Crazy Strange Days podcast presents Crazy Strange Stories Episode twenty one. Are Vampires Real? Inside nine shilling accounts of alleged blood sucking monsters from history. Long before author bramstroke Stoker introduced readers to Dracula in eighteen ninety seven, terrifying reports of real vampires struck fear in the hearts of people around the world. Of all the ghules lurking behind dark corners, vampires may be the most terrifying. Quick fanged, and with an insatiable thirst for blood. They've hunted in, haunted, and delighted humans for centuries. So are there examples of real vampires in history? Of course there are. The answer is complicated, but not an outright no. In Europe and the United States, some people were dubbed vampires after they died, as their fellow townspeople believed that they continued to spread pestilence from the grave. They were dug up, marked as undead, and burned to ashes. Meanwhile, there have been plenty of bloodthirsty rulers and even more vicious serial killers who could be described as vampiistic. Prince Vladdy Impaler, thought to be the inspiration for Dracula, allegedly dipped his bread in human blood, and German serial killer Fritz Harmon killed many of his victims with a love bite straight through the windpipe. Today there are even thousands of people who readily identify as vampires and yes, they drank human blood. Today we're going to learn about nine real vampires from history, from serial killers in serbian pests to cruel leaders with an insatiable bloodlust. Mercy Brown the vampire of nineteenth century New England. To residents of the tiny town of Exeter, Rhode Island, George Brown's family seemed to be suffering from a curse in the second half of the nineteenth century. His wife Mary and his daughters Mary, Olive and Mercy died from tuberculosis. By eighteen ninety two, his son Edwin, who was formerly a big husky young man, also seemed near death, so the locals decided to take action. They suspected it was not tuberculosis, then called consumption that haunted the Brown family, but something much more sinister. Locals began to fear that one of the Brown women was undead and feast on the living tissue and blood of Edwin, so they convinced George to let them exum and examine the bodies of Mary, Mary Olive, and Mercy. On March seventeenth, eighteen ninety two, a group of men marched into Chestnut Hills Cemetery with shovels and started to dig in Mary and Mary Olive's caskets. The townspeople found only bones, but Mercy, who had died just two months earlier, still looked very human. There was blood in her veins and a flush in her cheeks. The body was in a fairly well preserved state, a correspondent from the Providence Journal later reported. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found. Though a local doctor insisted that this was perfectly normal given this short amount of time since Mercy's death, the townspeople took it as a sure sign that she was a vampire. They burned her heart and liver, mixed the ashes with water, and had Edwin drink the concoction. What Unsurprisingly, this didn't do much. Edwin died a few months later. Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento. If there's one thing people know about vampires, it's that they drink blood. So Richard Chase, a blood obsessed serial killer who murdered at least six people in the nineteen seventies, certainly qualifies as a real life vampire. Known as the Dracula Killer, Chase displayed psychopathic tendencies from a young age. He set small fires and was crueled towards animals. As he grew older, he also began to suffer from delusions that his heart had stopped and that he was a walking corpse. Chase developed an obsession with blood and was institutionalized after attempting to inject himself with rabbit blood that couldn't have been good. Though, he was briefly held in a psychiatric facility where fellow patients allegedly observed Chase drinking the blood of birds he caught and killed. Chase was released in nineteen seventy six. Shortly thereafter, he turned his attention to humans. On December twenty ninth, nineteen seventy seven, Chase killed his first known victim, Ambrose Gariffin, in Sacramento, California. Chase shot Griffin as he helped his wife unload groceries from their car. Less than a month later, on January twenty third, nineteen seventy eight, he shot Teresa Wallen after entering her home through an unlocked door. He then stabbed her and drank her blood, allegedly using a yogurt container as a cup. Four days after that, Chase killed four people at once after entering another home through an unlocked door, Evelyn Merrith, her six year old son Jason, her twenty two month old nephew, David Ferreira, and her friend Daniel Meredith. History reports that Chase removed Merith's organs, filled them with blood, and then took them home with him. Though police were unable to track Chase down quickly, they found even more horrors at his apartment. Human blood was everywhere, in his sink, on his utensils, and even in his blender. It appeared that this real life vampire had been drinking blood for quite some time. He was found guilty of first degree murder and sent to prison, where he died by suicide on December twenty sixth, nineteen eighty. Of course, here we are to lad Vlad the Impaler, the possible inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula, our modern day, modern day conception of Vampires was largely sculpted by Bram stokers eighteen ninety seven novel Dracula. Dracula, of Course, is about a fearsome vampire who hunts human victims and drinks their blood, and Stoker drew some inspiration from a real vampire, the violent ruler Vlad Dracule Dracoul Dracula, born between fourteen twenty eight. In fourteen thirty one, Vlad spent the first part of his life as a hostage with his younger brother Radu and the Ottoman Empire. There he was possibly tortured and may have witnessed the impalement of the Ottoman's foes, a technique he'd later infamously use on his own enemies. After Vlad's father and older brother were overthrown in a coup, Vlad went home. He was able to wrest power back from his father's