Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #16 - Clinical Vampirism: Are Vampires Real?

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Have you ever heard of "clinical vampirism," more commonly known today as Renfield's Syndrome? One review of psychiatric literature claims that over 50,000 people addicted to drinking blood have appeared in case studies from 1892 to 2010. But does that mean that any of them are actually, at least medically speaking, vampires? For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com

Welcome to another edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and today we will be diving into the mysterious world of psychology, specifically the psychology of vampires or of people acting like vampires. Clinical vampirism, more commonly known as Renfield syndrome, is defined as an obsession with drinking blood most often for sexual satisfaction. One review of psychiatric literature claims that over 50,000 people addicted to drinking blood have appeared in case studies between 1892 and 2010. Clinical vampirism has been observed by psychiatrists and psychologists dating back to the 1800s.

Clearly, and random regular folk have encountered blood drinkers for millennia. But is it actually a valid, clinically defined, treatable medical condition as its name implies? Maybe. Maybe not. Despite how official it sounds, clinical vampirism is not found in any edition of the International Classification of Diseases or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. So good luck using it as a basis for an insanity defense plea in your upcoming trial. While you might truly believe that you are a vampire, your judge will not. Nonetheless, clinical vampirism feels like a real thing, doesn't it?

Clinical vampires have appeared on shows like CSI and Criminal Minds. Clinical vampire case studies have appeared in peer-reviewed psychiatric journals. However, most academics and doctors will argue that it is not a real thing. Not at least in how it sounds. Most will argue it's just part of an ongoing obsession, our ongoing obsession with the figure of the fictional vampire in all of its blood sucking gory. That we only think we see honest to God vampires and people who are actually suffering from way more common and explainable mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Now let's examine the history of the study of human blood suckers and see what you think.

Are any real people kind of real vampires? Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what a vampire is. We've talked about vampires numerous times before in times say. Episode 207, The Vampire of Sacramento, serial killer Richard Chase. Episode 390, The Florida Vampire Murders. Bonus episode 7, Vlad the Impaler Dracula, Man Behind the Vampire. Episode 253, The Dusseldorf Vampire, that wicked son of a bitch Peter Curtain. And vampires have come up in still more episodes. But we've never focused solely on vampirism

as some sort of affliction or condition that you could actually suffer from. An affliction where you believe you actually are the Halloween and horror folklore version of the type of vampire I'd be more likely to talk about on my Scared to Death podcast. The figure of the monstrous vampire is so firmly ingrained in our minds,

our cultural consciousness, that off the top of our heads, all of us can probably think of its primary defining traits. We might think of Dracula, Bram Stoker's OG vampire, with his glinting fangs, long black cape, receding hairline, and overall aristocratic appearance. We might think of the general rules of vampirdom. That vampires can't go out in the sunlight. They're weakened by garlic and crucifixes. That they can't see the reflection in a mirror, but can shapeshift into a bat or dematerialize entirely. They can be killed by too much sunlight or a wooden stake through the heart. And we like to know all of this because the vampire myth has been around since long before any of us were born. Our

We likely know all of this because the vampire myth has been around since long before any of us were born. Our enduring fascination with vampires evolved from beliefs and superstitions dating back to medieval Europe, and those beliefs were based on similar creatures going back to the beginning of recorded civilization. There are the Eight Wrathful Ones, for example, the destructive Dharmapala deities of Tibetan Buddhism. Some are shown in ancient art from the 8th century CE drinking from skulls full of blood. The first pictorial evidence of the vampire might be from an ancient Assyrian bowl from at least as far back as the 7th

century BCE, showing a man copulating with a female vampire-looking creature whose head has been severed. Kinky! The ancient Babylonian, Semite, and Egyptian cultures going back several millennia all have myths and legends involving a dead person that continues to live in its original body and feeds off of the blood of the living. Similar ancient beliefs can be traced to various European, Chinese, Polynesian, African cultures with most referring to demonic female figures who fuse relationships between the living and the dead through sexualized blood rituals. Sounds hot.

Why do all these legends exist? Because vampires are obviously very real monsters and one can kill you tonight! Be careful! You're never safe from monsters. You can only hope to be lucky enough to not end up being tortured and killed by one of these undead bastards. Or these legends exist because cannibalism is pretty fucked up and the leaders of various human civilizations have long told stories to their people trying to teach them to not do that. These legends exist because it's weird and a great way to pick up various diseases if you drink human blood, especially fresh blood. Just like eating truly raw meat is a great way to pick up

diseases, not even necessarily human meat. The Old Testament of the Bible addresses Especially fresh blood. Just like eating truly raw meat is a great way to pick up diseases. Not even necessarily human meat. The Old Testament of the Bible addresses blood sucking as being taboo. Saying in Genesis chapter 9 verses 3 and 4, Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, but you shall not eat flesh with its life. That is, its blood. In other words, don't suck the blood out of living things, you creep, or eat bloody meat. God repeated this council numerous times through Moses. And whatever man of the house of Israel, or of the strangers who dwell among you, who eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. Comes from Leviticus 17 10.

cut him off from among his people. It comes from Leviticus 1710. Get away from our tribe before you get us all infected with some virus or bacteria, you dirty dirtbag dipshit. Significantly, the Bible also connects the practice of ingesting blood with the mystical world of occultism. Moses told the Israelites, as recorded in Leviticus 1926, You shall not eat anything with the blood, nor shall you practice divination or susane.

Foundational to Western culture is the idea that consuming blood is off limits and also evil, connected to the occult, connected to the underworld of the devil and his demons. What most of us think of vampires today, we probably don't think of biblical warnings. We probably think of tall pale beans with dark hair, piercing eyes, dangerous lethal fangs glinting in the moonlight. So where did that image come from? While many cultures have

a vampire-like figure, our modern idea of the vampire comes primarily from medieval Central and Eastern Europe. Countries like Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and of course Romania, home to the region of Transylvania. Muahahahaha! These will be the cultures where we get our modern word vampire from. Such as V-A-M-P-I-R, vampire in Hungarian. Almost the exact same spelling. A prevalent belief in these

areas involved a person who has died leaving his tomb at night to attack his victims, often friends and relatives, to suck their blood to retain his own immortality. Such as belief in Romania in the Stregoi, troubled blood-sucking spirits risen from the grave. Stregoi been written about since at least as early as the 16th century and it's believed that this word evolved from another word used to describe a similar creature going all the way back to Roman times. From creatures like the Strigoi, many of the stereotypical characteristics of the vampire have emerged.

