Ever since the dawn of human consciousness, when men first stood erect on the savannas of Africa and the steppes of Asia, the creatures of the overworld have exercised a powerful hold on the darker regions of our minds. Ghosts, ghouls, boggarts, werewolves, kelpies, demons, eleves, valkyries, bargeists, and sceadugengan (shadow walkers) have haunted our dreams and our lonely moments. There is none of the overworld exercised such a powerful grip on human subconsciousness as vampres though. Which is why a new item from Italy this week was irresistible.
There are many legends and superstitions concerning vampires and similar creatures all around the world. The blood drinking faction of the undead seem to have been busy all around Europe from the medieval era until the 1930s when they all moved to Hollywood or Pinewood. Most of the superstitions centre on how vampires can be deterred, killed and interred. The way the corpses of supernatural manifestations should be disposed of in order to stop them becoming undead again is of utmost importance.
Some examples of vampire lore are just silly. The belief that garlic will repel a vampire for example ignores the fact that garlic will repel anybody if we are less than assiduous about dental hygiene after eating it. The legend that iron will repel vampires fails in the same way as anybody who has been hit in the face with a shovel or old fashioned frying pan will testify. In some parts of Europe vampires were not very bright and it was simply sufficient to steal one of a suspected vampire's socks in order to ensure the unfortunate ceature spent the rest of eternity looking for the missing item of hosery and never left the grave to trouble local virgins.
In other places putting a coin in the vampire's mouth is believed to do the trick. The vampire swallows the coin when trying to rise from their coffin and their fellow vampires have not yet learned the Heimlich manouvre.
Legends also show vampires to be very anally retentive. For this reason in Germany poppy seds were put in the coffin of a suspected vampire and on revitalising the monster could not resist the urge to count and grade the seeds which kept them busy for along time.
All these methods are proved because people they are used on never acually return to the realm of the living as vampires. What more proof could anybody want.
In Britain and Ireland the coffin of a suspected vampire would be lifted out of the house through a window which was then bricked up as everyone knows vampires can only re-enter a house the same way as they left. In Shropshire when I was young every child knew (because the rustics delighted in telling us) that some old houses had bricked up windows because a vampire had once lived there. It was nothing to do with the pernicious window tax, levied on the number of windows a house had of course. The tax persisted from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It's abolition marked the end of The Dark Ages 
(As an exercise readers can work out which parts of the above paragraph might be true)
One of the most persistent and popular superstitions is that a vampire can only be killed with a steak. This may well be true, but only if the steak is from a restaurant that serves it raw.
Perhaps the most bizarre of all "stop the vampire" techniques came to light earlier this week. It was reported in the news archaeologists excavating a sixteenth century graveyard in Italy opened one of the graves to find the female skeleton had a brick between its teeth. After consulting folklore experts the archaeological team concluded this proved the woman was suspected of being a vampire.
Apparently it did not occur to them that maybe she just liked chewing bricks.
To sae the Plagiarism police flagging me, this post also appears, in a slihghtly different form at my UK blog page Boggart Blog - post title Vampire's grave opened.
See more posts with a supernatural theme:
Beloved Succubus (gothic horror poem)
The Headless Horseman (horror in the style of The Great William McGonagall)
Attack Of The Killer Trousers (sheer comic silliness)
A smack in the mouth for sceptics (not everything has a rational explanation)
Did you see that (Cryptozoology)
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Comments: 17
What is a poppy sed? Teehee I was making fun of your typo.
No problem. I added that line after running the spellchecker and then going to get my folklore encyclopedia to look up a few oddball beliefs. Of course now you have commented on it I can't correct it without spoiling the joke. ;)
Fangs for the comment
Do you know how Vald came by his nickname The Impaler? It relates to his favourite way of executing people. Gather is a bit too tame these days for me to go into detail though.
Vampire leg ends (from amputee vampires) are older than Vlad though but the term vampire is quite modern.
I'm related to Heathcliffe (a dark man) as somebody commented at Boggart Blog the other day (my picture here makes me look fatter than I am).Strangely my "special nurse" when I was in hospital for many months commented on this resemblance too. She lives at Top Withins which was the lifelocation that inspired Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. And my friend's name........
Kathy of course.
Having said that I enjoyed reading this if only for the examples of some of the folk legends of the past.
I do agree that Vladd came by his name "The Impaler" uh, honestly ?
In the north of England "Are you chewing a brick" was the stanard question to anyone acting so aggressively they obviously were looking for a fight. Someone asking that question indicated they were ready to oblige.
I live the gothic horrprs too, but often, as with the the vampire legends, the origins are even darker and more interesting as in this the famous painting The Incubus by Henry Fuseli. Whereas all gothic vampires have a good tailor and Dracula in particular has a penchant for opera cloaks lined in red satin the little guy in the picture has never bothered to even visit a cut price clothing store.
What the picture does symbolise though could be a medieval understanding of depression or melancholoy as it was known until Dr. Freud came along. The alusion could be extended to any kind of psychological disorder of course.
Thank you for posting to this group whose only purpose is to thank you for posting to this group.
That sound like a story I would love to hear.