enemies, but Vlad never forgot what they had done to his family. Before long, he set out to establish dominance in the most violent way imaginable. Vlad hosted a banquet and invited those who had opposed him. He never intended to listen to their concerns. However, those who continued to resist him, were rounded up and bloodily impaled on spikes, and thus Vlad Dracula became known as Vlad the Impaler. From there, Vlad the Impaler's bloody reputation only grew. In a fourteen sixty two letter to an ally describing his campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, Vlad boasted of killing peasants, men and women, old and young. We killed twenty three thousand, eight hundred and eighty four Turks. By the time he was imprisoned by the Hungarians, Vlad had killed an estimated eighty thousand people, tens of thousands of whom were impaled. Vlad had also shown a fondness for human blood, as evidenced by claims that he dipped his bread in blood before he ate it, though this particular assertion has never been verified, but many of Vlad's vicious deeds have been and a supposedly inspired Stoker as he prepared to write his iconic vampire novel Arnold Paole, one of Europe's first real vampires in the early eighteenth century, Arnold Paol had the bad luck of falling off a hay wagon and breaking his neck. Then, after he was buried, he had even worse luck when people in his Serbian village became convinced he was a vampire. As National Geographic reports, the modern vampire myth arguably began with the story of his body being exhumed, which spread across Europe and became a subject of interest to philosophers like Voltaire, Dennis Deirdre and Jean Jacques Heil Rousseau. There you go, French, I butchered some French. I'm back at it baby. Filled with bloody, gory details, it triggered a superstition about vampires that endures to the modern day. In some ways, his story bears a remarkable, remarkable resemblance to Mercy Brown's. After he died, dozens of other people in his village also died, which made the living suspicious that he was undead and sucking their blood. Austrian authorities sent a military doctor named Johann Flukinger to investigate the claims. He watched as the villagers dug up his body forty days after his death, and penned a shocking report to his superiors in seventeen thirty two describing what he saw. They found that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, that the shirt, the covering, and the coffin were completely bloody, that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the skin, had fallen off, and that new ones had grown even more Shockingly, Flukenger reported that his body groaned and bled profusely when the villagers drove a steak through his heart. They saw from this that he was a real vampire. The doctor wrote, Fritz Harmon, the vampire of Hanover, who killed his victims with a love bite. To those that knew him, Fritz seemed harmless, if a little odd, But Harmon was in fact a fearful killer who targeted young boys and men. He killed at least twenty four victims between nineteen eighteen and nineteen twenty four in Hanover, Germany. Known as the Vampire of Hanover because he often bit his victims through the windpipe in what Herman called a love bite. This real vampire hunted for young men at Hanover's train stations. There, teenage runaways fleeing postwar hardships were easy to lure back to his apartment, where Harmon promised to give them a good meal. Then, after feeding his victims, he would attack. He'd strangle them or bite them through their windpipe, sexually molest their bodies, and dismember them. Harman dumped many of their corpses into the nearby lying river, but he also ground up their remains into meat that he sold as pork. In May of nineteen twenty four, children playing alongside the river bank found a human skull and bones, which led to the discovery of more than a dozen sets of human remains. Suspicion quickly fell on him, who had been observed attacking a young boy in the train station. Investigators went to his apartment and found blood on the walls and floors and clothing belonging to his victims. After he was arrested, Harriman readily confessed. He eventually claimed that he'd killed upwards of seventy young boys or men, but he was found guilty of twenty four murders. He was sentenced to die by guillotine in nineteen twenty five at Hanover Prison. His last words were quite vampiric. I repent, but I do not fear death. Peter Plugowitz, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. Another real life vampire from Serbia, like Arnold Payol, The next real vampire on our list died in Serbia in the eighteenth century. In like Payoel, Peter was exhumed by his fellow villagers out of fear that he was an undead bloodsucker. In the weeks after he died, a number of his fellow villagers also perished after suffering from a mysterious twenty four hour illness. The dead were both young and old, and many made a terrifying claim on their deathbeds. They said that Peter, who he had come to them in their sleep and strangled them. Even Peter's wife claimed that her husband had visited her in her sleep, though she said that he just wanted a pair of shoes. It was odd. The villagers decided to exhume Peter's body and search him for telltale signs of va vampiresm according to Vampire's Burial and Death Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber. They asked a parish priest and an imperial proviser to be sent during the exhumation. Reluctantly, the provisor agreed and recorded what he witnessed. First of all, I did not detect the slightest odor that is otherwise characteristic of the dead, he wrote. The body except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away, was completely fresh. Not without astonishment, I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common observation, he had sucked from people that were killed by him, as in Piole's exhimation. The townspeople quickly sharpened a steak, which they plunged into Peter's chest. To the provisioner's shock, fresh blood flowed from his ears in mouth. Other wild things also happened, which he was to decline to detail in