incorrupt bodies were vampires, while the Roman church believed they were saints. It
must still be observed that Vampire beliefs were common in (Catholic) Poland, and
that there is little indication they were less common in Croatia than among the Serbs.

Causes of vampirism included being born with a caul, teeth, or tail, being conceived
on certain days, irregular death, excommunication, improper burial rituals etc.
Preventative measures included: placing a crucifix in the coffin, or blocks under the
chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the
same reason, or piercing the body with thorns or stakes. In the case of stakes, the
general idea was to pierce through the vampire and into the ground below, pinning
them. Certain people would bury their potential vampires with scythes above their
necks, so the dead would decapitate themselves as they rose.
Evidence that a vampire was at work in the neighbourhood included death of cattle,
sheep, relatives, neighbours, exhumed bodies being in a lifelike state with new growth
of the fingernails or hair, or if the body was swelled up like a drum, or there was
blood on the mouth and if the corpse had a ruddy complexion.

Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (the Kashubs placed the head
between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, holy water on the grave or
exorcism.

[edit]

Romanian vampires

Tales of vampiric entities were also found among the ancient Romans and among the
Romanized inhabitants of eastern Europe, Romanians (known as Vlachs in historical
context). Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it is not surprising that
Romanian vampires are similar to the Slavic vampire. They are called Strigoi based
on the ancient Greek term strix for screech owl, which also came to mean demon or
witch.

There are different types of Strigoi. Strigoi vii are live witches who will become
vampires after death. They can send out their soul at night to meet with other witches
or with Strigoi morţi who are dead vampires. The Strigoi morţi are the reanimated
bodies which return to suck the blood of family, livestock, and neighbours. Other
types of vampires in Romanian folklore include Moroi and Pricolici.

A person born with a caul, tail, born out of wedlock, or one who died an unnatural
death, or died before baptism, was doomed to become a vampire, as was the seventh
child of the same sex in a family, the child of a pregnant woman who did not eat salt
or who was looked at by a vampire, or a witch. Moreover, being bitten by vampire,
meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.

The Vârcolac which is sometimes mentioned in folklore was more closely related to a
mythological wolf that could devour the sun and moon (similar to Fenris in Norse
mythology), and later became connected with werewolves rather than vampires. The
person afflicted with lycanthropy could turn into a dog, pig, or wolf.

The vampire was usually first noticed when it attacked family and livestock, or threw
things around in the house. Vampires, along with witches, were believed to be most
active on the Eve of St George's Day (April 22 Julian, May 4 Gregorian calendar), the
night when all forms of evil were supposed to be abroad. St George's Day is still
celebrated in Europe.

A vampire in the grave could be told by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse
with a red face, or having one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were
found by distributing garlic in church and seeing who did not eat it.

Graves were often opened three years after death of a child, five years after the death
of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for vampirism.
Measures to prevent a person becoming a vampire included, removing the caul from a
newborn and destroying it before the baby could eat any of it, careful preparation of
dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing over the corpse, placing a
thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on windows and rubbing it
on cattle, especially on St George's & St Andrew's days.

To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body followed by decapitation
and placing garlic in the mouth. By the 19th century people were shooting a bullet
through the coffin. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces
burned, mixed with water, and given to family members as a cure.

[edit]

Roma and vampires

Even today, Roma frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced
by Bram Stoker's book, Dracula, in which the Szgany Roma served Dracula, carrying
his boxes of earth and guarding him.

Traditional Romani beliefs include the idea that the dead soul enters a world similar to
ours except that there is no death. The soul stays around the body and sometimes
wants to come back. The Roma myths of the living dead added to and enriched the
vampire myths of Hungary, Romania, and Slavic lands.

The ancient home of the Roma, India, has many mythical vampire figures. The Bhut
or Prét is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wanders around animating
dead bodies at night and attacks the living like a ghoul. In northern India could be
found the BrahmarākŞhasa, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by
intestines and a skull from which it drank blood. Vetala and pishacha are some other
creatures who resemble vampires in some form. Since Hinduism believes in
reincarnation of the soul after death, it is supposed that upon leading an unholy or
immoral life, sin or suicide, the soul reincarnates into such kinds of evil spirits. This
kind of reincarnation does not arise out of birth from a womb, etc, but is achieved
directly, and such evil spirits' fate is pre-determined as to how they shall achieve
liberation from that yoni, and re-enter the world of mortal flesh through next
incarnation.

The most famous Indian deity associated with blood drinking is Kali, who has fangs,
wears a garland of corpses or skulls and has four arms. Her temples are near the
cremation grounds. She and the goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija who
could reproduce himself from each drop of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so
none was spilled, thereby winning the battle and killing Raktabija.

Sara, or the Black Goddess, is the form in which Kali survived among gypsies.
Gypsies have a belief that the three Marys from the New Testament went to France
and baptised a gypsy called Sara. They still hold a ceremony each May 24 in the
French village where this is supposed to have occurred. Some refer to their Black
Goddess as "Black Cally" or "Black Kali".
One form of vampire in Romani myth is called a mullo (one who is dead). This
vampire is believed to return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a
person (usually a relative who had caused their death, or hadn't properly observed the
burial ceremonies, or who kept the deceased's possessions instead of destroying them
as was proper).

Female vampires could return, lead a normal life and even marry but would exhaust
the husband.

Anyone who had a hideous appearance, was missing a finger, or had animal
appendages, etc., was believed to be a vampire. If a person died unseen, he would
become a vampire; likewise if a corpse swelled before burial. Plants or dogs, cats, or
even agricultural tools could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons kept in the house
too long would start to move, make noises or show blood. (See the article on vampire
watermelons.)

To get rid of a vampire people would hire a Dhampir (the son of a vampire and his
widow) or a Moroi [citation needed] to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, gypsies
drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth,
over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed
hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further
measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it,
decapitating the corpse, or burning it.

According to the late Serbian ethnologist Tatomir Vukanović, Roma people in

Kosovo believed that vampires were invisible to most people. However, they could be
seen "by a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday who wear their drawers and
shirts inside out." Likewise, a settlement could be protected from a vampire "by
finding a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday and making them wear their shirts
and drawers inside out (cf previous section). This pair could see the vampire out of
doors at night, but immediately after it saw them it would have to flee, head over
heels."

[edit]

New England

During the 18th and 19th centuries the belief in vampires was widespread in parts of
New England, particularly in Rhode Island and Eastern Connecticut. In this region
there are several well-documeted cases of families disinterring loved ones and
removing their hearts in the belief that the deceased was a vampire who was
responsible for sickness and misfortune in the family. The most well known case is
that of nineteen year old Mercy Brown who died in Exeter, Rhode Island in 1892. Her
father, assisited by the family physician, removed her from her tomb two months after
her death. Her heart was cut out then burnt to ashes. An account of this incident was
found among the papers of Bram Stoker and the story closely resembles the events in
his classic novel, Dracula.

[edit]
Eighteenth century vampire controversy
During the 18th century there was a major vampire scare in Eastern Europe. Even
government officials frequently got dragged into the hunting and staking of vampires.

The word vampire only came into the English language in 1732 via an English
translation of a German report of the much-publicized Arnold Paole vampire staking
in Serbia.

It all started with an outbreak of alleged vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1725 to 1734. Two famous cases involved
Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole. As the story goes, Plogojowitz died at the age of
62, but came back a couple of times after his death asking his son for food. When the
son refused, he was found dead the next day. Soon Plogojowitz returned and attacked
some neighbours who died from loss of blood.

In the other famous case, Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who had allegedly
been attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After his death, people
began to die, and it was believed by everyone that Paole had returned to prey on the
neighbours.

These two incidents were extremely well documented. Government officials

examined the cases and the bodies, wrote them up in reports, and books were
published afterwards of the Paole case and distributed around Europe. The
controversy raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural epidemics
of so-claimed vampire attacks, with locals digging up bodies. Many scholars said
vampires did not exist, and attributed reports to premature burial, or rabies.
Nonetheless, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well-respected French theologian and scholar,
put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746 in which he claimed vampires did
exist. This had considerable influence on other scholars at the time.

Eventually, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician to

investigate. He concluded that vampires do not exist, and the Empress passed laws
prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies. This was the end of the
vampire epidemics. By then, though, many knew about vampires, and soon authors
would adopt and adapt the concept of vampire, making it known to the general public.

[edit]

Contemporary belief in vampires

Belief in vampires still persists across the globe.

During late 2002 and early 2003, hysteria about alleged attacks of vampires swept
through the African country of Malawi. Mobs stoned one individual to death and
attacked at least four others, including Governor Eric Chiwaya, due to a belief that the
government was colluding with vampires.[1]
In Romania, several relatives of Toma Petre dug up his body, tore out his heart,
burned the organ and drank its ashes in water in February of 2004, thinking that he
had become a vampire.[2]

In January 2005, it was reported that an attacker had bitten a number of people in
Birmingham, England, fueling concerns about a vampire roaming the streets.
However, local police stated that no such crimes had been reported to them, and this
case appears to be an urban legend.[3]

In the modern folklore of Puerto Rico and Mexico, the chupacabra (goat-sucker) is
said to be a creature that feeds upon the flesh or drinks the blood of domesticated
animals, leading some to consider it vampiric. The "chupacabras hysteria" was
frequently associated with deep economical and political crisis, particularily during
the middle of the 90`s decade. The chupacabra is also believed to be an alien.

[edit]

Traits of vampires
• Vampires, being already dead, do not need most normal things required for
human life, such as oxygen. They often have a pale (for vampires from
literature and cinema) or ruddy (for those from folklore) appearance, and are
cool to the touch from the perspective of humans.

• Vampires are sometimes considered to be shape-shifters, though this feature is

more commonly present in fiction than in the original folklore.

• Some vampires can fly. Sometimes this power is supernatural, other times it is
connected to the vampire's ability to turn into flying creatures (e.g., bats, owls,
flies) or into lightweight forms (e.g. straw, dust, smoke) and then create winds
as a means of propulsion.

• Vampires typically cast no shadow and have no reflection. This mythical

power is largely confined to European vampiric myths and may be tied to
folklore regarding the vampire's lack of a soul. In modern fiction, this may
extend to the idea that vampires cannot be photographed.

• Some tradititions hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless he or she is
invited in. This concept has been referenced throughout the history of vampire
fiction (from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Christabel, through Bram
Stoker's novel Dracula to Stephen King's novel Salem's Lot, and even Buffy
the Vampire Slayer). Generally, however, a vampire can come and go at will
after being invited once.

• Vampire powers are often limited during the day or in daylight. In some cases
sunlight may burn or kill vampires, or they may be comatose during the day.

• Vampires may be reluctant to enter or cross bodies of water, particularly

running water.
 • Some tales maintain that vampires must return to their native soil before
sunrise to take their rest safely. Others place native soil in their coffins,
especially if they have relocated.

• Vampires in some tales have very specific dietary requirements while others
do not. However, most tales of the undead feature vampires that cannot eat (or
at least cannot gain nourishment from) normal human food. In most cases they
sustain themselves by sucking living people's blood or life force ; this seems to
be a requirement for their continued existence regardless of whether they are
able to absorb other food and drink, or gain anything from such.

• Werewolves are sometimes held to become vampires after death, and

vampires are frequently held to have the ability to transform themselves into
wolves.

• Apotropaics, or objects intended to ward off vampires, include garlic, a branch

of wild rose, and all things sacred (e.g., holy water, a crucifix, a rosary, or
sacred objects from other faiths). This weakness on the part of the vampire
varies depending on the tale. Garlic is confined mostly to European vampire
legends. In myths of other regions, other plants of holy or mythical properties
sometimes have similar effects. Holy water and other holy symbols depend
upon the culture. In Eastern vampiric myths, vampires are often similarly
warded by holy devices such as Shintō seals.

• There are three main ways to destroy a typical European vampire: a

consecrated bullet, a wooden stake through the heart where two roads meet, or
decapitation. This includes other means of death that effectively removes a
vampire's head, such as incinerating the body completely.

• Old folklore from Eastern Europe suggests that many vampires suffered from
a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, being fascinated with counting.
Millet or poppy seeds were placed on the ground at the gravesite of a
presumed vampire, in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting.
Chinese myths about vampires also state that if a vampire comes across a sack
of rice, s/he will have to count all of the grains. Aside from the Muppet
character of Count von Count on television's Sesame Street, this characteristic
seems to have largely disappeared from popular culture.

[edit]

Natural phenomena that propagate the vampire myth

[edit]

Pathology and vampirism

Some people argue that vampire stories might have been influenced by a rare illness
called porphyria. The disease disrupts the production of heme. People with extreme
but rare cases of this hereditary disease can be so sensitive to sunlight that they can
get a sunburn through heavy cloud cover, causing them to avoid sunlight — although
it should be noted that the idea that vampires are harmed by sunlight is largely from
modern fiction and not the original beliefs. Certain forms of porphyria are also
associated with neurological symptoms, which can create psychiatric disorders.
However, the hypotheses that porphyria sufferers crave the heme in human blood, or
that the consumption of blood might ease the symptoms of porphyria, are based on a
severe misunderstanding of the disease. There is no real evidence to suggest that
porphyria had anything to do with the development of the original folklore, as the
hypothesis is mainly based off the characteristics of the modern vampire in any case.
[4]

Others argue that there is a relationship between vampirism and rabies, since people
suffering from this disease would avoid sunlight and looking into mirrors and would
froth at the mouth. This froth could sometimes look like blood, being red in colour.
However, like porphyria, there is little evidence to prove any links between vampires
and rabies.

There have been a number of murderers who performed seemingly vampiric rituals
upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kurten and Richard Trenton Chase were both
called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the
people they murdered, for example. Legends that Erzsébet Báthory, a medieval
Slovak aristocrat, murdered hundreds of women in bizarre rituals involving blood,
helped mold contemporary vampire legends.

Some psychologists in modern times recognize a disorder called clinical vampirism

(or Renfield Syndrome, from Dracula's insect-eating henchman, Renfield, in the novel
by Bram Stoker) in which the victim is obsessed with drinking blood, either from
animals or humans.

[edit]

Finding vampires in graves

When the coffin of an alleged vampire was opened, people sometimes found the
cadaver in a relatively undecomposed state, which could have been interpreted as the
corpse being the equivalent of a well-fed vampire. Another reason to believe that a
body is a vampire that has fed on the living is the strange illusion that the hair, nails,
and teeth have grown [5]. It is a well known phenomenon that after death the skin and
gums lose fluids and contract, exposing the roots of the hair, nails, and teeth, even
teeth that were concealed in the jaw. [6] Folkloric accounts almost universally
represent the alleged vampire as having ruddy or dark skin, not the pale skin of
vampires in literature and film. In the past, people were often malnourished and
therefore thin in life, which could account for the pale skin often referred to. Corpses
swell as gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso and blood tries to escape
the body. During decomposition blood can often be seen emanating from nose and
mouth, which could give the impression that the corpse was a vampire who had been
drinking blood. Natural processes of decomposition, absent embalming, tend to
darken the skin of a corpse — hence the black, blue, or red complexion of the
folkloric vampire.
[edit]

Vampire bats

Bats have become an integral part of the vampire myth only recently, although many
cultures have myths about them. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with
the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. Conversely, the gypsies
thought them lucky and wore charms made of bat bones. In English heraldic tradition,
a bat means "Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos"[7]. In South America,
Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld.

The three species of actual vampire bats are all endemic to Latin America, and there is
no evidence to suggest that they had any Old World relatives within human memory.
It is therefore extremely unlikely that the folkloric vampire represents a distorted
presentation or memory of the bat. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors
first came into contact with vampire bats and recognized the similarity between the
feeding habits of the bats and those of their mythical vampires. The bats were named
after the folkloric vampire rather than vice versa; the Oxford English Dictionary
records the folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological not until 1774. It
wasn't long before vampire bats were adapted into fictional tales, and they have
become one of the more important vampire associations in popular culture.

[edit]

Vampires in fiction
Main article: Vampire fiction

Lord Byron introduced many common elements of the vampire theme to Western
literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813). These include the combination of
horror and lust that the vampire feels and the concept of the undead passing its
inheritance to the living.

John Polidori authored the first "true" vampire story called The Vampyre. Polidori
was the personal physician of Lord Byron and the vampire of the story, Lord
Ruthven, is based partly on him — making the character the first of our now familiar
romantic vampires. The story is sometimes still falsely attributed to Lord Byron.

Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular
fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious
demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a
Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.

[edit]

Sources
Books:
 • Barber, Paul : Vampires, Burial and Death : Folklore and Reality . Yale
University Press.1988. ISBN 0300048599
• Bell, Michael E.: Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's
Vampires. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001. ISBN 0786708999
• Bunson, Matthew: The Vampire Encyclopedia. Crown Trade Paperbacks,
1993. ISBN 0517881004
• McNally, Raymond T.: Dracula Was a Woman. McGraw Hill, 1983. ISBN
0070456712
• Wright, Dudley: The Book of Vampires. 1914 (available in various reprints)
• Frayling, Christopher: "Vampyres, Lord Byron to Count Dracula". 1991.
ISBN: 0-571-16792-6

Articles:

1. ^ "'Vampires' strike Malawi villages", Raphael Tenthani, BBC News,

December 23, 2002
2. ^ "Romanian villagers decry police investigation into vampire slaying",
Matthew Schofield, Knight Ridder Newspapers, March 24, 2004
3. ^ "Reality Bites", Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, January 18, 2005, accessed
online August 17, 2005
4. ^ "The Vampire", Henry Steel Olcott, The Theosophist, Vol XII, 1891,
accessed online December 15, 2005
5. ^ "Do hair and nails continue to grow after death?", SDSTAFF Hawk
(pseudonym), The Straight Dope, August 9, 2001, accessed online December
15, 2005

[edit]

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

vampire
[edit]

Related legendary creatures

• Civatateo
• Hopping corpse
• Kitsune
• Lamia
• Manananggal
• Oni
• Pontianak
• Vrykolakas
• Vetala
• Yakshi
[edit]

Other

vampire
Dictionary
vam·pire (văm'pīr')
n.

1. A reanimated corpse that is believed to rise from the grave at night to suck the
blood of sleeping people.
2. A person, such as an extortionist, who preys upon others.
3. A vampire bat.

