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.