140 Unknown Facts About Vampire

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Vampires are imaginary creatures that survive by eating the life-essences of living beings, usually by drinking their blood. Although typically described as dead but supernaturally animated creatures, some obsolete traditions believed that vampires (blood suckers) were living people.

Unknown Facts About Vampire

Vampires survive on blood.
Vampires do not have a reflection.
A group of Vampires is called a brood.
Rabies has been connected with vampire fables.
Garlic protects us from the attack of Vampires.
Count Dracula is one of the most well-known Vampires.
In medieval times, Redheads were regarded as Vampires.
Bavarian vampires are said to sleep with the left eye open
A vampire can turn into a bat, rat, owl, moth, fox, or wolf.
People are turned into vampires by being bitten by a Vampire.
The most famous vampire of all time is Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Vampires can be killed by the use of a wooden stake through the heart.
Sometimes Vampires can be hybrids (a half vampire – half human being).
One of the most famous “true vampires” was Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
A vampire costume is the second most popular adult fancy dress costume.
The ancient Greeks supposed that Gingers turn into Vampires when they die.
In the Oxford Dictionary, the word Vampire makes its first presence in 1734.
Vampires actually date back to the ancient Babylonians and the year 4000 BC.
The oldest known vampire legends come from Babylonian and Sumerian mythology.
“Porphyria” is a kind of disease that many people called it as Vampire Disease.
Chinese vampires were called a Ch’iang Shih and had red eyes and crooked claws.

Interesting Facts About Vampire Bats

Few people think the name “Vampire” is derived from the Hungarian word “Vampir”.
All European vampires are said to have an hypnotic gaze that draw in their victims
There are few truly vampiric animals, including leeches, lampreys and vampire bats.
The name “Vampire” comes from the Albanian Dhampir which means “to drink with teeth”.
A group a vampires has variously been called a clutch, brood, coven, pack, or a clan.
There are some other creatures that can go up and fight vampires like wolves and demons.
Vampires have super strength and often have a hypnotic, sensual effect on their victims.
Popular tradition states that vampires can shape-shift into wolves, bats or clouds of mist.
Female demons called the Lilu were said to hunt women and children at night and their blood.
Dolmen, an ancient rock tombstone, played a very important role in the theory of the Vampire.
Porphyria said to not only have affected King George III, but also latterly Princess Margaret.
Vlad Dracul’s bloodthirsty reputation inspired Bram Stoker to write his famous novel “Dracula”.
The first vampire traced to Greek mythology in the story of a young Italian man named Ambrogio.
Some people believe that Cain was the first vampire, cursed by God for slaying his brother Abel.
To prevent an Vampire attack, a person should make bread with the blood of a vampire and eat it.
Vlad of Walachia had a bad habit of killing the people by skinning them alive and eating the victim.

Facts About Vampire Diaries

victims – totally dispelling the idea that vampires are sensual & romantic (as if they ever could be)!
Mermaids can also be vampires—but instead of sucking blood, they suck out the breath of their victims.
There is a myth that the word Vampire derives from the Turkish word Upyr, upper or upior which means witch.
According to a Romanian legend, if you want to find a Vampire you’ll need a 7-year-old boy and a white horse.
The Ghanan Asasabonsam vampire has iron teeth and hooks for feet which they drop from treetops onto unsuspecting
A vampire supposedly has control over the animal world and can turn into a bat, rat, owl, moth, fox, or wolf.
Bela Lugosi, famous for portraying Count Dracula, was buried in his full Dracula costume, including the cape.
One of the earliest accounts of vampires is found in an ancient Sumerian and Babylonian myth dating to 4,000 B.C.
Probably the most famous vampire of all time, Count Dracula, quoted Deuteronomy 12:23: “The blood is the life.”
Some historians argue that Prince Charles is a direct descendant of the Vlad the Impaler, the son of Vlad Dracula.
When a suspected vampire dies, the body is dug up and a stake is driven through its heart to make sure it stays dead.
Romanians believed that Saturdays were the best day of the week to tackle a vampire as they lay powerless in their grave.
The other traditional methods of killing vampires include decapitation and stuffing the severed head’s mouth with a brick.
Vampire bats have small and extremely sharp teeth which are capable of piercing an animal’s skin without them even noticing.
Vlad III Tepes was also known as Vlad Dracul for his incredible cruelty, allegedly killing over 30,000 people at one one time!
It's almost as if we each have a vampire inside us. Controlling that beast, that dark side, is what fascinates me.- Sheryl Lee

