Most modern portrayals of the vampire would have you believe that they are little more than slightly pale, hipster-haired sex fiends who just really want to make out with misunderstood teenage girls. But that’s certainly not how the original folklore depicted them and, thanks to a few new archeological finds, we might be able to (God forgive me,) shed a little light on the reasons why.

The old-timey vampire couldn’t have been further from the pseudo-goth nancy-boys of today. Ancient  folklore depicted vampires as bloated, discolored, blotchy-skinned, stinking animated corpses covered in rotting death shrouds. But then, if we kept with that story, what would our pre-teen girls masturbate to when they outgrew boy bands?
 

 
This modern fantasy – the gaunt, pale,  noble vampire heartthrob – didn’t become popular until much later, when The Vampyre, a novel written by John Polidori, was published in the 19th century. This work established much of the current vampire mythos, including all of the Romantic affectations, the seductive associations, and their ritualistic origins.But before that time, the origin of the vampire varied greatly, with different cultures believing them to be anything from the angry spirits of evil men, to regretful suicides, to the Chinese belief that a dead body jumped over by a dog would arise as the living dead. But then, the phrase “similar to a vampire” should be taken with a grain of salt as well. What people thought constituted a ‘vampire,’ varied even greater than what they thought spawned them.

The Bulgarians, for example, believed vampires only had one nostril, while the Moravian vampires were all nudists. Albanian vampires wore high-heeled shoes exclusively, and Mexican vampires had skulls in place of heads. Brazilian vampires had furry feet like hobbits, and early American vampires were thought to suck blood from their victims’ ears using their vampiric noses. There were common traits across all cultures, however. Red hair was often thought to be a sign of vampirism, as well as the ability to sleep with one eye open. All Southeastern Asian vampires shared a bizarre kind of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in common: They could be stopped by spilling bags of rice, sand, or seeds in front of them, because they’d have to count every single particle before they could move on.

But more importantly, the common traits of bloating flesh, ceaselessly staring eyes, sharp teeth and fingernails were all cornerstones of these tales. And we’re recently discovered a reason for that.

A Venetian archaeological find in back in 2006 turned up an ancient plague pit, (a mass grave for disease victims,) wherein a woman was buried with a brick shoved between her teeth, presumably to prevent her from feeding. This intrigued forensic scientists, who then began investigating possible reasons for the ancient gravediggers to suspect this particular corpse amongst the dozens present. They found that the brick was placed in this specific woman’s mouth several years after she was buried, when a resurgence of plague hit the area. The gravediggers, faced with an influx of new bodies, began exhuming older, pre-existing mass graves to inter the fresh ones.

When they came across a body that seemed much more well-preserved than the others, but still bloated due to the decomposition process, they assumed this was a sign of a fresh feeding. And since seemingly fresh blood was seeping from the face, and a hole was eaten through the burial shroud – as though she’d been chewing it – you can start to see why they were unsettled. So they assumed it was a vampire, and teenagers suddenly had one more way to express their parental angst.

But the bloating they saw was actually little more than the post-mortem build up of gases in the body, and the blood is really a slurry of bodily fluids pushed up through the mouth by decomposing organs. After death, the body also loses fluids and skin, gums, and facial features begin to contort and shrink, which explains the illusion of the sharp teeth and long nails, Finally, the burial shroud was decayed about the mouth due to the higher presence of bacteria there, especially after death. As for the unnerving, ceaseless stare? Well, all right. That one is just plain vampirism. Feel free to panic and start staking everything that looks a little pekid.

That brings up the subject of killing vampires: It’s easy to see where the holy associations-  like crosses and holy water came from – people still turn to religion to combat perceived evil in modern times. And fire… well, fire burns, doesn’t it?

Got a scary thing? Burn with fire. Problem solved!

But then, where did the practice of wooden staking come from? That just seems so bizarrely specific, and yet it’s also a common theme all across the world. This, again, can be explained by the nature of human decomposition. Penetrating the body at an advanced stage of decay, and with a suitably large instrument, would cause the body to “bleed” and deflate as the internal pressures suddenly expelled the dead fluids inside. As the gases escaped the body, they would also produce a groaning, hissing, screaming noise, which could have either sounded like an unearthly death cry or, in some cases, sound quite similar to flatulence.

So, does it take away a little of the magic knowing that ancient vampires were fat, purple nudists in high heels with hobbit feet, who would fart through their mouths when you killed them?
 

 
As stupid as this may seem – misinterpreting all of these normal, natural stages of death as proof of mythical monsters – it’s not like this was limited to ancient times. In 2005, Romanian villagers were prosecuted for mutilating a corpse, which they explained to the authorities was the body of a relative recently passed. Sickness, ill fortune, and disease plagued the family immediately after their uncle died, and so they assumed it was the evildoing of a dark spirit. Operating under this belief, they dug him up, staked him with a pitchfork, and pulled out his heart. Then, because if something is worth doing, it’s worth insanely overdoing, they also burned the heart and mixed the ashes into some Peppermint Schnappes…which they all drank! Hey, listen: if you’re going to lose a relative, be arrested for human vandalism, and get cursed by a demon, the least you could do is get fucked up on his monsterjuice. When asked why, exactly, they were so convinced their uncle was a vampire, the family cited some familiar reasoning: He was bloated and discolored, yet looked plump and recently fed. His teeth and nails were long, and there was blood about his mouth. When they staked him, he moaned, screamed, and twitched – as though alive. That’s when they knew for sure.

So clearly, while the vampire myth may have evolved so drastically as to be all but unrecognizable from its origins, apparently human stupidity has not. We’re all still falling for the same trick, 500 years later. But we are gettin’ fucked up on vampires now, and that’s a new twist: Nobody from ancient times can say they were taking Dracula shots, can they? I guess humanity has made some progress, after all.
 

Read more from Robert at his own site, I Fight Robots

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