Are vampires real?
Scientific analyzes reveal to us how the phenomenon of vampires can be explained in terms of serious pathologies and atypical forms of decomposition, which were misrepresented in the Middle Ages. But is it really like that?
From a logical-rational perspective, vampires are puzzling. On one hand, the simplicity with which their modern myth was constructed is striking: literary characters that found fertile ground in Romanticism, though it was in the twentieth century, especially with the advent of cinema and television, that they fully manifested their ambiguous allure. On the other hand, what is truly perplexing is the immense interest they garner from the general public. After all, they are miserable, cursed beings, subject to many limitations and troubles, not to mention the numerous ways they can be killed despite being labeled as supernatural: a stake through the heart, silver bullets (sometimes shared with werewolves), sunlight, crucifixes, and holy water. In short, they are relatively weak and fragile creatures, easily defeated as Hollywood often depicts. Yet, the act of drinking blood grants the vampire an irresistible allure, tied to sexuality, the fascination of death intertwined with life, the sensual bite on the neck, and other features such as marble-white skin, icy eyes, and feral protruding canines, which clash with the reassuring normalcy of patriarchal society. It is as if the vampire represents everything we cannot be: incredibly strong yet vulnerable, immortal but dependent on the living for survival, incapable of natural reproduction yet a sexual fetish, the undead embodies all the contradictions of humanity.
But despite being fascinating and anthropologically and symbolically interesting, one thing can be said with certainty: vampires do not exist in the real world. Or at least, not in the form described by novels and films.
Reading the Wikipedia page on vampires can leave one astounded. The anonymous author of that entry has skillfully included numerous mythological and religious data tracing back to the Babylonians, describing the vampire phenomenon as real and existing since the dawn of time, as if it were a species parallel to ours. As scholars in the field, we categorically deny the existence of a "parallel race" to humans with the typical characteristics of vampires, namely the act of feeding on blood. Among human ancestors and parallel species like Australopithecines, parasitic blood consumption was not practiced. Moreover, very few animals in the world feed in this manner: phyllostomatid and desmodontid bats in South America, as well as leeches, lampreys, ticks, and mosquitoes, though the latter do not feed on human blood but use it as food for their larvae.
Even the oldest mythologies deny this possibility: while there are many stories about nocturnal demons that disturb humans in their sleep or kidnap children, such as the Greek Lamia, these are creatures unrelated to humanity. They are spiritual beings like fairies or goblins, or entities like incubi and succubi, which played a significant role in the invention of Satanism during the Middle Ages and today in the formulation of alien abduction theories, the so-called Abductions. In reality, these are spiritual, psychic, or energetic entities that, in our opinion, exist but are not recognized by our science due to its technological inability to perceive them with the limited instruments available. Religions, meanwhile, label them as demonic and evil beings.
Vampires, however, possess a characteristic that distinctly sets them apart from these types of demons: they are corporeal, physical, connected to humanity and its most vital and sacred part—the red blood. Blood, in its symbolism and color, encompasses all the contradictions of our society. As we have seen, red is primarily the color of life, of the setting sun, of menstrual blood, of fertility, of abundance. But with the advent of warrior societies that wiped out peaceful matriarchal ones, it became a symbol of violence, oppression, and possession. Psychologically, the vampire drinking the blood of its victim can be seen as a form of possession, a connection that literature has often highlighted. The moment of the bite on the neck, intensely erotic, unconsciously becomes a union, a sexual act, but also something related to maternity, to life nourishing death and transforming it into new life, albeit briefly: these are eternal concepts tied to destruction and regeneration, well expressed in stories about the Mother Goddess, the alchemists' Solve et Coagula, and so on.
If, beyond its negative reputation, the vampire finds in its intrinsic weakness the reason for its charm, thus becoming a positive figure on an unconscious level, we must say a few words about ancient myths that have nothing good about them. As we mentioned earlier, there are "invisible parasites" that live among us and feed on our emotions. Ancient myths about vampire-like beings contain truly defamatory elements, denigrating aspects of matriarchy that found expression in the dark Middle Ages in a form of social violence that is entirely unjustifiable.
