Real Vampires Amongst Us

Undead is a collective name for beings that the superstitious believe are deceased yet behave as if alive. Undead may be spiritual, such as ghosts, or corporeal, such as vampires and zombies. Undead are featured in the legends of most cultures and in many works of fantasy and horror fiction. Bram Stoker considered the term "The Un-Dead" for the original title for his novel Dracula (1897), and its use in the novel is mostly responsible for the modern sense of the word. The word does appear in English before Stoker but with the more literal sense of "alive" or "not dead," for which citations can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary. Stoker's use of the term refers only to vampires, and the extension to other types of supernatural beings arose later. Most commonly, it is now taken to refer to supernatural beings which had at one time been alive and continue to display some aspects of life after death, but the usage is highly variable.   By Anthony Capucci Art by Ricardo Pustanio

A convicted hotel bomber from California who modeled himself on a fictional vampire the highgate vampire, notable cases of vampire entities in the modern age, the chupacabra ("goat-sucker") of Puerto Rico and Mexico is said to be a creature that feeds upon the flesh or drinks the blood of domesticated animals, leading some to consider it a kind of vampire. The "chupacabra hysteria" was frequently associated with deep economic and political crises, particularly during the mid-1990s.

In Europe, where much of the vampire folklore originates, the vampire is considered a fictitious being, although many communities still believe the undead walk the earth... In some cases, especially in small localities, vampire superstition is still rampant and sightings or claims of vampire attacks occur frequently. In Romania during February 2004, several relatives of Toma Petre feared that he had become a vampire. They dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it.

 

So you must ask. Does the real Vampire exist today in the form of what old legends tell? Cities in america like New Orleans host many Vampire cults and also host a few vampire tours. Since hurricane Katrina on August 20, 2005 the actual cult has supposedly dwindled to a handful of die hard undead's.

Vampire communities and many practiced Vampyre life stylers exist today in many states and cities and sites about it are frequented on the internet. Also you can find out where to buy your fangs, coffins and get your Blood fix. Any search online can pull up a Vampire Directory, and find many real Vampire Support groups. Their are even sites that will tell you how to perform Safe Bloodletting & Feeding, Tips on dealing with the hunger and cravings, blood substitutes. Cooking with Blood, Various methods of avoiding discomfort from the sun & bright lights. Even how to come out of the casket in the sense of letting friends and family know your a blood sucker. For a thorough examination of traditional vampire folklore, see the works of Montague Summers and Anthony Masters.

Sanguinarius.org for Real Vampires
The foremost real vampire information & resource site on the 'Net -- Established Spring, 1997.
This site, excluding the Teen Vampires section, is intended for mature viewers 17 or older. This web site is dispelling many of the the myths about vampires and other real vampire topics.

Also see: Vampires & Werewolves: Are They Mostly Ghostly or Really Rather Real?

Also: Vampires

Vampirism is the practice of drinking blood from a person or animal. In folklore and popular culture, the term 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 (or flesh) has been used as a tactic of psychological warfare intended to terrorize the enemy, and can be used to reflect various spiritual beliefs.

In zoology and botany, the term vampirism is used in reference to leeches, mosquito's, mistletoe, vampire bats, and other organisms that subsist on the bodily fluids of other hosts.

Tales of the dead craving blood are found in nearly every culture around the world, including some of the most ancient ones. Vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are mentioned in early Babylonian demonology, and the even more ancient bloodsucking Akhkharu in Sumerian mythology. These female demons were said to roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and killing newborn babies and pregnant women. One of the demons, named Lilitu, was later adapted to Jewish demonology as Lilith.

 

Highgate Vampire

Many popular books on ghosts mention a vampire which purportedly haunted Highgate Cemetery in the early 1970s. The growth of its reputation is a fascinating example of modern legend-building, which can be traced through contemporary media reports and subsequent books by two participants, Seán Manchester and David Farrant. The most academic account is given by a folklore scholar, Professor Bill Ellis, in the journal Folklore [1]. He writes from the viewpoint of sociological legend study; this concerns public perceptions of a real or purported event, and how these are shaped into a narrative by processes of rumor, selection, exaggeration, stereotyping etc.

Other narratives which treat these purported happenings as fact are available in the books and web sites of Seán Manchester and David Farrant.

