Enough with the Vampires!

Even though we are between Twilight movies and the book series has ended, people still flock to my website in droves to read about the Volturi vampires. Why, I ask, why? (Really, feel free to comment below on your reasons.)

But there's no stopping the people when they want something (hello, French Revolution) so on that note, last week's National Geographic email promised intel on Venetian vampires. As it turns out, there's a book to promote, Vampire Forensics by Mark Collins Jenkins, who Amazon.com says is chief historian of the National Geographic Society’s archives.

You can actually read a good chunk of the book on Amazon - and it seems both well-researched and interesting and not at all academic in tone. From what I browsed, the book is about how vampires have permeated pop culture and the actual, historical stories underpinning the legends. But what caught my attention was the excerpt on the National Geographic page, describing in detail how Dr. Matteo Borrini discovered the 16th-century female "vampire" skeleton in Venice about a year and a half ago. It explains how Borrini came to theorize that the skeleton was a suspected "after-devourer," at least in the minds of the dead woman's contemporaries. The vampire was believed to eat its shroud, then its fingers, and eventually its living family members - and in order to stop it, the people would unearth the skeleton and stuff dirt in its mouth so it couldn't chew. They might throw a brick in, just to be extra-sure, which is what happened in this particular case. It's grisly and fascinating, no?

The accompanying photo, by the way, is thought to be the burial site of Vlad Tepes, Bram Stoker's inspiration for Dracula, at Snagov Monastery outside of Bucharest, Romania. Even the tomb has its own legend surrounding it. When archaeologists opened the grave in the 1930s, it was empty except for some animal bones. They found the remains of a man in another grave under the church, but since this person still had his head - Vlad was famously decapitated - it couldn't have been him. This skeleton had a golden ring tied on to its coat with a golden thread - a clue to identity, perhaps, except that the ring has since been lost, alas. So where is Vlad? No one knows, but the legend of Snagov continues. :)