Forbidden History - Vampires: Fact, Fiction or Folklore?

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

From Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897 to the modern phenomena of Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood, the legend of the vampire lives on. But how real are these mythical creatures? In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we delve into whether any aspects of the vampire myth are based in reality... Cast List: Jamie Theakston: Investigative reporter Deborah Hyde: Editor, The Skeptic Magazine Ross Andrews: Author & Historian Andrew Gough: Writer, presenter and editor of The Heretic Magazine  Richard Felix: A historian and lecturer specialising in local and paranormal history Heather Osborn: Author & Historian Lynn Picknett: Historian and researcher specialising in exposing historical conspiracies. She is also the co-author of several notable works Bozhidar Dimitrov: Director, Sozopol Museum David Farrant: Vampire Hunter Aro Draven: Contemporary Vampire Lia Benninghof: Contemporary Vampire Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. According to legend, a vampire is a mythical being who subsists by feeding on the blood of living creatures. They're the stuff of nightmares, prowling through the night and digging their bangs into the necks of their victims. But do they have a historical origin? and do they, as some claim, still exist today?

We explore the folklore and the myths to reveal what sort of creature that history has spawned in the modern era. In a nutshell, a vampire is a man or woman who has died but exists in the afterlife by feeding on the blood of living creatures. In recent times, there have been numerous exhumations of vampire burials.

Some of them beheaded with the heads placed between the knees, others with wooden stakes driven through the heart. There are thousands of them all over the world. Mostly people who have watched interview with a vampire, True Blood or read some Twilight book, and that's what they want to be. There are people who role play, and there are people who play for real. According to modern folklore,

a vampire is an undead being who rises, from the grave and feeds on the blood of living creatures. Typically, they were said to wear shrouds, and were often described as having a gaunt, pale face, and of course, a sharp pair of fang teeth. And killing them? Well, that was quite a performance. According to legend, the best way to kill a vampire

is to go in its coffin during the day, of course, when it's helpless because of the light, put a stake through its heart, or cut its head off. and or pin it to the coffin, break its legs, nail them to the coffin. So come nighttime, it can't move. It's imprisoned. Traditionally, they belong to Eastern Europe. In Britain, there are one or two rather pathetic little outbreaks

that turn out to be nothing of the sort. In Eastern Europe, the idea that the dead can rise from their graves and suck blood from the living is... kind of imprinted in the DNA of the people there. In certainly in rural areas, in Poland, for example, Czechoslovakia, Romania, people totally believe that there are such things as vampires, and they take steps to prevent them from wreaking havoc in the villagers. It's Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula,

which is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel, and which provided the basis of the modern vampire legend. The success of this book spawned a vampire craze still popular today, with books, films, and television shows, all dedicated to the fanged phenomena. Vampires, real or not, are big business. Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, completely changed the game, taking away the Eastern European undead,

putrified, zombie-type figure that rose from the grave to something far more romantic, count with a cape and fangs, and completely changed the thing, and sold millions of novels and plays and films. Bram Stoker's book, Dracula, was huge. I mean, this is where the party starts. And it's because he has the knowledge

of all the folk tale that's gone before him, Vlad the Impaler, all the other sort of myths and legends about vampires. But what he does is really special. He makes them sophisticated and quite sexy and just a bit daunting. The reason why people thought Vlad the Impailer was a vampire is that his family gets inducted to the Order of the Dragon.

So he's a 15th century sort of noble family man, and he is given the title of Dracula, which morphs into his son's title of son of Dracula and son of Dracula. And this is where the legend of Dracula is truly born. Throughout folklore, vampires are infamous for drinking the blood of their victims, often women. And back in the Middle Ages in Europe, people, were simply terrified of them. But according to legend, there were certain things that were able to ward off vampires. Garling is one example, but also sacred items, like a crucifix, a rosary, or holy water.

Also, according to the lore, vampires are said to be unable to walk on consecrated ground, such as churches or temples, or cross-running water. Journalist Jamie Fexton is on the hunt to get to the roots of the history and the folklore and has arranged to meet Deborah Hyde, an expert on the vampire phenomena. Deborah, what are the origins of the vampire legend? Well, they seem to be a southern and eastern European folklore construct from at least the 9th century, possibly further back than that.