The publicity was initiated by a group of young people interested in the occult who began roaming the overgrown and dilapidated cemetery in the late 1960s, a time when it was being much vandalized by intruders . On 21 December 1969 one of their members, David Farrant, spent the night there, according to his account written in 1991. In a letter to the Hampstead and Highgate Express on 6 February 1970, he wrote that when passing the cemetery on 24 December 1969 he had glimpsed "a grey figure", which he considered to be supernatural, and asked if others had seen anything similar. On the 13th, several people replied, describing a variety of ghosts said to haunt the cemetery or the adjoining Swains Lane. These ghosts were described as a tall man in a hat, a spectral cyclist, a woman in white, a face glaring through the bars of a gate, a figure wading into a pond, a pale gliding form, bells ringing, and voices calling . Hardly two correspondents gave the same story (a common feature in genuine folk traditions about eerie places).

A second local man, Seán Manchester, was just as keen as Farrant to identify and eliminate what he and Farrant believed was a supernatural entity in the cemetery. The Hampstead and Highgate Express reported him on 27 February 1970 as saying that he believed that 'a King Vampire of the Undead', a medieval nobleman who had practiced black magic in medieval Wallachia, had been brought to England in a coffin in the early eighteenth century, by followers who bought a house for him in the West End. He was buried on the site that later became Highgate Cemetery, and Manchester claimed that modern Satanists had roused him. He said the right thing to do would be to stake the vampire's body, and then behead and burn it, but regrettably this would nowadays be illegal. The paper headlined this: 'Does a Wampyr walk in Highgate?'

(Manchester has claimed, however , that the reference to 'a King Vampire from Wallachia' was a journalistic embellishment. Nevertheless, the 1985 edition of his book also speaks of an unnamed nobleman's body brought to Highgate in a coffin from somewhere in Europe.)

In his interview of 27 February, Manchester offered no evidence in support of his theory. The following week, on 6 March, the same paper reported David Farrant as saying he had seen dead foxes in the cemetery, 'and the odd thing was there was no outward sign of how they died.' When told of this, Manchester said it seemed to complement his theory In later writings, both men reported seeing other dead foxes with throat wounds and drained of blood.

Farrant was more hesitant in identifying the phenomenon he had seen. In some interviews he called it simply a ghost or specter, sometimes he agreed that it might be vampirism. It is the 'vampire' label which has stuck.

The Mass Vampire Hunt of March 1970

The ensuing publicity was enhanced by a growing rivalry between Farrant and Manchester, each claiming that he could and would expel or destroy the specter. Manchester declared to his associates that he would hold an 'official' vampire hunt on Friday 13 March -- such Fridays are always ominous dates in British and American superstition (Friday the Thirteenth), and are frequently chosen for items on occult matters in the media. ITV then set up interviews with both Manchester and Farrant, and with others who claimed to have seen supernatural figures in the cemetery. These were broadcast on ITV early on the evening of the 13th; within two hours a mob of 'hunters' from all over London and beyond swarmed over gates and walls into the locked cemetery, despite police efforts to control them.

Manchester's exorcism claims
In later years, Manchester wrote his own account of his doings that night (The Highgate Vampire 1985; 2nd rev. ed. 1991). According to his narrative, he and some companions entered the cemetery, unobserved by the police, via the damaged railings of an adjoining churchyard, and tried to open the door of one particular catacomb to which a psychic sleepwalking girl had previously led him; but try as they might, it would not budge an inch. Failing in this, they climbed down on a rope through an existing hole in its roof, finding empty coffins into which they put garlic, and sprinkling holy water around. .

Some months later, on 1 August 1970 (Lammas Day), the charred and headless remains of a woman's body were found not far from the catacomb. The police suspected that it had been used in black magic. Soon after this incident, there was a noticeable surge in both Farrant's and Manchester's activities. Farrant was found by police in the churchyard beside Highgate Cemetery one night in August, carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake. He was arrested, but when the case came to court it was dismissed .

A few days later Manchester returned to Highgate Cemetery, but in the daytime, when visits are allowed. Again, we must depend on his own published book for an account of his actions, since neither press nor police were present. He claims that this time he and his companions did succeed in forcing open, inch by inch, the heavy and rusty iron doors of a family vault (indicated by his female psychic helper). He lifted the massive lid off one coffin, believing it to have been mysteriously transferred there from the previous catacomb. He was about to drive a stake through the body it contained when a companion persuaded him to desist. Reluctantly, he shut the coffin, put garlic and incense in the vault, and came out from it.