In fact, the myth of the Lamia originates from the nymph Lamia, who was the daughter of Poseidon (or Belus) and queen of Libya, thus having primordial Ligurian and matriarchal ancestry. In the Greek story, Lamia met Zeus, who fell in love with her, and the result of their union was many children, whom Hera, driven by jealousy, systematically killed. Lamia, driven to madness, began seeking out all the children she could find to make them suffer the same fate as hers. Each child she killed transformed into a demon, who in turn killed other children, and so on, giving rise to the legend of the malevolent Lamiae.
This particular way of "propagating the species" includes two typical elements of vampires: the spread of evil through victims, akin to the contagious bite, and the concept of a "curse," which is the central theme of the most famous literary vampire, Bram Stoker's Dracula. However, in the legend of the Lamiae, there are truly dramatic and real elements that have nothing to do with curses cast by some god but with dramatic social changes that ended a society ancient by tens of thousands of years.
It is paradoxical that the victims of the Lamiae are only children and that the Lamiae themselves are female, as if the demonization was aimed at the matriarchal woman who lived freely and harmoniously with creation, who was responsible for raising the children, and who had equal and affectionate relationships with men. With the advent of societies based on stable dwellings, possession, and marriage in which the wife was a slave, these ancient women, survivors of ancestral ways of living, likely attacked patriarchal villages, trying to kidnap children to save them from an unhappy fate and make them free, in the same way as the Middle Eastern Lilith and the Irish fairies.
It is from such stories that the black legends about witches, the shamanic women tied to the Ancient Religion, arose, which, elaborated by Christian theology, led to the invented trials for witchcraft and Satanism.
Let's reiterate the concept: although malevolent deities exist, the concept of Satan was invented to destroy the practitioners of the Ancient Religion who still survived in the countryside and among the mountains. The stories of these child-killing entities were the ideological basis on which all texts fighting witchcraft were designed. It is paradoxical that there is no trace of vampirism in these texts, perhaps because it never existed as such. But is that really the case?
The discovery in 2006 of a woman's skeleton in Venice with a brick jammed between her teeth baffled both scientists and enthusiasts. Many sensationalist TV shows screamed "miracle," and that find, by Prof. Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropologist, is still cited today as definitive proof that vampirism exists. However, it should be noted that the skeleton found on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venetian Lagoon, in a mass grave occupied by the victims of the 1630 Plague, shows no traces of sharp canines or other typical vampire features. There is only that incredible brick shoved in the mouth, breaking teeth and jaw, as if to prevent feeding. Why this gesture? And who performed it?
The date 1630 is indicative. That year saw the outbreak of the Bubonic Plague, described by Alessandro Manzoni in "The Betrothed," which caused the death of 45,000 people in Venice alone, out of a population of 150,000. Among the victims was surely the unfortunate subject of that sort of exorcism: a young woman who evidently showed characteristic signs of decomposition. The lazaretto was a place where the dead were dumped into mass graves, and it is possible that the gravediggers, seeing the unusually decomposed body of that woman, thought they were dealing with a vampire, specifically a nachzehrer.
The nachzehrer (literally "night devourer") is a medieval legendary figure originating in Bavaria and spreading throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from where the superstition could have reached Venice. It is a being halfway between a human and a vampire, a not fully formed vampire, so called because of the habit of "devouring shrouds." At the time, it was customary to place a shroud over the face of the deceased. Sometimes, due to the complex processes of decomposition, this shroud would be sucked into the mouth by the action of intestinal gases, and if the body was exhumed a few months after death, one might witness the frightening phenomenon of the shroud appearing chewed or devoured. Such a sight, undoubtedly extreme, likely gave rise to these superstitions.