[French, from German Vampir, of Slavic origin.]

vam·pir'ic (văm-pĭr'ĭk) or vam·pir'i·cal (-ĭ-kəl) or vam'pir'ish (-ĭsh) adj.

Modern day Vampires
21st century information. Do not be scared, just be careful.
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Thesaurus
vampire

noun

A perversely bad, cruel, or wicked person: archfiend, beast, devil, fiend,

ghoul, monster, ogre, tiger. See kind/cruel.

Word Origins
vampire
from Serbo-Croatian
This word originated in Yugoslavia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Thanks to Bram Stoker and his ilk, we know all about vampires. We know that they
once were people but now are dead; that they can't stand sunlight and spend their days
in their coffins; that they have no reflections in mirrors because they have no souls;
that they cannot enter a house without being invited but once invited can enter again
and again; that for convenience they can change into vampire bats; that they drink the
blood of others with the result that these others become vampires after death; and that,
being dead already, they're very hard to kill, the effective methods being beheading,
cremation, or a stake through the heart.

But what about the name vampire? Where did that come from? That's harder to
determine. We know that words like vampire were thick as bats in the Slavic
languages of eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian,
and Serbo-Croatian all had vampir, while Bulgarian also had vapir or vepir. There is
also a variant beginning with u, as in Polish upiór, Russian upyr', Ukrainian uper or
upyr. It is possible that this u-word came from Turkish uber, meaning "witch," and
also possible that that u-word was the ancestor of vampire. And perhaps not. For our
purposes, Serbo-Croatian is as good a candidate for the word's source as any other. Its
word is vampir, the same form that made its way through such intermediate languages
as Hungarian, German, and French to arrive in England by 1734. An English
document of that date declares that "These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies
of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the
Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them." That
about sums it up.

Serbo-Croatian is a Slavic Indo-European language spoken both by Serbs and by

Croats in Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than 20,000,000 people
altogether. But since the people are not all together, and since the two cultures have
recently become enemies, or at least gone their separate ways, they prefer to consider
themselves speakers of two separate languages, Serbian and Croatian. The chief
difference between the two is that Serbian is usually written in a Cyrillic (or Russian)
alphabet, Croatian in a Roman one. From this language, or these languages, English
has also imbibed slivovitz (1885) or plum brandy and has learned to wear a cravat
(1656) or necktie, a word that traces back from French to German to the Serbo-
Croatian word meaning a Croat. Neckties were worn by Croatian mercenaries in
France.

Encyclopedia
vampire, in folklore, animated corpse that sucks the blood of humans. Belief in
vampires has existed from the earliest times and has given rise to an amalgam of
legends and superstitions. They were most commonly thought of as spirits or demons
that left their graves at night to seek and enslave their victims; it was thought that the
victims themselves became vampires. The vampire could be warded off with a variety
of charms, amulets, and herbs and could finally be killed by driving a stake through
its heart or by cremation. Sometimes the vampire assumed a nonhuman shape, such as
that of a bat or wolf (see lycanthropy). Probably the most famous vampire in literature
is Count Dracula in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.

Bibliography
See A. Masters, The Natural History of the Vampire (1972); N. Auerbach, Our
Vampires, Ourselves (1995).

Mythology
vampires

Originally part of central European folklore, they now appear in horror stories as
living corpses who need to feed on human blood. A vampire will leave his coffin at
night, disguised as a great bat, to seek his innocent victims, bite their necks with his
long, sharp teeth, and suck their blood.

 The most famous vampire is Count Dracula, from the novel Dracula by Bram
Stoker.

WordNet
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun vampire has one meaning:

Meaning #1: (folklore) a corpse that rises at night to drink the blood of the living
Synonym: lamia

Wikipedia
vampire
This article or section contains information that has not been verified and thus might
not be reliable. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please check for
inaccuracies and modify as needed, citing sources.
For treatments of the vampire legend in fiction, see Vampire fiction.

Count Orlok from Nosferatu

Vampires are mythical or folkloric creatures, typically held to be the re-animated
corpses of human beings and said to subsist on human and/or animal blood
(hematophagy), often having unnatural powers, heightened bodily functions, and/or
the ability to physically transform. Some cultures have myths of non-human
vampires, such as demons or animals like bats, dogs, and spiders. Vampires are often
described as having a variety of additional powers and character traits, extremely
variable in different traditions, and are a frequent subject of folklore, cinema, and
contemporary fiction.

Vampirism is the practice of drinking blood from a person/animal. Vampires are said
to mainly bite the victim's neck, extracting the blood from a main artery. In folklore
and popular culture, the term generally refers to a belief that one can gain supernatural
powers by drinking human blood. The historical practice of vampirism can generally
be considered a more specific and less commonly occurring form of cannibalism. The
consumption of another's blood (and/or flesh) has been used as a tactic of
psychological warfare intended to terrorize the enemy, and it can be used to reflect
various spiritual beliefs.

In zoology, the term vampirism is used to refer to leeches, mosquitos, mistletoe,

vampire bats, and other organisms that prey upon the bodily fluids of other creatures.
This term also applies to mythic animals of the same nature, including the
chupacabra.

Etymology
English vampire comes from German Vampir, in turn from early Old Polish *vąper'
(where ą is a nasal a, and both p and r' are palatalized), in turn from Old Slavic *oper
(with a nasal o) or Old Church Slavonic opiri. The Slavic word, like its cognate
netopyr' ("bat"), comes from the PIE root for "to fly". The word Upir as a term for
vampire is found for the first time in written form in 1047 in a letter to a Novgorodian
prince referring to him as 'Upir Lichyj' (Wicked Vampire). Evidence suggests that an
Upir was originally just a sort of psychopomp, a spirit which accompanies the soul of
a dead person from the grave to the afterlife [citation needed].

Vampires in ancient cultures

Tales of the dead craving blood are ancient in nearly every culture around the world.
Vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are mentioned in early Babylonian demonology.
These female demons were said to roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and
killing newborn babies and pregnant women. One of these demons, named Lilitu, was
later adapted into Jewish demonology as Lilith. Lilitu/Lilith is sometimes called the
mother of all vampires. For further information, see the article on Lilith.

The Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet in one myth became full of blood lust after
slaughtering humans and was only sated after drinking alcohol colored as blood.

In Homer's Odyssey, the shades that Odysseus meets on his journey to the underworld
are lured to the blood of freshly sacrificed rams, a fact that Odysseus uses to his
advantage to summon the shade of Tiresias. Roman tales describe the strix, a
nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood. The Roman strix is the source of the
Romanian vampire, the Strigoi and the Albanian Shtriga, which also show Slavic
influence [citation needed].

In early Slavic folklore, a vampire drank blood, was afraid of (but could not be killed
by) silver and could be destroyed by cutting off its head and putting it between the
corpse's legs or by putting a wooden stake into its heart.

Medieval historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded
the earliest English stories of vampires in the 12th century.

Many vampire legends also bear similarities to legends regarding succubi or incubi.

Folk beliefs in vampires

It seems that until the 19th century, vampires in Europe were thought to be hideous
monsters rather than the debonair, aristocratic vampire made popular by later fictional
treatments. They were usually believed to rise from the bodies of suicide victims,
criminals, or evil sorcerers, though in some cases an initial vampire thus "born of sin"
could pass his vampirism onto his innocent victims. In other cases, however, a victim
of a cruel, untimely, or violent death was susceptible to becoming a vampire. Most of
the European vampire myths have Slavic and/or Romanian origins.

Slavic vampires

The Slavic people including most east Europeans from Russia to Bulgaria, Serbia to
Poland, have the richest vampire folklore and legends in the world. The Slavs came
from north of the Black Sea and were closely associated with the Balts. Prior to 8th
century AD they migrated north and west to where they are now.

Christianisation began almost as soon as they arrived in their new homelands.

However, through the 9th and 10th centuries, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the
western Roman Catholic Church were struggling with each other for supremacy. They
formally broke in 1054 AD, with the Bulgarians, Russians, and Serbians staying
Orthodox, while the Poles, Czechs, and Croatians went Roman. This split caused a
big difference in the development of vampire lore - the Orthodox church believed
incorrupt bodies were vampires, while the Roman church believed they were saints. It
must still be observed that Vampire beliefs were common in (Catholic) Poland, and
that there is little indication they were less common in Croatia than among the Serbs.

Causes of vampirism included being born with a caul, teeth, or tail, being conceived
on certain days, irregular death, excommunication, improper burial rituals etc.
Preventative measures included: placing a crucifix in the coffin, or blocks under the
chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the
same reason, or piercing the body with thorns or stakes. In the case of stakes, the
general idea was to pierce through the vampire and into the ground below, pinning
them. Certain people would bury their potential vampires with scythes above their
necks, so the dead would decapitate themselves as they rose.
Evidence that a vampire was at work in the neighbourhood included death of cattle,
sheep, relatives, neighbours, exhumed bodies being in a lifelike state with new growth
of the fingernails or hair, or if the body was swelled up like a drum, or there was
blood on the mouth and if the corpse had a ruddy complexion.

Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (the Kashubs placed the head
between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, holy water on the grave or
exorcism.

Romanian vampires

Tales of vampiric entities were also found among the ancient Romans and among the
Romanized inhabitants of eastern Europe, Romanians (known as Vlachs in historical
context). Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it is not surprising that
Romanian vampires are similar to the Slavic vampire. They are called Strigoi based
on the ancient Greek term strix for screech owl, which also came to mean demon or
witch.

There are different types of Strigoi. Strigoi vii are live witches who will become
vampires after death. They can send out their soul at night to meet with other witches
or with Strigoi morţi who are dead vampires. The Strigoi morţi are the reanimated
bodies which return to suck the blood of family, livestock, and neighbours. Other
types of vampires in Romanian folklore include Moroi and Pricolici.

A person born with a caul, tail, born out of wedlock, or one who died an unnatural
death, or died before baptism, was doomed to become a vampire, as was the seventh
child of the same sex in a family, the child of a pregnant woman who did not eat salt
or who was looked at by a vampire, or a witch. Moreover, being bitten by vampire,
meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.

The Vârcolac which is sometimes mentioned in folklore was more closely related to a
mythological wolf that could devour the sun and moon (similar to Fenris in Norse
mythology), and later became connected with werewolves rather than vampires. The
person afflicted with lycanthropy could turn into a dog, pig, or wolf.

The vampire was usually first noticed when it attacked family and livestock, or threw
things around in the house. Vampires, along with witches, were believed to be most
active on the Eve of St George's Day (April 22 Julian, May 4 Gregorian calendar), the
night when all forms of evil were supposed to be abroad. St George's Day is still
celebrated in Europe.

A vampire in the grave could be told by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse
with a red face, or having one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were
found by distributing garlic in church and seeing who did not eat it.

Graves were often opened three years after death of a child, five years after the death
of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for vampirism.

Measures to prevent a person becoming a vampire included, removing the caul from a
newborn and destroying it before the baby could eat any of it, careful preparation of
dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing over the corpse, placing a
thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on windows and rubbing it
on cattle, especially on St George's & St Andrew's days.

To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body followed by decapitation
and placing garlic in the mouth. By the 19th century people were shooting a bullet
through the coffin. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces
burned, mixed with water, and given to family members as a cure.

Roma and vampires

Even today, Roma frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced
by Bram Stoker's book "Dracula" in which the Szgany Roma served Dracula, carrying
his boxes of earth and guarding him.

Traditional Romani beliefs include the idea that the dead soul enters a world similar to
ours except that there is no death. The soul stays around the body and sometimes
wants to come back. The Roma myths of the living dead added to and enriched the
vampire myths of Hungary, Romania, and Slavic lands.

The ancient home of the Roma, India, has many mythical vampire figures. The Bhut
or Prét is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wanders around animating
dead bodies at night and attacks the living like a ghoul. In northern India could be
found the BrahmarākŞhasa, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by
intestines and a skull from which it drank blood. Vetala and pishacha are some other
creatures who resemble vampires in some form. Since Hinduism believes in
reincarnation of the soul after death, it is supposed that upon leading an unholy or
immoral life, sin or suicide, the soul reincarnates into such kinds of evil spirits. This
kind of reincarnation does not arise out of birth from a womb, etc, but is achieved
directly, and such evil spirits' fate is pre-determined as to how they shall achieve
liberation from that yoni, and re-enter the world of mortal flesh through next
incarnation.

The most famous Indian deity associated with blood drinking is Kali, who has fangs,
wears a garland of corpses or skulls and has four arms. Her temples are near the
cremation grounds. She and the goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija who
could reproduce himself from each drop of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so
none was spilled, thereby winning the battle and killing Raktabija.

Sara, or the Black Goddess, is the form in which Kali survived among gypsies.
Gypsies have a belief that the three Marys from the New Testament went to France
and baptised a gypsy called Sara. They still hold a ceremony each May 24 in the
French village where this is supposed to have occurred. Some refer to their Black
Goddess as "Black Cally" or "Black Kali".

One form of vampire in Romani myth is called a mullo (one who is dead). This
vampire is believed to return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a
person (usually a relative who had caused their death, or hadn't properly observed the
burial ceremonies, or who kept the deceased's possessions instead of destroying them
as was proper).
Female vampires could return, lead a normal life and even marry but would exhaust
the husband.

Anyone who had a hideous appearance, was missing a finger, or had animal
appendages, etc., was believed to be a vampire. If a person died unseen, he would
become a vampire; likewise if a corpse swelled before burial. Plants or dogs, cats, or
even agricultural tools could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons kept in the house
too long would start to move, make noises or show blood. (See the article on vampire
watermelons.)

To get rid of a vampire people would hire a Dhampir (the son of a vampire and his
widow) or a Moroi [citation needed] to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, gypsies
drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth,
over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed
hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further
measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it,
decapitating the corpse, or burning it.

According to the late Serbian ethnologist Tatomir Vukanović, Roma people in

Kosovo believed that vampires were invisible to most people. However, they could be
seen "by a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday who wear their drawers and
shirts inside out." Likewise, a settlement could be protected from a vampire "by
finding a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday and making them wear their shirts
and drawers inside out (cf previous section). This pair could see the vampire out of
doors at night, but immediately after it saw them it would have to flee, head over
heels."

Other Old World vampires

• In Ancient Greece and Medieval Bulgaria the Lamia had the upper body of a
woman, the lower body of a winged serpent and craved blood (especially the
blood of women). Medieval and later Greek folklore features the vrykolakas,
(which is now considered synonymous with "vampire").

• In Moravia, vampires were fond of throwing off their shrouds and attacking
their victims in the nude.

• In Albania, a type of vampire known as the Liogat or sampiro was supposed to

be the reanimated corpse of Albanians of Turkish descent. It was covered in a
shroud and wore high-heeled shoes. The only way to vanquish it was to have a
wolf bite its legs off so it would never rise again from its grave.

• In Bulgaria, a vampire had only one nostril and slept with his left eye open and
his thumbs linked. It was held responsible for cattle plagues.

New World

• In Aztec mythology, the Civatateo was a sort of vampire, created when a

noblewoman died in childbirth.
 • Later Mexican vampires were easily recognizable by their fleshless skulls.

• In the Caribbean, vampires known as Soucoyah in Trinidad and Tobago, Ol'

Higue in Jamaica, and Lagaroo in Grenada, take the form of old women
during the day, and at night shed their skin to become flying balls of flame
who seek blood. They were said to be notoriously obsessive-compulsive, and
could be thwarted by sprinkling salt or rice at entrances, crossroads and near
beds. The vampire would feel compelled to pick up every grain. They could
also be killed by rubbing salt into their discarded skin, which would burn them
upon returning to it before morning.

• The Rocky Mountain vampires sucked the blood out of its victim's ears using
its pointed nose.

• Brazilian vampires had plush-covered feet.

Asia and the Pacific

• India is home to beliefs in a spirit called the vetala, a wraithly vampire that can
leave its host body to feed.

• In Japan, the kitsune is a vampiric shapeshifting fox-spirit that takes its origins
from both Chinese and Indian mythology. Kitsune may be either maleficent or
benevolent, or both; kitsune are said to drain the life-force of its victims after
charming them or becoming their lover, in similar fashion as succubi or
incubi. Oni myths also have similarities with Western vampire legends. There
are also tales of kamaitachi, a phenomenon where it was said that evil gods
would thirst for human blood.

• The Chinese vampire, the hopping corpse (jiāng shī), has more in common
with Western ideas of corporeal zombies or ghouls but is still depicted as
draining the victim of blood.

• In Philippine folklore, the Manananggal was a female vampire whose entire

upper body could separate from her lower body and who could fly using
wings. She sucked the blood of fetuses. The Aswang was believed to always
be a female of considerable beauty by day and, by night, a fearsome flying
fiend. She lived in a house, could marry and have children, and was a
seemingly normal human during the daylight hours.

• In Malaysian folklore, the Penanggalan was a vampire whose head could

separate from its body, with its entrails dangling from the base of its neck. The
Pontianak was a female vampire that sucked the blood of newborn babies and
sometimes that of young children or pregnant women.

Eighteenth century vampire controversy

During the 18th century there was a major vampire scare in Eastern Europe. Even
government officials frequently got dragged into the hunting and staking of vampires.
The word vampire only came into the English language in 1732 via an English
translation of a German report of the much-publicized Arnold Paole vampire staking
in Serbia.

It all started with an outbreak of alleged vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1725 to 1734. Two famous cases involved
Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole. As the story goes, Plogojowitz died at the age of
62, but came back a couple of times after his death asking his son for food. When the
son refused, he was found dead the next day. Soon Plogojowitz returned and attacked
some neighbours who died from loss of blood.

In the other famous case, Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who had allegedly
been attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After his death, people
began to die, and it was believed by everyone that Paole had returned to prey on the
neighbours.

These two incidents were extremely well documented. Government officials

examined the cases and the bodies, wrote them up in reports, and books were
published afterwards of the Paole case and distributed around Europe. The
controversy raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural epidemics
of so-claimed vampire attacks, with locals digging up bodies. Many scholars said
vampires did not exist, and attributed reports to premature burial, or rabies.
Nonetheless, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well-respected French theologian and scholar,
put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746 in which he claimed vampires did
exist. This had considerable influence on other scholars at the time.

