March 11, 2025 • 23 mins
This week we start our deep dive into Vampires. What are they, where do they come from? These mysterious creatures of the night have a confusing and interesting folklore dating back to the 1400s in Southeastern and Eastern Europe. Vampires have made a huge impact in culture, but are we getting it right, find out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Today on The Carolina Storyteller, We're gonna be talking about, uh,
something everybody's heard about, but are we really getting it right?
You know, those blood sucking creatures that infest the media.
I'm not talking about politicians. I'm talking about vampires. This
is The Carolina Storyteller. The dark ones were shadows, creep,
(00:27):
story rise as the camp reeves, John the voice of
haunting through with every sale, He's fens off, Will that
Goose whispers to night sauty by the fire light, off
the story line, the general lot of storyteller joy through
(00:51):
the story champas fels the darknessing night in the night
of the Night. Welcome folks to The Carolina Storyteller. I
want to remind if you want to support the show,
you can go over to patreon dot com forard Slash
(01:12):
The Carolina Storyteller and you get a look at everything
that we've got going on and help pay for all
of this and everything that's going to be going on
in the future. This week, we're starting a multi part
discussion on vampires. You know, the creatures that hide in
the outer reaches of the world and prey upon the
(01:38):
blood of the living. And I wanted to come out
at night. They sleep in coffins, right, that's what they are. Well,
depends on who you ask. So the first part of
this discussion is we're going to go back to what
a vampire actually is, and, believe it or not, vampires
are actually specific to one region and one region only.
(02:00):
There are many vampiric creatures and a lot of creatures
get confused with them. Just an example, I'm just going
to read you some names real quick. The all uh
the as in boas a mo as a ma uh,
the by it tall, which is from India as I
(02:21):
couldn't tell. The boo Hag is considered a vampiate creature,
and we've already talked about that before. Even the chup
of Kabra is considered vampiric. Uh so is the cheatype,
the draff mir the drag or, which is a Norse
and I may have mispronounced that horribly the day. Anyway,
(02:45):
I could go on for hours just naming different types
of vampiric creatures. I really could. I don't have all
day to do that, So today we're just going to
talk about vampires themselves. Where do they come from? The
actual legends of vampires actually originated in southeastern and eastern
Europe around Some people say it was the eighteenth century,
(03:11):
but it was really closer to the fourteenth century that
these legends were really started up. There was actually, in
I believe it was fourteen eighty five, a man who
was originally accused of being a vampire, and this is
when the world word originated. So the story goes is
(03:33):
that this man he lived in dishonest life. He was
an obesive husband, he was a philanderer, he was a
lot of horrible things. And when he died, of course
his soul did not go on, and at night the
(03:56):
town began to suffer strange, mysterious going John's where people
would be killed in the middle of the night, it
seemed by mysterious forces. Well, they'd die in the middle
of the night, but it didn't seem natural. A lot
of the aspects of what we call vampire were in
(04:16):
these deaths. The disappeared to be dehydrated or exagrenated, and
medically there may have been many excuses for one or
two of these, but this was a large number. Now,
what turned everybody to this guy was that his wife
suddenly reported seeing him haunting her to the point that
(04:39):
he actually assaulted her in the night while she was
trying to sleep. He would come back home and have
his way with her, and she began reporting it to
the local priest. I don't know why she didn't report
it to the cops. I guess when it's you know,
a dead guy, you go to a priest before you
go to the cops. That makes sense to me. I'm
(05:00):
not one hundred percent sure, but that's what she did.