Thus, it seems certain that the "Venetian vampire" was not a vampire at all but rather a Nachzehrer. Upon finding the bloated body with the shroud in its mouth, the gravediggers thought it prudent to place a brick between her teeth to "prevent" her from chewing! Indeed, the sometimes "alive" appearance of corpses can be the primary cause of the belief in the undead: consider that nails and hair continue to grow for up to two months after an individual dies. Such beliefs had a significant impact, especially in Eastern Europe, from where the name vampire (which in Russian is upir) originates. Here, the abysmally low cultural level of peasants, the backward feudal society, and a certain animism typical of Slavic populations created the legend as we know it today.
There were many openly declared cases of vampirism, though today we cannot consider them real. One famous case involved a Serbian peasant named Peter Plogojowitz, a textbook example on which we can now shed light. It was 1725. Plogojowitz lived in a village called Kisilova and, although he appeared to be in good health, he died suddenly. In the following eight days, nine other people died in the same manner. On their deathbeds, all nine victims claimed to have seen Plogojowitz strangling them at night. The villagers, astonished by these statements from dying people (who had no reason to lie), decided to exhume his body to look for signs of vampirism.
Despite his reluctance, the Austrian-Hungarian government representative in the region, Kameralprovisor Frombal, agreed to the autopsy as the villagers claimed that similar incidents had occurred in the past during Turkish rule. Skeptical but willing to witness the exhumation, Frombal saw the sight that shocked everyone: Plogojowitz's body was intact, with hair and beard grown, skin and nails peeled away, revealing new skin underneath, and fresh blood found in his mouth and oozing from his ears and nose. It was too much for the villagers, who panicked. Frombal, as a good government official, took no special measures other than having the corpse burned, but his report constitutes an exceptional document on this phenomenon.
An article about this incident was published by the Viennese newspaper Wienerisches Diarium, now known as Die Wiener Zeitung, which brought widespread attention to the case, much like the similar case of Arnold Paole, a Serbian militiaman who died in the same year, 1725.
Paole lived in the village of Medveda, located near the Morava River close to the town of Paracin, in an area still under Austro-Hungarian rule. He was a hajduk, an outlaw who fought against the Turks, recruited by the Austrians for the border defense troops. Paole claimed to have been haunted by a vampire in his youth, which he supposedly managed to kill. These were boastful tales spiced with a heavy dose of imagination, but popular superstition believed him. When he died accidentally from a fall, followed by the deaths of four other people who said they had been tormented by him at night, it was immediately suspected that he had become a vampire.
This time, without waiting for the governor, the villagers opened his grave ten days later and saw the same signs as in the first case: an incorrupt body covered in blood, peeling skin, and a mouth full of blood. There were no half measures this time: a stake was driven into his heart, to which Paole reportedly reacted by "coughing and groaning." Then the body was burned, and the four others who had died were also subjected to the same treatment to prevent them from turning into vampires. The story was documented in the report of military doctors sent by the Austrian army because Paole was a militiaman. However, the story doesn’t end there. Six years later, the vampire epidemic reoccurred in the same village, resulting in 17 mysterious deaths over three months.
A young Austrian doctor was assigned to investigate the deaths. He found no signs of an epidemic but also did not believe in the vampirism claims. After long investigations, the idea was accepted that Turkish vampires had caused the slaughter. The task of beheading the victims and burning the bodies was assigned to the Gypsies. The case was detailed in the Nuremberg Gazette, giving rise to the myth as we know it today.
Another interesting case took place in Istria, in the town of Corridico. It was described by the Italian-origin historian Johann Weichard von Valvasor: in 1672, sixteen years after his death, the peasant Giure Grando "returned at night," haunting his victims in their sleep, knocking on their doors, and causing their deaths. "Whenever Giure Grando knocked on a house in Corridico, someone would die a few days later" (link). The story was picked up in the mid-19th century by a German novelist, Johann Joseph von Görres, who turned it into a literary case, embellishing it with gory details. For instance, he described how Grando's body was finally eliminated with the classic stake and decapitation, not without difficulty.