And it continued to exist all through medieval times and even into modern times. Really we see vampire legends where there's a combination of epidemic death and where people misunderstand the normal processes of decomposition. And when you say people misunderstand the process of decomposition, what do you mean by that? We understand that when people die, that they eventually decompose, but it's not a uniform or an easy process to predict. And things like the pH of the soil, the temperature of the environment, how deep you manage to bury a body, what somebody died of, all of these kinds of things end up playing into

whether they actually decomposed at a particularly predictable way. The legend of empire starts in Eastern Europe in sort of medieval times. And it starts because people totally misread and misunderstand what happens to a body when it decomposes after death. You know, it sits upright. Blood is churned up through the esophagus out of the mouth. And it looks as though these bodies are still alive in the coffin. But in reality, it's just the natural process of dying and decomposing. And they found bodies with steak,

driven through their hearts in Eastern Europe, haven't they? They have. It was a perfectly respectable way of getting rid of a vampire to stake them either through their heart or their navel, any part of their body. And we might think that this is a very metaphorical kind of a thing, but it's actually just a very large pin. If you had a body that wasn't buried sufficiently deeply, predators were getting at it, perhaps it was bloating and moving around in the grave, then you could keep it physically where it was by staking it to the ground. Conversely, it's not just the decomposition, It's the preservation of the bodies.

Imagine if you bury your mother in midwinter in a shallow grave, then someone goes in digging because they want the clothes, the jewelry, and they see she's perfectly preserved. So hence, the legend of the undead is born. So this is what gave birth to the whole vampire legend that we know of today, right? Yes, yes, it is. And there's all sorts of things that you could do to actually make sure that that kind of half-dead, half-spiritual, half-alive being was depotentiate.

You could stake it, you could burn it to ashes and drink the ashes, you could decapitate it. They're all very kind of mechanical measures that would be taken. So the killing of a vampire, driving the stake through the heart, that is actually based on medieval evidence? Traditional vampires, yes, would be staked into their graves, either through the naval or the heart. And then in romantic literature, they went very much for the heart because it was more symbolic, it was more symbolic. it was more flamboyant. Staking a body through its chest to the ground was a common, if superstitious, practice

to stop a corpse rising from its grave, particularly in Eastern European cultures. But it was also common practice to bury sharp objects alongside the body, such as sickles, so that they would penetrate the skin if the body tried to leave the burial. This practice slowly became associated

with the killing of the undead, especially vampires. In recent years, many so-called vampire burials have been discovered in Bulgaria. Vampires seem to have originated in Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th century. People in those days misunderstood dead bodies, putrefaction, the fact that it was very cold in those countries,

and people couldn't bury people very deep. They'd come back three weeks. weeks later to find mother, a child dug up, dragged out of the grave, half eaten, blood all over them, and the rumours started to spread. In 2014, a so-called vampire burial was unearthed near Ravadinovo Castle in Sosopal in Bulgaria, where the skeleton had had a piece of metal driven through its torso. According to the experts, the skeleton belonged to a man aged. between 40 and 50 and dated back to the early 13th century.

So far, over a hundred of these so-called vampire burials have been discovered in this country. In recent times, there have been numerous exhumations of what are known as vampire burials in Eastern Europe. They've found bodies, some of them beheaded with the heads placed between the knees, others with wooden stakes driven through the heart, stones, huge stones, sometimes in the mouth, and large stones actually sometimes placed on the face, which they believe to be the bodies of vampires, because the whole idea is, of course, to keep them in the grave and not let them rise for the grave. Well, approximately the last five years, there have been about 500,000.

burials found of these supposed vampires. But really what it goes to show is that the dating of these vampire skeletons is that it goes from the 1100s all the way through the 19th century. And it demonstrates a whole fear culture about vampires. Not that vampires actually existed, but that people have been afraid of vampires for a very long time. Vampires are said to be undead creatures who exist on the blood of the living. There were reports of them preying on victims across

Europe for centuries, and they were made famous by authors like Bram Stoker, and more recently in comic books and films. But is there any truth to the stories? In Bulgaria, they have discovered what are claimed to be a number of vampire burials, skeletons that were either impaled with wooden stakes through their chests, or decapitated because they were feared to be undead. So far, literally hundreds of these bodies have been discovered all over the country. Unusually, rather than the traditional wooden stakes through their hearts, the corpses here were buried with plows, sickles and farming tools embedded in their torsos. In 2009, museum director Bahadar Dimitrova revealed one of the suspected vampire corpses to the world.