And so the priest began looking for this guy. And
this is where the idea of religious economy in vampires
probably originates from, because the legend goes is that the
priest ended up confronting this guy and realizing it was him,
(05:22):
held out the cross in front of him and rebuked
him in the name of Jesus Christ. It was believed
that his spirit had become a revenant and reinhabitated his body,
and in order to keep the body, he had to
drink blood. But that's just his case, because there's so
(05:46):
much more to get into when it comes to vampires
from Middle Eastern From Middle Eastern I mean, sorry, not
Middle Eastern, Eastern Europe and southeast and southeastern Europe. Now,
when I'm talking about these I'm talking about your Slovakia's,
the Transylvania's, anything that ends with an Ania, basically Austria,
(06:08):
even Switzerland. Okay, all of these places today border areas
like Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Poland all the way into Moscow. This
is the area that we're talking about. We're talking about
a huge swath of the European continent where they believed
(06:30):
that these creatures existed. Now, one of the beliefs that
they had with these creatures was that they were reanimated
corpses brought back by evil. Now they weren't one hundred
percent sure how it happened. Generally, they believed that it
was a revenant spirit. The spirit was not able to leave,
(06:52):
so it brought its body back after death, and then
because it was undead, it had to take life in
order to have life. So it became this vicious cycle.
But what was interesting is is that they had another
term out there for children born from vampires. Hold on, now,
(07:15):
I know what you're saying, children born from vampires. That's
absolutely right. The legends from this time believed in something
called a drapnir or a half blood vampire. Now, these
were children that were born either a male normally a
male vampire father and a human woman who either was
(07:37):
enticed or un enticed to bear a child of the vampire.
Or they could come from a vampire mother and a
human male who for whatever reason decided he was going
to bang a vampire, and these children would have vampire
(08:00):
like qualities. They would be similar to vampires, but they
wouldn't have what they called the bloodlust and the thirst
that vampires had. And generally these children were chosen to
be vampire hunters. So this was a real thing, just
like which hunting was a real thing back in you know,
the fifteen, sixteen hundreds, and seventeen hundreds. Vampire hunters were
(08:24):
real thing before all of that, There were people out
there hunting vampires, and they were usually the children of vampires.
They would be raised kind of by the church almost
because their mother would of course be either mother or
father would of course be ostracized by the community. So
(08:45):
the church would take these children in and raise them
to hunt the evil spawn that created them. Now, during
all of this time, we had a lot of interesting characters,
and of course one of those interesting characters was Glad Tepish.
Now Vlad Tepish for those of you who do not know,
was a count. He had a country basically that he ran,
(09:09):
and that was Transylvania. Big surprise, he became known as
Glad the Impaler. Now he had what scientists today call
a genetic disorder. He was allergic to sunlight. Blad was
a very blood thirsty man, and to show how powerful
(09:30):
he was, he did this thing with his enemies where
when he would kill them, he would put their heads
upon the pikes. But after he killed them and he
cut the heads off, he'd collect the blood and drink it. Now,
this was supposed to in his mind, I'm assuming by
everybody's retelling of it, it's made him seem like he
(09:51):
was a badass. You know. This was the Oh look
at how bad Blad Tepish is. He's so he's so
tough that he's cutting off people's heads sticking them on
a pike. You want it to and still fear. What
he did was create a legend, and that legend ended
up being turned into a book by a man named
(10:11):
Bram Stroker. And we all know this is Dracula. This
is where the legend of Dracula really came from. Is
it came from a very real person who did some
very horrible real things, and a writer got a hold
of it and transferred it. But where everybody's like, oh,
vampires are fiction, No, vampires, by all accounts, legends and
(10:32):
the low truly existed. They truly hound some of these places.
And it wasn't just in southeastern Europe. If we fast
forward a couple hundred years, there were stories of vampires
in England, there were stories of vampires in France, and
even in the United States of America. There was a
legend of a vampire. We've already covered it, and her
(10:54):
name was Mercy Brown. Now what's interesting is is that
her story is that she died, and because she died
in the winter, they didn't they couldn't bury her yet.
But as she died. After she died, other people got sick.
(11:18):
They started getting sick, They started getting ill, and they
started dying all of something that nobody else could see.
