Introduction:
Once Bitten
I remember well my first frightening encounter with the undead creature that is the subject of this book. I could have been no more than seven or eight years old when it first entered our living room one Friday evening during the late-night creature feature film on television. Though my hands were pressed tightly over my eyes in sheer terror, I could still see enough through the slits of my fingers to take in the frightening scene before me. It was a dark and eerie castle standing high in the mountains of Transylvania. Poor, unsuspecting Renfield had just arrived and entered the dilapidated grand hall, which seemed empty of all but spiderwebs and a creepy soundtrack. Then, from the top of a massive stone staircase, a lone figure appeared, bearing a single candle that struggled against the darkness.
Renfield stopped nervously in his tracks as the figure descended towards him one step at a time. Suddenly the music rose to a dramatic crescendo, and the camera panned in on the figure as it halted on a small landing above. The feeble light cast by the candle revealed the pallid skin and slicked-back hair of Bela Lugosi dressed in a tuxedo and cape. The music died as a devilish smile crossed his face, and in a thick Hungarian accent he exclaimed, “I am … Dracula.”
Of course, even by that age the image of the vampire was nothing new to me. I saw his cartoonish face each morning on my box of Count Chocula cereal and in television commercials for everything from toothpaste to used cars, during which he was always taking “a bite out of prices.” At one point the count even helped me practice my numbers, as we counted puppet bats together on the children’s television program Sesame Street, singing out, “ONE, TWO, THREE, AH AH AH AH AH!”
Universal Pictures’ 1931 film version of Dracula, however, changed all of that for me. He was no longer a comic character with a bad accent, but a horrid figure who stalked unsuspecting prey in order to drink their blood, or who lurked about the closets of small children who watched too many horror movies. Needless to say, I was instantly sold, and from that point on a lifelong fascination with the creature developed. It was no surprise, then, that as each Halloween rolled around I donned my best pair of plastic fangs, and with a cape my mother sewed for me and a distinctive widow’s peak penciled onto my forehead, I grabbed my trick-or-treating bag and headed out into the night as Count Dracula. Only, unlike the real vampire portrayed in the movies, I was in search of tasty morsels rather than tasty mortals.
As I grew older, of course, I began to focus on more serious topics, like girls, and the allure of the vampire began to slowly fade along with my childhood. Then one day shortly after college I was confronted by the creature once again in a new and even more startling way, which for the second time in my life transformed my thinking on the topic and inspired my later search for the true origins of the vampire and the writing of this book.
I was traveling through the southern Carpathian Mountains of Romania in the summer of 2001 with a small group of hikers backpacking through Eastern Europe, and after a long day of trekking we wearily stumbled into the village of Zarnesti. Zarnesti is situated at the foothills of the Piatra Craiului National Park, inside the elbow of the mountain range. It is a wild place of deep limestone gorges and dark forests filled with beech and spruce—the hunting grounds of wolf packs and solitary brown bears. After a hearty meal of stuffed cabbage rolls, sauerkraut, and mamaliga (a type of cornmeal mush), we lolled back in our chairs as the sun went down, drinking Ursus, a Romanian beer, and watching the locals trickle in. As foreigners, we immediately attracted attention, and as the night grew on more and more villagers approached our table to hear us talk about life beyond the snow-topped wall of the Carpathians. The beer flowed and the villagers sang their lively folk songs describing what life was once like under Communist rule.
As the night wore on, one of my companions eventually asked if there were any vampires about, laughing at his own question as if to dispel the childishness of it. I guess I expected the villagers to laugh also and exclaim how silly we tourists were with our foolish notions, but instead the table grew quiet as if a heavy weight had settled on its drinkers. One old villager, a sheep herder named Alexandru, who drank more than I thought any one person ever could, suddenly turned serious and, in an expressive mix of Daco-Romanian and broken English, began a most curious tale.
According to Alexandru, in the time of his father’s father there was a woman who had become a vampire and was terrorizing the village livestock with a wasting disease. In response to the attacks, the local populace dug up her corpse, decapitated it, and drove metal spikes into the body before reburying it. The gruesome action seemed to work, and the curse of the vampire was lifted from the village. During the tale there were many grunts and nods of agreement from other locals positioned around the table, yet by the end of the story not a sound could be heard in the inn save the crackling of the fireplace behind us. It was obvious that this was no mere tale the villagers devised to scare passing tourists. One look in their eyes and it was plain enough to see that they truly believed the old shepherd’s account of the facts.
The next day, as we entered the Zarnesti gorge, pushing deeper into the mountains, my thoughts were still occupied with the conversation of the night before. Although it seemed preposterous in this day and age that there were still those who believed the dead could rise from the grave and bring harm to the living, questions began tugging at my mind. Have vampires ever really existed, and if so, how were eyewitness accounts through history different from the pop-culture brand of blood drinker I was raised on?
Certainly the vampire Alexandru described was far removed from the tuxedo-and-cape-wearing creature I was used to, but where did the facts end and the fiction take over? Of even greater consequence, do vampires still exist today? Discovering the answers, I later found, turned out to be a more daunting task than climbing the Carpathian Mountains themselves. It became a hunt that weaved its way through the modern gothic nightclubs of American cities, the desolate burial grounds of Eastern Europe, and dusty library shelves filled with ancient books, on a trail that stretched its way back to the dawn of mankind itself.
Vampires Through the Ages: Lore & Legends of the World’s Most Notorious Blood Drinkers chronicles the story of this deadly creature, shedding light on the legends and beliefs, both ancient and modern, that surround it. It will delve deep into humanity’s primordial fears of death and damnation, and track down the infamous, real-life blood drinkers of the past and the present whose own bloodlust has added to the gruesome framework of the vampire’s tale.
In the process, the book promises to have something for everyone—from the serious scholar in search of the truth, to those living today what we call the modern “vampyre lifestyle,” to anyone just wanting to sink their teeth into a good old-fashioned scary story.
So, for those about to undertake this harrowing journey: remember the words in the dedication of this book, and keep your crucifix close and your stakes well sharpened, but above all else—enjoy the hunt.