Sex, sex, lies, and the promise of great sex, with occasional torture. It’s easy to see why vampires captivate our senses in books and on screen. The only thing more alluring and insane than the vampire fiction our culture is obsessed with, is the history that inspired the stories. People that inspired vampire myths make Edward Cullen look like a pansy and dwarf Eric Northman down to almost mortal status (although probably still very sexy). These diabolic psychos shaped some of the darkest parts of our history. These aren’t the sort of vampires you want to model your Halloween costume after!
Erzsébet Báthory
Madame Bathory is one of the most prolific lady killers in world history. This rich, powerful matron was often left alone while her husband was at war. She was called a vampire because she was said to bathe in the blood of the girls she killed. She would lure young girls into her castle with promises of jobs and etiquette lessons, then torture them. Her torture included biting off their flesh, performing amateur surgery, mutilating their faces, hands and genitals, and basically finding new ways to kill an estimated 650 girls, using their blood as a youth serum.
Vlad The Impaler
Many believe Vlad was the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s original Dracula. He was the prince of Wallachia (1431-1476), a prosperous region. Poor little Vlad was kidnapped and imprisoned at 11-years-old, to ensure his father would pay them annual tribute money. Little Vlad thus grew up with a vengeful hatred of the Turks, he wrote to his cohort: “I have killed men and women, old and young…23,884 Turks and Belgians, without counting those whom we burned alive in their homes or whose heads were not chopped off by our soldiers.” When Vlad wasn’t busy going on mass murder sprees, he enjoyed impaling people on sharpened spikes and dining amongst the decaying bodies, burning, skinning, roasting and boiling people that got in his way. The estimated death toll at his hands is 40,000-100,000.
Arnold Paole/ Peter Plogojowitz
These guys are two murderous peas in a pod. They’re also known as some of the earliest stories that ignited vampire hysteria. Both of them are said to have killed handfuls of people postmortem, feasting on their flesh. The two hooligans also both claimed to have been attacked be vampires and contracted a mysterious 24-hour virus, in which they tended to by bathing in the blood of vampire and eating the dirt from his grave. They incited both villages to go into mass hysteria. In Arnold’s case, and infectious disease specialist concluded that the deaths were a result of malnutrition in the region. In both cases, the villagers weren’t satisfied and dug up the graves, claiming the decomposing zombie corpses still bore lifelike signs, so the bodies were respectively burned at the stake and decapitated.
The “Mad Monk”
Grigori Rasputin is revered as a vampire by some because of his supposed ability to magically heal, lusty trysts, and incredible ability to withstand assassination attempts. He was a religious zealot who was an advisor to the tsarist government, and who loved to drink profusely and sleep around. Even his daughter wrote about his um, manhood in her autobiography. During an assassination attempt, he survived food laced with cyanide, then survived several bullet wounds to the back. His assassins believed the job was over and let him be, only to come back to a very much alive Rasputin whispering “you bad boy” in his ear and strangulating the prince who was trying to kill him. He was the repeatedly shot and bludgeoned, rolled into a rug and thrown into the Neva River. When his body was dug up by the coroner, the cause of his death was revealed to be . . . drowning.
A big thanks to our guest blogger, Dane Stocken, for this article!