Archaeologists dug up these moneyed bloodsuckers whilst excavating a monastery near the Black Sea. As in Sosopal, we unearthed 700 Christian graves and found only two traces of anti-vampire manipulation. The alleged vampire skeleton is on display on the first floor of the museum, and Dimitrova agreed to explain all about the discovery. Why do you believe this to be a vampire? I am scientist, I am rational, so I don't believe. But the Bulgarians believe that people were either good or bad.

These Bulgarians believe that if you're good, you go up to heaven. And if you are not good, you remain here on earth. Some people believe that the bad people at midnight rise from their graves and go to certain places to drink blood from people and animals. The only way to stop this was for the young people to go to the graves on the third or the fourth day after the death, then stab the body with an iron piece of an agricultural tool. In fact, there have been hundreds of so-called vampire corpses dug up across Hungary, Romania, and neighboring countries, all with similar metal farm machinery embedded in their skeletons. Do people believe that the vampires exist today?

Yes, to my surprise, people do believe that vampires exist today. Just recently, I watched a documentary from Bulgarian and Romanian border where they discovered the same. same practice in Romania and very recently forensic scientists found that this practice is still continuing in northwest Bulgaria. So they're doing it today, they're driving steaks through people today. Yes, absolutely, yeah. Wow, that's extraordinary. The best is, of course, finding burials where the skeleton has a stake through its chest.

And they actually call these vampire burials. So it's testament to the fact that this wasn't just some light-hearted belief, it was a really important part of their belief system. And they took it quite seriously indeed. And how many vampire graves did they find on this site? Out of the total of 700 graves, only two burials were found from several periods. One of a man and one of a woman built according to Christian practices, and these two were buried in a very different fashion to the others.

It's worth saying that the museum doesn't really believe that this was a burial of a real-life vampire, rather that it was thought of as such many centuries ago by a people who lived in fear, ignorance, and extreme superstition. People were terrified of suicides rising from the grave, and this is really where it came from. Basically, a wooden stake was driven through the heart, and a stone placed on the face to stop them rising. because they knew that the suicide wouldn't be at rest, because they knew that the suicide wouldn't get into heaven and didn't want to go to hell and would rise. There have been hundreds of vampire burials being discovered in Eastern Europe.

I mean, it's obviously the tip of the iceberg. Certainly a few centuries ago, there was what was known as an epidemic of vampires. Whole villages became vampires because their relatives, their relatives had risen up from the grave and in some way infected them because it was thought of as a plague. It was a very real thing, it was a physical thing, and they had to do something about it.

So they would go to the graves and they would prevent their relatives from getting out of the grave and doing it to other people. The vampire graves bring to light the fact that the belief in the existence of vampires was dead serious. Today it's fiction, we enjoy a good vampire movie

Every year we get a new one. We think they're funny. We think they're sexy. We think they're romantic. But these were real. These were things that people feared. And these vampire graves service testament to that. According to legend, to kill a vampire,

you have to either shoot them using silver bullets, drive a wooden stake in their heart, or cut off their head, all of which form part of a vampire killing kit at a museum in England, and the astonishing story of the Romanian corpse, who was staked for, through the heart in his grave because his family thought he was a vampire.

If people do happen to encounter a vampire, there are only two ways of killing it. Number one, cut off its head. Number two, ram a wooden or a metal steak right through its heart. End of story, job done. Going back 200 years, when people did very much believe, in vampires. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that they would have had implements in the home to kill them. Certainly not impossible. Perhaps the biggest thing against it would be the people that believed in this stuff that actually tried to

kill vampires did it with found objects. They did it with stakes, spades, sides, that kind of thing, which is why they don't survive. What's curious is that more and more so-called vampire corpses are being unearthed around the world. In Romania in February 2004, several relatives of a local farmer, Toma Petri, feared that he had become a vampire. They dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it. He had died. His family thought that he may be acting in a vampiric way because one of his relatives became ill. So they dug him up, they got his heart, they reduced it to ashes, and they fed the ashes to her. And she did recover, so it worked for them.