Eventually, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician to

investigate. He concluded that vampires do not exist, and the Empress passed laws
prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies. This was the end of the
vampire epidemics. By then, though, many knew about vampires, and soon authors
would adopt and adapt the concept of vampire, making it known to the general public.

Contemporary belief in vampires

Belief in vampires still persists across the globe.

During late 2002 and early 2003, hysteria about alleged attacks of vampires swept
through the African country of Malawi. Mobs stoned one individual to death and
attacked at least four others, including Governor Eric Chiwaya, due to a belief that the
government was colluding with vampires.[1]

In Romania, several relatives of Toma Petre dug up his body, tore out his heart,
burned the organ and drank its ashes in water in February of 2004, thinking that he
had become a vampire.[2]

In January 2005, it was reported that an attacker had bitten a number of people in
Birmingham, England, fueling concerns about a vampire roaming the streets.
However, local police stated that no such crimes had been reported to them, and this
case appears to be an urban legend.[3]
In the modern folklore of Puerto Rico and Mexico, the chupacabra (goat-sucker) is
said to be a creature that feeds upon the flesh or drinks the blood of domesticated
animals, leading some to consider it vampiric. The "chupacabras hysteria" was
frequently associated with deep economical and political crisis, particularily during
the middle of the 90`s decade. The chupacabra is also believed to be an alien.

Traits of vampires
• Vampires, being already dead, do not need most normal things required for
human life, such as oxygen. They often have a pale (for vampires from
literature and cinema) or ruddy (for those from folklore) appearance, and are
cool to the touch from the perspective of humans.

• Vampires are sometimes considered to be shape-shifters, though this feature is

more commonly present in fiction than in the original folklore.

• Some vampires can fly. Sometimes this power is supernatural, other times it is
connected to the vampire's ability to turn into flying creatures (e.g., bats, owls,
flies) or into lightweight forms (e.g. straw, dust, smoke) and then create winds
as a means of propulsion.

• Vampires typically cast no shadow and have no reflection. This mythical

power is largely confined to European vampiric myths and may be tied to
folklore regarding the vampire's lack of a soul. In modern fiction, this may
extend to the idea that vampires cannot be photographed.

• Some tradititions hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless he or she is
invited in. This concept has been referenced throughout the history of vampire
fiction (from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Christabel, through Bram
Stoker's novel Dracula to Stephen King's novel 'Salem's Lot). Generally,
however, after the first time the vampire is invited in he or she can come and
go as desired.

• Vampire powers are often limited during the day or in daylight. In some cases
sunlight may burn or kill vampires, or they may be comatose during the day.

• Vampires may be reluctant to enter or cross bodies of water, particularly

running water.

• Some tales maintain that vampires must return to their native soil before
sunrise to take their rest safely. Others place native soil in their coffins,
especially if they have relocated.

• Vampires in some tales have very specific dietary requirements while others
do not. However, most tales of the undead feature vampires that cannot eat (or
at least cannot gain nourishment from) normal human food. In most cases they
sustain themselves by sucking living people's blood or life force ; this seems to
be a requirement for their continued existence regardless of whether they are
able to absorb other food and drink, or gain anything from such.
 • Werewolves are sometimes held to become vampires after death, and
vampires are frequently held to have the ability to transform themselves into
wolves.

• Apotropaics, or objects intended to ward off vampires, include garlic, a branch

of wild rose, and all things sacred (e.g., holy water, a crucifix, a rosary, or
sacred objects from other faiths). This weakness on the part of the vampire
varies depending on the tale. Garlic is confined mostly to European vampire
legends. In myths of other regions, other plants of holy or mythical properties
sometimes have similar effects. Holy water and other holy symbols depend
upon the culture. In Eastern vampiric myths, vampires are often similarly
warded by holy devices such as Shintō seals.

• There are three main ways to destroy a typical European vampire: a

consecrated bullet, a wooden stake through the heart, or decapitation. This
includes other means of death that effectively removes a vampire's head, such
as incinerating the body completely.

• Old folklore from Eastern Europe suggests that many vampires suffered from
a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, being fascinated with counting.
Millet or poppy seeds were placed on the ground at the gravesite of a
presumed vampire, in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting.
Chinese myths about vampires also state that if a vampire comes across a sack
of rice, s/he will have to count all of the grains. Aside from the Muppet
character of Count von Count on television's Sesame Street, this characteristic
seems to have largely disappeared from popular culture.

Natural phenomena that propagate the vampire myth

Pathology and vampirism

Some people argue that vampire stories might have been influenced by a rare illness
called porphyria. The disease disrupts the production of heme. People with extreme
but rare cases of this hereditary disease can be so sensitive to sunlight that they can
get a sunburn through heavy cloud cover, causing them to avoid sunlight — although
it should be noted that the idea that vampires are harmed by sunlight is largely from
modern fiction and not the original beliefs. Certain forms of porphyria are also
associated with neurological symptoms, which can create psychiatric disorders.
However, the hypotheses that porphyria sufferers crave the heme in human blood, or
that the consumption of blood might ease the symptoms of porphyria, are based on a
severe misunderstanding of the disease. There is very little evidence to suggest that
porphyria had anything to do with the development of the original folklore. [4]

Others argue that there is a relationship between vampirism and rabies.

There have been a number of murderers who performed seemingly vampiric rituals
upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kurten and Richard Trenton Chase were both
called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the
people they murdered, for example. Legends that Erzsébet Báthory, a medieval
Hungarian aristocrat, murdered hundreds of women in bizarre rituals involving blood,
helped mold contemporary vampire legends.

Some psychologists in modern times recognize a disorder called clinical vampirism

(or Renfield Syndrome, from Dracula's insect-eating henchman, Renfield, in the novel
by Bram Stoker) in which the victim is obsessed with drinking blood, either from
animals or humans.

Finding vampires in graves

When the coffin of an alleged vampire was opened, people sometimes found the
cadaver in a relatively undecomposed state, which could have been interpreted as the
corpse being the equivalent of a well-fed vampire. Another reason to believe that a
body is a vampire that has fed on the living is the strange illusion that the hair, nails,
and teeth have grown [5]. It is a well known phenomenon that after death the skin and
gums lose fluids and contract, exposing the roots of the hair, nails, and teeth, even
teeth that were concealed in the jaw. [6] Folkloric accounts almost universally
represent the alleged vampire as having ruddy or dark skin, not the pale skin of
vampires in literature and film. In the past, people were often malnourished and
therefore thin in life, which could account for the pale skin often referred to. Corpses
swell as gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso and blood tries to escape
the body. During decomposition blood can often be seen emanating from nose and
mouth, which could give the impression that the corpse was a vampire who had been
drinking blood. Natural processes of decomposition, absent embalming, tend to
darken the skin of a corpse — hence the black, blue, or red complexion of the
folkloric vampire.

Vampire bats

Bats have become an integral part of the vampire myth only recently, although many
cultures have myths about them. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with
the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. On the other hand, the
gypsies thought them lucky and wore charms made of bat bones. In English heraldic
tradition, a bat means "Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos"[7]. In South
America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the
Underworld.

The three species of actual vampire bats are all endemic to Latin America, and there is
no evidence to suggest that they had any Old World relatives within human memory.
It is therefore extremely unlikely that the folkloric vampire represents a distorted
presentation or memory of the bat. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors
first came into contact with vampire bats and recognized the similarity between the
feeding habits of the bats and those of their mythical vampires. The bats were named
after the folkloric vampire rather than vice versa; the Oxford English Dictionary
records the folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological not until 1774. It
wasn't long before vampire bats were adapted into fictional tales, and they have
become one of the more important vampire associations in popular culture.

Vampires in fiction
 Main articles: Vampire fiction, and [[]], and [[]], and [[]], and [[]]

Lord Byron introduced many common elements of the vampire theme to Western
literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813). These include the combination of
horror and lust that the vampire feels and the concept of the undead passing its
inheritance to the living.

John Polidori authored the first "true" vampire story called The Vampyre. Polidori
was the personal physician of Lord Byron and the vampire of the story, Lord
Ruthven, is based partly on him — making the character the first of our now familiar
romantic vampires. The story is sometimes still falsely attributed to Lord Byron.

Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular
fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious
demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a
Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.

Sources
Books:

• Barber, Paul : Vampires, Burial and Death : Folklore and Reality . Yale
University Press.1988. ISBN 0300048599
• Bell, Michael E.: Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's
Vampires. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001. ISBN 0786708999
• Bunson, Matthew: The Vampire Encyclopedia. Crown Trade Paperbacks,
1993. ISBN 0517881004
• McNally, Raymond T.: Dracula Was a Woman. McGraw Hill, 1983. ISBN
0070456712
• Wright, Dudley: The Book of Vampires. 1914 (available in various reprints)
• Frayling, Christopher: "Vampyres, Lord Byron to Count Dracula". 1991.
ISBN: 0-571-16792-6

Articles:

1. ^ "'Vampires' strike Malawi villages", Raphael Tenthani, BBC News,

December 23 2002
2. ^ "Romanian villagers decry police investigation into vampire slaying",
Matthew Schofield, Knight Ridder Newspapers, March 24 2004
3. ^ "Reality Bites", Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, January 18 2005, accessed
online August 17 2005
4. ^ "The Vampire", Henry Steel Olcott, The Theosophist, Vol XII, 1891,
accessed online December 15 2005
5. ^ "Do hair and nails continue to grow after death?", SDSTAFF Hawk
(pseudonym), The Straight Dope, August 9 2001, accessed online December
15 2005

See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
vampire

• Dracula
• Elizabeth Bathory
• Energy vampire
• Fire vampire
• Hopping corpse
• Maschalismos
• Medieval revenant
• Mercy Brown vampire incident
• Vampire bat
• Vampire hunter
• Vampire lifestyle
• Vampire: The Masquerade
• Vlad III Dracula

External links
• Staking Claims: The Vampires of Folklore and Fiction from the Committee
for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
• Vampires from: The New England Skeptical Society
• Professor Elizabeth Miller has written books and articles on Stoker's Dracula
and Vlad Ţepeş.
• Knots, Threads, Spinning, and Vampires
• Vampiric Studies is a site by Catherene NightPoe containing a vast amount of
information regarding vampires.
• Transylvanian Society of Dracula containing articles about vampires &
vampyre subcultures]

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not
have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Donate to Wikimedia

Translations
Translations for: Vampire

Nederlands (Dutch)
vampier, parasiet (figuurlijk), toneelluik (voor plotse verschijning/ verdwijning),
uitbuitende verleidster

Français (French)
vampire, exploiteur
Deutsch (German)
n. - Vampir

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. (μτφ.) βαμπίρ, βρικόλακας, αιματορουφήχτρα, (ζωολ.) βαμπίρος

Italiano (Italian)
vampiro, sanguisuga

Português (Portuguese)
n. - vampiro (m)

Русский (Russian)
вампир, летучая мышь

Español (Spanish)
n. - vampiro, vampiresa, mujer fatal

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - vampyr, blodsugare

中国话 (Simplified Chinese)

n. - 吸血鬼

中國話 (Traditional Chinese)

n. - 吸血鬼

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 吸血鬼

‫( العربيه‬Arabic)
‫ شبح خرافي يقال انه يجول في‬,‫ مصاصه دم‬,‫)السم( خفاش يمتص الدماء‬
‫الليل بعد ان ترك قبره لمتص اص دماء النائمين‬

‫( עברית‬Hebrew)
n. - ‫ דלת קטנה על במת התיאטרון להיעלמויות פתאומיות‬,‫ סחטן‬,‫ נצלן‬,‫דם‬-‫ מוצץ‬,‫ עלוקה‬,‫ערפד‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.

chupacabra
For the heavy metal album by SOiL, see El Chupacabra (album).
Photo of what is alleged to be a chupacabras

The Chupacabra or Chupacabras is a creature said to inhabit parts of the Americas.

It is associated particularly with Puerto Rico, where it was first reported, Mexico, and
the United States, especially in the latter's Latin American communities. The name,
which translates literally from Spanish as "goat-sucker", comes from its reported habit
of attacking and drinking the blood of livestock. Physical descriptions of the creature
vary. Sightings began in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s, and have since been reported
as far north as the Carolinas and as far south as Chile.

Though some argue that the chupacabra may be a real creature, mainstream scientists
and experts generally contend that the chupacabra is a legendary creature, or a type of
urban legend.

History
The legend of los Chupacabras began in about 1992, when Puerto Rican newspapers
El Vocero and El Nuevo Dia began reporting the killings of many different types of
animals, such as birds, horses, and as its name implies, goats. At the time it was
known as El Vampiro de Moca since some of the first killings occurred in the small
town of Moca. While at first it was suspected that the killings were done randomly by
some members of a satanic cult, eventually these killings spread around the island,
and many farms reported loss of animal life. The killings had one pattern in common:
each of the animals found dead had two punctured holes around their necks.

The term "chupacabra" was supposedly coined by Puerto Rican television personality
Silverio Pérez, who intended the name to be a joke, although the word had already
been used in Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, so it seems likely that there
is an earlier origin.

Soon after the animal deaths in Puerto Rico, other animal deaths were reported in
other countries, such as the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile,
Colombia, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, Brazil, the United States and, most notably,
Mexico. Both in Puerto Rico and Mexico, El Chupacabra gained urban legend status.
Chupacabras stories began to be released several times in American and Hispanic
newscasts across the United States, and chupacabras merchandise, such as t-shirts and
baseball hats, was sold.

The chupacabra is generally treated as a product of mass hysteria, though the animal
mutilations are sometimes real. Like many cases of such mutilations, however, it's
been argued that they are often not as mysterious as they might first appear.
Sightings

Drawing of a Chupacabra

Certain South American rain forest natives believe in the "mosquito-man", a mythical
creature of their folklore that pre-dates modern chupacabras sightings. The mosquito-
man sucks the blood from animals through his long nose, like a big mosquito. Some
say mosquito-man and chupacabras are one and the same.

Notable sightings in the United States include one reported by multiple eye-witnesses
in Calaveras County, California, and at a recent birthday celebration of a
Development Team member of a local charity in Houston, Texas. According to these
reports, the creature was sighted for the first time in the early to mid 1990s, harming
animals of different species - although it is now thought that people did this
themselves.

In July of 2004, a rancher near San Antonio, Texas, killed a hairless, dog-like creature
(the Elmendorf Creature) that was attacking his livestock. It was later determined to
be a canine (most likely a coyote) of some sort with demodectic mange. In October of
2004, two animals which closely resemble the Elmendorf creature were observed in
the same area. The first was dead, and the second was noticed by a local zoologist
who was called to identify the animal while she was travelling to the location where
the first was found. Specimens were studied by biologists in Texas; the creatures are
thought to have been canines of undetermined species with skin problems and facial
deformities.

El Chupacabra has often been spotted in Michigan, a recent sighting occuring in

Grand Haven. A forty-two year old man said he saw it suck the blood out of a cat.

A famous appearance in the city of Varginha, Brazil, (see Varginha incident) is

sometimes attributed to the chupacabras, the phenomenon is more frequently
associate with extraterrestrials. In 1997, was an explosion of Chupacabra cases in
Brazil, were reported in Brazilian newspapers, one report coming from police officer,
who claimed to get a nauseous feeling when he saw a dog-like chupacabra in a tree.

Supposed appearance
Usually, Chupacabras are said to appear in three specific forms:
 • The first and most common: a lizard-like being, appearing to have leathery or
scaly greenish-gray skin and sharp spines or quills running down its back. It
stands approximately 3 to 4 feet (1 to 1.2 m) high, and stands and hops in a
similar fashion as a kangaroo. In at least one sighting, the creature hopped 20
feet (6 m). This variety is said to have a dog or panther-like nose and face, a
forked tongue protruding from it, large fangs, and is said to hiss and screech
when alarmed, as well as to leave a sulfuric stench behind.
• The second variety also stands and hops as a kangaroo, and it has coarse fur
with greyish facial hair. The head is similar to a dog's, and its mouth has large
teeth.
• The third form is simply that of a strange breed of wild dog that is mostly
hairless, has a pronounced spinal ridge, unusually pronounced eye sockets,
teeth, and claws, but is otherwise a typical canine. This animal is said to be the
result of interbreeding between several populations of wild dogs, though
enthusiasts claim that it might be an example of a dog-like reptile. The account
during the year 2001 in Nicaragua of a chupacabras corpse being found
supports the conclusion that it is simply a strange breed of wild dog. The
alleged corpse of the animal was found in Tolapa, Nicaragua, and forensically
analyzed at UNAN-Leon. Pathologists at the University found that it was just
an unusual-looking dog. It should be noted that there are very striking
morphological differences between different breeds of dogs (which wild dogs
are generally descended from) that easily account for the strange
characteristics of such an animal.

Some reports claim the chupacabra's red eyes have the ability to hypnotize and
paralyze their prey—the prey animal is mentally stunned, allowing the chupacabras to
suck the animal's blood at its leisure. The effect is similar to the bite of the vampire
bat or certain snakes or spiders that stun their prey with venom. Unlike conventional
predators, the chupacabras sucks all the animal's blood (and sometimes organs)
through a single hole or two holes.

In fiction
• The episode El Mundo Gira of the TV series X-Files is about a man believed
to be El Chupacabra.
• In November of 2005 the Sci-Fi Channel aired a movie called Chupacabra,
about a beast killing on a cruise ship.
• An episode of Dexter's Laboratory had the Chupacabra as one of Dexter's
experiments (which he named Charlie) that escaped to South America.
Throughout the episode, Dexter could not remember the creature's purpose
until the end, when he realizes that he created Charlie to scare Dee Dee.

Naming convention
The creature is known as both "chupacabras" and "chupacabra" throughout the
Americas, with the former probably being the original word, and the latter a better
regularization of it. The name can be preceded by the masculine definite article ("el
chupacabras"), which means "the goat-sucker" in Spanish.
See also
• Cryptozoology
• Vampire

Similar creatures include:

• Jersey Devil
• Skunk Ape
• Mothman
• Monkey-man of New Delhi

lilin

According to The Alphabet of Ben-Sira, the lilin or lilim (singular lili) are the
daughters of Lilith and Asmodai, engendered while Lilith was still Adam's wife. They
are demons, with their function being similar to that of a succubus. While men feared
them for this reason, mothers feared the attack of the lilin because they were also said
to kidnap children, as Lilith herself did.

