Why is everyone so obsessed with vampires? We have no idea, but fangs for asking!
VAMPIRE STORIES have been around for thousands of years. An ancient Babylonian and Assyrian myth from around 4,000 B.C. describes an ekimmu (or edimmu). What’s that? It’s a person who did not receive a proper burial or died a violent death. Instead of remaining dead, an ekimmu returns to suck the life out of a living human. Here are a few more bits of vampire lore from human history.
• During the 16th century (1500s), gravediggers checked to make sure corpses had not chewed on their burial shrouds. Why? It was a sure sign of vampirism. If such a sign was seen, the gravedigger would shove a rock or brick into the corpse’s mouth to keep it from feeding on other dead bodies and rising from the grave. In 2006, scientists found the skull of a female “vampire” near Venice, Italy. A slab of rock had been shoved into her mouth so forcefully it broke her teeth.
• Drinking the ashes of a burned vampire has been said to help those bitten by vampires. But in Russian folklore, vampire attacks could be prevented by eating bread baked with vampire blood.
• Burying corpses facedown was once a popular way to prevent supposed vampires from coming back to life. If they “woke up,” they would dig themselves deeper into the earth instead of clawing their way out. Skeletons thought to be thousands of years old have also been found staked, decapitated, pinned with arrows, and crushed by boulders…all thought to be ways to keep vampires from rising from their graves.
• Garlic is the most traditional way of repelling vampires. It has been used for more than 2,000 years.
• According to a legend from the Balkans, vampires could be born out of fruit that was more than 10 days old (or fruit not eaten by Christmas).
• Vampire hunters in Romania and Hungary had a strange way of finding them. They would lead a horse through a graveyard. If the horse refused to step over a grave, a vampire rested inside the grave.
• Nineteenth-century Transylvanian midwives knew how to stop the dead from turning into vampires. They drove nails into a corpse’s forehead before burial or cut off its head and stuffed its mouth with garlic.
• Count Von Count from Sesame Street comes by his love of counting honestly. Folklore says vampires love counting. And if they’re tricked into counting a lot of something—say, seeds or grains of sand—they will forget all about drinking your blood.