The doctors couldn't figure it out. But when they went
to check on Mercy, I'm sorry, when they went to
check on her, it still looked healthy even though she
was dead. So they performed this autopsy and there was
(11:41):
blood still in the heart Now today's scientists will probably
tell you, well, yeah, that's a natural, common occurrence. But
I'm pretty sure that if you found pressure blood in
the heart back in the eighteen hundreds and you had
everybody dying, well then you have to do something. So
they ended up burning her heart and making a tenure
with the ashes for one of her relatives who was
(12:04):
sick because she was preying on her own family, supposedly,
and then they sent him away and he got better,
So it could have been the conditions of the area
making them get worse. But he did still dying of
what was known as consumption, but it was a year
or two later, so it did not appear for a
(12:26):
long period of time that he was affected by his sister,
the vampire Mercy Brown. Now it's interesting that vampires have
made it this far, but a lot of people don't
get just how prevalent these things were. From Poland to Russia,
they were all trying to figure out how to deal
(12:47):
with them, and they had different methods of dealing with vampires.
It varied from staking which was the most in common
myth most common method to burning them, to cutting off
the head and even stuffing the head with garlic, and
then they would put the head behind the bottos when
(13:08):
they buried it back in the ground buttocks, not botos,
And forgive me for saying it like that. Believing that
that way the head couldn't get back. They would do
things like drive iron needles into the corpse to pen
it in place so that it could not move, putting
pins through the mouth and over the eyes so that
it could not open its mouth their eyes to move,
(13:32):
all kinds of things, Pouring boiling water over the grave
and sprinkling it with holy water afterwards. They even went
in so far as to perform exorcisms over the grave
to deal with these creatures. And this is this is
things that people actually did. This isn't like, oh, it's
(13:53):
a legend. This happened a lot, so much so that
it was considered common practice, and people were taught how
to do these things because they thought that they needed
to know in case they had to deal with the
threat of a vampire. The vampires are traditionally not believed
(14:14):
to be natural beings. However, there are some Eastern European
legends that state that these beings were actually created and
were from Persia, possibly descendants of Lilith of all people,
(14:36):
who in Persian law is a demon, but in other
law she was the first woman who defied God when
she was supposed to kneel before Adam. So these things
have been around for thousands of years. Well not by
that name, because the name vampire only originates from Eastern Europe.
(15:02):
Like I said, they have so many other names for
so many other creatures that are so different. So what
makes a vampire? Well, believe it or not, there is
a criteria as to what a vampire is. How to
identify it. You had to look for a vampire's grave
(15:28):
by leading a virgin boys big graveyard or church grounds
on a virgin stallion. The horse would then supposedly balk
at the grave in question. Generally a black horse was required,
though in Albania it was supposed to be white. If
there were holes appearing in earth over a grave, this
was a sign of vampire. Corpses that were thought to
(15:50):
be vampire were dreerally described as having a healthier appearance
than expected, plump, and showing little to no signs of composition.
In many cases, when the graves were open, the villagers
described the corpse of having a lifelike appearance, fresh blood
of a victim over its space evidence that this vampire
(16:11):
had eaten soon. And the way you could tell the
vampire was in your community if no one was dying
is that animals would die because vampires didn't need human life.
They just needed life. They needed blood so they could
prey upon cattle, they could pray upon dogs, they could
eat your cats. You know, I wonder if we had
(16:33):
vampires during the twenty twenty four election and nobody figured
that out. Well, oh no, somebody gets to Chicago anyway.
The point being is that there were signs that a
vampire was there. But what if the vampire wasn't in
(16:53):
the grave? Well that was the thing is that it
didn't have to be in the grave. You could also
take a vampire, take the whole investigation thing near where
you suspected the vampire to live. In fact, it was
believed that if there was Poltergeis style activity in a home,
it was a possibility that a vampire could be living
(17:15):
there or had been living there at some point in time.