Helplessness in sunlight, a lack of reflection in mirrors, the ability to turn into a bat or mist, and the vampire's victim becoming a vampire themselves once the feeding has ended. Of course, there have always been regional variations in these myths, depending on specific cultural taboos. Other ways to join the undead, depending on local tradition, have been to commit suicide, practice black magic, be cursed by your parents or the church, be a werewolf, magic, be cursed by your parents or the church, be a werewolf, or even be an unlucky corpse in Greece on the way to the cemetery and have a bird or a cat cross in front of the procession. Oh damn it! You're on your way to heaven but now you're a vampire. Fucking stupid cat. In Dalmatia, modern-day Croatia, vampires

were divided into two categories. Innocent and guilty, respectively called Danak and Orko. Some of the prerequisites to becoming a naughty, naughty orko vampire were working on Sunday, smoking on a religious holiday, or incestuous relations with a female ascendant, in particular your grandma. Those three actions should not be in the same category. My god, Luca, you worked on Sunday? What were you thinking? And you smoked on Easter? Oh, you've damned your soul. You might as well go fuck Nana now. To counter the danger of these Nana humping vampires, schemes ranging from the crude to the elaborate were designed to identify potential vampires and to

eliminate them from the world of the living. Tombs were often open to see if the cadaver had moved, if it had warm, rosy cheeks, open eyes, or if its hair and nails were still growing. To be clear, though this sounds like nothing more than silly superstition, there is actually evidence of bodies simply not decaying as they normally do and it's super creepy. According to prolific author and professor of forensic psychology and criminal justice Dr. Catherine Ramsland, construction workers digging in the Chinese city of Nanjing unearthed a corpse that was five centuries old yet still had supple skin and flexible joints. While numerous

Catholic saints have shown similar grace and death. A man whose coffin washed into a Kentucky River in a 1927 flood who looked as if he had been buried the day before, proved to have died 113 years earlier. Even the casket lining and his clothes were perfectly preserved, and he was no saint. In a book titled Dead Reckoning, medical examiner Michael Baden, with decades of experience exhuming corpses, tells of his astonishment when he saw the body of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader who was murdered in 1963. Exhumed three decades later in 1991 to examine the bullet holes, the body shocked everyone in attendance. Baden said, when we opened the casket we were all shocked to find that Medgar Evans looked as though he had died only the day

before. And now back to vampires. There have also been preventative measures taken to identify potential vampires, including the identifying characteristics of an unusual birthmark, an infant born with teeth, red haired and or sometimes blue-eyed children, particularly tall and gaunt people and people with epilepsy. And any of these characteristics in different times and places could have led you to being a very, very unlucky if you were suspected of being a vampire. You could have been exercised, brutally mutilated, or just straight-up murdered.

In Bulgaria, a sorcerer armed with a saint's picture would supposedly drive your vampiric spirit into a bottle and then throw that bottle into a fire. Vampire be gone! Elsewhere, the suspected vampire would be put to death and some of its blood or flesh consumed. If already buried the cadaver would be unearthed and the head severed and placed between the feet. The heart might also be boiled in oil and or dissolved in vinegar. The most popular response however is the one that lasted in vampire mythology until today. To impale the vampire on a wooden stake. A single blow through its heart. And while all of this sounds like misplaced superstition, like backwards people taking strange measures to protect themselves from something as

simple as nail beds receding in a corpse post burial, consider the fact that in early modern Europe there were people who were consummate bloodsuckers. These people were former suck-alums, some of them like Gilles de Rae, the Countess Elizabeth Bathory and the previously mentioned Vlad the Impaler, all of whom were at least accused of having reveled in their own bloodlust. But belief in truly monstrous vampires persisted to the modern era. In 1896, the New York World reported that belief in vampires was alive and well in Rhode Island.

Near Newport, six separate incidents were documented that involved exhuming a recently deceased person, removing the heart and burning it. This generally occurred when several members of the same family appeared to die from a similar wasting disease. People in the area at the time believed that a vampire fed first on those it was close to before then moving on to other people. So it seemed that a family member who died first and became a vampire was now victimizing its own kin. But are vampires only the stuff of myths and legends endlessly recycled into pop culture? Or could they be in some way or

another actually real? As in clinically real? Could you, medically speaking, become a vampire? Is there an actual disorder known as clinical vampirism that compels people to suck blood? Let's look into it. The earliest presentation of clinical vampirism in psychiatric literature was a psychoanalytic interpretation of two cases written by University of Colorado School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry faculty members so many fucking words Dr. Richard L. Vandenberg and John F. Kelly all the way back in 1964. In the

introduction to that paper Vandenberg and Kelly write that clinical vampirism could be a whole lot more common than conventional psychiatric thought dictated. The scientific literature on the subject of vampirism is extremely meager. What references there are, for the most part, treat the subject briefly and superficially. But the authors feel that such behavior and fantasies are more common and important than their relative absence in the literature would suggest. As the authors point out, brief and sporadic reports of blood-drinking behaviors associated with sexual

pleasure have appeared in psychiatric literature at least since 1886 with the work of Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, another dick. Born in 1840, von Kraft-Ebbing got his start working in a mental hospital in Baden, Germany gaining experience in the extensive field of mental illness and neurological disorders. In 1868, Von Kraft Ebing set up his own practice as a neurologist in southwestern Germany. After serving as a field doctor in the Franco-Prussian War, he would go on to pursue an academic career. Inspired by his maternal grandfather, an attorney who was committed to championing the legal rights of those condemned to ostracism by a still very puritanical society, much of

von Kraft-Ebbing's research was focused on something that would seem very familiar to us now. Examining the relationships between psychiatry and criminal law. For example, what constituted an insanity defense? Were there some psychological impulses that were irresistible, truly, and thus affected the criminal's culpability? As you can probably guess, von Kraft Ebing was way ahead of his time. And his book suggested that deviations weren't necessarily reflections of moral defect, but