Upon deserting Adam and turning against God, Lilith was warned that one hundred of
her demonic children would die daily if she did not return to God. She refused, and so
it is said that one hundred lilin die daily.

The masculine of lili is lilu, a demon attested in Akkadian mythology. See Lilith for
an etymological discussion.

Lilin in popular culture

In the popular anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, the seventeenth angel, Kaworu
Nagisa, refers to human beings as being "lilin," or descendents of Lilith. Adam and
Lilith, in the storyline, are giant primordial beings who gave life to the world. Their
reunion, however, marks the end of the world.

In the ongoing comic book series Lucifer, the lilim are an army of demons descended
from Lilith who are led by Lucifer's former consort, Mazikeen.

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have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Sekhmet
Two statues of Sekhmet (standing) in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin.

In Egyptian mythology, Sekhmet (also spelt Sachmet, Sakhet, and Sakhmet), was
originally the war goddess of Upper Egypt, although when the first Pharaoh of the
12th dynasty moved the capital of Egypt to Memphis, her cult centre moved as well.
As Lower Egypt had been conquered by Upper Egypt, Sekhmet was seen as the more
vicious of the two war goddesses, the other, Bast, being the war goddess for Lower
Egypt. Consequently it was Sekhmet who was seen as the avenger of wrongs, and
scarlet lady, a reference to blood. As the one with blood-lust, she was also seen as
ruling over menstruation.

Her name suits her function, and means (one who is) powerful, and she was also given
titles such as (one) before whom evil trembles, and lady of slaughter. Sekhmet was
believed to protect the pharaoh in battle, stalking the land, and destroying his enemies
with arrows of fire, her body being said to take on the bright glare of the midday sun,
gaining her the title lady of flame. Indeed it was said that death and destruction was
balsam for her heart, and hot desert winds were believed to be this goddess's breath.

In order to placate Sekhmet's wrath, her priesthood felt compelled to perform a ritual
before a new statue of her each day of the year, leading to it being estimated that over
seven hundred statues of Sekhmet once stood in the funerary temple of Amenhotep
III, on the west bank of the Nile. It was said that her priests protected her statues from
theft or vandalism by coating them with anthrax, and so Sekhmet was also seen as a
bringer of disease, to be prayed to so as to cure such ills by placating her. The name
"Sekhmet" literally became synonymous with doctors during the Middle Kingdom.

She was envisioned as a fierce lioness, and in art, was depicted as such, or as a
woman with the head of a lioness, dressed in red, the colour of blood. Sometimes the
dress she wears exhibits a rosetta pattern over each nipple, an ancient leonine motif,
which can be traced to observation of the shoulder-knot hairs on lions. Tame lions
were kept in temples dedicated to Sekhmet at Leontopolis.

To pacify Sekhmet, festivals were celebrated at the end of battle, so that there would
be no more destruction. On such occasions, people danced and played music to soothe
the wildness of the goddess, and drank great quantities of wine. For a time, a myth
developed around this in which Ra, the sun god (of Upper Egypt), created her from
his fiery eye, to destroy mortals which conspired against him (Lower Egypt). In the
myth, however, Sekhmet's blood-lust lead to her destroying almost all of humanity, so
Ra tricked her into drinking blood-coloured beer, making her so drunk that she gave
up slaughter and became the gentle Hathor.

After Sekhmet's worship moved to Memphis, as Horus and Ra had been identified as
one another, under the name Ra-Herakhty, when the two religious systems were
merged, and Ra became seen as a form of Atum, known as Atum-Ra, so Sekhmet, as a
form of Hathor, was seen as Atum's mother. In particular, she was seen as the mother
of Nefertum, the youthful form of Atum, and so was said to have Ptah, Nefertum's
father, as a husband.

Nethertheless, this identification with Hathor, who was originally a separate deity, did
not last, mostly because their character was so wildly differing. Later, the cult of Mut,
the great mother, became significant, and gradually absorbed the identities of the
patron goddesses, merging with Sekhmet, and Bast, who lost their individuality.

The Hymn of Sekhmet says:

Mine is a heart of carnelian, crimson as murder on a holy day.

Mine is a heart of corneal, the gnarled roots of a dogwood and the bursting of
flowers.
I am the broken wax seal on my lover's letters.
I am the phoenix, the fiery sun, consuming and resuming myself.
I will what I will.
Mine is a heart of carnelian, blood red as the crest of a phoenix.

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strix (mythology)

The appearance and sound of the screech owl influenced Roman ideas of the blood-
drinking strix. (Note that the owl depicted here is an Eastern Screech Owl, which is native to the
Americas but resembles the European Scops Owl that was familiar to the ancient Romans.)

The strix or striga (pl. striges; occasionally corrupted to stirge) was an Ancient
Roman legendary creature, usually described as a nocturnal bird of ill omen that fed
on human flesh and blood, like a vampire. Unlike later vampires, it was not a revenant
— a risen corpse — but the product of metamorphosis. The name is Greek in origin
and means "owl", with which bird it is usually identified (the name of the genus Strix
follows this meaning).

Classical stories
The earliest recorded tale of the strix is from the lost Ornithologia of the Greek author
Boio, which is partially preserved in Antoninus Liberalis's Metamorphoses. This tells
the story of Polyphonte and her two sons Agrios and Oreios (their father being a wild
bear), who were punished for their cannibalism, like Lycaon, by being transformed
into wild animals. Polyphonte became a strix "that cries by night, without food or
drink, with head below and tips of feet above, a harbinger of war and civil strife to
men".1 The first Latin allusion is in Plautus's Pseudolus (819), dated to 191 BCE, in
which a cook, describing the cuisine of his inferiors, compares its action to that of the
striges—i.e., disemboweling a hapless victim. Horace, in his Epodes, makes the strix's
magical properties clear: its feathers are an ingredient in a love potion. Seneca the
Younger, in his Hercules Furens, shows the striges dwelling on the outskirts of
Tartarus. Ovid (Fasti, vi.101 ff.) tells the story of striges attacking the legendary king
Procas in his cradle, and how they were warded off with arbutus and placated with the
meat of pigs, as an explanation for the custom of eating beans and bacon on the
Kalends of June.

Though descriptions abound, the concept of the strix was nonetheless vague. The
scientific Pliny, in his Natural History (xi.232), confesses little knowledge of them;
he knows that their name was once used as a curse, but beyond that he can only aver
that the tales of them nursing their young must be false, since no bird except the bat2
suckled its children.

Medieval and modern

The legend of the strix survived into the Middle Ages, as recorded in Isidore's
Etymologiae (book 12, ch. 7.42, and gave both name and attributes to the strigoaicǎ,
the Romanian witch, and to the strega, the Italian witch. Also the Albanian shtriga is
described as a witch and derives from the Strix; she can transform into a flying insect.

See also
• Lamia
• Lilith
• Strigoi

Notes
Note 1: Translation by Oliphant, pp. 133-134 Note 2: In the ancient world the bat was
commonly classified as a bird; only Aristotle differed, considering it halfway between
bird and land animal. See Oliphant, p. 134 n. 4

References
• Classical works are cited in the text.
• "The Story of the Strix: Ancient", by Samuel Grant Oliphant, in Transactions
and Proceedings of the American Philological Association', Vol. 44. (1913),
pp. 133-149
• "Carna, Proca and the Strix on the Kalends of June", by Christopher Michael
McDonough, in Transactions of the American Philological Association
(1974-), Vol. 127. (1997), pp. 315-344.

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have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

strigoi
This article or section contains information that has not been verified and thus might
not be reliable. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please check for
inaccuracies and modify as needed, citing sources.

In Romanian mythology, strigoi (same form singular or plural) are the evil souls of
the dead rising from the tombs during the night to haunt the countryside. A strigoaicǎ
(singular feminine form) is a witch. Strigoi are also known as "moroi" in some parts,
especialy rural areas. They are close relatives of the werewolves known as "pricolici"
or "vârcolaci", the latest also meaning "goblin" at times.

These names are derived from strigǎ, which in Romanian meant "witch" or "barn
owl", cognate with Italian strega, which means "witch", and descended from the Latin
word strix, for a shrieking vampiric bird. Strigoi viu (plural: Strigoi vii) is a living
vampiric witch. Strigoi mort (plural: Strigoi morţi) is a dead (undead) vampire. They
are most often associated with vampires or zombies.

According to Romanian mythology a strigoi has ginger hair, blue eyes and two
hearts.

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have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Shtriga

The Shtriga, in Albanian folklore, was a witch that would suck the blood out of
infants at night while they slept, and would then turn into a flying insect.

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have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

St George's Day

St George's Day is celebrated in several nations of whom Saint George is the patron
saint, including England, Georgia, Bulgaria, Portugal, and Catalonia. In England it is
the National Day. April 23 was the date of Saint George's death in 303.

In 1969, Saint George's feast day was reduced to an optional memorial in the Roman
Catholic calendar, and the solemnity of his commemoration depends on purely local
observance. He is however still honoured as a saint of major importance by Eastern
Orthodoxy. His feast date remains the second most important National Feast in
Catalonia. There, it is known in Catalan as Dia Sant Jordi and it is traditional to give
a rose and a book to a loved one. This tradition inspired UNESCO to declare this the
International Day of the Book, since 23 April 1616 was also the date of the death of
the authors William Shakespeare (according to the Julian calendar) and Miguel de
Cervantes (according to the Gregorian calendar).

St George is also the patron saint of the scouting movement. Many Scout Troops in
the United Kingdom take part in a St George's Day Parade on the nearest Sunday to
April 23. A message from the Chief Scout is read out and the Scout Hymn is sung. A
"renewal of promise" then takes place where the Scouts renew the Scout's Promise
made at joining and at all Scout meetings.

St George's Day in England

St George's Day is not celebrated as much in England as other National Days are
around the world. The celebration of St George's Day was once a major feast in
England on a par with Christmas from the early 15th century. However this tradition
had waned by the end of the 18th century. In recent years Andrew Rosindell M.P. for
Romford, has been putting his argument forward in the House of Commons to try to
make St George's day a public holiday.

A traditional custom at this time was to wear a red rose in one's lapel though with
changes in fashion this is not as widely done. Another custom is to fly or adorn the St
George's cross flag in some way: pubs in particular can be seen on April 23 festooned
with garlands of St George's crosses. However the modern association of the St
George's cross with sports such as football and rugby means that this tradition too is
losing popularity with people who do not associate themselves with those sports.

There is a growing reaction to the late twentieth century indifference to St George's

Day. Organizations such as the Royal Society of Saint George (a non-political
nationalist society founded in 1894) have been joined by the more prominent St
George's Day Events company (founded in 2002), with the specific aim of
encouraging celebrations. On the other hand, there have also been calls to replace St
George as patron saint of England, on the grounds that he was an obscure figure who
had no direct connection with the country.

St George's Day in Georgia

St George's Day on November 23 is a public holiday in Georgia. Coincidentally, in
2003, the Rose Revolution reached its peak on St George's Day when Eduard
Shevardnadze resigned as President of Georgia.

St George's Day in Orthodoxy

A common practice in Orthodox churches is to postpone St George's Day if April 23
falls within Great Lent. If Easter occurs on or after April 23, the feast day is pushed to
the Monday after Easter.

External links
• Essay on the tradition of St George's Day
• St George's Day Events company website
• The Royal Society of Saint George website

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have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
bhut

In Hinduism and Buddhism, a bhut is a type of evil spirit (pl: bhutas, buthas). It is
especially the evil ghost of a man who has died execution, accident, or suicide. People
protect themselves by laying on the ground, because the bhutas never rest on earth.

Reference
• Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Legend (ISBN 0500510881) by Anna
Dhallapiccola

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have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

ghoul
Dictionary
ghoul (gūl)
n.

1. One who delights in the revolting, morbid, or loathsome.

2. A grave robber.
3. An evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore believed to plunder graves and
feed on corpses.

[Arabic ġūl, from ġāla, to seize, snatch.]

ghoul'ish adj.
ghoul'ish·ly adv.
ghoul'ish·ness n.
vetala

A vetala is a vampire-like being from Indian mythology. They differ from vampires
in other traditions in that they exist as wraithly beings who reside by day in the
corpses of others. These corpses may be used as vehicles for movement (as they no
longer decay while so inhabited), but a vetala may also leave the body at night to feed.

In Indian folklore, the vetala is an evil spirit who haunts cemeteries and takes
demonic possession of corpses. They make their displeasure known by troubling
humans. Victims reanimated by a Vetàla would always have their hands and feet
pointed backwards. They can drive people mad, kill children and cause miscarriages
but they also guard their villages.

They are hostile spirits of the dead whose children did not perform funerary rites in
their memory. As a result they are trapped in the twilight zone between life and after-
life. These creatures can be appeased with gifts or frightened away with spells. One
can free them from their ghostly existence by performing their funerary rites. Being
spirits, unfettered by the laws of space and time, they have an uncanny knowledge
about the past, present and future and a deep insight into human nature. Hence, many
sorcerers seek to capture them and turn them into slaves.

A sorcerer once asked King Vikramaditya to capture a vetala who lived in a tree that
stood in the middle of a crematorium. The only way to do that was by keeping silent.

However, every time Vikramaditya caught the ghost, the ghost would enchant the
king with a story that would end with a question. No matter how hard he tried,
Vikramaditya would not be able to resist answering the question. This would enable
the vetala to escape and return to his tree. The stories of the vetala have been
compiled in the book "Vetala-pachisi".

Pishacha

Pishachas are flesh eating demons, according to Hindu mythology. There origin is
obscure, although some believe that they were created by Brahma. Another legend
describes them as the sons of either Krodha (a Sanskrit word meaning anger) or of
Daksha’s daughter who was named Pishacha. They have been described to be of dark
complexion, have bulging veins and with red colored protruding eyes. They are
believed to have their own language, which is called Paishachi.

They like darkness and haunts cremation grounds along with other demons like
Bhutas (meaning ghosts) and Vetals. Pishachas have the power to assume different
forms at will, and may also become invisible. Sometimes, they would possess human
beings, and the victims shall be afflicted with a variety of maladies and abnormalities
like insanity. Certain mantras are supposed to cure such afflicted persons, and drive
away the Pishacha which may be possessing that particular human being. In order to
keep the Pishachas away, they are given their share of offerings during certain
religious functions and festivals.

Ka·li (kä'lē)
n. Hinduism.

One of the manifestations and cult titles of the wife of Shiva and mother goddess
Devi, especially in her malevolent role as a goddess of death and destruction, depicted
as black, red-eyed, blood-stained, and wearing a necklace of skulls.

[Sanskrit Kālī, from kālī, feminine of kāla-, dark, of Dravidian origin; akin to
Kannada kāḍu, black, blackness.]

mullo

Mullo (Muli : female, Mulo : male) is an undead, revenant, or vampire of gypsy (or
Roma) folklore. 'Mullo' means 'one who is dead'. A dead person would return and do
bad things and/or feed on the blood of a living person. The victim was usually a
relative who had caused the mullo's death, or who didn't correctly observe the burial
ceremonies, or who kept the corpse's possessions instead of destroying them as was
proper.
vampire watermelon

"Blood" forms naturally on a few square centimeters of the outside of an aged

watermelon. Another picture shows the whole melon.

Vampire watermelons are a folk legend from the Balkans, in southeastern Europe.
The story is associated with the Roma people of the region, who originated much of
vampire folklore among other unusual legends.

The belief in vampire watermelons is similar to the belief that any inanimate object
left outside during the night of a full moon will become a vampire. According to
tradition, virtually any kind of melon or pumpkin kept more than ten days or after
Christmas will become a vampire, rolling around on the ground and growling to
pester the living. People have little fear of the vampire melons because of the
creatures' lack of teeth. One of the main indications that a melon is about to undergo a
vampiric transformation (or has just completed one) is said to be the appearance of a
drop of blood on its skin.

The only known reference in scholarship is Tatomir Vukanović's account of his

journeys in Serbia from 1933 to 1948. He wrote several years later in the Journal of
the Gypsy Lore Society:

The belief in vampires of plant origin occurs among Gs. [Gypsies] who belong to the
Mosl. faith in KM [Kosovo-Metohija]. According to them there are only two plants
which are regarded as likely to turn into vampires: pumpkins of every kind and
water-melons. And the change takes place when they are 'fighting one another.' In
Podrima and Prizrenski Podgor they consider this transformation occurs if these
vegetables have been kept for more than ten days: then the gathered pumpkins stir all
by themselves and make a sound like 'brrrl, brrrl, brrrl!' and begin to shake
themselves. It is also believed that sometimes a trace of blood can be seen on the
pumpkin, and the Gs. then say it has become a vampire. These pumpkins and melons
go round the houses, stables, and rooms at night, all by themselves, and do harm to
people. But it is thought that they cannot do great damage to folk, so people are not
very afraid of this kind of vampire.
Among the Mosl. Gs. in the village of Pirani (also in Podrima) it is believed that if
pumpkins are kept after Christmas they turn into vampires, while the Lešani Gs. think
that this phenomenon occurs if a pumpkin used as a syphon, when ripe and dry, stays
unopened for three years.
Vampires of vegetable origin are believed to have the same shape and appearance as
the original plant.
…
The Gs. in KM. destroy pumpkins and melons which have become vampires … by
plunging them into a pot of boiling water, which is then poured away, the vegetables
being afterwards scrubbed by a broom and then thrown away, and the broom burned.

The majority of Vukanović's article discusses human vampires; vampiric agricultural

tools are also mentioned. Though modern readers may be skeptical that such beliefs
ever existed, the superstitions of Gypsy culture are well documented. The Journal of
the Gypsy Lore Society has many articles that are collections of Gypsy tales,
presumably oral history. However others are horror stories that allegedly include the
direct involvement of the source (e.g., the fatal consequences of disrespecting the
dead). In this context, vampire watermelons are not necessarily any more implausible
than other superstitious beliefs.

The story was popularised by Terry Pratchett's 1998 book Carpe Jugulum, a comic
fantasy novel making extensive use of vampire legends. Pratchett has stated that he
did not invent the vampire watermelon story himself. It is found in several other
works: Jan Perkowski's 1976 book reprinted Vukanović's account, and recent popular
books on the topic of vampirism include a mention.