writing. I passed them by out of high respect. Peter's body was then burned to ashes. Unlike in the case of Mercy Brown. However, it doesn't seem that anyone consumed them. It's a safe bet. There we come Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess, who may have killed hundreds of girls. She may be the inspiration for Bloody Mary as well, one of three possible culprits. Now, Bathriy was not a vampire in traditional sense. She was alive while she took her victims, for one, and though she did horrible things to them, she did not suck their blood. But Bathriy did allegedly have vampiric tendencies like bathing in their blood in order to maintain her youth. Indeed, the so called Blood Countess seemed to have an obsession with violence. Between fifteen ninety and sixteen ten, she allegedly tortured hundreds of young women and girls from her lair in a castle in present day Slovakia. Legend states that she started with servant girls, then targeted the daughters of the gentry, and finally resorted to kidnapping local girls. Her victims were purportedly subjected to terrible torture. Bathory was rumored to burn and then freeze them, beat them, and mutilate them with scissors. She allegedly covered them with honey and let bugs feast on their flesh, sewed their lips shut, and stuck needles under their fingernails. Georgie Thurzo, an official who investigated the claims against Bathory, interviewed three hundred witnesses who told him horrifying stories. Some claimed that she was a vampire, while others said she'd had sex with the devil. He eventually charged Bathory with the debts deaths of eighty girls, but some believe that she had as many as six hundred and fifty victims. For these crimes, Bathory was put under house arrests until her death in sixteen fourteen. However, not everyone believes the incredible claims against her. It's true that King Matthias the Second, who first sent Thurzou to investigate, owed Bathory a great debt. It could be that the charges against her were less of a vampire hunt and more of a witch hunt, and that the king merely wanted to remove Bathory from power to avoid paying the significant sums of money he owed. The graves of vampires in Poland, those stories of real vampires were well documented by officials who witnessed their unburials. Many accused vampires were dealt with by villagers without the authorities looking over their shoulders. To understand the breadth of this, you only have to look at recent archaeological discoveries of vampires in Poland. While excavating a site near pin, for example, archaeologists uncovered a shocking sight a female skeleton with a sickle laid across her throat and a padlock on her toe. As experts explained, this was a preventative measure to keep the vampire from rising from the dead. The sickle was not laid flat, but placed on the neck in such a way that if the deceased had tried to get up, most likely the head would have been cut off or injured. The more they looked, the more vampire graves the archaeologists found near the city. Most recently, they uncovered the grave of a child with a padlat lock on its ankle. The child had been buried face down, which was likely another preventative measure to keep the vampire from rising from the dead. A similar discovery was also made in Luzino, Poland, where archaeologists found a graveyard full of vampires. Many had been dug up and reburied, and some were decapitated. Many of the dead had coins in their mouths, and others had bricks laid near their arms and legs. In Polish lore, vampires are like zombies corpses that can rise from the dead. Thus, measures like laying a sickle across a grave or putting bricks on a skeleton were meant to keep them buried and secured in the ground. The lives of real vampires in our modern world. While it's not all that shocking that the past is full of stories of vampires, it may surprise some that at least five thousand people identify as vampires in the United States at least as of twenty fifteen. These people are not undead or particularly violent, but they do have vampire vampiristic tendencies. According to Today, some have blood fetishes and participate in various blood related activities. Others merely act like vampires, avoiding sun exposure in drinking donated human blood. That said, not all self proclaimed vampires drink blood. Those who do are known within the vampire community as blood vampires, but there are also psychic and energy vampires who feed not on blood but on the life force energy of others. We're people you pass on the street street and likely socialize with on a daily basis. Mrticus, the founding member of Atlanta's Vampire Alliance, told The Guardian, we often keep this aspect of our life secret, for fear will be misunderstood, and to safeguard against reprisals from what society deems taboo now. Myrtikis Murticus, an antique dealer by day, added that he prefers to keep his vampire identity private. Why could you have a name like Bill. I'm more concerned about family life. The economy, finding a steady donor, and hoping the media doesn't attribute the latest murder to nonexistent vampire calls that than I am worried about seeking social justice and acceptance for my identity. He explained. As such, there's actually an incredible range of real vampires throughout history and even up to today. Though vampires like Dracula are of course fictional, there are serbian peasants, bloodthirsty rulers, violent serial killers, and others who might fit our definition of a real vampire. And since there are thousands of self identifying vampires in the United States today, you might even know one without knowing it. All right, everyone, that is it for your nine chilling accounts of alleged vampires. I have been in the studio all day. This is the second drop I've done, and this is not the only one. We've got one more for tonight with News with Them, the latest installment Geopolitics in our conversations that go along with it. So five star, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts, Share with a friend, We love y'all. I have been mixed, strange, and I am out the lady day Dad excluding