were issues of serious, debilitating mental illness. Contrary to the pervading, sin-centric view of his time, he argued that homosexuality, for example, had at least some basis in genetics. i.e. you were born gay as opposed to choosing to be gay. An outlawing homosexual behavior would serve no useful societal purpose, but would instead create a harmless and unnecessarily victimized criminal class who would be the victims of blackmail, social ostracism, and professional prejudice in addition to being literally imprisoned or worse. He published his Fundamentals of Criminal Psychology, followed in 1875 by his first major work, Textbook of Forens of forensic psychopathology. But his most

famous work was Psychopathia Sexualis published first in 1886 which for many years will be the standard textbook on sexual pathology. Kind of a handbook for figuring out what kind of filthy fucking perv you might be. Von Kraft-Evian was actually so worried about the book being read for its salacious details rather than its medical content, he published the case studies only in Latin. This is for studying, not for learning new dick and puss tricks, you dirty pervs! Nonetheless, it's rumored that there was a marked increase in sales of Latin dictionaries in Germany and Austria after the publication of Psychopathy of Sexualists.

Hard times for perves back then. Had to know or learn some Latin in order to read about some juicy filth. Psychopathia Sexualis made great advances in the classification and investigation of what we now diagnostically label as sexual dysfunctions. These include some benign things like a lack of sexual drive, failure to become aroused, a failure to reach orgasm in both men and women. Also included all sorts of descriptions of sexual interests we might just classify as kinks now, as well as more extreme disorders if you will, like things like clinical vampirism. Writing about a

patient he calls Verseni, Von Kraft-Ebbing describes lust murder in which quote Violation is omitted and the sadistic crime alone becomes the equivalent of coitus So crazy that that is a real thing. It's come up in so many serial killers We've covered right the paraphilia Where someone literally not only gets an erection from an act of sadism such as cutting or stabbing their terrified victim, but they can actually ejaculate from violent and not typically sexual actions like those alone. Vampires like Bram Stoker's Dracula might not be real, but there are certainly some humans who have indeed been monsters. And I will share some harrowing tales of these all-too-real monsters

right after today's mid-show sponsor break. If you don't want to hear these ads, you can sign up to be a space littered on patreon for five dollars a month and get the entire catalog ad free and more. And just like a vampire, I have reappeared! And now it's time to meet Von Craft Ebbing's disturbing vampiric real-life monster of a patient, a man he called Versenze. Born in 1849, Versenzi apparently suffered from erectile dysfunction, either nearly instantly ejaculating in certain situations or being completely unable to ejaculate entirely in others. He was accused of attempting to strangle his nurse Marianne while she lay sick in her bed

and made a similar attempt on a married woman identified as our Sufi as Well as an attempt on another married woman Identified as gala by strangling her as he kneeled on her abdomen and then unfortunately He will be successful in later murder attempts on a December night in 1870 a 14 year old servant girl named Johanna Mota set out for a neighboring village between 7 and 8 o'clock in the morning. She didn't return to the time she was expected and her master set out to find her, discovering her body near the village lying by a path in the fields. As Von Kraft Ebbing describes it,

The corpse was frightfully mutilated with numerous wounds. The intestines and genitals had been torn from the open body and were found nearby. The nakedness of the body and erosions on the thighs made it seem probable that there had been an attempt at rape. The mouth, filled with earth, pointed to suffocation. In the neighborhood of the body, under a pile of straw, were found a portion of flesh torn from the right calf and pieces of clothing. The perpetrator of the deed remained undiscovered. My god, that poor 14 year old girl, 14, it just met such an unbelievably terrible end. Every bit as terrifying as if she had been ravaged

by an actual vampire. Eight months later on August 28th, 1871, a 28-year-old married woman named Frigeni set out for the fields early in the morning. When she didn't come back, her husband went out to find her. And he also found a preposterously disturbing scene that I'm sure he never, ever fully recovered from. He found her body lying naked in a field. Amongst other wounds, her stomach had been ripped open and her partially eaten intestines were hanging out. The very next day in the same area, 19-year-old Maria Prevatale

noticed that she was being followed by her cousin, who is Verseni. Abruptly, he dragged her into a field of grain, threw her onto the ground, began to choke her, but she was able to convince him to let her go, and once she left, she promptly reported him to the police. The right call. The 22-year-old Versenzi was now brought before a court and examined, and it was found that he had a, quote, greatly developed penis, okay, but an underdeveloped right frontal lobe. Oh boy, so little tiny brain, great big dick. I think we can all

agree that that's a terrible combination, right? When it came to his family history, two of his uncles were described as cretins. A third uncle was microcephalic, beardless with one testicle missing and another testicle atrophied. Psycho had quite the collection of uncles. A cousin suffered from cerebral hyperemia, an excess of blood vessels in the brain, and another was a confirmed thief. Von Kraft Ebing was trying to prove by laying out his family history that Versenny was not some sinful deviant who chose to do what he did because he was simply evil, but rather someone with some faulty wiring in his over-or-under to

cook noodle, who was born with a high probability of being mentally ill. Eventually, Versenny confessed he said that the acts of violence quote gave him an indescribably pleasant lustful feeling which was accompanied by erection and ejaculation. Usually he said simply choking them had satisfied him. But he then had allowed his victims to live, and he then allowed his victims to live. But in two murder cases mentioned, his sexual satisfaction was delayed until he choked them until they died. He said that the gratification experienced in the garroting was greater than in masturbation. The abrasion to the skin on modest thighs were produced by his teeth.

Sucking her blood gave him the most intense, lustful pleasure he had ever felt. He said that he had torn out a piece of flesh from her calf and taken it with him to roast it home, but on the way he hid it under a straw sack for fear his mother might suspect him. So insane, but not criminally insane. He knew what he was doing, he knew it was fucked up at least, but he did it anyway because he wanted to feel how it made him feel.

