Maybe it's because the season premiere of True Blood is upon us that makes this latest discovery about vampires extra intriguing ... archaeologists have discovered a fresh batch of vampire skeletons dating back to the Middle Ages First a lady vampire skull and now this! This is fabulous news, not only because for those of us who love our vampires it proves that the blood-suckers might really have existed, but because it also turns an old bit of widely held vampire lore totally on its head.
Vampires through the ages have always been portrayed as pretty much invincible and seem to survive just about anything -- being thrown into a vat of acid, fires, bombs, dismembering, disembowelment ... But a simple stake through the heart, and they are goners. Why is that? Where did that come from?
Well, the Bulgarian discovery seems to provide a clue. The stakes may have not been so much about killing the vampire, as much as it was a restraining device use to prevent them from rising and stalking humans.
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The two skeletons found in the Black Sea town of Sozopol were both stabbed through their chests in the heart, pinning them to their graves. The belief is that the stakes would prevent the vamps from rising from the dead and leaving their graves to feast on human blood.
So I guess after their human death, the people would turn into vampires in their grave and just lay there, totally unable to move in excruciating hunger and desire for human blood, until their flesh just rotted away and they became skeletons. That would take a long time. It's not hard to see why literature and later Hollywood had to tweak that drawn-out process for something a little more dramatic and bloody, huh?
Are you fascinated by vampires? Do you believe there is some truth to this ages old legend?
Image via milan.boers/Flickr
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Comments 18
legends are something interseting
Did you READ the article? They found skeletons -- regular human skeletons -- with stakes through the heart, as part of a custom that was meant to prevent these bodies from turning into skeletons and rising from the grave. Just because those ancient Bulgarians believed that once people died, they could turn into vampires and rise from the grave doesn't mean those bodies were those of actual vampires.
Sheesh.
do you know how legends of vampires came about, jesus, do some damn research. Back in the day there was this one woman (I forgot her name I did this whole research paper on the supernatural in high school) who drank blood because she thought it kept you young and beautiful, she killed her servants, drank their blood, and even bathed in it.......and Dracula was based off of Vlad the impaler, he killed people and ate them and drank their blood, he also liked to impale people in huge stakes, which is where the stake through the heart came from.................its all right here on the internet, look it up
Melanie, you're talking about Elizabeth Bathory - and no. That's part of the inspiration for Dracula. But stories of vampires far predate that.
As a previous commenter said - you guys seem to be getting extremely dim or not reading articles before you post. Why is this exciting? They didn't find vampires nor did they claim to. They found graves of people who had been thought to be vampires back when people were ignorant hicks by the majority. Typically tuburculosis was enough to get you accused of being a vampire.
The story of vampires started DIRECTLY from a lack of understanding of human decomposition. They would observe a corpse they had buried or that hadn't been buried yet and notice that it becomes engorged with blood, red and flushed, blood may leak out of the mouth, skin recedes and nails look longer - in other words, to an ignorant person, all the signs that a corpse is rising from the dead and engorging itself with the blood of the living. When we started understanding both human decomposition, and the cause of diseases like tuburculosis, vampire accusations greatly diminished into nothing as a regular occurrence and we quit uselessly stabbing bodies like these.
Also Melanie, Vlad Dracula never drank anybody's blood. There's one unsubstantiated claim of him sipping it out of a chalice, but that's up for contesting, and the only story of that occurring.
Yep, I'm thinking the "& Real" part should be removed from the title. Sure, people feared vampires 500 years ago, but that doesn't mean they actually existed. Only the fear was real.
Just like the Salem Witch trials - though they burned women, none of them survived by use of witchcraft - they all died. Generally this proved they were never witches, and were murdered for no reason.