It was even believed in some parts that a person
could only turn into a vampire if they were descended
from a vampire in some way, adding more weight to
the idea of Draftmere. You know, half vampires supposedly Draffmere,
(17:37):
if they died, would turn into a full vampire. Therefore,
whenever one of them was around, if they'd take the bucket,
it was off with the head, stake, through the heart, nails,
through everything. A lot of work going in to dealing
with vampires. Vampires were considered to be humanoid. They may
(17:59):
have supernatural abilities. They could shape shift, even turning themselves
in the midst to slip through cracks in the door
so that they could get into the house, which is
weird because they apparently also had rules they had to
stand by. They couldn't cross the threshold unless they were
invited in, so unless you invited a vampire into your house,
(18:19):
you didn't have to worry about the vampire coming in.
You had to say, hey, come on in, have some
supper before the vampire could get to you. And if
you barred a vampire from your house by specifically stating
that was no longer invited, they had to leave and
they couldn't come back in. So your home basically became
a protective place, which is why people would rush to
(18:41):
be home at night and why there were so many
stories about don't go out at night. The vampire might
get you a use of that too, you know, because
apparently the threshold of the home held some kind of
magical protection that kept them at bay. But if you
allowed one in, that's all, she wrote, she'd become an
(19:01):
inpro forever or he or they, however they identify it,
I don't know. I'm not vampire tender expert. That's not me,
that's somebody over there. Anyway, The point of this is
is I want to get the basis of what a
vampire actually is. So a vampire, by their standards, is
a creature either or either having lived or living, or
(19:27):
either having lived or existing as an undead state requiring
the drinking of another's life force in order to continue
its life. They would appear undead, yet at the same
time not They would have like you know, they have
(19:48):
the blue tinted skin of being dead. It looked like
they died, but they'd still look pretty good even though
they died, you know, if you are getting what I'm saying.
They would have to sleep during the day because the
sun light hurt them. Now, this could be because the
sun light probably sped up decomposition, and they're decomposing. Everything
(20:10):
they're doing is try to stall that process a little
bit longer so sun might hurt them. Religious econofy drove
them away, And believe it or not, it didn't say
Christian religious economy, though the priest was Christian in the
story that I told. There are other tales of other
religions where they were able to call upon their gods
(20:32):
for the power to drive the vampire out. So if
we're making a list here, if you want to know
if it's a vampire, the first thing that has to
deal with is that it's got to be dead or
at least resembling debt. It's got to look healthy even
(20:54):
though it's dead. Very weird to combine the two, but
that's two toive things. You're gonna have a whole bunch
of things dying around you, whether it's people, livestock, there's
just gonna be a lot of death. Grays may or
may not be disturbed. But if there's a disturbed grave,
you might have a vampire or grave rubbers, who knows,
probably a vampire. Get the steaks ready. It is allergic
(21:19):
to sunlight and it does not do well with religion, economy.
So for those of you who'sought being Italian and cooking
spaghetti all the time was going to protect you. Guess
what garlic on the list? However, ash and I believe
it's hemlock wood, ash and some other kind of wood.
(21:41):
I'm gonna I'm gonna look here to make sure I
understand it. Wild rose hawthorn were used to hold them out,
even mustard seeds. Garlic is something that has come along,
but it was not typically used. Also, if you consecrated
(22:06):
the ground around your town, supposedly, if you've blessed the town,
they could not enter. And it was ash and aspen,
Ash hawthorne and ashben were the three types of wood
that were used primarily to battle into beat vampires. So
this is part one and we've gotten what is the vampire?
(22:28):
Part two we're going to talk about the media and
vampires and how far they've kind of gotten off of
the list, and even though they're off the list, are
they actually correct but referencing something else. This has been
the Carolina Storyteller. Thank you guys for watching. I hope
you guys enjoyed, and remember to go over to Patreon
(22:50):
dot com. Slash the Carolina Storyteller. To support the show,
get all kinds of new stuff, neat stuff. We've got
a merch store that you can get the link to there.