He said that it had never occurred to him to touch the genitals of the murdered women or to sexually penetrate his victims. It fully satisfied him to throttle them and suck their blood. Based on all of this, Von Kraft Ebbing was content to label Versenny a quote, modern vampire. He had no desire for female anatomy, actually had no idea what a vagina even looked like when he attacked his first victims. He instead completely focused on the flesh and blood of his victims. But one case could not prove clinical vampirism on its own. Von Kraft-Debby then looked at another very famous case, famous at the time at least,

not as much now, that of the vampire of Montparnasse. His human name was a little different, Sergeant Francois Bertrand, he was a sergeant in the French army, also known as Bertrand the ghoul. Bertrand was born on October 29th 1823 and began dissecting dead cats and dogs as soon as his grubby little hands were capable of subduing and stabbing these poor pets. By the age of 13, he was masturbating according to sources, quote, excessively. Imagine that he was murdering women after violently fucking them. He would also imagine having sex with them as corpses and imagine himself defiling them with their blood and gore.

So he's more than a little fucked up. Also, what is an excessive amount of masturbation for a 13-year-old boy? I mean, I feel like a couple times a day is normal. So this guy must have been trying to set some kind of world record. Just turn his dick into a callous. Von Kraft Ebbing wrote, Occasionally in such situations, the thought of carrying out a similar act with male corpses would come up,

but it was always attended with a feeling of disgust. Of course, eventually imagination would not be enough for this young deviant. Soon he would be, and this is a lot, masturbating into the corpses of cats and dogs he'd either killed or found dead. So that's pretty gross. Kid truly had a dirty, dirty dick. Eventually, that wouldn't be enough either. Towards the end of 1846, at the age of 23, his mind turned firmly to human corpses. At first he had a horror of it. Von Kraft Ebing describes, In 1847, being by accident in a graveyard, he ran across the grave of a newly buried corpse.

Then this impulse, with headache and palpitation of the heart, became so powerful that, although there were people nearby and he was in danger of detection, he dug up the body anyway. In the absence of a convenient instrument for cutting it up, he satisfied himself by hacking at it with a shovel. And then he took off, incredibly sexually excited, before he could be caught. Then for the next two weeks he was beset by terrible headaches. Headaches that seemed to accompany a strong impulse, strong urge to commit more brutalities upon corpses. He would eventually give in about 15 times. He would generally dig up the freshly buried bodies with his hands, then cut them with a sword or a pocket knife,

tear out their entrails, and masturbate. Afterwards, he would re-enter the bodies. Eeeh. You know, many of us have had the proverbial walk of shame, you know, headed home after a regrettable sexual decision. I doubt too many of us have ever experienced the reburial of shame. I hope. On July of 1848, however, he came across the freshly dead body of a 16-year-old girl, wanted to have sex with her, not just cut her up. He would later call

me to describe his insane experience like this. I covered it with kisses and pressed it wildly to my heart. All that one could enjoy with a living woman is nothing in comparison with the pleasure I experienced. After I had enjoyed it for about a quarter of an hour, I cut the body up as usual and tore out the entrails. Then I buried the cadaver again. And in this instance, as much as he liked the the sex, he found that cutting the body up actually gave him greater satisfaction than penetrative sex. So that's just a just a bit terrifying. Some grave diggers at the Mon Parnasse cemetery, where

Bertrand most often liked to head out at night for his version of clubbing, started to catch on noticing the graves kept being disturbed and between the summer of 1848 and March of 1849, a series of bodies were exhumed and found to be severely mutilated. Then on March 15, 1849, Patron admitted himself into a hospital with gunshot wounds. Sources vary as to whether he was shot by a police officer or a gravedigger when fleeing a cemetery after trying to mutilate yet another corpse. One of Patron's surgeons obtained a full confession. Patron was arrested and sentenced to, wait for it, one year in jail.

Which might sound too light, might not sound like enough, but at least he wasn't killing any woman to get his rocks off, right? He waited for them to die like a gentleman, on their own, which is, you know, a lot better. I mean, mean still pretty fucked up but not like the corpses were complaining. Not a single corpse complained about what he did. I don't want anyone brutalizing me when I'm alive but once I'm dead, have the time of your life. Right? Come on, coroners, morticians, gravediggers, have at it. I'm done with my mortal coil. Following his release from incarceration, it doesn't appear that Sergeant Francois Bertrand ever escalated to murder. He was never suspected of it.

He was also never arrested for violating any more corpses. So he either figured out how to control his impulses or got a lot better at hiding the bodies he was mutilated. He went on to work as a clerk, a mailman, and a lighthouse keeper. That's probably a good job for him. How about you hang out alone in the lighthouse for the rest of your days? Then he died in 1878 at the age of 55. A random trivia, he also inspired the creation of the term necrophilia. In another case study from Psychopatheia sexualis, Von Kraft-Evving presented the case of a married man who presented himself with numerous scars of cuts on his arms. When he wished to

approach his wife, who was young and somewhat nervous, he first had to make a cut in his arm. Some interesting foreplay. Then she would suck the wound and during the act become violently excited sexually. Okay, sounds like those cuts might have been worth it. Another woman he studied listed only as Mrs. H experienced no pleasure during sex, excuse me, even though she liked kissing her husband, but experienced quote, the greatest pleasure in biting him. It was extremely gratifying to her to bite her husband so hard that she drew blood. She was pleased at being bitten in lieu of coitus and also if she herself was allowed to bite him. Kinky. So were these people clinical vampires? Clinical

vampirism is somewhat hard to define. In the first case I listed out Versenzi, von Kraft Ebbing's wildly sexually violent, little brain big dick modern vampire, didn't seem to like sucking blood so much as assaulting biting and even committing cannibalism. In the second we wouldn't label the vampire of Mon Parnasse, Sergeant Bertrand, a vampire so much as we may call him a necrophiliac, someone sexually aroused by corpses. The last two, the cases of the women, seemed to more closely align with what we might think of as vampirism, sexual excitement brought on by the act of sucking blood.

