The legend of the vampire is one of the most ancient of human horrors, and one that has proved irresistible to novelists, filmmakers, artists, and more. We will take a look at the origins of this myth, particularly in Eastern Europe.
Benjamin Radford quotes writer Matthew Beresford in his article on the origins of the vampire: “There are clear foundations for the vampire in the ancient world, and it is impossible to prove when the myth first arose. There are suggestions that the vampire was born out of sorcery in ancient Egypt, a demon summoned into this world from some other." Some scholars trace it to ancient Greece, but the superstitions especially flourished in the Middle Ages, as the plague ravaged towns and left sufferers with bloody mouth lesions that the uneducated and afraid deemed evidence of vampirism. Paul Barber suggests that "the vampire stories prove to be an ingenious and elaborate folk-hypothesis that seeks to explain otherwise puzzling phenomena associated with death and decomposition."
There were several ways to become a vampire, as scholar Ace Pilkington chronicles: “In the words of… Barber… ‘People who are different, unpopular, or great sinners are apt to return from the dead’… The list of people who might come back as vampires is long and, as we might expect, not based on logic. It includes sorcerers, witches, alcoholics, people of another faith, highwaymen, seventh children, and so on… Another possibility is that ‘a body may become a revenant when an animal jumps over it’… Of course, in folktales as in other forms of vampire fiction, the bite of a vampire works especially well.” Writing for the University of California, Berkeley, Patricia McBroom accounts for just how seriously people took this putative threat: “As far back as the 17th century, Eastern Europeans feared this half-dead figure who rose from the grave swollen with blood to haunt the night…So frightened were people that they stood vigil over the bodies of dead relatives to prevent them from being turned into vampires. This could happen if a cat, horse or other creature stepped over the body. ‘Epidemics’ of vampires would sweep across the land, from Russia to Greece, where the legend thrived, and it was not unusual for vigilante groups to go after graves, stripping open the coffin and impaling the corpse with a hawthorn stake, chopping off the head or burning the entire body… Once they had opened a burial site, peasants knew the corpse was that of a vampire if they found in it ‘a man who has not disintegrated’... and who was ‘fat, swollen and red with blood,’ according to the notes of a 19th century Serb. The peasants would then ‘pierce it with that stake’ the Serb wrote, and throw it on a fire to be burned.’”
Gothic literature of the 18th and 19th century represents the contemporary incarnation of the myth, with numerous poems and novels taking the sanguinary, undead monster as its subject. Notable works include John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871-1872), and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the most famous of the genre. Stoker’s novel established many of the tropes of the myth, such as the elegant aristocrat, the poor breath, and the shape-shifting and hypnotism, but as Eric Michael Johnson notes, “the depiction of the vampire as a savage beast of prey, the infection of new vampires through bites or contaminated blood, their ability to transform into specific animal 'familiars' (especially wolves and bats), and the method of dispatching the undead by murdering them in their coffins while they slept, would all be borrowed directly from Slavic folklore.”
The legend of the vampire now mostly endures in fiction, no longer seen as any real rationale for the vicissitudes of existence, but there is still the occasional example of vampire “sightings” or encounters in Europe.