Sources
• T. P. Vukanović, The Vampire; published in four parts in the Journal of the
Gypsy Lore Society from 1957 to 1960. (excerpts)
o (reprinted in) Jan L. Perkowski, Vampires of the Slavs (Columbus,
Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1976)
• Matthew Bunson, The Vampire Encyclopedia (New York: Gramercy, 2000)
• Annotations for Carpe Jugulum (see the note for page 150).

dhampir
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This article or section contains information that has not been verified and thus might
not be reliable. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please check for
inaccuracies and modify as needed, citing sources.

A "dhampir" is a being that is half-vampire and half-human, born from a vampire

father and a human mother. In some beliefs, the vampire father is the deceased
husband of the widowed mother. Dhampirs, in comparison with normal human
beings, are unusually adept at killing vampires. The word "dhampir" is associated
with folklore of the Roma people of the Balkans.

Legends
In the Balkans it is believed that vampires have a great desire for women, so a
vampire will return to have intercourse with his wife or with a woman he was
attracted to in life. Throughout the area the term dhampir refers to the offspring of a
vampire and a human; terms for such a being that are used in various subregions
include vampijerović, vampirić ("little vampire"), and lampijerović; in some regions
the child is named "Vampir" if a boy and "Vampiresa" if a girl, or "Dhampir" if a boy
and "Dhampiresa" if a girl. In other areas it is believed that the offspring of a vampire
will "be slippery like jelly, and cannot live" (Vukanovic 1957-1959, pt. 3, p. 112).

Among all Balkan peoples it is believed that the child of a vampire can see and
destroy vampires. Among some groups, the ability to see vampires is considered
exclusive to dhampirs. The powers of a dhampir may be inherited by the dhampir's
offspring. Various means of killing or driving away vampires are recognized among
peoples of the region, but the dhampir is seen as the chief agent for dealing with
vampires. Methods by which a dhampir kills a vampire include shooting the vampire
with a bullet, transfixing it with a hawthorn stake, and performing a ceremony that
involves touching "crowns" of lead to the vampire's grave. If the dhampir cannot
destroy a vampire, he may command it to leave the area.

A dhampir is always paid well for his services. The amount of money varies, but there
is never dickering over the price. Standard pay for a dhampir may also include a meal
or a suit of clothing. Sometimes a dhampir is paid in cattle.

False dhampirs

Quite often[citation needed], charlatans traveling the regions around the Carpathian
Mountains and elsewhere in Eastern Europe would claim to be dhampirs. Operating
by the original myth of vampyr (old spelling, both singular and plural) as spirit
creatures, they were the only ones who could see the spirit and would put on elaborate
shows for villages, often wrestling with an invisible foe until it was then trapped in a
brass vessel. Usually a dhampir would wait until there was a death in a village.[citation
needed]
As rural people tended to be more superstitious, unnatural explanations would be
believed for unusual events, real or imagined (such as believing to have seen the dead
walking the village at night). The belief was that the vampyr would take over the
recently dead corpse, for as long as it would last, to invade villages. They fed off life
force directly, not by blood, sometimes killing victims in close proximity so life
leaving the body could be consumed more quickly.) Once fear, grief and superstition
took hold in a village following a recent death, the dhampir would "come to the
rescue".[citation needed]

Fiction
Japanese author Hideyuki Kikuchi has written seventeen novels in his Vampire
Hunter D series about a dhampir called "D", who travels across a war-torn land
fighting against "The Nobility" (who are actually vampires). There have been two
anime based on his books. The first is an adaptation of the original novel, while the
other is an adaptation of the third novel in the series. In both anime, D is referred to,
both directly and indirectly, as the son of Count Dracula

Another dhampir is Blade, from the eponymous Marvel comic book series. He
became a popular character through the Blade movie made in 1998 and its sequels,
starring Wesley Snipes as the main hybrid hero. However, instead of being the
offspring of a vampire and human, Blade's mother was bitten by a vampire while she
was pregnant with her baby, Eric. It should be noted that Blade is only recently
depicted as a Dhampir, as the original incarnation had the same origin, but did not
have Vampiric powers. Instead, he could 'smell' things of a supernatural nature, most
usually vampires.

Rayne, the main character of the BloodRayne video game franchise, is another
dhampir. She also has many brothers and sisters (that she must slay) who are also
dhampirs.

Alek Knight is the dhampir anti-hero of the Slayer vampire series of novels by Karen
Koehler. He is also a skilled vampire hunter.

From the Castlevania series of video games, Adrian Farenheits Tepes (also known as
simply as Alucard) is the offspring of an unnatural bond between Dracula and a
human woman named Lisa.

Donovan Baine, a character in the video game series Darkstalkers, is also a dhampir.

The protagonist of Dhampire: Stillborn, a graphic novel scripted by Nancy Collins, is

a dhampir, as is Magiere, the female protagonist of the Saga of the Noble Dead which
commences with the aptly-titled novel Dhampir. In the latter case, the character
begins the story with no knowledge of her ancestry and earns her living as a fake
vampire-hunter as above; her discovery of the true state of affairs comes as a
considerable shock.

Role-playing Games: Vampire: The Masquerade

In the Vampire: The Masquerade role-playing game universe created by White Wolf
Game Studios, a Dhampir is the child of a 15th generation Vampire and a Mortal
(may be of either gender) or two 15th generation vampires. The word "dhampir"
originates from gypsy folklore.

While a Dhampir is not technically a Ghoul (a human given supernatural powers by

drinking vampire blood), they have biological similarities to Revenants (ghouls that
are literally bred to serve vampires). The most important differences between
Dhampirs and Revenants are cultural. Revenants grow up in a freakish, monstrous
subculture of Vampires and Ghouls. Only quite unusual circumstances could lead to a
Revenant growing up among normal, contemporary humans. A Dhampir probably
spent most of her time among normal humans. She might not even know about her
supernatural heritage. Learning about the secret World of Darkness may come as a bit
of a shock.

All Dhampirs are young, without exception. The Thin-Blooded (weakest of all
vampires, so far removed from Caine that they are nearly human) themselves have
appeared only within the last 20 years (as of 1998).

Role-playing Games: Kindred of the East

In the Kindred of the East role-playing game universe created by White Wolf Game
Studios, dhampyr means the offspring of an Asian vampire (also called Cathayan or
Kuei-jin) with a human or with another of its kind. Dhampyrs, or Shade Walkers, can
function both day and night, although they find sunlight uncomfortable. They can
breed with humans, but not with Kuei-jin or other dhampyrs.

Dhampyrs must eat, drink, and sleep. By using chi energy, they can perform feats not
possible for humans. They can regain chi through rest or by eating flesh (usually they
cannot by drinking blood). Dhampyrs are mortal but can live for centuries. Once
mature, they age at roughly 1/10 the rate of humans. Severe injuries can kill them, but
they can withstand far worse damage than humans. Under certain circumstances, a
dhampyr who dies can return as a Kuei-jin.

About half of all dhampyrs conceived are not carried to term; this apparently is true
for both human and Kuei-jin mothers. Dhampyrs tend to grow up psychologically
disturbed, whether raised by a human or a Kuei-jin. Their unusual abilities make them
useful tools for their parents in the Kuei-jin courts; however, they are never fully
accepted in Kuei-jin society. Their half-monstrous nature also prevents them from
participating fully in mortal society. They are often loners and wanderers by nature.

Although Kindred of the East is set in the same World of Darkness universe as
Vampire: The Masquerade, dhampyrs do not mix well with the Western vampires of
that universe (Cainites). Dhampyrs cannot be ghouled (made subservient to a Western
vampire) or Embraced (transformed to Cainites). Conversely, Cainites cannot produce
dhampyr offspring. In 1999, White Wolf introduced an end-time scenario which
affected all of their game lines; included in this was the "Vampire: The Masquerade"
series. In the book "The Time of Thin Blood," weak-blooded Western Vampires--
whose blood was sufficiently distant from that of the original Vampire, Caine--lacked
many standard vampiric powers and were often incapable of creating further
vampires, but became capable of conceiving and birthing dhampiri. This was
considered a sign of the coming eschaton, known to Vampires as "Gehenna."

References
Legends

• T. P. Vukanović. 1957-1959. "The Vampire." Journal of the Gypsy Lore

Society, 3rd ser. Part 1: 36(3-4): 125-133; Part 2: 37(1-2): 21-31; Part 3: 37(3-
4): 111-118; Part 4: 39(1-2): 44-55. Reprinted in Vampires of the Slavs, ed.
Jan Perkowski (Cambridge, Mass.: Slavica, 1976), 201-234. The reprint lacks
footnotes. Most material on dhampirs is in part 4, under the heading "Dhampir
as the Chief Magician for the Destruction of Vampires."

Kindred of the East

• Hal Mangold. Half-Damned: Dhampyr: Children of the Living Dead.

Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 2000. WW2920. ISBN 1-56504-247-
6. Especially pp. 23-26.
 • Phyllis Bowen, Mark Cenczyk, Jess Heinig, Amy Lindgren, Steve Long.
Kindred of the East Companion: A Sourcebook for Vampire: The Masquerade.
Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1998. WW2901. ISBN 1-56504-223-
9. pp. 38-42.

• Kindred of the East: A Sourcebook for Vampire: The Masquerade. Clarkston,

GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1998. WW2900. ISBN 1-56504-232-8. p. 220.

See also
• Vampire hunter

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not
have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

la·mi·a (lā'mē-ə)
n., pl. -mi·as or -mi·ae (-mē-ē').

1. also Lamia Greek Mythology. A monster represented as a serpent with the

head and breasts of a woman that ate children and sucked the blood from men.
2. A female vampire.

[Middle English, from Latin, from Greek.]

vrykolakas
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cleanup.
See rationale on the talk page, or replace this tag with a more specific message. Editing help
is available.
(Tagged June 2005)

The vrykolakas (Greek βρυκόλακας pronounced "vree-KO-la-kahss", IPA

[vri'kolakas]) is a monster from modern Greek folklore. It has similarities to many
different legendary creatures. For example, it is like a ghost, in that it is a haunting
spirit of the dead. Legends also say it crushes or suffocates the sleeping by sitting on
them, much like a mara or incubus (cf. sleep paralysis). It also has many affinities
with the werewolf (see below). But the legendary creature most sources equate it with
is the vampire.

The Greeks traditionally believed that a person could become a vrykolakas after death
due to a sacrilegious way of life, an excommunication, or a burial in unconsecrated
gound, but especially by eating the meat of a sheep which had been wounded by a
werewolf. Some even said that a werewolf itself could become a powerful vampire
after being killed, and would retain the wolf-like fangs, hairy palms, and glowing eyes
it formerly possessed. Indeed, the very word vrykolakas comes from the Bulgarian
word върколак "(vŭrkolak)" meaning "werewolf."

The vrykolakas knocks on the doors of houses and calls out the name of the residents.
If it gets no reply the first time, it will pass without causing any harm. But if someone
answer the door, he or she will die a few days later and become another vrykolakas.
For this reason, there is a superstition in certain Greek villages that one should not
answer a door until the second knock.

Since this creature becomes more and more powerful if left alone, legends state that
one should impale, behead, and cremate a suspected body as soon as possible, so that
the it may be freed from living death and its victims may be safe.

The traditional tales of the vrykolakas are only vaguely similar to those of the
vampire, but the two have long been equated. It has become normal, in translating
vampire movies and the like into Greek, to translate "vampire" as "vrykolakas".
Presumably Modern Greeks raised on Hollywood vampire movies would be just as
likely, if not more so, to think of Dracula instead of the traditional Greek monster,
when a vrykolakas is mentioned.

vetala

A vetala is a vampire-like being from Indian mythology. They differ from vampires
in other traditions in that they exist as wraithly beings who reside by day in the
corpses of others. These corpses may be used as vehicles for movement (as they no
longer decay while so inhabited), but a vetala may also leave the body at night to feed.

In Indian folklore, the vetala is an evil spirit who haunts cemeteries and takes
demonic possession of corpses. They make their displeasure known by troubling
humans. Victims reanimated by a Vetàla would always have their hands and feet
pointed backwards. They can drive people mad, kill children and cause miscarriages
but they also guard their villages.

They are hostile spirits of the dead whose children did not perform funerary rites in
their memory. As a result they are trapped in the twilight zone between life and after-
life. These creatures can be appeased with gifts or frightened away with spells. One
can free them from their ghostly existence by performing their funerary rites. Being
spirits, unfettered by the laws of space and time, they have an uncanny knowledge
about the past, present and future and a deep insight into human nature. Hence, many
sorcerers seek to capture them and turn them into slaves.

A sorcerer once asked King Vikramaditya to capture a vetala who lived in a tree that
stood in the middle of a crematorium. The only way to do that was by keeping silent.

However, every time Vikramaditya caught the ghost, the ghost would enchant the
king with a story that would end with a question. No matter how hard he tried,
Vikramaditya would not be able to resist answering the question. This would enable
the vetala to escape and return to his tree. The stories of the vetala have been
compiled in the book "Vetala-pachisi".

kitsune
Statue of kitsune at Inari shrine adjacent to Todaiji Buddhist temple Nara, Japan.

Kitsune (Kanji:狐) is the Japanese word for fox. Japan has two kinds of fox: the
Japanese Red Fox (Hondo kitsune living in Honshu; Vulpes vulpes japonica) and
Hokkaido Fox (Kita kitsune living in Hokkaido; Vulpes vulpes schrencki). They are
also associated with mythical beliefs in Japanese folklore.

Folklore
In Japanese folklore, these animals are believed to possess great intelligence, long
life, and magical powers. Foremost among these is the ability to take the shape of a
human; a fox is said to learn to do this when it attains a certain age (usually a hundred
years, though some tales say fifty). Kitsune usually appear in the shape of a beautiful
woman, a pretty young girl, or an old man.

Other powers commonly attributed to the kitsune include possession, the ability to
breathe or otherwise create fire, the power to manifest in dreams, and the ability to
create illusions so elaborate as to be almost indistinguishable from reality. Some tales
go further still, speaking of kitsune with the ability to bend time and space, to drive
people mad, or to take such nonhuman and fantastic shapes as a tree of incredible
height or a second moon in the sky. Occasionally kitsune are ascribed a characteristic
reminiscent of vampires — these kitsune feed on the life or spirit of the humans they
come into contact with. Sometimes kitsune are depicted guarding a round or pear-
shaped ball (hoshi no tama or star ball); it is said those who obtain it can force the
kitsune to help them; one theory says that the kitsune "reserves" some of its magic in
this ball when it shape shifts. Kitsune must keep their promises or suffer a
deterioration in their rank and power.

Kitsune are often associated with the deity of rice known as Inari. Originally kitsune
were the messengers of Inari, but now the line between the two has become blurred to
the point that Inari is sometimes depicted as a fox. Kitsune are connected to both the
shinto and Buddhist faiths.

The folkloric kitsune is a type of yōkai. In this context, the word kitsune is often
translated as fox spirit. However, one should not take this to mean that a kitsune is not
a living creature, nor that a kitsune is a different creature than a fox. The word spirit is
used in its Eastern sense, reflecting a state of knowledge or enlightenment. Any fox
who lives sufficiently long, therefore, can be a fox spirit. There are two major types of
kitsune; the myobu, or celestial fox — those associated with Inari, who are presented
as benevolent — and the nogitsune, or wild fox (literally "field fox"), who are often,
though not always, presented as malicious.

Kitsune are often noted for their tails — a fox may possess as many as nine of them.
Generally, an older and more powerful fox will possess a greater number of tails, and
some sources say that a fox grows an additional tail for each hundred or thousand
years it has lived. However, the foxes that appear in folk stories almost always
possess one, five, or nine tails.

When a kitsune gains nine tails, its fur becomes silver, white, or gold. These kyūbi no
kitsune ("nine-tailed foxes") gain the power of infinite vision. Similarly, in Korea, a
fox that lives a thousand years is said to turn into a kumiho (literally "nine-tail fox"),
but the Korean fox is always depicted as evil, unlike the Japanese fox, which can be
either benevolent or malevolent. Chinese folklore also contains fox spirits with many
similarities to kitsune, including the possibility of nine tails.

In some stories, kitsune have difficulty hiding their tail — usually the foxes in these
stories have only one, which may be an indication that this is a weakness born of
inexperience — when they take human form; the observant protagonist sees through
the fox's disguise when the drunken or careless fox allows its tail to show.

A famous kitsune would be the great guardian spirit, Kyubi. Revered by some, Kyubi
is a protective Guardian spirit, helping young souls who appear to be "lost", in their
journey through this incarnation. Kyubi usually does not stay for very long, only for a
few days, but may end up staying for years at a time when it becomes attached to one
soul. It is a rare kitsune spirit that gifts those lucky few that it graces with its presence.

In Japanese folklore, the kitsune are often presented as tricksters — sometimes very
malevolent ones. The trickster kitsune employ their magical powers to play tricks on
people; those portrayed in a favorable light tend to choose as targets overly-proud
samurai, greedy merchants, and boastful commoners, while the more cruel kitsune
tend to abuse poor tradesmen and farmers or Buddhist monks.

However, there is a second common portrayal: as a lover. These love stories usually
involve a young human male and a kitsune who takes the form of a woman.
Sometimes the kitsune is assigned the role of seductress, but often these stories are
romantic in nature. Such a story usually involves the young man (unknowingly)
marrying the fox, and emphasizes the devotion of the fox-wife. Many of these stories
also possess a tragic element — they usually end with the discovery of the fox, who
then must leave her husband.
The oldest known story of a fox-wife, which provides a folk etymology of the word
kitsune, is an exception. In this story, the fox takes the shape of a woman and marries
a human male, and the two, in the course of spending several happy years together,
have several children. She is ultimately revealed as a fox when, terrified by a dog, she
returns to her fox shape to hide, in the presence of many witnesses. She prepares to
depart her home, but her husband prevails upon her, saying, "Now that we have spent
so many years together, and I have had several children by you, I cannot simply forget
you. Please come and sleep with me." The fox agrees, and from then on returns to her
husband each night in the shape of a woman, leaving again each morning in the shape
of a fox. Therefore, she comes to be called Kitsune — because, in the classical
Japanese, "kitsu-ne" means "come and sleep", while "ki-tsune" means "always
comes".