Could some, none, or, you know, all of these cases be thought of as clinical vampirism? Richard Von Craft Ebing thought that they all qualified. But Von Craft Ebing was working in a very different psychiatric landscape than ours today. The psychiatric landscape was more likely to consider as real diseases his psychiatric landscape. Not just vampirism, but also possession, where the patient believes they're possessed by demonic forces. Lycanthropy, where the patient believes they are a werewolf, and other phenomena

that we might relegate today to folk or religious superstition. Still, when Von Krav Debbing's work ended along with the 19th century, other students of the human mind would pick up his torch and keep trying to clinically define vampirism. Combined in the psychiatric literature or evidence of this condition. Literature for evidence, excuse me, of this condition. That paper we mentioned by the University of Colorado's Vandenberg and Kelly, published in 1964, would do away with the connection to necrophilia, seeking clinical vampirism as, quote,

the act of drawing blood from an object, usually a love object, and receiving resultant sexual excitement and pleasure. They reported on the case of a young man serving a prison sentence who came to the attention of prison authorities after several inmates were caught stealing iron tablets and expressed a fear of developing anemia. An investigation revealed that the young man had been trading sexual favors with these inmates in return for the opportunity to suck their blood.

Like many researchers before them, Vandenberg and Kelly agreed that clinical vampires suck blood for sexual satisfaction, but brought up the possibility that clinical vampires could suck their own blood too. Like in the case of a 28 year old man who, at puberty, began masturbating after cutting himself and then taking erotic satisfaction at the sight of his own blood flowing Yikes, that's a that's a risky way to beat off With practice he was able to direct blood spurts from his neck artery to his mouth while he beat off Sweet Jesus So glad I don't even always need lotion to get the job done just a solid grip in about five minutes of privacy

hashtag blessed to get the job done. Just a solid grip and about five minutes of privacy. Hashtag blessed. Unlike the people in Richard Von Kraft Ebbins case studies and these new cases of clinical vampirism, the ones who suffered from it weren't monsters prowling the night looking for corpses of living people to violently assault, but regular people who seem to suffer from an extreme condition. An overwhelming desire for blood. Either their own or others. In the mid 20th century century, an Austrian-born American anthropologist known primarily for her work on possession trance and

other altered states of consciousness, Erika Eichhorn Borjanyan, identified the case of a young woman hospitalized during her fourth pregnancy following repeated vomiting of considerable amounts of blood. She apparently greatly enjoyed these hemorrhages and the side of her blood. She also voluntarily disconnected transfusion equipment, let her blood drip, and stated she would prefer to drink her blood instead of having blood injected into her veins. At first no investigation was able to determine the source of her bleeding. Finally a mouth examination by a specialist revealed several bleeding self-inflicted wounds

at the base of the tongue. Treating staff inferred that she sucked on these wounds and then just kept swallowing the blood until she vomited. Apparently sometimes she would keep the blood in her mouth before rejecting it because subsequent analysis would reveal that gastric juices of hers were not always present. In this blood, in this vomit, she eventually developed a severe anemia from continuing with this compulsion and designed Excuse me and died from it two years later an Autopsy revealed a stomach Completely bloated with blood if you fucking loved blood her own while very rare cases of people extremely obsessed with blood do keep surfacing in

1994 a 35 year old man referred to in psychiatric literature simply as Jeremy had been raised in a seemingly ordinary middle-class family. His father worked as an electrical engineer and his mother was a mathematics teacher. He had a little brother he perceived to be his mother's favorite, leading him to harbor an intense hatred of her. He would later alleged that his mom was physically abusive but it's unclear if instances of abuse actually took place. Seems like everybody else growing up with this kid living in this childhood home felt that his perception of reality was not great. And he's not doing well mentally. For example, Jeremy claimed that his mom belonged to a witchcraft club.

No, she just dabbled in astrology. Jeremy claimed his mom had held a cult seances where Jeremy would be drained of his blood Jeremy first demonstrated an unusual fascination with blood at the age of five when he was hospitalized with pneumonia while convalescent he started to draw pictures of hypodermic needles dripping blood and more concerning butts just human butts with open wounds oozing blood a lot of butt blood Human butts with open wounds, oozing blood. A lot of butt blood. Then in grade school, his preoccupation with gore expanded to include drawings of goblins, bats, witches, scenes of violent deaths from gunshot wounds.

Also became an avid reader of witchcraft literature and horror novels, including most of the classics. Uh oh. I also drew a bunch of fucked up monster stuff as a kid and read a lot of horror books. His mom testified that when Jeremy was 13 he started killing small animals in the neighborhood. Cats, squirrels, fish, birds, and eating them. For the record I did not do that. He also became nocturnal, started sneaking out of the house at night to wander the streets of his hometown. Uh oh, I also did a bit of that. Things would escalate from there. At 15 Jeremy was caught stealing a case of

tear gas from a local police station, and that led to the first of several court-ordered hospitalizations. After his discharge, he began showing signs of psychosis. He developed a delusion that a transmitter in his head was being controlled by somebody in outer space. For the record, I've never thought that. At least not while sober. Believing that something was wrong with his head head he then built and started wearing a cardboard pyramid like a little hat of sorts in the hopes it would somehow protect and heal him. It didn't. He was in and out of psychiatric treatment throughout much of

his teenage years. Clearly he's severely mentally ill. At the age of 17 he just closed to a therapist. He was thinking of killing his dad. He was then hospitalized for two weeks and then returned home to a very nervous dad. He was then hospitalized for two weeks and then returned home to a very nervous dad. He was far from cured. His family became seriously alarmed when he began keeping an axe at his bedside after saying that. Yeah, that would be alarming. Instead of somehow having him committed again at this time, they installed locks on their bedroom doors, even slept in shifts so that one family member would always be awake to keep an eye on ol' Jerbear. What a nightmare.

Eventually, Jeremy's mom obtained a court order to remove him from the home. He moved into his own apartment, but then at the age of 19, they let him move back in. Once again, his mental condition started to deteriorate rapidly. His interest in consuming animal and human flesh was rekindled, and he killed several neighborhood cats, removed their brains to see if he could learn how to correct his own brain from studying theirs. Also reportedly got a hold of some horse blood and drank it, and now really wanted to drink some human blood. After another court ordered hospitalization for killing, dissecting, and eating another

cat, he was released into the custody of his now divorced father, and now he's worried about vampires. Well, he's kind of worried. He's kind of worried, kind of jealous. He begins to have auditory hallucinations where a voice keeps warning him that some people are actual, real, can turn into a bat and fly away and shit, don't have reflections and mirrors, living dead immortal vampires. And the voice then ridicules him because he's not a vampire. He's never killed anyone. The voice starts telling him that to become a vampire himself, he's got to kill somebody.