And oh yeah, stay spooky, my friends. We'll see you
next time.
Today on The Carolina Storyteller, We're gonna be talking about, uh,
something everybody's heard about, but are we really getting it right?
You know, those blood sucking creatures that infest the media.
I'm not talking about politicians. I'm talking about vampires. This
is The Carolina Storyteller. The dark ones were shadows, creep,
(00:27):
story rise as the camp reeves, John the voice of
haunting through with every sale, He's fens off, Will that
Goose whispers to night sauty by the fire light, off
the story line, the general lot of storyteller joy through
(00:51):
the story champas fels the darknessing night in the night
of the Night. Welcome folks to The Carolina Storyteller. I
want to remind if you want to support the show,
you can go over to patreon dot com forard Slash
(01:12):
The Carolina Storyteller and you get a look at everything
that we've got going on and help pay for all
of this and everything that's going to be going on
in the future. This week, we're starting a multi part
discussion on vampires. You know, the creatures that hide in
the outer reaches of the world and prey upon the
(01:38):
blood of the living. And I wanted to come out
at night. They sleep in coffins, right, that's what they are. Well,
depends on who you ask. So the first part of
this discussion is we're going to go back to what
a vampire actually is, and, believe it or not, vampires
are actually specific to one region and one region only.
(02:00):
There are many vampiric creatures and a lot of creatures
get confused with them. Just an example, I'm just going
to read you some names real quick. The all uh
the as in boas a mo as a ma uh,
the by it tall, which is from India as I
(02:21):
couldn't tell. The boo Hag is considered a vampiate creature,
and we've already talked about that before. Even the chup
of Kabra is considered vampiric. Uh so is the cheatype,
the draff mir the drag or, which is a Norse
and I may have mispronounced that horribly the day. Anyway,
(02:45):
I could go on for hours just naming different types
of vampiric creatures. I really could. I don't have all
day to do that, So today we're just going to
talk about vampires themselves. Where do they come from? The
actual legends of vampires actually originated in southeastern and eastern
Europe around Some people say it was the eighteenth century,
(03:11):
but it was really closer to the fourteenth century that
these legends were really started up. There was actually, in
I believe it was fourteen eighty five, a man who
was originally accused of being a vampire, and this is
when the world word originated. So the story goes is
(03:33):
that this man he lived in dishonest life. He was
an obesive husband, he was a philanderer, he was a
lot of horrible things. And when he died, of course
his soul did not go on, and at night the
(03:56):
town began to suffer strange, mysterious going John's where people
would be killed in the middle of the night, it
seemed by mysterious forces. Well, they'd die in the middle
of the night, but it didn't seem natural. A lot
of the aspects of what we call vampire were in
(04:16):
these deaths. The disappeared to be dehydrated or exagrenated, and
medically there may have been many excuses for one or
two of these, but this was a large number. Now,
what turned everybody to this guy was that his wife
suddenly reported seeing him haunting her to the point that
(04:39):
he actually assaulted her in the night while she was
trying to sleep. He would come back home and have
his way with her, and she began reporting it to
the local priest. I don't know why she didn't report
it to the cops. I guess when it's you know,
a dead guy, you go to a priest before you
go to the cops. That makes sense to me. I'm
(05:00):
not one hundred percent sure, but that's what she did.