The human progeny of human-kitsune marriages are generally held to possess special
physical and/or supernatural qualities. The specific nature of these qualities, however,
varies widely from one source to another. Among those who are said to have such
extraordinary power is the famous onmyoji Abe no Seimei, who is said to be a son of
a kitsune hanyō.

Rain falling from a clear sky — a sun shower — is sometimes called kitsune no
yomeiri or "the kitsune's wedding".

Many people believe that the Kitsune travel from China to Japan.

Kitsune in fiction
Embedded in popular folklore as they are, kitsune have made appearances in many
contemporary Japanese works. The digimon Renamon from the third season of the
Digimon anime was inspired by the kitsune, as was Sonic the Hedgehog's two-tailed
sidekick Tails. The SNES/Super Famicom game Shadowrun features a female shaman
named Kitsune. She can transform into a fox, which is also her totem animal. She is
an extensive magic user. Two Pokémon, the Vulpix and the Ninetales, are
undoubtedly derived from the mythical nine-tailed fox. In some Zelda games, Keaton
is a yellow 'ghost fox'. In Mega Man X Command Mission there is a set of secret
bosses named OneTail through NineTails, and each looks like an anthropomorphic
fox with the described number of tails. In Ragnarok Online, the kitsune is featured as
a powerful monster called a ninetails, and as a boss named Moonlight Flower. Shippo
from InuYasha is a kitsune as well, as is Ryutarou from Pom Poko.

As a nod to the shapeshifting abilities sometimes attributed to kitsunes, Shippo is

capable of taking many forms through use of a green leaf on his head, in the manner
of the tanuki. A shapeshifting kyūbi no kitsune named Sakura is one of the main
characters of the anime Hyper Police. In addition, the spirit of a kyūbi no kitsune,
called the Kyūbi no Yōko (Nine-tailed demon fox), was sealed within Uzumaki
Naruto, the main character of Naruto (Note: "yoko" is another name for the mythical
fox creature). Shuichi Minamino nick named Kurama, a main character of Yu Yu
Hakusho, is a reincarnated bandit or theif kitsune, named Yoko Kurama, with flowing
silver hair and can form a rose into a whip called the 'Rose whip'. He can also use any
plant as a weapon. Konno Mitsune of Love Hina is almost exclusively referred to as
Kitsune due to her sly prankster nature. The story of the nine tails fox is also told by
Shuri Kurogane in Ran, Kurosawa's epic retelling of King Lear.

In anime, kitsune are sometimes depicted in a manner similar to non-furry catgirls,

usually as female, seductive, and fond of alcohol.

A few Western authors have also made use of the kitsune legends. Neil Gaiman's The
Sandman: The Dream Hunters is a short story featuring a kitsune protagonist, lushly
illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano. Gaiman also mentions Kitsune briefly in his novel
American Gods. Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo features a female fox character with the
stage name "Kitsune", who is a trickster and master thief. One of the two main
characters of Andi Watson's comic Skeleton Key is a transplanted kitsune with a sweet
tooth. In the realm of novels, Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman likewise features a
kitsune. Both of the latter characters are named "Kitsune". White Wolf Game Studio's
Werewolf: The Apocalypse roleplaying game also features a race of shapeshifting
fox-men known as the "Kitsune". In the Magic: The Gathering collectible card game,
the kitsune appear in the Champions of Kamigawa block as a race of noble, plains-
dwelling samurai and clerics. Fantasy author Mercedes Lackey introduced kitsune
characters in her SERRAted Edge novels. An issue of the Psycho Circus comic book,
starring the members of the band KISS as cosmic beings, featured a story where a
feudal-era samurai is trapped in a traveling circus populated by kitsune. In the series
"Crescent Moon" by Haruko Iida and Stuart Hazleton, has a demon fox, as the
unoffical leader of the Moonlight bandits, named Misoka Asagi.

In the fall of 2004, Wizards of the West Coast released an expansion to its popular
trading card game Magic: the Gathering. This expansion, and the two following sets
collectively called the Kamigawa block, contained many cards that featured the
Kitsune. The Kitsune also played a vital role in the tree novels that accompanied the
sets: Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa, Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa, and
Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa. It is currently unknown if Magic: the Gathering will
revisit the Kitsune as a card type and characters for their novels.

Other Meanings
There is a Japanese dish called kitsune udon, a type of udon soup so named because
kitsune are said to have a particular fondness for the fried sliced tofu (aburaage or
usuage) it contains.

Kitsuné is also the name of a French record label, specializing in house, disco, and
electro, among other pop styles.

succubus
A bracket carved as a winged succubus on the outside of an English inn, suggesting
that a brothel could have been found inside.

In medieval legend, a succubus (plural succubi; from Latin succubare, "to lie under")
is a female demon which seduces men (especially monks) in dreams to have sexual
intercourse. They draw energy from the men to sustain themselves, often until the
point of exhaustion or death. From mythology and fantasy, Lilith and the Lilin
(Jewish), Lilitu (Sumerian) and Rusalka (Slavic) were succubi.

According to the Malleus Maleficarum, or "Witches' Hammer", succubi would collect

semen from the men they slept with, which incubi would then use to impregnate
women. Children so begotten were supposed to be more susceptible to the influence
of demons.

Honoré de Balzac wrote a short story The Succubus concerning a 1271 trial of a she-
devil succubus in the guise of a woman, who amongst other things could use her hair
to entangle victims.

From the 16th century, the carving of a succubus on the outside of an inn indicated
that the establishment also operated as a brothel.

Appearance
The appearance of succubi varies just about as much as that of demons in general;
there is no single definitive depiction. However, they are almost universally depicted
as alluring women with unearthly beauty, often with demonic batlike wings;
occasionally, they will be given other demonic features (horns, a tail with a spaded
tip, snakelike eyes, hooves, etc).

In modern fiction
Succubi are often featured in fantasy fiction and role-playing games, and often shown
with batlike wings and bikini clad. Succubi are often very prominent in the sexual
aspects of fantasy fandoms and paraphilia. Charles Williams's 1937 novel Descent
into Hell features an academic who consciously rejects the potential affections of a
real woman in favor of a physically identical but perfectly obedient and pliable
succubus.

In Dungeons & Dragons succubi are numerous tanar'ri demons, many under the
command of the Abyssal Lord Graz'zt. Succubi are featured prominently in the
Planescape games, and in D&D the female child of a succubus and a human is
traditionally called an "Alu-demon" and the male child a "Cambion". Also, the
offspring of an alu-demon or cambion's union with a human is known as a tiefling.

They also appear as enemies in many video game series and can be seen in the
Castlevania video game series and in several Blizzard Entertainment games, such as
Diablo and World of Warcraft. Drakan features them as well, but the main character
is female and thus the emphasis is put on their deceiving qualities. Morrigan Aensland
is an individual succubus from the Darkstalkers series, also appearing in many of
other Capcom fighting games. Another succubus, Lilith, later made an appearance in
Darkstalkers 3 - Jedah's Damnation.

Succubi also appeared in the Starship Titanic game, although not intended as demonic
figures - here, they are the 'Succ-U-Bus' (a pun on "Suck-you-bus"), a
communications system based on sending messages in containers through a vacuum-
powered system. Succubi are featured in Nippon Ichi's tactical RPG Disgaea: Hour of
Darkness as an enemy. Succubus is also a level 37 (rather low level) demon in the
game Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne on the Playstation 2, and was a remarkable foe
in the Madou Monogatari Games series made by COMPILE.

Succubi and incubi are both referenced by the Reverend Hale in Arthur Miller's
classic play The Crucible.

In the manga Mark of the Succubus by Ashly Raiti and Irine Flores, a young succubus
would rather learn about humans than seduce them.

Succubi appear in television as well. In a South Park Season 3 episode called "The
Succubus", Chef tries to marry a woman who turns out to be a demon sent from hell.

Succubi have spread to comics as well, such as the print comic Hellblazer. In
Hellblazer, a succubus named Chantinelle falls in love with an angel and bears him a
cursed child. Also apearing as one of the main characters in the webcomic Krakow[1]
is a succubus named Kia. She falls in love with her victim, Case, and moves in with
him and his roommate, Tom. The comic also deals with Kia's family, whose father is
the devil, and sisters are succubi (though her younger sister, Guinness, appears to be
more naga than succubus).

Castlevania games, starting from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, often include
sucubi in their bestiary. Usually they appear in form of sexily-dressed or naked
woman with bat wings on their backs.

In World of Warcraft, an MMORPG game made by Blizzard Entertainment, succubus

is a pet of the warlock class.
In popular MMORPG Ragnarok Online, Succubus appear as mentioned before with
bat like wings and bikini clad, and can also be tamed as a pet. The succubus also
appears in the legendary MMORPG Lineage 2 with bat like wings and bikini clad.

See also
• Empusa
• Energy vampire
• Incubus, a male version of the demon.
• Interdimensional hypothesis
• Lamia
• Lilith
• Mara
• Melusine
• Naamah
• Neuralger, a fictional, related but potentially less damaging demon.

External links
• Succubus: The Demonic Seductress - A site dedicated to information on
succubi.

Succubus: The Demonic Seductress.

An online resource for everything pertaining to the demonic female spirit known
as a succubus. Includes the history of the succubus starting with Lilith, examples
of Succubi including the Lilin and Rusalka among others, art featuring the
succubus both as individual pictures and as part of a gallery, poems & lyrics
about succubus, as well as succubus stories, articles, books, products and more.

succubus

n : a female demon believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men [syn:
succuba]

Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University:

po
 What is a Succubus?

From Wikipedia:

In medieval legend, a 'succubus' (plural succubi; from Latin succubare, "to lie under")
is a female demon which comes to men, especially monks, in their dreams to seduce
them and have sexual intercourse with them, drawing energy from the men to sustain
themselves, often until the point of exhaustion or death. This legend was an
explanation for the phenomena of wet dreams and sleep paralysis. Lilith and the Lilin
( Jewish), Belili ( Sumerian) and Rusalka ( Slavic) were succubi.

From www.hypnosisinmedia.com.

Incubus and Succubus: In medieval lore, a succubus was a female spirit that would
lay with men to steal their seed: it was given as an explanation of night arrousal and
wet dreams. It was also paired with the incubus, the male form, sometimes
transforming between the two forms to pass along the stolen seed to unknowing
women. In later stories, especially in contemporary horror writing, both would be
given hypnotic powers that would give them the ability to command and compell
members of the opposite sex.

From occultopedia.com

A lewd female demon or goblin which takes on the illusory appearance of a female
human being and seeks sexual intercourse with men, usually while they are asleep.

The princess of all the succubi (plural) is Nahemah. Its male counterpart is called
Incubus. A semi-human offspring is called Cambion.

According to the view of most medieval theologians, incubi outnumbered succubi by

nine to one, but the ladies made up in menace for what they lacked in numbers by
being alluring and persuasive, using their considerable charms to seduce men and lead
them to eternal damnation.

From Legends of the Succubus

The succubus is a demon from legend that supposedly preys on mortal men while he
sleeps; a sexual vampire of sorts. The actual name has its origins from late Latin-
succuba meaning prostitute, which in turn comes from medieval Latin sub cubaire
meaning 'that which lies beneath'. The male version is the incubus (from Latin- 'that
which lies above'). There are some sources who claim that the succubus and the
incubus are one and the same creature who can change form at will to prey on
mortals.

In medieval times, the succubus was seen as a fearsome creature who killed her
victims by drinking their breath. This is interesting in that, at the time, the breath was
seen as a part of the person's spirit, and in doing so, the succubus was thought to be
stealing the victim's soul. Later, the habits of the succubus were deemed to of a more
sexual than vampiric nature, and this notion probably arose from the change in social
climate that saw sexual deviancy as a mortal sin, and so, those who committed such a
sin against God, were deserving of their fate in some way.

Various Succubi

Lilith

Origins of Lilith (From The Lilith Gallery):

Lilith has many origins. In one version of the bin-Sira version of the Bible, Lilith is
the first wife of Adam (before Eve) and was created at the same time that god created
Adam. In Greek myth, she is the goddess of the dark moon (Artemis is the goddess of
the full moon, and Hecate is the goddess of the crescent moon). In Mesopotamian
legends, Lilith is a fertility/earth goddess who protects people's children and helps to
harvest food. In both Arabic and Jewish myths however, she is a succubus. A demon-
woman who hunts men, seduces them and drains their life with a kiss. Jewish mothers
believed Lilith would come to take their children away and eat them.

The Lilin
(From Wikipedia)
According to Jewish folklore, the 'lilin' are the daughters of Lilith and Adam,
engendered while she was his wife. They are demons, with their function being that of
a succubus. Men and also mothers feared the attack of the lilin, because they were
also said to kidnap children, like Lilith.

The lilin are considered night spirits

Mara
(From Wikipedia)
'Mara' is the name of a fabulous ogress who hags people when sleeping. People feel
pressure on their chest, and some people report that they observed Mara laying on
their chest sometimes choking their necks, and mostly accompanying with sleep
paralysis.

Rusalka

(From Wikipedia)
In Slavic mythology 'Rusalka' was a female ghost, water nymph or succubus-like
demon who lived in a lake. Her eyes shone like a green fire. Men who were seduced
by her died in her arms, and in some versions her laugh can also cause death (compare
with the Irish banshee). She corresponds to the Scandinavian and German Nixie. The
ghostly version of the succubus is the soul of a young woman who died in or near a
lake (many of these rusalki were murdered by lovers), and came to haunt that lake;
this undead rusalka is not particularly malevolent, and will be allowed to die in peace
if her death is avenged.
Yuki-Ona

(From Wikipedia)
'Yuki-onna' (??, " snow woman") is a spirit or type of spirit found in Japanese
folklore. She is a popular figure in Japanese animation, manga, and literature. Yuki-
onna is sometimes confused with Yama-uba ("mountain crone"), but the two figures
are not the same.

Yuki-onna appears as a tall, beautiful woman with long hair. Her skin is inhumanly
pale or even transparent, causing her to to blend into the snowy landscape. She
sometimes wears a white kimono, but other legends describe her as nude, with only
her face, hair, and pubic region standing out against the snow. Despite her inhuman
beauty, her eyes can strike terror into mortals. She floats across the snow, leaving no
footprints (in fact, some tales say she has no feet), and she can transform into a cloud
of mist or snow if she is threatened.

Yuki-onna is winter personified, particularly the storms common during that time of
year. She is at the same time beautiful and serene, yet ruthless in her killing of
unsuspecting mortals. Until the 18th century, she was almost uniformly portrayed as
evil. Today, however, stories often color her as more human, emphasizing her
ghostlike nature and ephemeral beauty.

In many stories, Yuki-onna reveals herself to travelers who find themselves trapped in
snowstorms and uses her icy breath to leave them as frost-coated corpses. Other
legends say that she leads them astray so they simply die of exposure. Other times,
she manifests holding a child. When a well-intentioned soul takes the "child" from
her, he or she is frozen in place. Parents searching for lost children are particularly
susceptible to this tactic. Other legends make Yuki-onna much more aggressive. In
these stories, she often physically invades people's homes, blowing in the door with a
gust of wind, to kill them while they sleep (though some legends require her to be
invited inside first).

Exactly what Yuki-onna is after varies from tale to tale. Sometimes she is simply
satisfied to see her victim's death. Other times, however, she is more vampiric,
draining her victims' blood or "life force". She occasionally takes on a succubus-like
manner, preying on weak-willed men in order to drain or freeze them through sexual
intercourse or a kiss.

Like the snow and winter weather she represents, Yuki-onna has a softer side. She
sometimes lets would-be victims go for various reasons. In one popular Yuki-onna
legend, for example, she sets a young boy free due to his beauty and age. She makes
him promise to never mention her again, though, and when he relates the story to his
wife much later in life, his wife reveals herself to be none other than the snow woman.
She reviles him for breaking his promise but spares him yet again, this time out of
concern for the children she has born him. In a similar legend, Yuki-onna melts away
once her husband discovers her true nature.

Allu: offspring of Succubi

(from Wikipedia)
In Akkadian mythology the 'Allu' were a race of monstrous and faceless demons that
destroyed all what they could capture. They were engendered during a man's sleep
with Lilitu or one of her demon servants (see also succubus). When the man who had
engendered them was about to die, they surrounded his bed waiting for the moment
during which they could take their father's soul, impeding his travel to the
Underworld, and making of him an errant spirit, feared by all living people (see also
ghost).

In Sumerian mythology 'Allu' was a demonic power.

Belili

(from Wikipedia)
'Belili' was first a Sumerian minor goddess called Gesht-inanna, sister of Dumuzi, and
wife of Nin-gishzida (the door keeper of An). She was later included in the
Babylonian pantheon with the name of Belili or Belit-ili (also spelled Belet-ili),
acquiring in some time a much higher status as the wife of Bel (the Assyrian and
Babylonian equivalent to Baal). The Canaanites called her Baalat or Baalit, the wife
and female counterpart of Baal. As the wife of Bel she can be associated with Ishtar
for Assyrians and Babylonians, with Astarte for Semites, and with Asherah for
Philistines; in this sense Belili can also be associated with sacred prostitution and
human sacrifice (of children, by fire). Some authors, however, relate her with Lilith,
who is commonly associated with the demon Asmodai and considered a female
demon with the function of acting as a succubus. Other authors say that she could
have been a fertility goddess (this connects her again with Ishtar, Astarte and
Asherah), and some Neopagans consider Belili a mother goddess.

Lamia

(from Legends of the Succubus)

A related concept [to the succubus] is the Lamia from old English legends. The lamia
was said to appear in graveyards as a beautiful woman who draws young men to their
deaths. She would lie in wait for a naive victim, looking as if she needs his assistance
in some way. legend has it that, if you see such a woman in a graveyard who appears
to need help, you are supposed to call out to her, for the Lamia cannot answer back,
since she has a snakes tongue and can only hiss.