He's got to drink their blood. Oh, and he also starts to believe that his grandma used an ice pick to steal some of his blood while he slept. His grandma who was wheelchair bound. So he's doing great. He's clearly doing great. He's totally fine. Definitely does not need to be involuntarily committed for a long time and heavily medicated or anything. Jeremy furious over his stolen blood situation, god damn it grandma, decides to

murder his grandma. And then sadly he does. His verbatim account of the murder documented in the court-ordered forensic mental health evaluation reveals his very psychotic state of mind. So it was raining one day and I washed out of this job interview so then I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold. I picture him saying this as if it's completely understandable. Like he's expecting the person to listen and be like, oh yeah, of course. I mean, what else would he do? I mean, you don't get a job, you gotta get a fucking gun, you gotta paint some bullets gold. So he says, so it's raining one day and I washed out of the job interview so then I took out a gun and painted the Bullish Gold I asked my grandmother if she wanted anything done and she said she wanted me to do the laundry

I did laundry and asked her if she wanted anything else done. She said no, so I put on my suit and I shot her I thought she wanted to die when I pulled the gun on her. I was surprised. She said no, no, don't do that But it was too late Once I pulled the gun on her I had to do it I shot her in the heart and she was wiggling and screaming at me. Then I shot her three more times real fast. I started saying a bunch of weird things to her real fast. I whispered in her ear something about the devil, something I had read in a witchcraft book once.

I gave her last rites and said a small short prayer. I picture him just fucking, you know, eating a doughnut, you know, after that, having some coffee. What do you want to talk about? I've talked about my grandma. What do you want to talk about? The coroner's report indicated that the poor elderly woman was also stabbed, but Jeremy denied doing that. He did admit to trying to suck the blood out of her wounds, but then gave up because she was quote, too old. With the murder complete, he dragged the corpse off the sofa into a bedroom where he poured gas on it, ignited the body, and then that just fucking burned the whole house down.

He then disposed of the gun in a nearby river picked up his dad drove to drove his dad to his house he was with his dad when the police called to report the tragedy. Jeremy and his dad then drove to what remained of the torched house and Jeremy tried to enter it to retrieve a box telling the police he had to get it because it contained important tax returns. I gotta get those tax returns I can't possibly ever get new copies from the IRS or my accountant. What Jeremy didn't know is that the box had already been confiscated by the police and it contained among other things his gold-painted bullets. Next day Jeremy went to the police station forcibly

tried to recover the box as in attack the officers in the way of the box and that didn't work out well for him. A struggle you know ensued obviously Jeremy's arrested charged with assault and battery with police officer, and then he confessed to the murder of his grandma the following day. The ensuing trial would be a battle of mental health experts. The defense claiming that he had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Oh yeah, he sure seemed to. While the prosecution claimed that Jeremy suffered from borderline personality disorder, but was nonetheless criminally responsible. Interestingly, no mental health experts would even bring up clinical vampirism.

The jury convicted Jeremy of second-degree murder, which carried a lengthy sentence, and then returned with a concurrent lengthy sentence for arson. Then after an incident in prison in which he tried to murder a guard, ol' J-Dog was committed to a maximum-security forensic hospital where hospital where as of 1994 he continued to maintain that he was a vampire and needed human blood to sustain himself. But was he or is he, we don't know anything about what's happened to him since, really a clinical vampire? Or was he as some other psychologists would posit simply schizophrenic or psychotic? Schizophrenia, we've talked about that so many times here over the years in Time Suck, is a mental disorder characterized by recurring episodes of

psychosis which include hallucinations, hearing voices, delusions or paranoia, disorganized thinking or behavior, and flat or inappropriate affect. Symptoms develop gradually, typically begin during young adulthood. Adding fuel to the fire, many people with schizophrenia have other mental disorders, especially substance use disorders, depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorder. It is still unclear what exactly causes schizophrenia, but there are certainly genetic factors and environmental ones as well, such as possibly being raised in an urban versus a rural area, childhood

adversity, cannabis use during adolescence, infection, parents age, conception, poor nutrition during pregnancy. We don't really know why clearly. Like with most other psychiatric disorders, we meat sacks actually haven't known about schizophrenia for all that long. The illness was distinguished from a type of dementia and wasn't named schizophrenia until 1908. The term being coined by a Swiss psychiatrist named Eugen Blüller. We still didn't actually understand very much about it. Prior to the 1960s, non-violent petty criminals and women were sometimes diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The latter being characterized as mentally ill just for not performing their culturally expected duties within our patriarchal culture as wives and mothers. Why haven't you watched the dishes yet? What are you? Schizophrenic Kathy? Then in the mid to late 1960s many black men were labeled as being schizophrenic due primarily to their demanding for civil rights you know like equal rights and black power activism having those things being labeled as delusional You want a quality? As a black man in America. What are you fucking crazy? What are you some kind of schizophrenic? That actually happened not too long ago

Then in the early 1970s in the US the diagnostic model for schizophrenia was still too broad and clinically based using the diagnostic and statistical manual Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 2, published 1968, which wasn't very effective when it came to diagnosing people because of how it told physicians to diagnose as in this case. The condition which most urgently requires treatment should be listed first. For example, if a patient with simple schizophrenia was presented to the diagnostician because of pathological alcohol intoxication, then the order of diagnoses would be first pathological intoxication and second schizophrenia simple type. But then later the manual

says under alcohol paranoid state, this term describes the paranoid state which develops in chronic alcoholics, generally male, and is characterized by excessive jealousy and delusions of infidelity by the spouse Patients diagnosed under primary paranoid states or schizophrenia should not be included here even if they do drink to excess And that is confusing as fuck But in 1980 the DSM-3 was published and it showed a shift in focus from the clinically based biopsychosocial model the idea that illness and health are the result of an interaction between biological, psychological, and social factors, to a more reason-based medical model.

Basically, instead of trying to evaluate each person individually according to their personal biology, psychology, and social circumstances, you should have a set of objective criteria and just see if the people match that. Kind of like the kiss method, right? Keep it simple, stupid. Sounds pretty reasonable. With schizophrenia now being something that was far easier and clearer to diagnose, many started looking to that instead of clinical vampirism to describe blood-obsessed behavior. Schizophrenic delusions often orbit blood, the body and internal organs, as schizophrenics often perceive that their bodies are being messed with, tampered with, or made impure. And so now the move shifts away from labeling people who obsess over or consume blood from clinical vampires to schizophrenics or those suffering from comparable diseases. But then someone accidentally reignited the obsession with clinical vampirism and gave it the name it would continue to be associated with to the present day.