Facts About Vampire Power Consumption

After the advent of Christianity, methods of repelling vampires began to include holy water, crucifixes, and Eucharist wafers.
Vampire’s habits include being very pale, being super hot, sleeping during the day, not eating food and remaining young-looking forever.
Certain regions in the Balkans believed that fruit, such as pumpkins or watermelons, would become vampires if they were left out longer than 10 days.
Not all vampires were thought to physically leave their grave. In northern Germany, the Nachzehrer stayed in the ground, chewing on their burial shrouds.
In folklore, the vampire’s first victim would often be his wife. This is why, in some cultures, when a husband died, the wife would change her appearance.
During the vampire panic in New England, vampires were finding a new role in European books like The Vampyre (1819), Carmilla (1871-72), and Dracula (1897).
The most popular vampire in children’s fiction in recent years had been Bunnicula, the cute little rabbit that lives a happy existence as a vegetarian vampire.
In 2013, archaeologists in Bulgaria found two skeletons with iron rods through their chests; according to an article in Archaeology magazine, the pair are believed to have been accused vampires.
Prehistoric stone monuments called “dolmens” have been found over the graves of the dead in northwest Europe. Anthropologists speculate they have been placed over graves to keep vampires from rising.
By the end of the twentieth century, over 300 motion pictures were made about vampires, and over 100 of them featured Dracula. Over 1,000 vampire novels were published, most within the past 25 years.

Unbelievable Facts About Vampire

Usually people turn to stakes, fire and sunlight to kill a vampire but there are many other ways including, beheading, boiling in vinegar, pounding a nail through the navel or scattering birdseed on their tomb.
According to several legends, if someone was bitten by a suspected vampire, he or she should drink the ashes of a burned vampire. To prevent an attack, a person should make bread with the blood of vampire and eat it.
Staking became widely (almost universally) considered the way to kill vampires because it’s the method Bram Stoker decided to adopt for his 1897 novel Dracula, which became the most influential vampire fiction of all time.
Vampires can be out and active during the day. Count Dracula did as much. However there are certain vampires who have a strong reaction to sunlight. Count Orlock was vapourized just walking across in front of a window at dawn.
The first full work of fiction about a vampire in English was John Polidori’s influential The Vampyre, which was published incorrectly under Lord Byron’s name. Polidori (1795-1821) was Byron’s doctor and based his vampire on Byron.
Sunlight being fatal to vampires is also a fictional invention. Vampires are active by night rather than by day in Slavic folklore, but there is no tradition of them bursting into flames, melting, or turning to ashes if exposed to sunlight.
After the advent of Christianity, methods of repelling vampires began to include holy water, crucifixes, and Eucharist wafers. These methods were usually not fatal to the vampire, and their effectiveness depended on the belief of the user.
The legend that vampires must sleep in coffins probably arose from reports of gravediggers and morticians who described corpses suddenly sitting up in their graves or coffins. This eerie phenomenon could be caused by the decomposing process.
In all mythologies, vampires prey on living people (sometimes specifically on women, children, or babies), and in most cases, they drink human blood. They also often eat human body parts. Which body parts depends on which culture is telling the story.