History of the Succubus

The Biblical Lilith (From The Lilith Gallery)

When the Almighty created the first, solitary man, He said: It is not good for man to
be alone. And He fashioned for man a woman from the earth, like him (Adam), and
called her Lilith. Soon, they began to quarrel with each other. She said to him: I will
not lie underneath, and he said: I will not lie underneath but above, for you are meant
to lie underneath and I to lie above. She said to him: We are both equal, because we
are both created from the earth. But they did not listen to each other.
When Lilith saw this, she pronounced God's avowed name and flew into the air.
Adam stood in prayer before his Creator and said: Lord of the World! The woman
you have given me has gone away from me. Immediately, the Almighty sent three
angels after her, to bring her back.

The Almighty said to the Angels: If she decides to return, it is good, but if not, then
she must take it upon herself to ensure that a hundred of her children die each day.
They went to her and found her in the middle of the Red Sea. And they told her the
word of God. But she refused to return. They said to her: We must drown you in the
sea. She said: Leave me! I was created for no other purpose than to harm children,
eight days for boys and twenty for girls.

When they heard what she said, they pressed her even more. She said: I swear by the
name of the living God that I, when I see you or your image on an amulet, will have
no power over that particular child. And she took it upon herself to ensure that, every
day, a hundred of her children died. That is why we say that, every day, a hundred of
her demons die. That is why we write the names Senoi, Sansenoi and Semangloph on
an amulet for small children. And when Lilith sees it, she remembers her promise and
the child is saved.

Pope Gerbert and the Succubus

One story of a succubus was told by Walter Mapes in his De Nugis Curialium
[Courtier's Trifles] (approx 1185) about Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope
Sylvester II (999-1003). As a young man, Gerbert fell in love with the daughter of the
Provost of Rheims. She rejected him, and he became despaired. One day he met a
beautiful maiden named Meridiana who offered him sex, magical knowledge, and
money if he would only stay faithful to her. He agreed and prospered rapidly
becoming Archbishop of Rheims, Cardinal, Archbishop of Ravenna, and ultimately
Pope. All the while, he kept Meridiana secret, and she even forgave him when the
Provost's daughter found him inebriated and seduced him one day. Finally, Meridiana
prophesied that Gerbert would die as he celebrated mass in Jerusalem, which turned
out to be a church close by possessing an alleged piece of the Cross. Realizing he was
about to die, Gerbert made a public confession of his sins and died repentant. Mapes
also noted that Gerbert's tomb in the Lateran sweats copiously before the death of a
Pope.

Execution of Johannes Junius for Witchcraft

Johannes Junius ( 1573- August 6, 1628) was the Burgomeister of Bamberg, famous
today for his letter written to his daughter from jail while he awaited execution for
witchcraft.

Junius became Burgomeister in 1608 and remained in that position until his arrest,
which came shortly after his wife had been executed on similar charges. He was
implicated in witchcraft by other victims of the witch craze (which was particularly
pronounced in Bamberg, where five burgomeisters were burned at the stake), who had
been pressured under torture to reveal the names of their accomplices. Court
documents describe how Junius at first denied all charges and demanded to confront
his witnesses, and continued to deny his involvement in witchcraft after almost a
week of torture, which included the application of thumbscrews, leg vises
(Beinschrauben), and strappado. He finally confessed on July 5, 1628, and was
publically burned to death one month later.

In his confession, Junius relates that in 1624, while in a difficult financial state, he
was seduced by a woman who later proved to be a succubus and threatened to kill him
unless he renounced God. At first Junius refused, but soon more demons materialised
and attacked him further, finally convincing him to accept the Devil as his God. He
took the witch-name of Krix and was provided with a familiar named F??in
("Vixen"), at which point several local townsfolk revealed themselves as similarly
allied with Satan and congratulated him. Thereafter he regularly attended witch's
sabbats, to which he rode on the back of a monstrous, flying black dog. At once such
sabbat he attended a Black Mass at which Beelzebub made an appearance. Although
his fellow witches and familiar demons had commanded him to kill his children in
their name, he had been unable to perform this sacrifice, for which he was beaten.
However, he did admit to having sacrificed his horse and burying a sacred wafer.

On July 24, shortly before his execution, Junius managed to write a letter to his
daughter, Veronica, which was smuggled out of jail by his guard and successfully
delivered. In the letter he defends his innocence, claims that those who testified
against him have secretly begged his forgiveness, and recounts the abject horror of his
torture (inflicted upon him by his brother-in-law and three others), from which his
hands still shake at the time of writing the letter. He also says that at first he attempted
to create a confession in which he could not identify the other witches, but was forced
to name names under threat of further torture. The letter begins: "Many hundred
thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica," and ends "Good night, for
your father Johannes Junius will see you no more."

Herdsman and the Dairymaid

(From Legends of the Succubus)

The 16th Century author, Nicholas Remy also tells of a herdsman found guilty of
witchcraft who, when asked how he had first fallen into the company of witches,
explained that he had been corrupted by a succubus. The herdsman said that he had
fallen passionately in love with a dairymaid who, alas, did not return his affections.
One day, he was, in his own words, 'burning with desire in his solitary pasturage'
when he saw what at first he took for the person of his beloved hiding behind a bush.
He ran to her, made violent advances, and was repulsed. After a while, the
'dairymaid'- in reality, a demon who had assumed the girls appearance- allowed the
herdsman to do with her body as he would on condition that he 'acknowledged her as
his Mistress, and behaved to her as though she were God Himself'.

Exercising the Succubus

(From Legends of the Succubus)

One line of defence against the succubus was the employment of prayer , fasting and
other religious devotions.At some time around the year 1500, the Bishop of Aberdeen
is recorded as having successfully prescribed such remedies for a young man who
approached him for spiritual guidance. For many months, the young man had been
pestered by a succubus who came to him by night and either coaxed or forced him
into sexual embrace which lasted until the break of day. The Bishop ordered the
victim to engage in devout prayer and austerity. Apparently, the measure was
successful, for after a few days, the young man was 'delivered from the succubus
devil'.

Huysmans Encounter with a Succubus

(From Legends of the Succubus)

Sometimes, however, those following a life of religious devotion found their prayers
of little efficacy against the wiles of the succubi. Thus, for example, towards the end
of the last century, the French writer, J. K. Huysmans claimed to have been attacked
by a succubus whilst staying at a monestary. Huysman, a novelist of distinction, was
in the process of returning to the catholic church whilst on the short monastic retreat.
This was intended as a spiritual antidote to the psychological effects of the several
years he had spent in what he himself called 'the latrines of superstition'- a reference
to his contacts with the oft sinister subculture of 19th Century Parisian occultism.
One night, lying in his hard monastic bed, Huysmans awoke from the climax of an
erotic dream to see a succubus vanishing away. That it has taken a physical form, and
was not illusiary, was apparent, Husman said, from the appearance of the sheets he
had shared with the demon. Huysman's dream had ended with 'an intense ejaculation'.
According to many demonologists, the fruits of such succubi-induced climaxes were
bourne away by the demons who then, taking on the forms of incubi, used them to
fertilise human women.
Incubus

Incubus can refer to:

 • Incubus (demon), a demon said to rape women while they slept
• Incubus (band), an American alternative rock band.
• Incubus (film), a 1965 film in esperanto starring William Shatner.
• Incubus (NWOBHM), a NWOBHM band from the early 1980s.

Incubus can also be:

• "Incubus", a song on Marillion's 1984 album Fugazi.

• Incubus, a line of running shoes manufactured by Reebok.
• Inkubus Sukkubus, a British Goth metal band.

incubus (demon)
This article is about a type of demon; see Incubus for other meanings.

In Western medieval legend, an incubus (plural incubi; from Latin incubare, "to lie
upon") is a demon in male form supposed to lie upon sleepers, especially on women
in order to have sexual intercourse with them. A female version was called a
succubus. There are several possible explanations for the incubus legends:

• Women who were pregnant but not married would often accuse an incubus,
when in fact they were having sex outside of marriage.
• Waking dreams or nightmares.
• They form part of the well-attested Medieval preoccupation with sin,
especially sexual sins of women.
• Actual rapes of sleeping women were attributed to demons by rapists in order
to escape punishment.
• The feeling of smothering while sleeping is known since antiquity as
nightmare. The modern term for this state is sleep paralysis.
• Because of the weight given to sexual sin in the Middle Ages, nocturnal
arousal, orgasm or nocturnal emission were explained away by the legends of
creatures causing an otherwise guilt-producing and self-conscious behavior.
Thus people could say they were not to blame for it; it was obviously outside
of their control: they were a victim.
• Young women/men being sexually assaulted in their sleep by a known
attacker such as a friend or family member, although not common, has been
reported and may explain some nocturnal attacks. The victims may find it
easier to explain the attack as supernatural rather than confront the idea that
the attack came from someone that is trusted in the family. See incest or
"situational molesters".

During the witchhunts, alleged intercourse with demons or with Satan was one of the
purported sins for which women were killed.

Sometimes incubi were said to conceive children with the women whom they raped;
the most famous legend of such a case includes that of Merlin, the famous wizard
from Arthurian legend.

In some legends, incubi and succubi were said not to be different genders of the same
demonic "species," but the same demon able to change their sex; the idea being that a
succubus would be able to sleep with a man and collect his semen, and then transform
into an incubus and use that seed on women. Nevertheless their offspring were
thought to be supernatural in many cases, even if the actual genetic material originally
came from humans. In the modern era, succubi have featured in roleplaying games as
tantalizing imagery for marketing. The theme of the incubi has continued into modern
times as well, with stories of unseen paranormal beings which rape female victims
such as Invisible Masters and the creature in the movie The Entity.

See also
• Classification of the demons
• Demonology
• Diabolical pact
• Francesco Maria Guazzo
• Incarnation of the demons
• List of sexology topics
• List of specific demons and types of demons
• Mara
• Merlin
• Nature and appearance of the demons
• Nightmare
• Night terror
• Invisible Master
• The Entity
• Nocturnal emission
• Pan
• Popo Bawa
• Succubus
• Sleep paralysis
• Spina's classification of demons
• Sexual relationships between demons and humans
• Sexuality of the demons
• Witch trial

kamaitachi

Kamaitachi（鎌鼬）, or "Sickle Weasel" is the name given to a bizarre Japanese

folk tradition. It refers to a phenomenon where people would be suddenly knocked
down by a strong gust of wind and find that they had been cut. The cut was
supposedly so fine that it did not hurt at first, but would invariable become infected.
This phenomenon was dubbed, "kamaitachi" and blamed on malevolent kami who
thirsted for human blood. (see also Vampires and Japanese mythology)

hopping corpse

In popular Chinese mythology, hopping corpses (Traditional Chinese: 僵屍 or 殭屍;

Simplified Chinese: 僵尸; Hanyu Pinyin: Jiāngshī; literally "stiff corpses") are
reanimated corpses that hop around, killing living creatures to absorp life essence
from their victims. Jiangshi is also pronounced Geung si, which is the Cantonese
pronounciation for Hopping Corpse. They are said to be created when a person's soul
(魄 Po) fails to leave the deceased's body.

It came from the myth of "The Corpses who Travel a Thousand Li" (千里行屍),
which describes Tao wizards who transport corpses over long distances to hop on
their own feet back to their hometown for proper burial.

Some people speculate that hopping corpses were originally smugglers in disguise
who wanted to scare off law enforcement officers.

Hopping Corpses were a popular subject in Hong Kong movies during the 1980s;
some movies even featured both Chinese Hopping Corpse and "Western" zombie. In
the movies, hopping corpses can be put to sleep by putting on their foreheads a piece
of yellow paper with a spell written on it (Chinese talisman or 符 pinyin fu2).
Generally in the movies the hopping corpses are dressed in imperial Qing Dynasty
clothes, their arms permanently outstretched due to rigor mortis. Like those depicted
in Western movies, they tend to appear with an outrageously long tongue and long
fingernails. They can be evaded by holding one's breath, as they track living creatures
by detecting their breathing. Their visual depiction as horrific Qing Dynasty officials
reflects a common stereotype among the Han Chinese of the foreign Manchu people,
who founded the much-despised dynasty, as bloodthirsty creatures with little regard
for humanity.

It is also conventional wisdom of feng shui in Chinese architecture that a threshold

(Chinese: 門檻), a piece of wood approximately six inches high, be installed along the
width of the door to prevent a hopping corpse from entering the household.

References in works of fiction

Poster for the movie Mr. Vampire.

"Geeonshe", a word based on the Japanese pronunciation of jiangshi, is used in some
obscure games and trading card games as a term for creatures that combined the
characteristics of Chinese and "Western" vampires.

The hopping corpse has appeared in a handful of films from Hong Kong that have
seen Western release, including the Geung si sin sang (aka Mr. Vampire) series
featuring Lam Ching Ying.

In the video game Super Mario Land one of the minor enemies, Pionpi, has
characteristics of the Jiang Shi.

Another video game, Phantom Fighter for the Nintendo Entertainment System,
featured Kyonshies almost exclusively as enemies. As the Chinese hero Kenchi, you
battled the hopping phantoms with punches and kicks, and even took control of a
kyonshi infant by ringing a special bell hidden in some stages.

In the fighting game Darkstalkers, the character Hsien-Ko (Lei-Lei in the Japanese
version) is based on the Jiang Shi.

In the role-playing game Shining Force III, Scenario 1, the inhabitants of Quonus
Village have been cursed and transformed into hopping corpses named "kyon-shi", a
Japanese pronunciation of Jiang Shi. They attack the player, and can either be killed
or relieved of their curse and brought back to life with a holy Elbesem Orb. One of the
kyon-shi, a dark wizard called Noon, becomes a playable character when rescued.

In the anime and manga Shaman King, the Tao family has a massive army of Jiangshi
at the family's call. One certain Jiangshi the show focused on was Lee Bailong (a.k.a.
Lee Pai-Long), who is a thinly veiled reference to Bruce Lee.

In the novel Anno-Dracula by Kim Newman, a hopping vampire appears as a minor

villain.

In the Disney/Square Enix video game Kingdom Hearts II, Heartless with
charateristics of the Jiang Shi appear in Mulan's world, the Land of Dragons. The
Heartless' name is "Night Walker".

In the MMORPG "Ragnarok Online", monsters known as Munaks and Bonguns were
heavily based on the Jiang Shi figure. Both of these creatures have a loathing for
living alone and bounce around looking for a player to approach so they may attack.
The difference between them is that the weaker Munaks are females clad in traditional
red outfits and have long queues, while the more formidable Bonguns are males
wearing blue and own shorter queues. While fighting these monsters, a player may
even be lucky enough to find a Munak or Bongun hat which they can equip for a
substantial advantage over most headgear in the game. These hats even include the
yellow sheet of paper hanging over the face, though it should be noted that the paper
seen on Bonguns has been somehow torn in half. Both monsters can also be tamed
and kept as pets.

A Jiang Shi was featured in an episode of the children's cartoon show Jackie Chan
Adventures. In this depiction the Chinese Vampire was depicted as feeding off his
victim's chi (life force) rather than drinking their blood. The victims could be revived
by a magical chi transfer that temporarily left the revived individual with some of the
personality of the chi donor.

In the animes Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT it is believed by some
fans that the charecter Chaozu is loosely based on the Jiang Shi

The vampires became the main theme in three successive television series in Hong
Kong, "My Date with a Vampire" (我和殭屍有個約會), which were loosely
continued from two earlier series starring Lam Ching-Ying as his typical role of a
taoist priest. Many of the international myths of vampires were incorporated into the
program, including the idea that vampires are in classes, depending on what class of
vampires bite them, as well as many Chinese legends, some of which are changed for
the sake of entertainment, e.g. Pangu, the mythical creator of the world, was in fact a
clan of people, and that all the vampires of the world can traced back to one of its
members, who was not technically a vampire for he was never a mortal to start with.
The vampires were also changed (at least the first five classes anyway) to resemble
human beings, apart from the time they use their powers and drink blood. This also
saw the transformation of vampires from stereotype villains to heroes.

See also
• Undead
• Zombie
• Vampire

manananggal

A manananggal is a creature in Filipino folklore. It resembles a Western vampire in

being an evil, human devouring monster or witch. The myth of the Manananggal is
popular in the Visayan region of the Philippines, especially in the western provinces
of Capiz, Iloilo, Antique. There are varying accounts of the features of a
manananngal. Like vampires, Visayan folklore creatures, and aswangs, manananggals
are also said to abhor garlic. Folklore of similar creatures can be found in the
neighbouring nations of Indonesia and Malaysia and the folklore may have originated
from there.

Features
A manananggal is described as being an older, beautiful woman (as opposed to an
aswang), capable of severing its upper torso in order to fly into the night with huge
bat wings to prey on unsuspecting pregnant women in their homes; using an elongated
proboscis-like tongue, it sucks the hearts of fetuses or blood of an unsuspecting,
sleeping victim. The severed lower torso is left standing. At this point, it is said to be
vulnerable. Sprinkling salt, smearing crushed garlic or ash on top of the standing torso
is fatal. The upper torso then would not be able to rejoin and will die at daybreak. The
name of the creature originates from an expression used for a severed torso:
Manananggal comes from the Tagalog word, tanggal which means separated or
severed.
Proliferation
A manananggal is also said to create other manananggals by tricking ordinary
persons to drink the cooked blood of another person, similar to the vampires' making
an ordinary person to drink vampire blood.

Capiz
The province of Capiz is the subject or focus of many manananggal stories, similarly
with the stories of other types of mythical creatures, such as ghosts, goblins, ghouls
and aswangs. Among the indigenous people, Capiz has a reputation of having many
of these creatures.

Tabloids and Malaysia

Superstitious folk in the Vizayan provinces still hang cloves of garlic or onion around
windows, doors, etc. with the purpose of repelling this creature as well as the aswang.
They are a favorite theme for sensationalist tabloids. They may be a product of mass
hysteria or intentionally propagated to keep children off the street, home at night and
wary or careful of strangers, or simply to entertain them. Similar folklore can be
found in the neighbouring Malaysia.

Other terms and versions

Aswang- Manananggals are popularly referred to as Aswangs. But this is because the
term Aswang is also generic and can refer to all types of ghouls, mananangals,
witiches(Mangkukulam), etc.

Tik-tik-Aside from aswang, manananggals are sometimes referred to as tik-tik. The

sound it is supposed to be making while flying. The fainter the sound the nearer it is.
This is to confuse the victim. The Tik-tik eats a child in the mothers womb causing
the body or face of the child to be disformed. It's apparitions are black cats and crows.