And so the priest began looking for this guy. And
this is where the idea of religious economy in vampires
probably originates from, because the legend goes is that the
priest ended up confronting this guy and realizing it was him,
(05:22):
held out the cross in front of him and rebuked
him in the name of Jesus Christ. It was believed
that his spirit had become a revenant and reinhabitated his body,
and in order to keep the body, he had to
drink blood. But that's just his case, because there's so
(05:46):
much more to get into when it comes to vampires
from Middle Eastern From Middle Eastern I mean, sorry, not
Middle Eastern, Eastern Europe and southeast and southeastern Europe. Now,
when I'm talking about these I'm talking about your Slovakia's,
the Transylvania's, anything that ends with an Ania, basically Austria,
(06:08):
even Switzerland. Okay, all of these places today border areas
like Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Poland all the way into Moscow. This
is the area that we're talking about. We're talking about
a huge swath of the European continent where they believed
(06:30):
that these creatures existed. Now, one of the beliefs that
they had with these creatures was that they were reanimated
corpses brought back by evil. Now they weren't one hundred
percent sure how it happened. Generally, they believed that it
was a revenant spirit. The spirit was not able to leave,
(06:52):
so it brought its body back after death, and then
because it was undead, it had to take life in
order to have life. So it became this vicious cycle.
But what was interesting is is that they had another
term out there for children born from vampires. Hold on, now,
(07:15):
I know what you're saying, children born from vampires. That's
absolutely right. The legends from this time believed in something
called a drapnir or a half blood vampire. Now, these
were children that were born either a male normally a
male vampire father and a human woman who either was
(07:37):
enticed or un enticed to bear a child of the vampire.
Or they could come from a vampire mother and a
human male who for whatever reason decided he was going
to bang a vampire, and these children would have vampire
(08:00):
like qualities. They would be similar to vampires, but they
wouldn't have what they called the bloodlust and the thirst
that vampires had. And generally these children were chosen to
be vampire hunters. So this was a real thing, just
like which hunting was a real thing back in you know,
the fifteen, sixteen hundreds, and seventeen hundreds. Vampire hunters were
(08:24):
real thing before all of that, There were people out
there hunting vampires, and they were usually the children of vampires.
They would be raised kind of by the church almost
because their mother would of course be either mother or
father would of course be ostracized by the community. So
(08:45):
the church would take these children in and raise them
to hunt the evil spawn that created them. Now, during
all of this time, we had a lot of interesting characters,
and of course one of those interesting characters was Glad Tepish.
Now Vlad Tepish for those of you who do not know,
was a count. He had a country basically that he ran,
(09:09):
and that was Transylvania. Big surprise, he became known as
Glad the Impaler. Now he had what scientists today call
a genetic disorder. He was allergic to sunlight. Blad was
a very blood thirsty man, and to show how powerful
(09:30):
he was, he did this thing with his enemies where
when he would kill them, he would put their heads
upon the pikes. But after he killed them and he
cut the heads off, he'd collect the blood and drink it. Now,
this was supposed to in his mind, I'm assuming by
everybody's retelling of it, it's made him seem like he
(09:51):
was a badass. You know. This was the Oh look
at how bad Blad Tepish is. He's so he's so
tough that he's cutting off people's heads sticking them on
a pike. You want it to and still fear. What
he did was create a legend, and that legend ended
up being turned into a book by a man named
(10:11):
Bram Stroker. And we all know this is Dracula. This
is where the legend of Dracula really came from. Is
it came from a very real person who did some
very horrible real things, and a writer got a hold
of it and transferred it. But where everybody's like, oh,
vampires are fiction, No, vampires, by all accounts, legends and
(10:32):
the low truly existed. They truly hound some of these places.
And it wasn't just in southeastern Europe. If we fast
forward a couple hundred years, there were stories of vampires
in England, there were stories of vampires in France, and
even in the United States of America. There was a
legend of a vampire. We've already covered it, and her
(10:54):
name was Mercy Brown. Now what's interesting is is that
her story is that she died, and because she died
in the winter, they didn't they couldn't bury her yet.
But as she died. After she died, other people got sick.
(11:18):
They started getting sick, They started getting ill, and they
started dying all of something that nobody else could see.