Historical Facts About Vampire

One of the most famous “true vampires” was Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) who was accused of biting the flesh of girls while torturing them and bathing in their blood to retain her youthful beauty. She was by all accounts a very attractive woman.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) remains an enduring influence on vampire mythology and has never gone out of print. Some scholars say it is clearly a Christian allegory; others suggest it contains covert psycho-sexual anxieties reflective of the Victorian era.
Documented medical disorders that people accused of being a vampire may have suffered from include haematodipsia, which is a sexual thirst for blood, and hemeralopia or day blindness. Anemia (“bloodlessness”) was often mistaken for a symptom of a vampire attack.
In some vampire folktales, vampires can marry and move to another city where they take up jobs suitable for vampires, such as butchers, barbers, and tailors. That they become butchers may be based on the analogy that butchers are a descendants of the “sacrificer.”
Recognizable vampire mythology goes back as far as ancient Babylonia and the Sanskrit tales of classical India. There were blood-drinking demons (known as lamiae) in ancient Greece and Rome, in the medieval Islamic world (ghouls and affrits), and in Renaissance Europe.
A rare disease called porphyria (also called the "vampire" or "Dracula" disease) causes vampire-like symptoms, such as an extreme sensitivity to sunlight and sometimes hairiness. In extreme cases, teeth might be stained reddish brown, and eventually the patient may go mad.
In 1718, the Treaty of Passarowitz transferred control of large regions of Eastern Europe from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburg monarchy. A decade later, the Austrian government started hearing for the first time about “vampire epidemics” in its newly-acquired eastern provinces
Unlike the witch crazes which had previously swept across Europe, vampire scares typically focused primarily on accusing the dead of evil behavior. So hunting and slaying vampires mostly involved digging up graves and desecrating corpses, rather than persecuting and killing the living.
Thresholds have historically held significant symbolic value, and a vampire cannot cross a threshold unless invited. The connection between threshold and vampires seems to be a concept of complicity or allowance. Once a commitment is made to allow evil, evil can re-enter at any time.
In Slavic lore (as well as that of various other cultures), vampires are undead, i.e. dead but mobile and active. In some cultures, vampires are instead demons or creatures whose origins are entirely supernatural. And in some cultures, they may be evil spirits that invade a living body.

Mind-Blowing Facts About Vampire

Vampire hysteria and corpse mutilations to “kill” suspected vampires were so pervasive in Europe during the mid-eighteenth century that some rulers created laws to prevent the unearthing of bodies. In some areas, mass hysteria led to public executions of people believed to be vampires.
Chinese vampires were called a ch’iang shih (corpse-hopper) and had red eyes and crooked claws. They were said to have a strong sexual drive that led them to attack women. As they grew stronger, the ch’iang shih gained the ability to fly, grew long white hair, and could also change into a wolf.
Various forms of vampire lore exist in Asia, the Pacific Rim, Africa, Central and South America, and Australia. The Slavic folklore of Eastern Europe is where much of our own culture’s concept of vampires originated. Eastern Europe is also where Max learned to hunt vampires, as is recounted in Vamparazzi.
The Upyr vampire is a vicious vampire that has a human appearance and sleeps at night. It can be destroyed by burning its body however once burnt, the body will burst releasing hundreds of maggots and rats. A vampire slayer will have to kill all these animals too to prevent them returning to exact revenge!
While blood drinking isn’t enough to define a vampire, it is an overwhelming feature. In some cultures, drinking the blood of a victim allowed the drinker to absorb their victim’s strength, take on an animal’s quality, or even make a woman more fecund. The color red is also involved in many vampire rituals.
Stoker originated the concept, still popular in many vampire portrayals today, that a vampire has no reflection in a mirror. This trope doesn’t exist in folklore or in fiction before Dracula. (Max, who certainly never encouraged Stoker to think such nonsense, also denies that Stoker based Dr. Van Helsing on him.)
Although staking vampires to “kill” them was common in some Slavic regions, it was often instead used as a method of immobilization. By driving a stake through the torso of a vampire to pin it to its grave, you could prevent it from rising to hunt and kill. Max employs this technique on a vampire hunt in Vamparazzi.
The Muppet vampire, Count von Count from Sesame Street, is based on actual vampire myth. One way to supposedly deter a vampire is to throw seeds (usually mustard) outside a door or place fishing net outside a window. Vampires are compelled to count the seeds or the holes in the net, delaying them until the sun comes up.
The first vampire movie is supposedly Secrets of House No. 5 in 1912. F.W. Murnau’s silent black-and-white Nosferatu came soon after, in 1922. However, it was Tod Browning’s Dracula—with the erotic, charming, cape- and tuxedo-clad aristocrat played by Bela Lugosi—that became the hallmark of vampire movies and literature.

