The vampire who visits me every night!
Question
Do Vampires really exist?!
The short answer is: No, they don't. But but but... then?!?
Vampire Bats
Of course, you have vampire bats (Phyllostomidae). These nice animals
eat red fruits and look like our common description of a vampire:
they have blood around their mouth which bear pretty long canines,
hence, their name.
Ooops! Wrong bat. Okay! Vampire bats really drink the blood of other
animals, two spicies drink birds' blood and the main and most abundant
species (Desmodus rotundus) likes mammalian blood (cattle,
not human).
These bats are found in Central and South America.
For more useful information about vampire bats, read this page:
http://www.batconservation.org/content/meetourbats/vampire.htm
Hmmm... Didn't vampires exit way before vampire bats? Well,
not really since vampire bats have existed for 6 to 8 million
years. However, Europeans found vampire bats only when they
discovered the Americas. Thus, we named the bats after the
belief of the vampires and not the other way around. When Bram
Stoker wrote his novel Dracula (1897), he incorporated
the vampire bats in his story and since then human vampires
can transform to bats.
European Origins
From writings, we can trace the origin of the vampires believes to
circa 1000 in Russia. The word 'vampire' seems to come from the
Slavic word vampir or vampyr which themselves seem
to come from the Russian word upir. There seems to be older
writings also referencing vampire like creatures.
In the dark ages, some people would be buried alive (not like that
doesn't happen anymore today...) This would happen because their
heart would stop or rather slow down to a crawl long enough for
others to think that they were dead. There are different diseases
which generate that state. And at the time, when someone died, you
were most likely going to burry him or her very quickly. Especially
in the middle ages when you had no way to know why a person really
died... and it was known that dead people could kill you too.
(mainly by transmitting diseases). So we were just a lot faster to
burry our deads in order to be safe.
|