Renfield's Syndrome. In the early 1990s, the unfortunately named Richard Knoll, Dick Knoll, sounds more like a mound of dirt shaped like a dick than a human, was a psychologist who had left his job at a state hospital in New Jersey to try his hand at horror and monster themed novels. As he prepared to defend his doctoral thesis in clinical psychology at New York's New School for Social Research, he decided his next book, a work of non-fiction, would combine his two areas of expertise. He bundled together some of the medical research he had done for his novels to examine the psychopathology that really lay behind creepy real-life phenomena and he gave it the title vampires werewolves and demons 20th century reports in the psychiatric literature and that is the kind of book title that definitely grabs my attention

at the time this book came out in 1992 the field of mental health care was still in the throes of a seismic shift as we just said in 1980 the third edition the DSM had radically changed how mental illnesses were classified and organized. Trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, Knoll felt that the DSM-III was definitely an improvement over the old Freudian psychoanalytic way of doing things, but he also found himself critical of how the new manual reduced highly complex illnesses to bullet points and checklists. There are some mental disorders that scientists have definite biological data to go on, information about the brain and how it functioned differently than a normal one, in disorders like schizophrenia,

bipolar, one disorder, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc. But there are other ones that are less provable and more based on observation, he felt. And it was these disorders that got prescribed in mass, since they could just be warped around to fit almost anyone. As an example, in the 1980 DSM-3, a new category of dissociative disorders appear, including one for multiple personality disorder, and this directly led to an epidemic of that diagnosis by 1990. In Knoll's mind, it was the rush to identify these kinds of disorders, to classify each and every presentation of every odd

kind of person as a new kind of medical category that weakens psychiatry as a whole. It seemed to Richard like the goal of psychiatry was less to help people and more for psychiatrists just to constantly invent new disorders, increasing their own credibility. With these critiques swimming around his head as he typed away his manuscript late one night, he was struck by a sudden urge. What if he could make up another disorder and see if it stuck as real?

Tucked into Knoll's 1992 book were just a few paragraphs calling for the need to classify a brand new diagnosis based on case studies Knoll had dug up from the archives in which patients would develop fixations with consuming live animals or blood, either their own or from another person, while also becoming sexually aroused. Knoll suggested the condition be called Renfield Syndrome, named after Dracula's fanatically devoted human familiar and servant in Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula. The book that really cemented, by the way, many of the abilities and weaknesses we now think of when we think of vampires in the public consciousness.

In the story, Renfield was cursed to live by consuming flies and spiders to absorb their energy, giving readers a more humanized, grounded version of the same compulsions that drove the titular vampire. In Knoll's joke description, initially the patient exhibits a zoophagia, a compulsion to eat insects or to eat live animals and drink their blood. As the condition worsens, the behavior grows more and more deviant, culminating in a compulsion to drink another person's blood in an act described as true vampirism, including intentionally harming another individual for that purpose, the same behavior that Renfield is seen exhibiting in the fictional novel.

While clinical vampirism had already been coined as a term in psychiatric literature, Knoll elevated the concept with a catchy pop culture name and a narrative of escalation, explaining that the inciting incident would lead sufferers to associate blood with an excitement that would eventually evolve to include a sexual component. But Knoll believed that nothing about Renfield syndrome is actually unique when it comes to a diagnostic perspective. It was Knoll's opinion that anyone who might fit the criteria for Renfield syndrome actually suffered from other more common disorders like bulimia or schizophrenia. To Knoll, the rare case of someone wanting to drink human blood is not indicative of an

actual syndrome but of something much simpler. I'm sorry to say and this isn't very clinical or very sophisticated or academic, but some people," he would say in an interview, "...are just fucking nuts. Not everything can be categorized." And that is a great no-bullshit quote. While the book sold fairly well, Noel didn't really think his gag was going to lead to anything more than, you know, just being a gag. But then in 1994, a producer from NBC called,

saying the network was planning a Halloween segment on the illness and wanted him to appear as its resident medical expert Noel declined to appear but he did convince his best friend Canadian psychologist and schizophrenia researcher Leonard George to do it in his place Leonard was more than happy to do it and on the NBC special He went through the diagnostic criteria for Renfield syndrome without a hint of irony in his voice And with that the monster was out of the box and it's still out He went through the diagnostic criteria for Renfield syndrome without a hint of irony in his voice. And with that, the monster was out of the box and it's still out. The world's burgeoning internet culture with all its non-fact-checked information would

then accelerate a belief in this Renfield syndrome. This made-up syndrome. Soon Renfield syndrome would become something of a mainstay in some of television's most popular police procedural crime dramas. Both CSI and Criminal Minds have had episodes featuring characters who are said to suffer from this quote disorder. And Noel's made-up monster didn't stop there. Fellow academics, people with doctorates who had spent years if not decades of their lives studying mental illness, began to

jump on the Renfield syndrome bandwagon. For decades, Noel sat back in amusement as his bandwagon. For decades, Noll sat back in amusement as his fictional mental illness began racking up citations in peer-reviewed non-fiction medical journals. A Google Scholar search turns up over a dozen results for Renfield syndrome, including a 2010 citation in Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association purporting to include a case study, and the following year an article in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, which purports to lay out a proper working definition of the disorder, that an offhand joke was now being cited in scholarly papers without a hint of irony surprised Noel, but bad information going viral was not new to psychiatry.

This is a branch of medicine whose most famous practitioner, Sigmund Freud, once recommended copious amounts of cocaine as a treatment. I mean, if you're suffering from boredom, ho! Shit ton of cocaine, that's gonna cure you. Probably gonna give you something more serious than boredom in return though, like a heart attack or an empty bank account. There was also the Satanic Panic from the 1980s, which we've discussed many times, which waves of people across America and elsewhere, many of them licensed psychiatrists, were convinced that children were truly being preyed on by these global cabals or local cabals of devil-worshipping psychopaths who were actually conjuring demons or Satan himself to inflict further pain on the children.