The doctors couldn't figure it out. But when they went
to check on Mercy, I'm sorry, when they went to
check on her, it still looked healthy even though she
was dead. So they performed this autopsy and there was
(11:41):
blood still in the heart Now today's scientists will probably
tell you, well, yeah, that's a natural, common occurrence. But
I'm pretty sure that if you found pressure blood in
the heart back in the eighteen hundreds and you had
everybody dying, well then you have to do something. So
they ended up burning her heart and making a tenure
with the ashes for one of her relatives who was
(12:04):
sick because she was preying on her own family, supposedly,
and then they sent him away and he got better,
So it could have been the conditions of the area
making them get worse. But he did still dying of
what was known as consumption, but it was a year
or two later, so it did not appear for a
(12:26):
long period of time that he was affected by his sister,
the vampire Mercy Brown. Now it's interesting that vampires have
made it this far, but a lot of people don't
get just how prevalent these things were. From Poland to Russia,
they were all trying to figure out how to deal
(12:47):
with them, and they had different methods of dealing with vampires.
It varied from staking which was the most in common
myth most common method to burning them, to cutting off
the head and even stuffing the head with garlic, and
then they would put the head behind the bottos when
(13:08):
they buried it back in the ground buttocks, not botos,
And forgive me for saying it like that. Believing that
that way the head couldn't get back. They would do
things like drive iron needles into the corpse to pen
it in place so that it could not move, putting
pins through the mouth and over the eyes so that
it could not open its mouth their eyes to move,
(13:32):
all kinds of things, Pouring boiling water over the grave
and sprinkling it with holy water afterwards. They even went
in so far as to perform exorcisms over the grave
to deal with these creatures. And this is this is
things that people actually did. This isn't like, oh, it's
(13:53):
a legend. This happened a lot, so much so that
it was considered common practice, and people were taught how
to do these things because they thought that they needed
to know in case they had to deal with the
threat of a vampire. The vampires are traditionally not believed
(14:14):
to be natural beings. However, there are some Eastern European
legends that state that these beings were actually created and
were from Persia, possibly descendants of Lilith of all people,
(14:36):
who in Persian law is a demon, but in other
law she was the first woman who defied God when
she was supposed to kneel before Adam. So these things
have been around for thousands of years. Well not by
that name, because the name vampire only originates from Eastern Europe.
(15:02):
Like I said, they have so many other names for
so many other creatures that are so different. So what
makes a vampire? Well, believe it or not, there is
a criteria as to what a vampire is. How to
identify it. You had to look for a vampire's grave
(15:28):
by leading a virgin boys big graveyard or church grounds
on a virgin stallion. The horse would then supposedly balk
at the grave in question. Generally a black horse was required,
though in Albania it was supposed to be white. If
there were holes appearing in earth over a grave, this
was a sign of vampire. Corpses that were thought to
(15:50):
be vampire were dreerally described as having a healthier appearance
than expected, plump, and showing little to no signs of composition.
In many cases, when the graves were open, the villagers
described the corpse of having a lifelike appearance, fresh blood
of a victim over its space evidence that this vampire
(16:11):
had eaten soon. And the way you could tell the
vampire was in your community if no one was dying
is that animals would die because vampires didn't need human life.
They just needed life. They needed blood so they could
prey upon cattle, they could pray upon dogs, they could
eat your cats. You know, I wonder if we had
(16:33):
vampires during the twenty twenty four election and nobody figured
that out. Well, oh no, somebody gets to Chicago anyway.
The point being is that there were signs that a
vampire was there. But what if the vampire wasn't in
(16:53):
the grave? Well that was the thing is that it
didn't have to be in the grave. You could also
take a vampire, take the whole investigation thing near where
you suspected the vampire to live. In fact, it was
believed that if there was Poltergeis style activity in a home,
it was a possibility that a vampire could be living
(17:15):
there or had been living there at some point in time.