And this is only 12 years ago. Yes, I think that these kinds of folkclores still exist all over the place. People still believe in stuff. So the chap dies, they bury him in a grave, and then in the next sort of couple days, family and villagers become ill, particularly the daughter of his brother-in-law, who becomes so concerned that he is, well, obviously coming back from the dead to pray on his family and the villagers,

that he and his five mates go dig him up. They take out his heart, and they burn it at a crossroads, and they pin his legs to the coffin, all the things that you would do to somebody who you thought was a vampire. The only difference is, this is 2003. And guess what? He and his five mates, all six of them,

got six months in prison. This was way, way beyond just some folklorish superstition, because these people were doing things like going down to the graveyard and digging up their own. mother, their own daughter, their own uncle, and hammering a stake through their hearts, cutting them open, cutting their heads off. Totally horrific, but they felt with everything that they were that they had to do this, to save themselves and to save their village.

While traditions might fade, superstitions die really hard, and in Eastern Europe, you know, they're as real today as they ever were, and that case is a great example. This is not ignorance. This is people believe in what their grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents before them believed. As far as their concern, it's reality. In the 1970s, a story hit the headlines in England that there was a vampire roaming around at night in Highgate Cemetery in London. Amid tales of blood sacrifices, weird rituals, and people being attacked, the press had a field day. But what was really going on? Highgate vampire stories are really the ultimate British B movie.

You have mob exorcism going on. You have someone running around claiming that he's chasing vampires. You have British boppies running all over the place, hunting for vampires and ghosts in the night. Really, it's kind of a crazy mob scene, isn't it? A group of ghost hunters in the 1960s, early 70s were ghost hunting in Highgate's. Cemetery. It was pretty derelict by this time. And one of them spent the night there and believes that he saw a ghost, the figure dressed in a cape wandering through Highgate Cemetery.

It all starts in sort of the 1960s when the Satanists are doing rituals in the tombs, in the cemetery in Highgate. And what they find is that on the walls of the tombs are images of an entity they're trying to manifest, and people who have analyzed this have been led to believe that if manifested, this entity would stay. On Halloween, whether it's the same group or another group, actually broke into the cemetery, dug up a recent grave, spread flowers in circles in the graveyard, and hammered a metal steak through the coffin lid and through the heart of the person in the grave. vampire hunters flocked in large numbers to Highgate Cemetery, and one man ended up getting arrested.

His name is David Farrant. Journalist Jamie Thiexton went to meet him. What was it that you saw in Highgate Cemetery that night? Well, I can't tell you except it was a very tall figure, almost as tall as the gate. That is the top gate of Highgate Cemetery. Now, I didn't know if it was floating above the ground, because the bottom of the figure Seemed for disappearance blackness. I could only really see where it was higher

and it was highlighted against the sky. And also the area around myself turned icy cold. Bear in mind it was a bitterly cold night anyway in December. And I got the impression that it seemed to be trying to communicate with me. What was it trying to say to you?

It's not so much trying to say something. It was draining me of energy. It's almost like I felt I was being hypnotist. For sort of falling into a dream, I had no control over. There was quite a press for Rory at the time. I've seen the clippings, and I've seen pictures of you being arrested at that time. Why were you arrested? We were holding a vigil and we cast a circle by the grave of a 17th century pirate.

And the police turned out, admittedly we had a few symbols on the ground, magical symbols, we're trying to communicate with that. And ironically, the police turned up. Just as the church clock was striking midnight, all of a sudden these figures came charging out of the underground. And I was arrested in charge with indecency in a churchyard. David Ferrant, sort of head of the British occult society, had a really important role in the whole high-gauge vampire story.

He's the one who's going into the tombs and uncovering the fact that there were satanic rituals going on there. He's the one who identifies this entity that's trying to be manifested, and he's the one who kind of goes on this journey to find the vampire. Curiously, to this day, there's reports in Swain Lane, which is the road that goes right by Highgate Cemetery, of civilians reporting to the police, seeing a tall man with dark, piercing red eyes, walking across the street and through the wall. Now, they don't nothing about the Highgate Cemetery vampire.