Noel would eventually come clean in October of 2013 in a presentation given at Penn State, intending to take Renfield syndrome back into the realm of the fictional where he believed it belonged. But like with all monsters, once freed from their cages, they're hard to capture and imprison. People still refer to Renfield syndrome to this day as though it is a very real disease. And Noel's little prank put yet another wrinkle in diagnosing clinical vampirism. While before psychologists wanted if clinical vampirism was its own discrete category or just part of other more established diagnoses,

Noel's coin of the term brought up another question. Can clinical vampirism or Renfield syndrome ever be organic? And that people spontaneously experience a craving for blood? Or are people simply consciously or subconsciously imitating the figure of the fictional vampire we all know from our earliest years, just as the Bram Stoker's character Renfield does? To prove that people are sometimes simply imitating vampiric behavior, we have to look no further than the Twilight series. If you're one of the few that does not remember this cultural craze, Twilight is a series of four fantasy romance novels written by Stephanie Meyer.

They follow an every girl so generic as to appear completely personalityless, named Bella Swan, who moves to her father's town of Forks, Washington and falls in love with a 104 year old vampire named Edward Cullen. She also has a friend, Jacob Black, who's a werewolf, and fans would duke it out over who Bella should have ended up with, identifying themselves as members of Team Edward or Team Jacob. It is hard to state how massively popular this book series and later

film franchise of the same name truly was. It nearly single-handedly launched the careers of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. As of 2021, more than 160 million copies of the books have been sold worldwide and the franchise's five films have grossed a total of over 3.36 billion dollars. The books and movies created a so-called vampire renaissance which lasts from 2008 to 2014 where vampires consumed media, the vampire diaries, true blood, dark shadows, beautiful creatures, etc. Writing for Time magazine, Lev Grossman described how Twilight affected young people's psyches. People do not want to just read Myers books.

They want to climb inside them and live there. One example of trying to live in this vampiric world would be people getting dental implants to give them the appearance of having vampiric fangs. One 16-year-old fan named Taylor Walker enlisted dentist Dr. Mary Corton to help her out. Using a plastic-like substance, the dentist permanently molded long, sharp fang-like teeth to her canines, although she warned her that the veneer fractures would be ongoing since the human jaw is not meant to accommodate fangs. Another way fans emulated the world of Twilight was to literally suck blood.

According to an NBC News article from 2010, the same year the third film in the franchise, The Twilight Saga Eclipse was released, the romantic vampire craze was leading all kinds of teens to engage in risky blood sucking behavior. Online groups like I Drink Blood, I category at experienceproject.com and I Want to to be a vampire at the site 43 things comm Became filled with posts from a parent young people with a sudden hankering for some blood sucking Having that thick warm copper tasting blood in my mouth is the best thing I can think of Wrote a teenager identified as gothic girl 10 that year Sometimes my boyfriend lets me feed off of him. I let him feed off of me as well. And some just like to do it regardless of Twilight. In the same NBC News article, Michael Kapler, 16 years old, of Dallas, said he was biting his girlfriend intermittently for more than a year because of the intimacy of

it, not because of any gothic obsession. Whatever the reason, it's a pretty bad idea since drinking someone else's blood can lead to an infection of hepatitis B, hepatitis C, norovirus, HIV, and more. And just the bite itself is dangerous. Experts at the Mayo Clinic say human bites are just as dangerous and in some cases more dangerous than animal bites. Because of all the different types of bacteria typically found in the human mouth in addition to various viruses. 10 to 15 percent of human bites will become infected actually. So were any of these teens suffering from clinical vampirism? I mean they were drinking blood. They wrote of liking to bite, suck blood, also

sometimes getting sexual satisfaction from it. As probably many others do who like to explore various types of kinks involving blood play. In the end is clinical vampirism more of a spectrum? What about people who eat blood sausage? Type of sausage is cooked or dried and mixed with a filler until it's thick enough to solidify when cooled. It's not human blood. I don't... not normally. But many do continue to believe in the blood sausage's ability to promote vitality and strength. Are they clinical vampires? And then there are the Catholics who believe that ingesting communion in the form of wafers and wine is literally consuming Christ's body.

What about them? Well, some of them believe this. Are Catholics a type of clinical vampire? And at the extreme end, you know, extreme side or end of the spectrum, is the clinical vampire defined as someone who is obsessed with the corpses and the dead? Someone who cannibalizes? Someone who drinks blood, someone who drinks their own blood or something else entirely? Or does the clinical vampire exist at all? And we've just maybe shoehorned a random deviant type of compulsion into this archetype of an ancient, hopefully fictional figure that all of us recognize. It seems that the crossing of folklore, ancient tradition, religion, pop culture obsession, and medical diagnostics has produced an entity that is just as hard to capture as the mythical monster it's based off of.

Personally after all this, I do think vampires are real. Not the Bram Stoker kind, you know, we have yet to ever find evidence that a human can shape shift or stop aging, and a wooden stake to the heart, well that kills everybody. Not just vampires. But the person who must consume human blood, the person obsessed with it, thanks to a book or a movie or thanks to some unorthodox brain wiring, the person who will murder another human or dig up their body just to drink their blood, well that person's real. I mean sometimes they're clearly schizophrenic. But why can't you be schizophrenic and also I mean sometimes they're clearly schizophrenic. But why can't you be schizophrenic and also be a vampire? A clinical vampire.

Maybe Richard Knoll's fictitious category of mental illness, Renfield syndrome, should be reclassified as something that is all too real. And that's it for this edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story, check out the rest of the Bad Magic catalog. Beefier episodes at Time Suck every Monday at noon specific time. I think I said noon specific time. Noon Pacific time. Oh, reading. Reading notes.

Why can't I just do it perfectly every time? New episodes of the now long-running paranormal podcast, Scared to Death, every Tuesday at midnight. With two episodes of nightmare fuel, fictional horror I'm having a blast with, thrown into the mix each month. Thank you to Sophie Evans for suggesting this topic and the initial research on it. And thank you to Logan Keith, polishing up the sound of today's episode before being released. Please go to BadMagicProductions.com for all your bad magic needs. Have yourself a great weekend.