Other Filipino Mythological Creatures

• Multo, a ghost
• Kapre, a giant
• Tikbalang, half horse, half man.
• Aswang, a ghoul

Aswang

An Aswang (or Asuwang) is a ghoul in Filipino folklore. The myth of the aswang is
popular in the Western Visayan regions such as Capiz, Iloilo and Antique. The
trademark or major feature of Aswangs which distinguish them from other Filipino
mythological creatures is their propensity to replace stolen cadavers with the trunk of
a banana tree carved in the cadaver's likeness. They are also said to like to eat small
children. Their favorite body parts are the liver and heart. Other local names,
especially in Capiz are tik-tik and wak-wak.

Genre
Aswang, at times is also a generic term applied to all types of mythological creatures,
ghosts, manananggals, witches, shape-shifters, lycanths and monsters. Aswang is
often interchanged with manananggal, but they are different. There are also
characteristics and features that the Aswang also varies from filipino to filipino. The
paragraph below is more common or a typical description of the aswang.

Capiz
With respect to Aswang, Capiz( a region in the Western Visayas) is the subject or
focus of many Aswang, and other types of mythylogical and folkloric ghosts(multo),
goblins, ghouls, manannagal, witches(mangkukulam), giant horse men(tikbalang) and
other monster stories, especially for tabloids. Capiz is ( unfairly ) rumored to have a
number of aswang and covens of witches. Superstitious folk who believe in their
existence can still be found in these parts. They typically adorn windows, rooms, etc.
with garlic bulbs, holy water, etc. which supposedly repels these creatures. Aswangs
have the ability to transform into other shapes like a dog, a bat and a snake.

Superstitions
The myth of the Aswang is popular in the Visayan region of the Philippines, specially
in the western provinces of Capiz, Iloilo, Antique. Aside from entertainment value,
mothers are said to tell their children Aswang stories to keep them off the streets and
keep them home at night. Similar to Count Vlad III Dracula of Transylvania in
Vampire stories, the most popular characters are the clan of Teñente/ Tenyente/
Tiniente Gimo of the town of Dueñas, Iloilo.

Appearance and activities

An aswang is a regular townsperson by day and prefer an occupation related to meat,
such as butchery or making sausages.

Aswangs have an ageless appearance and a quiet, shy and elusive manner. They can
be distinguished from humans by two signs. One is the bloodshot eyes from staying
up all night looking for opportunities to sneak into houses where funeral wakes are
being held, and stealing the dead bodies.

According to the elderly, the Asuwang can also transform from human to animal and
animal to human. The Aswang can disguise him/herself as a pig, dog or a black bird.
Supposedly if a person looks at them in the eyes, the reflection would appear inverted.
During their nocturnal activities, they walk with their feet facing backwards.

One type is the tik-tik which transforms into a huge bird at night and prowls. The tik-
tik looks for a sleeping person. Then extends a very long proboscis into the
unsuspecting victim and proceeds to suck the blood. While performing, a 'tik-tik'
sound is heard.

In some stories, the tik-tik is an aswang's familiar, said to confuse people by it's 'tik-
tik' sound. If the aswang is near, the sound would be faint so that people hearing it
would think that the aswang is still far away.

Another familiar is the sigbin. Some say that this is another form that the aswang
transforms into and yet some say it is the companion of the tik-tik. It appears to be
similar to the chupacabra in appearance with the exception of spotty fur. It supposedly
has a wide mouth with large fangs.

Dealing with Aswangs

It is said that an Aswang can be revealed, with the use of a bottle of a special oil made
from coconut and mixed with plant's stems upon which special prayers were said.
When an Aswang comes near or walks outside the house at night, the oil is supposed
to boil and continue boiling until the Aswang leaves the area. They are also said to
abhor garlic.

Incidents and tabloids

Like UFO stories, X-files, etc. Aswang stories are one of the favorites in unreliable
sensationalist tabloids, especially when there are grave robberies, child kidnappings,
people with eccentric or peculiar habits and other incidents that can somehow be
attributed to them. There are also quite a number of superstitious people, in the
provinces mentioned who believe in their existence.

Other Filipino mythological creatures

• Manananggal
• Multo
• Kapre
• Tikbalang
• Mantahungal
• Nuno sa Punso
• Kataw
• Bungisngis
• Bakonawa
• Tahamaling
• Ada
• Batibat
• Sigbin
• Buso
• Pugot

pontianak
Pontianak is also a city in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.
A pontianak or kuntilanak (as known in Indonesia, sometimes shortened to just
kunti) is a type of vampire in Malay folklore. The pontianak is usually a woman who
died during childbirth and becomes undead, seeking revenge and terrorizing villages.
She often appears as a beautiful woman, usually accompanied by the strong scent
dangiling. the ground when wanting to feed. Men who are not wary will be killed
when she morphs into an ugly vampire, she will also eat babies and harm pregnant
women. People believe that having a sharp object like a nail helps them fend off
potential attacks by pontianaks, the nail being used to plunge a hole in the back of the
pontianak's neck.

It is believed that when a nail is plunged into the back of a pontianak's neck, she will
turn into a beautiful woman, until the nail is pulled off again. The Indonesian twist on
this is plunging the nail into the apex of the head of the kuntilanak.

See also
• Bajang
• Langsuir
• Langsuyar
• Manananggal

External links
• Article by Singapore Paranormal Investigators about pontianaks

• Pontianaks And The Issue Of Verisimilitude In Singaporean Cinema -- an

essay by Dr Timothy White of the National University of Singapore, about the
important role played by 1950s and 1960s horror films in the evolution of
pontianak mythology (Microsoft Word document).

THE TRUTH ABOUT VAMPIRES AND WHERE THEY COME FROM

Vampire myths go back thousands of years and occur in almost every culture
around the world. The variety of other-world bloodsuckers is almost endless —
from red eyed monsters with green or pink hair in China to the Greek Lamia which
has the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a winged serpent, from
vampire foxes in Japan to a head with trailing entrails known as the Penanggalang
in Malaysia.

The vampires we are familiar with today, although mutated by fiction and film, are
largely based on Eastern European myths, especially those of the Balkans and of
course the Carpathian mountains, including Hungary and Transylvania.

Our modern concept of the vampire still retains threads, such as blood drinking,
return from death, preying on humans at night, etc in common with the Eastern
European myths. However many things we are familiar with; the wearing of
evening clothes, capes with tall collars, turning into bats, etc are much more
recent inventions.

On the other hand, many features of the old myths such as the placing of millet or
poppy seeds at the gravesite in order to keep the vampire occupied all night
counting seeds rather than preying on relatives, have all but disappeared from
modern fiction and film.

The idea of the vampire come from the observations of primitive man that loss of
blood causes death. At least as early as 2000 BC they then deduced that the
power of life rests in the blood— the life is in the blood Genesis 9:4.

Since death was caused by life leaving the body, and since the life was in the
blood, they reasoned that if they could get the blood back into the dead body the
person would come alive again. Unfortunately they were not able to pump blood
back into the veins and they couldn’t get the corpse to drink any blood.

None-the-less it was believed that dead souls could drink the blood and it would
give them life, i.e. keep them from fading away entirely.

In Homer’s Odyssey we read (Book 11) where Odyssus sought information from
the ghosts in the land of mists, so he poured out blood into a trough which
attracted the shades. He kept them from drinking of the blood until they revealed
to him the information he sought.

Perhaps if the dead got enough blood they could come back to life entirely or at
least enough to be animate.

Here we have the beginnings of the vampire myth—the dead coming back to life
after drinking blood.

In the early stories these living-dead were more spirit than matter. Like spirits,
they could be invisible, they could fly, they could change form, and of course they
needed blood to stay functioning.

Being mostly spirit, they cast no shadow and had no reflection in the mirror. They
were obviously evil because they were transgressing the order established by God
and they were killing people and drinking their blood.

Since they were evil, they bonded with those things of night—wolves, bats, owls,
rats and other animals and forces associated with darkness.
And thus the vampire remained, more a creature of spirit and night until he was
given a new life by Bram Stoker in 1897.

Stoker came across the name Dracula in a book he was researching entitled An
Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820). This book has a
very short section on a "Voivode Dracula" who fought against the Turks. What
attracted Stoker to the name "Dracula" was a footnote by Wilkinson which stated
that

THE REAL DRACULA was Vlad Tepes or "Vlad the Impaler". A 15th century Romanian
prince who was famous for his acts of inhumanity and cruelty. Among his many atrocities was
his predisposition to impale the severed heads of his enemies on stakes. He earned himself
quite a bloodthirsty reputation. He was referred to as Vlad Dracula and also as Son of the
Devil/Son of the Dragon (his father was Vlad Dracul).

"Dracula in the Wallachian language means devil". Not quite accurate, but that is
what Stoker saw and copied into his notes. He was originally going to call his
vampire "Count Wampyr" but changed it to "Count Dracula." This change is
clearly made in Stoker's own notes for Dracula which are located at the
Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia.

The real Dracula (about whom we know much more than Stoker ever did) was
NOT a Count, nor was he a vampire (or ever associated with vampires). The two
Draculas have become greatly confused in many people's minds.
 BRAM STOKER (1847-1912) the creator of Dracula

In Stoker’s novel, Dracula possesses the following powers and supernatural traits:
he is potentially immortal
he survives on the blood of others
he has the strength of 20 men
he can shape-shift into the form of a wolf or a bat
he can appear as mist or elemental dust
he has no reflection in a mirror
he casts no shadow
he has hypnotic power over his victims
he can turn victims into vampires
But he does have limitations:
he may not enter a household unless he is invited
he must sleep on the soil of his native land
he can cross running water only at the slack or the flood of the tide
he is repelled by garlic and holy symbols (crucifix, holy wafer)
he can be destroyed by driving a stake through his
heart and decapitation

There is nothing in Stoker's novel to indicate that the vampire can be

destroyed by sunlight, though daytime, weakens him and reduces his
supernatural powers.

BELA LUGOSI, the most famous portrayer of vampires in films, is shown in a classical scene.
The sexual implications are quite clear and probably have contributed greatly to the popularity
of the vampire figure.

ANGEL, played by David Boreanaz, has his own TV series, which is a spin-off from Buffy:
The Vampire Slayer

Most of us are entertained by the vampires of print and film, but surely no one
believes that Dracula is any more real than Cinderella? Yes, many people believe
that vampires are real, and even admire them.

Actually there are real vampires.

One type of real vampire is an individual with a blood fetish – i.e. they get off on
drinking blood or having someone else drink their blood. You can look on the web
and find a website that over 100,000 people have visited that deals with real
vampires. Of course, they have no special powers, though they are pale from lack
of sunlight. Drinking blood does not make them immortal, in fact, it may shorten
their lifespan.

Most of these vampires can be found in various Goth groups. Many Goth women
get off on letting a “vampire” drink their blood. It is usually a little licking, never
an actual draining.

Goth is short for Gothic, as in Gothic novels like Frankenstein and Count Dracula, which feature
moody, pale characters with spooky stuff happening to them. Goth culture entails vampire fashions,
gloomy, emotional music, and clove cigarettes.

Another type of real vampire is a schizoid individual who THINKS he is a real

vampire. He believes he can form and will live forever. He thinks he has the to
become invisible. He is obviously insane and is a danger to those around him, for
he believes he must drink the blood of others to maintain his power. This type of
vampire may become a favorite of Goths, those most of them know they are only
pretending and get put off by any one who is not pretending.

A third type of real vampire is a psychic vampire. A psychic vampire is an

individual with an ability for absorbing the energy of others. They use up more
energy than normal people because there are continually in a state of emotional
fluctuation: lethargic and almost comatose one minute, hyperactive the next.
Most psyic vampires never realize what they are doing, and unconsciously drain
from other people.

Like mythical vampirism, no one is born with it. It has to be created in the
individual. It's a trait you have to develop, but it does help if you have parents
who are psychic vampires. One source says that if you have at least three psychic
vampires in your family, chances are about one in four that you are one.

Psychic vampires are present in every race, gender, age group, and religion even
Christians. Perhaps you know a psychic vampire.

Is there someone you know who leaves you feeling drained and tired? Does this
individual cling to you, demanding your attention? Does this individual seem to
always have problems? He or she is probably a psychic vampire.

A psychic vampire does not know that he or she has this problem. If you were to
tell them, they would deny it. The only solution to a psychic vampire is a wooden
stake through the heart, though simply avoiding them is a better alternative.

Yes, there are three types of real vampires, but the vampire of movie and myth
does not exist. Sorry Goths.

One legend claims stealing someone's shadow (by measuring it against a wall and
driving a nail through its head) can turn the victim into a vampire.
Avoid people who talk to themselves. According to Ukrainian legend, that could
indicate a dual soul and the second one doesn't die! Also watch out for the seventh
son of a seventh son, a person born with a red caul (amniotic membrane covering the
head), or a child born with teeth. A vampire can result if a cat or dog walks over a
fresh grave, a bat flies over the corpse, or the person has died suddenly as a result of
suicide or murder. Unfinished business can also cause a body to rise, as can
inadequate burial rites, including a grave that is too shallow.

Most vampires are described in folklore as flushed and ruddy, with swollen bodies
and bloated faces. Often, they can be identified because they're sitting up in the grave.

According to folklore, there are a number of ways to protect yourself from vampires,
including the ever-popular wearing of garlic or a religious symbol. You can slow a
vampire down by giving him something to do, like pick up poppy seeds or unravel a
net. (They're quite compulsive.) Cross water and he can't follow. If you can find the
body, give it a bottle of whiskey or food so it doesn't have to travel. If that doesn't
work, either shoot the corpse (may require a silver bullet) or drive a stake through the
heart. And remember, the vampire won't enter your dwelling unless invited.

Trivia is the Roman goddess of sorcery, hounds and the crossroads.

In Dante's "Inferno" the Ninth Circle of Hell is reserved for those who betray family
or country. The denizens of this deepest circle, who are frozen in ice, include Judas
(betrayer of Christ) and Cassius and Brutus (betrayers of Julius Caesar).

Abe Silverstein, who headed NASA's Space Flight Development Program, proposed
the name Apollo for the space exploration programs in the 1960's. He chose that
legendary Greek name because the virile Apollo was a god who rode through the
skies in a magnificent golden chariot. The precedent of naming manned spacecraft for
mythological gods had been set earlier with Project Mercury, also named by
Silverstein.

Some people consider the $1 bill unlucky because there are so many 13's on it: 13
stars, 13 stripes, 13 steps, 13 arrows and even an olive branch with 13 leaves on it. Of
course the $1 bill is unlucky - if it was lucky it would be a $100 bill.

The name of the legendary Lady Godiva's horse - Aethenoth

An artificial spider and web are often included in the decorations on Ukrainian
Christmas trees. A spider web found on Christmas morning is believed to bring good
luck.

When visiting Finland, Santa leaves his sleigh behind and rides on a goat named
Ukko. Finnish folklore has it that Ukko is made of straw, but is strong enough to carry
Santa Claus anyway.

According to legend, if a hare crosses a person's path as he starts out on a journey, the
trip will be unlucky and it's best to return home and start again. If a pregnant woman
sees a hare, her child may be born with a hare-lip. If a hare runs down the main street
of a town, it foretells a fire. Cornish legend says that girls who die of grief after being
rejected by a lover turn into white hares and haunt their former beaus.

Ancient Greeks wove marjoram into funeral wreaths and put them on the graves of
loved ones. The wreaths served as prayers for the happiness of the deceased in a
future life.

Breaking of a glass is traditional in some wedding ceremonies. This custom

symbolizes different things. To some its the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem,
and for some its the represents the fragility of a relationship.

In Greek culture, brides carry a lump of sugar in their wedding glove. It's supposed to
bring sweetness to their married life.

Placing a wreath on a grave is part of an ancient belief it was necessary to provide

comforts for the dead and give them gifts in order for their spirits to not haunt the
mourners. The circular arrangement represents a magic circle which is supposed to
keep the spirit within its bounds.

The Sphinx at Giza in Egypt is 240 feet long and carved out of limestone. Built by
Pharaoh Khafre to guard the way to his pyramid, it has a lion's body and the ruler's
head.

The Vikings believed that the Northern lights which are seen from time to time in the
north sky were caused by the flashing armor and spears of Odin's handmaidens as
they rode out to collect warriors slain in battle.

One gift-giving taboo in China is the giving of straw sandals, which are associated
with funerals, and therefore considered bad luck.

Crossing one's fingers is a way of secretly making the sign of the Cross. It was started
by early Christians to ask for divine assistance without attracting the attention of
pagans.

One sign of rain that farmers once searched for was for their pigs to pick up sticks and
walk around with them in their mouths.

During the Civil War, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant believed that onions would prevent
dysentery and other physical ailments. He reportedly sent the following message via
wire to the War Department: "I will not move my army without onions." Within a
day, the U.S. government sent three trainloads of onions to the front.

Contrary to popular belief, there are almost no Buddhists in India, nor have there been
for about a thousand years.

On the stone temples of Madura in southern India, there are more than 30 million
carved images of gods and goddesses.

One superstition says that if a girl leaves her house early on Valentine's Day and the
first person she meets is a man, then she will be married within three months.
Less romantic was the old historical opinion that Valentine's Day is a good day to
prepare eels for the purposes of magic. Eating an eel's heart was once believed to
enable a person to see into the future.

The reason one wears a wedding ring on the third finger is that (tradition says) there is
supposed to be a vein which goes directly from that finger to the heart—i.e., the seat
of love. Also, not everyone wears that wedding ring on the third finger of the LEFT
hand. In some traditions, such as the Jewish one, it is worn on the right hand. Also,
I'm given to understand that nuns ("brides of Christ") wear a wedding ring, again on
the right hand.

To prevent evil spirits from entering the bodies of their male children, parents dressed
them in blue. Blue was chosen because it's the color of the sky and was therefore
associated with heavenly spirits.

Girls weren't dressed in blue, apparently because people didn't think that evil spirits
would bother with them. Eventually, however, girls did get their own color: pink.
Pink was chosen because of an old English legend which said that girls were born
inside of pink roses.

The famous Citgo sign near Fenway Park in Boston is maintained not by Citgo, but
by Boston's historical society.