It's sort of a cult subject. Not everyone knows about it, but this gets reported to the police every two or three years. So it's quite curious that there continues to be the sort of spotting of an entity that people associate with the vampire. And is what you saw still there? Yes. It's there, it's been cited very, very recently. Not only actual figure itself, but people have had experiences there by the top gate. There's some sort of energy there.

energy there, which affects mobile phones and effects cameras. Often people have tried to take a picture after having a tour of the cemetery, and the battery is fully charged. It just goes dead. There are loads more people we have on record, and we can't possibly say they were all imagining more or less the same thing. It's been witnessed by many other people. So let's be real.

I mean, the account of the Highgate Vampire, Fantastic, entertaining, enthralling, romantic, sexy, all of that. But is it real? I really doubt it. Curiously, there are self-described vampires still living in the world today, and they're not rampaging through the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe. They live in Slough to the west of London, and their names, Arrow Draven and Leah Benninghoff.

There's vampires everywhere. Vampires can be doctors, nurses, solicitors, bank managers. mechanics, someone working in the local supermarket, your friends, your family. We could be anyone. When I first saw that he was a vampire, it was very interesting. I was like, okay, didn't know there was actually proper real vampires out there. I've always hoped there was. And to finally meet one was actually very interesting to finally get to know what it really is and everything,

what the lifestyles like and everything like that. There is that whole erotic sense of vampirism and drinking each other's blood, that kind of intimate connection to it, but really there's no benefit from it. It basically goes through your body and then it's expelled. There's no actual health benefit to it, and actually it could be dangerous

if you're taking high levels of blood into your system because you could overdose on iron. But in terms of blood transfusions, that's different. I mean, obviously, that's a necessary, medical procedure, there is a benefit to that, but that's a completely separate issue than drinking blood. Leah says that she can remember the exact moment that Arrow turned her into a vampire, and she drank human blood for the first time.

He turned me into a vampire. It had to be at night at 3 a.m. in the morning, the witching hour. And really, it all consisted of he drank my blood, and then I drank his blood. like a sort of a cycle feed. The vampire culture has people we call us donors who are people who willingly allow us to feed from them. So like I say, there are some, I'm sure, out there who would try and take it by force.

But most of us believe in, you know, respecting other people's wishes, other people's bodies. We don't do anything to harm others or, you know, even for whether it's for our own benefit or anything else. Why is it said that vampires drink blood? Blood is identified with life force. If you take something's blood out, it dies. So it's just a metaphor for just taking its life force away.

But isn't it poisonous drinking blood? It's not good for you, right? To actually drink blood, yes, it's not very good for you. The animals that do it are especially adapted for it, vampire bats and so forth. you can get iron poisoning and kidney failure. So if you're going to drink blood, stick to small quantities. There are many people in this day and age

that believe that they are vampires. They become blood brothers, blood sisters. Some of them carry a vial of blood around their neck or their partners' blood around their neck. They drink blood. Some of them, God forbid, make sacrifices of chickens and various things. Dresses in black as garth.

wear false fangs sometimes. They believe it, they love it. There's something marginal in society about the attraction of being Gothic or that whole goth persona, dressing differently, putting on that persona of darkness. And vampire culture kind of goes along with that, doesn't it? Being rebellious, being different. From the reports of vampires roaming through Highgate Cemetery to burials in Bulgaria and real-life blood sites,

in Britain, this culture is well and truly alive. And thanks to Twilight, it's gained a whole new generation of fans. But are any of the stories of vampires true? Or is it all just a Gothic fantasy? And at the end of the day, there's one question that stands out above all others. Just how good is it for you to actually drink someone else's blood? I can categorically tell you that there is absolutely there is absolutely no benefit whatsoever from drinking blood,

either from a chalice or from biting someone in the neck. It goes in one end and out the other. End of story. We're told there's an energy rush in drinking blood. You know, it's a highly taboo thing to do. But in reality, the dangers, i.e. the diseases far outweigh any potential health benefits. The irony is after centuries of the menace of vampires, something hideous coming at you, stinking of the grave, and you're running away because it's pure nightmare.

Now you have all millions of young girls thinking, vampires wonderful, bite me, bite me. To be honest, I think that today people are playing it being vampires. I think they're taking something from myth. They're taking something that's been really current and popular film and trying to live. it out. There are real origins to the superstition about vampires, and the bizarre tampering with corpses and burials many centuries ago has fed into the emergence of the legends we see on television and film. Add to this, the bloodlust of self-proclaimed vampires and those who claim there are predatory blood cults still out there, and you have a very real phenomena today.