From Bitchspot:
They did an episode on vampires on the latest MonsterQuest and I figured it’s yet another one of those crazy things that on the one hand is superstitious and on the other, you’ve got nutballs who seriously think they are vampires.
One thing that the show does reasonably well is give background on the subject matter and they spend nearly half the show examining the history of vampirism, both in history and popular media and it becomes clear that the modern concept of a vampire is almost entirely a cinematic and literary invention. The real world, although certainly much darker than the vampire on screen, isn’t nearly so supernatural.
Count Vlad Tepes, also referred to as “Dracul” or “Son of the Dragon” was the origin for the name Dracula. He was a bloodthirsty warlord in 15th century Wallachia. While he certainly did murder thousands of Turks by impaling them, there’s no evidence whatsoever that he ever drank blood. Today, he’s considered a national hero for almost singlehandedly repelling the Turk invasion of Romania.
Then there’s Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess in the 16th century who may well be the most prolific serial killer of all time. She was eventually accused of killing more than 600 young girls so she could bathe in their blood and although she was accused of often biting her victims, there is no evidence that she ever drank their blood. She was given house arrest and locked in a room in her castle for the rest of her days.
Finally, we have the case of Mercy Brown, the supposed American vampire who died of tuberculosis in 1892. When other members of her family became ill with the wasting disease, her body was exhumed, the heart burned and the ashes given to her brother Edwin to drink. It didn’t stop his death, also of tuberculosis, later that same year.
None of these cases were actual vampirism, they were superstition built on top of historical events, crafted by Bram Stoker into a literary creation with his novel Dracula. The modern view of the vampire owes more to writers like Stoker and Ann Rice, as well as films like Dracula and Nosferatu, than anything remotely historical.
That doesn’t stop anyone from pretending they really are a vampire though. The modern-day equivalent go by a lot of different names. Overall, many of them consider themselves to be part of a larger community called the Otherkin. This can include vampires, werewolves, angels, pretty much anything that is not entirely human. The one thing they all have in common is they’re all entirely nuts.
A fixation on being a “vampire” is simply the sign of an unhealthy view of one’s own humanity and a desire to be better than those around you. Some so-called vampires will deny that, of course, they’ll claim that they have a medical condition that requires them to ingest blood. Unfortunately, medical science doesn’t support their claims. Even for real diseases like Porphyria, which at one time were actually treated by drinking a small amount of blood, today they are handled by injectable medicines. In every case where supposed vampires have claimed they have a physical need to drink blood, science has proven conclusively that the need is psychological, not medical.
MonsterQuest tried to actually measure and quantify the two forms of modern vampire. They tested the blood of the butt-ugly lady who said she had to drink blood and found that her blood was completely normal and absolutely human. Then they tested the psycho… um, psychic vampire and found out that there was no signs of energy transference or anything else out of the ordinary. I could have told you that. The people who think they are vampires, like those who think they are werewolves, etc. are all out of their gourds.
Yet the same people who try to tell you that vampires just have a medical condition are the ones who will start talking about the “vampire community” and the “hierarchy among vampires”. I’m sorry, but cancer patients don’t pretend to have a community and a hierarchy and you certainly don’t have cancer patients running around looking like they were in a latex factory that exploded. I can’t say I’ve ever encountered nightclubs for cancer patients where they all gather to undergo chemotherapy, can you?
The real problem is that these so-called vampires are just delusional losers with a blood fetish, but for those who are true believers, for those who are really insane and often dangerously so, they pose a threat to the rest of us. Whether you’re talking about well-known cases like Rod Ferrell, who murdered his girlfriend’s parents in 1998 because he thought he was a 500-year old vampire named Vesago, and Susan Walsh, who vanished and is presumed dead in 1996 while researching vampire cults, or lesser-known cases like the 17-year old in Wales who killed his 90-year old neighbor and drank her blood so he could become immortal, or Manuela Ruda and her husband who killed a 33-year old man in Germany so they could drink his blood. According to Ruda, “We drank blood from living people. I had fangs from animals implanted in my mouth to bite better with. We learned which veins to bite so it wasn’t an artery we drank from. Later I filed down my teeth to razor sharpness. “We slept on graves. One time we dug a grave and slept in that to feel how it was. For the last 21/2 years I have had Satan in my soul.”
These people are just sick.
In the end, MonsterQuest is a pseudo-science show, not in the sense that they show spurious science, but that they try hard to be a science show but never really manage it. To paraphrase their tagline, “MonsterQuest searches for, yet never actually manages to find any, answers.” For all of their obvious hard work on screen, they come away from every single episode with empty hands. They never actually find anything, they never actually verify anything and they never answer any of the questions they propose to answer at the beginning. I guess it’s a good job if you can get it, getting a blank check to travel the world and never having to actually show anything for it. Good job, History Channel.