It was even believed in some parts that a person
could only turn into a vampire if they were descended
from a vampire in some way, adding more weight to
the idea of Draftmere. You know, half vampires supposedly Draffmere,
(17:37):
if they died, would turn into a full vampire. Therefore,
whenever one of them was around, if they'd take the bucket,
it was off with the head, stake, through the heart, nails,
through everything. A lot of work going in to dealing
with vampires. Vampires were considered to be humanoid. They may
(17:59):
have supernatural abilities. They could shape shift, even turning themselves
in the midst to slip through cracks in the door
so that they could get into the house, which is
weird because they apparently also had rules they had to
stand by. They couldn't cross the threshold unless they were
invited in, so unless you invited a vampire into your house,
(18:19):
you didn't have to worry about the vampire coming in.
You had to say, hey, come on in, have some
supper before the vampire could get to you. And if
you barred a vampire from your house by specifically stating
that was no longer invited, they had to leave and
they couldn't come back in. So your home basically became
a protective place, which is why people would rush to
(18:41):
be home at night and why there were so many
stories about don't go out at night. The vampire might
get you a use of that too, you know, because
apparently the threshold of the home held some kind of
magical protection that kept them at bay. But if you
allowed one in, that's all, she wrote, she'd become an
(19:01):
inpro forever or he or they, however they identify it,
I don't know. I'm not vampire tender expert. That's not me,
that's somebody over there. Anyway, The point of this is
is I want to get the basis of what a
vampire actually is. So a vampire, by their standards, is
a creature either or either having lived or living, or
(19:27):
either having lived or existing as an undead state requiring
the drinking of another's life force in order to continue
its life. They would appear undead, yet at the same
time not They would have like you know, they have
(19:48):
the blue tinted skin of being dead. It looked like
they died, but they'd still look pretty good even though
they died, you know, if you are getting what I'm saying.
They would have to sleep during the day because the
sun light hurt them. Now, this could be because the
sun light probably sped up decomposition, and they're decomposing. Everything
(20:10):
they're doing is try to stall that process a little
bit longer so sun might hurt them. Religious econofy drove
them away, And believe it or not, it didn't say
Christian religious economy, though the priest was Christian in the
story that I told. There are other tales of other
religions where they were able to call upon their gods
(20:32):
for the power to drive the vampire out. So if
we're making a list here, if you want to know
if it's a vampire, the first thing that has to
deal with is that it's got to be dead or
at least resembling debt. It's got to look healthy even
(20:54):
though it's dead. Very weird to combine the two, but
that's two toive things. You're gonna have a whole bunch
of things dying around you, whether it's people, livestock, there's
just gonna be a lot of death. Grays may or
may not be disturbed. But if there's a disturbed grave,
you might have a vampire or grave rubbers, who knows,
probably a vampire. Get the steaks ready. It is allergic
(21:19):
to sunlight and it does not do well with religion, economy.
So for those of you who'sought being Italian and cooking
spaghetti all the time was going to protect you. Guess
what garlic on the list? However, ash and I believe
it's hemlock wood, ash and some other kind of wood.
(21:41):
I'm gonna I'm gonna look here to make sure I
understand it. Wild rose hawthorn were used to hold them out,
even mustard seeds. Garlic is something that has come along,
but it was not typically used. Also, if you consecrated
(22:06):
the ground around your town, supposedly, if you've blessed the town,
they could not enter. And it was ash and aspen,
Ash hawthorne and ashben were the three types of wood
that were used primarily to battle into beat vampires. So
this is part one and we've gotten what is the vampire?
(22:28):
Part two we're going to talk about the media and
vampires and how far they've kind of gotten off of
the list, and even though they're off the list, are
they actually correct but referencing something else. This has been
the Carolina Storyteller. Thank you guys for watching. I hope
you guys enjoyed, and remember to go over to Patreon
(22:50):
dot com. Slash the Carolina Storyteller. To support the show,
get all kinds of new stuff, neat stuff. We've got
a merch store that you can get the link to there.
And oh yeah, stay spooky, my friends. We'll see you
next time.
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