Important Information About Vampire

The detailed written reports of the Austrian officials investigating the vampire epidemics in Serbia in the 1730s were read and discussed with fascination, and their contents were widely disseminated and repeated. This was how the vampire folklore of Slavic villages started spreading through Western Europe in the 18th century.
In vampire folklore, a vampire initially emerges as a soft blurry shape with no bones. He was “bags of blood” with red, glowing eyes and, instead of a nose, had a sharp snout that he sucked blood with. If he could survive for 40 days, he would then develop bones and a body and become much more dangerous and difficult to kill.
During the rest of the 18th century, vampires started making appearances in German-language poetry, including Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth” (1797). They first became popular in English poetry via Lord Byron’s “The Giaour” (1813) which was both a critical and commercial success. Byron learned about vampires on his Grand Tour of Europe.
One of the earliest accounts of vampires is found in an ancient Sumerian and Babylonian myth dating to 4,000 B.C. which describes ekimmu or edimmu (one who is snatched away). The ekimmu is a type of uruku or utukku (a spirit or demon) who was not buried properly and has returned as a vengeful spirit to suck the life out of the living.
In other regions, decapitation was considered the only truly reliable method of stopping a vampire. People in other areas considered cremation essential to prevent a vampire from rising (or from rising again), while still others believed that a vampire must be disposed of in water. Sometimes the heart of the vampire had to be cut out of its body.
The vampire epidemics of Eastern Europe became so widespread and notorious, and the gruesome anti-vampire activities they inspired were so alarming, by the early 1730s the Austrian Empire sent government officials to investigate. (Translations of the officials’ reports can be found in Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality.)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fany’s gothic 1872 novella about a female vampire, “Carmilla,” is considered the prototype for female and lesbian vampires and greatly influenced Bram Stoker’s own Dracula. In the story, Carmilla is eventually discovered as a vampire and, true to folklore remedies, she is staked in her blood-filled coffin, beheaded, and cremated.
Certain regions in the Balkans believed that fruit, such as pumpkins or watermelons, would become vampires if they were left out longer than 10 days or not consumed by Christmas. Vampire pumpkins or watermelons generally were not feared because they do not have teeth. A drop of blood on a fruit's skin is a sign that it is about to turn into a vampire.
Vampires in European folklore don’t have fangs; this is an invention of fiction and film. Stoker’s influential novel popularized the notion of vampires having protruding teeth (and then Hollywood really ran with the idea), which had previously appeared in some popular 19th century fiction. (Max, who knew Stoker, deplores such irresponsible inaccuracies.)
Here’s an anti-vampire measure that I found in my research and really wanted to use in Vamparazzi, but I never found a good place for it: One of the ways used to ward off vampires at night during the Serbian vampire epidemics of the 18th century was to sleep beneath a cloth that was covered in human excrement. (I’m guessing that kept everyone else away, too…)
Polidori’s Vampyre was a big commercial success, reprinted many times throughout the 19th century. It influenced other portrayals for the rest of the century, including Bram Stoker’s interpretation of the vampire as a shrewd and manipulative aristocrat. In Vamparazzi, actress Esther Diamond is working in a (fictional) modern stage adaptation of Polidori’s tale.