A later chapter of Manchester's book claims that three years afterwards he discovered a vampires corpse (he implies that it was the same one) in the cellar of an empty house in the Highgate/Hornsey area, and staked and burned it.

Manchester's story is full of melodramatic details mirroring the Dracula mythos: the sleepwalking girl; the vampire transported to England in a coffin; a coffined corpse 'gorged and stinking with the life-blood of others', with fangs and burning eyes; his own role as a Van Helsing figure. If he did indeed act as he describes, it can be regarded as a good example of what folklorists (following terminology established by Linda Degh) now call 'ostension' and legend tripping. This means the real-life imitation of elements from a well-known tale, often involving role-playing, and sometimes leading to ritual acts of vandalism and desecration.

There was more publicity about Farrant and Manchester when rumours spread that they would meet in a 'magicians' duel' on Parliament Hill on Friday 13 April 1973, which never came off. Farrant was jailed in 1974 for damaging memorials and interfering with dead remains in Highgate Cemetery -- vandalism and desecration which he insisted had been caused by Satanists, not him. Both episodes kept memories of the Highgate affair vivid. In 1975 Manchester wrote a chapter about it in a book edited by Peter Underwood, a well-known popular writer on ghost lore. The Highgate Vampire is now regularly featured in books and internet sites on occult subjects.

The feud between Manchester and Farrant remains vigorous to this day; each claims to be a competent exorcist and researcher of the paranormal; each pours scorn on the other's alleged expertise. They continue to investigate supernatural phenomena, and have both written and spoken repeatedly about the Highgate events, in every medium available, each stressing his own role to the exclusion of the other.

Seán Manchester, former patron of the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society, claimed[citation needed] also to have discovered a vampire by Robin Hood's Grave on the Kirklees Estate which he visited in 1991. The "vampire nun of Kirklees" was assumed to be the prioress who allegedly had bled Robin to death.

New Orleans and the Vampire Lore

Anne Rice (born Howard Allen O'Brien on October 4, 1941) is a best-selling American author of gothic and, later, religious-themed books. Best known for her Vampire Chronicles, her prevailing thematical focus is on love, death, immortality, existentialism, and the human condition. She was married to poet Stan Rice for 41 years until his death in 2002. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history.

Rice's first book, Interview with the Vampire, in 1973 and published it in 1976. This book would be the first in Rice's popular Vampire Chronicles series, which includes 1985's The Vampire Lestat and 1988's The Queen of the Damned. Rice has also published adult-oriented fiction under the pen name Anne Rampling, and has written explicit sado-masochistic erotica as A.N. Roquelaure.

Her fiction is often described as lush and descriptive, and her characters' sexuality is fluid, often displaying homoerotic feelings towards each other. Rice said that the bisexuality was what she was looking for in her characters; a love beyond gender especially with the Vampire Chronicles because the vampires were not of human society, therefore did not go by the expectations of that society. She also weaves philosophical and historic themes into the dense pattern of her books. To her admirers, Rice's books are among the best in modern popular fiction, possessing those elements that create a lasting presence in the literary canon. To her critics, her novels are baroque, "low-brow pulp" and redundant. A critical analysis of Rice's work can be found in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001).

Noted serial Killers who were related to Vampires because of their deeds.

"The Vampire of London" — John George Haigh, U.K. serial killer

John George Haigh (July 24, 1909 — August 10, 1949), nicknamed the "Acid Bath Murderer", was an English serial killer during the 1940s. He was convicted of the murders of six people, although he claimed to have killed a total of nine, dissolving their bodies in sulphuric acid before forging papers in order to sell their possessions and collect substantial sums of money. He acted under the mistaken belief that police needed a body before they could bring a charge of murder. He was convicted through forensic evidence and executed.

"The Vampire of Dusseldorf" — Peter Kürten, German serial killer

Peter Kürten (May 26, 1883-July 2, 1931) was a German serial killer dubbed The Vampire of Düsseldorf by the contemporary media. He committed a series of sex crimes, assaults and murders against adults and children, most notoriously from February to November 1929 in Düsseldorf.