Indeed, the idea of mysterious deaths is not convincing at all. The appearance of those supposed vampires is typical of the emphysematous stage of decomposition: the blood in their mouths was a result of the putrefaction of organs, not a conscious desire to feed on blood. Similarly, the characteristic detachment of skin and nails is typical of post-mortem epidermolysis. If anything, it is their behavior in life that may have aroused suspicion, and in this regard, there are diseases whose symptoms are incredibly similar to those of vampires.
Let us begin with the illness that most closely resembles vampirism: Porphyria. This is a rare, hereditary disease that prevents the production of heme, an enzyme in hemoglobin, the essential component of blood. Today it is relatively easy to treat with enzyme injections and prevention, but in the past, the disease was completely unknown and would erupt suddenly after years of latency. Symptoms included severe photophobia, reduced healing ability, reddish teeth, and thinning of the lips (which led to prominent gums). Additionally, the consumption of garlic had deleterious if not fatal effects on these individuals, as it exacerbated the symptoms of the disease. Could it be that a person afflicted with Porphyria was mistaken for a vampire?
However, more than this genetic disease, even common rabies can give rise to cases of supposed vampirism. Rabies is caused by a virus contracted through the bite of dogs, foxes, or bats. It is a fatal disease if untreated or neglected and has incredible symptoms: with an incubation period ranging from 10 days to a year, rabies attacks muscles and the central nervous system and in 75% of cases causes uncontrollable aggression, aversion to mirrors, antisocial behavior, hydrophobia, paralysis of the vocal cords, even priapism and spontaneous ejaculations (which could explain the uninhibited sexuality of the undead in popular culture). As you can see, there is the entire list of vampire characteristics, which are thus the cultural elaboration of these unknown diseases, and in the case of rabies, also widespread.
Starting with the first vampire novel written in 1819 by John William Polidori, directly inspired by Byron, up to the literary phenomenon of Dracula in 1897, in which Bram Stoker directly drew inspiration from a real person in the 15th century, the Prince of Wallachia Vlad III, known as Tepes, or the Impaler, but better known by the title Dracula or Draculea, which means "son of the Dragon." The Dragon in question is not Satan as commonly thought, but the honorary title of Knight of the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric order founded in Hungary in the 14th century that honored all defenders of Christianity against the Ottoman invasion.
Beyond Vlad's general ruthlessness, which was common among other princes of the time, there is not much that connects the historical Dracula to the literary one, who appears as a shapeshifter, dandy, seducer in his black coat, and above all a rebel against God afflicted by a curse. A man turned vampire by his choice, in the name of his dead wife Mina, and not due to a disease-epidemic. Here lies the origin of the charming and pleasure-seeking vampire, which has accompanied us to the present day, from Anne Rice's books to the Twilight saga, and numerous other titles.
However, there is a detail that doesn't add up and warrants investigation. In the three cases of pseudo-vampirism we have discussed, it is to be ruled out entirely that the three unfortunate bodies were those of blood-sucking vampires. There is a possibility that the three men were in some way psychic vampires. This concept originated with Spiritualism in France and is based on the idea of the incubus: that the true vampire is not a corporeal being, but a soul or astral body capable of absorbing the vital energies of people and leading them to death without physical contact.
If we return to the cases in Serbia, it is noteworthy that the accusation against the deceased was that they had returned to haunt the villagers, causing apparently sudden and inexplicable deaths. The same argument can be made, though the fear of cultural contamination is strong, for the case of Giure Grando, accused of the same crime 16 years after his death. Is it possible that the souls of these individuals visited their fellow villagers to exact revenge for old, unpunished wrongs?
Mesmer, the famous spiritualist, asserted that some people behave like true energy sponges, draining us of all vital energy when we spend time with them, as if they feed on it. Indeed, everyone's life experience is dotted with these strange characters who, at the end of an evening, for instance, leave us completely devoid of mental energy. As usual, the answer to this question cannot be given. Science does not conceive that social exchanges of mental energy exist among people, and thus there cannot be predators of this type. But common sense and logic lead us to think that beings with this nature could exist, perhaps, but it is not certain, even capable of killing from a distance and years after their death. If this were true, then the battle against vampires might just be beginning.