Random Facts About Vampire

That sunlight can kill vampires seems to be a modern invention, perhaps started by the U.S. government to scare superstitious guerrillas in the Philippines in the 1950s. While sunlight can be used by vampires to kill other vampires, as in Ann Rice’s popular novel Interview with a Vampire, other vampires such as Lord Ruthven and Varney were able to walk in daylight.
The best known recent development of vampire mythology is Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel. Buffy is interesting because it contemporizes vampirism in the very real, twentieth-century world of a teenager vampire slayer played by Sarah Michelle Gellar and her “Scooby gang.” It is also notable because the show has led to the creation of “Buffy Studies” in academia.
The vampyre in Polidori’s story is identifiably based on Lord Byron, with whom the young doctor had parted on bad terms. Byron didn’t want to be associated with the story’s authorship and took active steps to correct rumors attributing it to him. Nonetheless, rumors persisted for decades that Byron was the author of this story which has so heavily influenced concepts of the vampire.
The grandfather of modern vampire fiction is The Vampyre, a gothic tale published in 1819. Its author, Dr. John Polidori, adapted it from a fragment written and abandoned by Byron at the Villa Diodati in 1816, where Polidori was employed as Byron’s personal physician, and where Mary Shelley began work on Frankenstein in response to Byron’s suggestion that everyone at the villa write a ghost story.
In 2009, a sixteenth-century female skull with a rock wedged in its mouth was found near the remains of plague victims. It was not unusual during that century to shove a rock or brick in the mouth of a suspected vampire to prevent it from feeding on the bodies of other plague victims or attacking the living. Female vampires were also often blamed for spreading the bubonic plague throughout Europe.
Polidori’s Vampyre was the first narrative fiction in English about vampires, and it originated many concepts still in vogue today, such as its portrayal of the vampire as aristocratic and seductive. In Slavic folklore, by contrast, vampires were ordinary peasants, and they were grotesque, mindless, ravening monsters, like the creatures Max encountered during his days as a vampire hunter in Vamparazzi.
The Twilight book series (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn) by Stephanie Meyers has also become popular with movie-goers. Meyers admits that she did not research vampire mythology. Indeed, her vampires break tradition in several ways. For example, garlic, holy items, and sunlight do not harm them. Some critics praise the book for capturing teenage feelings of sexual tension and alienation.
According to the Egyptian text the Pert em Hru (Egyptian Book of the Dead), if the ka (one of the five parts of the soul) does not receive particular offerings, it ventures out of its tomb as a kha to find nourishment, which may include drinking the blood of the living. In addition, the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet was known to drink blood. The ancient fanged goddess Kaliof India also had a powerful desire for blood.
According to some legends, a vampire may engage in sex with his former wife, which often led to pregnancy. In fact, this belief may have provided a convenient explanation as to why a widow, who was supposed to be celibate, became pregnant. The resulting child was called a gloglave (pl. glog) in Bulgarian or vampirdzii in Turkish. Rather than being ostracized, the child was considered a hero who had powers to slay a vampire.
Many scholars argue the word “vampire” is either from the Hungarian vampir or from the Turkish upior, upper, upyr meaning “witch.” Other scholars argue the term derived from the Greek word “to drink” or from the Greek nosophoros meaning “plague carrier.” It may also derive from the Serbian Bamiiup or the Serbo-Crotian pirati. There are many terms for “vampire” found across cultures, suggesting that vampires are embedded in human consciousness.
Vampire legends may have been based on Vlad of Walachia, also known as Vlad the Impaler (c. 1431-1476). He had a habit of nailing hats to people’s heads, skinning them alive, and impaling them on upright stakes. He also liked to dip bread into the blood of his enemies and eat it. His name, Vlad, means son of the dragon or Dracula, who has been identified as the historical Dracula. Though Vlad the Impaler was murdered in 1476, his tomb is reported empty.
Hollywood and literary vampires typically deviate from folklore vampires. For example, Hollywood vampires are typically pale, aristocratic, very old, need their native soil, are supernaturally beautiful, and usually need to be bitten to become a vampire. In contrast, folklore vampires (before Bram Stoker) are usually peasants, recently dead, initially appear as shapeless “bags of blood,” do not need their native soil, and are often cremated with or without being staked.
Before Christianity, methods of repelling vampires included garlic, hawthorn branches, rowan trees (later used to make crosses), scattering of seeds, fire, decapitation with a gravedigger’s spade, salt (associated with preservation and purity), iron, bells, a rooster’s crow, peppermint, running water, and burying a suspected vampire at a crossroads. It was also not unusual for a corpse to be buried face down so it would dig down the wrong way and become lost in the earth.
While both vampires and zombies generally belong to the “undead,” there are differences between them depending on the mythology from which they emerged. For example, zombies tend to have a lower IQ than vampires, prefer brains and flesh rather than strictly blood, are immune to garlic, most likely have a reflection in the mirror, are based largely in African myth, move more slowly due to rotting muscles, can enter churches, and are not necessarily afraid of fire or sunlight.
Folklore vampires can become vampires not only through a bite, but also if they were once a werewolf, practiced sorcery, were excommunicated, committed suicide, were an illegitimate child of parents who were illegitimate, or were stillborn or died before baptism. In addition, anyone who has eaten the flesh of a sheep killed by a wolf, was a seventh son, was the child of a pregnant woman who was looked upon by a vampire, was a nun who stepped over an unburied body, had teeth when they were born, or had a cat jump on their corpse before being buried could also turn into vampires.
Garlic, a traditional vampire repellent, has been used as a form of protection for over 2,000 years. The ancient Egyptians believed garlic was a gift from God, Roman soldiers thought it gave them courage, sailors believed it protected them from shipwreck, and German miners believed it protected them from evil spirits when they went underground. In several cultures, brides carried garlic under their clothes for protection, and cloves of garlic were used to protect people from a wide range of illnesses. Modern-day scientists found that the oil in garlic, allicin, is a highly effective antibiotic.

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