"The Vampire of Paris" — Nicolas Claux (b.1972), French murderer

Nicolas Claux (born March 22, 1972, in Cameroon) is a convicted French murderer and was a self-proclaimed cannibal. He is sometimes referred to as Nico Claux or even the Vampire of Paris. After his release from prison in 2002, he has been painting portraits of serial killers and depictions of crime scenes and murder victims. He is currently residing in Paris. In 2006, a company in the U.S. began marketing a 2007 calendar showcasing Claux's paintings. Demand was so high that the company is considering a 2008 calendar and a line of posters.

"The Vampire Rapist" — Wayne Boden, Canadian serial killer

Wayne Clifford Boden (c. 1948 - March 27, 2006) was a Canadian serial killer and rapist active from 1968-1971. He earned the nickname "the Vampire Rapist" because he had the penchant of biting the breasts of his victims, a modus operandi that led to his conviction due to forensic odontological evidence, the first such conviction in North America and several years ahead of another serial killer, Ted Bundy.

"Vesago" — Rod Ferrell, U.S. murderer

Rodrick Justin Ferrell (born March 28, 1980) was the leader of a loose-knit gang of teenagers from Murray, Kentucky infamously known as the "Vampire Clan". In 1998 Ferrell pled guilty to the double-slaying of a couple from Eustis, Florida, becoming the youngest person in the United States on Death Row. Ferrell told people that he was a 500-year-old vampire named "Vesago."

The tendency of teenagers to be drawn to this group, and to the charismatic Rod Ferrell is thought to have been helped by the presence of a ruined structure nicknamed "Vampire Hotel" that sat in the hills of the Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area located in southwestern Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee.

Following the murders, the Vampire Hotel was mostly destroyed and the roads leading to it were closed off in an effort to stop its use as a secluded meeting place. Most of what remains is a large foundation, resembling a bunker, that extends out of the steep hillside. Scattered bottles and charred piles of wood serve as indications that visits are still made to the structure, located on the heavily wooded hillside overlooking Kentucky Lake to the west. Graffiti remains as a reminder of the structure's role in history. Skulls, pentagrams, cryptic numbers, and phrases remain, including "Follow me to death", "Deposit dead bodies here", "Those who came to this place fear not even evil", and references to the antichrist can still be found on the approximately 10 foot high portions of the foundation walls that remain exposed.

On November 25, 1996 (the week of Thanksgiving), Naoma Queen and Richard Wendorf were found beaten to death in their Eustis home. While 42-year-old Richard Wendorf was asleep on his couch, Ferrell had entered the home and beaten him multiple times with a crowbar, fracturing both his skull and ribs. When Queen had found Ferrell in the home moments later, he bludgeoned her to death, bashing her head with the crowbar. The victims were found bearing burn marks in the shape of a V. It was said that the V was Rod's symbol which he accompanied with a dot for each person he considered to be in his vampire cult.

The victims were the parents of Heather Wendorf, a long time friend of Rod's who he was helping run away from a home that she described as "hell".

Ferrell and the rest of his clan fled the scene. After four days of driving through four states, the group was found in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It is believed that Ferrell liked a video arcade in New Orleans and they were headed there. One of the girls placed a call to her mother in South Dakota. The group needed money and Remington thought her mother could help them. But Remington's mother informed the police about her whereabouts, and, after negotiations, Ferrell, Wendorf and the rest of the teens agreed to be arrested at a local Howard Johnson's hotel. The four were held at a Baton Rouge jail for a week before being extradited back to Florida where they were initially booked at Lake County jail. They were later moved to a juvenile facility in Ocala.

On February 12, 1998, then-seventeen-year-old Ferrell pled guilty to the murders, claiming that the others travelling with him were innocent except Scott Anderson who was simply an accessory. Anderson was convicted of premeditated first degree murder, sentenced to life in prison, while Charity Keesee and Dana Cooper were convicted of murder in the third degree.

For two years Ferrell held the record as the youngest inmate on death row until September 1999 when the Florida Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life without parole. Ferrell is serving his sentence at the Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida as inmate DC# 124473.

Richard Trenton Chase

 

Richard Trenton Chase (May 23, 1950 – December 26, 1980) was an American serial killer who killed six people in the span of a month in California. He earned the nickname The Vampire of Sacramento due to his drinking of his victims' blood and his cannibalism. He did this as part of a delusion that he needed to prevent Nazis from turning his blood into powder via poison they had planted beneath his soap dish. Please visit here to read more now!