The Origins Of Dracula (Supernatural Documentary) | Timeline

In the age of science, a

supernatural

story continues to seduce us. The legend of the elegant, aristocratic failed vampire is embodied in Count Dracula. His thirst for blood is both repulsive and irresistible. During the day, he hides his face from the sun. At night, he escapes from the velvet. The confines. of his coffin and the flaps to drain helpless damsels are his soul in cemeteries and archives around the world. Scholars are discovering the uncomfortable truth about vampires and are realizing that ancient people have compelling evidence for the belief that the dead could return to hunt their loved ones. the living when the disease runs rampant the vampires agitate the Nosferatu they do not die like the bee when it stings once it is only stronger and being stronger it had even more power to do evil this vampire that is among us is so strong in person like twenty men he is more than mortal by his cunning with the growth of aging he can command the elements the storm the fog the thunder he can command all things of Mena the rat and the wolf can grow and become small and cannot disappear and become unknown How then are we to begin our attack on him?, wrote Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel Dracula.

The story of the evil count has thrilled millions for more than a century, has generated some 200 deaths in total and practically the same fueled a mixed legend. and history to evoke his brilliant fictional creation, but to discover what new light science and history can shed on vampires, one must do their best to forget about Bram Stoker's retelling for the moment. Historians, folklorists and scientists who research the true history of vampires agree that fact is more convincing than fiction, but they find themselves following very different paths. Historians analyzing the real Dracula have more than enough evidence that he existed.

He may have been one of the world's great sadists, but not a vampire. Folklorists tracking vampires are discovering that for so long. As human memory stretches, people have gone to great lengths to ensure that the undead remain in their tombs, and archaeologists sometimes unearth evidence as well, like this 200-year-old corpse excavated on the Greek island of Lesbos. They have driven eight stakes into his neck. and groin scholars are finally bringing vampires out of their graves for close examination, they are discovering that the folklore vampire bears little resemblance to his dashing Hollywood counterpart, folklorist Paul Baba, there are tremendous differences between folklore vampires in the vampires In fiction, on the one hand, he is a peasant, he is dark instead of pale, he is swollen instead of thin, nothing is reported about canine teeth, much less that they grow as they do in the movies at the time of the full moon, nothing like that. is there and there are no bats in folklore, the famous blood drinking vampire bat got its name from the vampires of ancient lore, only in modern fiction do vampires change shape, so if you go looking for vampires you won't find light for fear that they love aristocrats with capes. who are old sometimes vampires don't even drink blood it is believed that vampires are the premature dead who returned from the grave to bring death and disaster to family friends and neighbors although they look like ordinary people, they are extraordinarily The restless peace comes to the vampire only when his corpse suffers one of the thousands of moosa mutilations, so they go to the cemetery, dig up the body and drive a stake through it, or decapitate it, cut it into pieces, or cremate it there in various ways. of dealing with vampires, the only one that appears in fiction is driving a stake into the decaying remains of a coffin with the initials JB on the lid lies a very unusual corpse, perhaps the only known vampire skeleton so far unearthed in The Americas, originally from Connecticut JB now resides at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC.

His sorry remains came to light in 1990, when a forgotten cemetery in Griswold Connecticut began to erode into a gravel pit. State archaeologists excavated 2,000 normal burials from around the 18th century and in one very rough one it was clear that the occupant had not rested in peace. Forensic anthropologist Paul Slezak was called in to take a closer look. Someone had entered after the body decomposed and scrambled the chest bones. They had removed the ephemeral tooth that is the upper leg bones and crossed them over the lower chest and took the skull and placed it in the middle of the chest so you essentially have the appearance of a skull and shinbones. crosses on top of chest bones mixed up for Slezak this post Mortem mutilation shows that JB was believed to be a vampire.

Oral and written accounts of such treatment are found with surprising consistency throughout the world, but physical evidence on JB's scale is a rare prize, when people ask me if JB is a vampire. I always ask what your definition of a vampire is if you believe in Bram Stoker Bela Lugosi then no it certainly isn't if you know anything about the vampire from the folklore of Europe and America then it's sleigh Zeke calls the state of Rhode Island for Florida Michael Bell has studied American vampire lore his research has turned him into a vampire hunter but unlike his fictional colleague of Dracula Fame Dr. van Helsing Michael Bell tracks his vampires in town halls and libraries, leafing through dusty toes and discovering tragic and seemingly unbelievable stories around the time of the American Revolution, stupid Tillinghast, his life was full and fertile, his farm in Rhode Island prospered, her children numbered 14, but then came the dream in which half of her orchard withered and died then her children began to die daughter Sarah 19 and beautiful was the first to leave then one by one another five fell ill and they died another languished the last three had told Stokely Tillinghast a dreadful thing before they died in the night Sarah returned and pressed her hands against them as they slept when Stokeley's wife Anna began to experience the exhausting visits of night life from Sarah.

They knew that to save the rest of the family, her dead daughter had to be arrested and a God-fearing family. he made an unholy decision as twilight fell still Attilan's ships set out along the family path towards the cemetery in daylight the stupa had already buried six of his children under the cover of darkness, he dug them up again one by one and while they were exhuming them they found that they were all decomposed until they arrived with Sara, who was the first to die and they discovered that she was fresh and looked more beautiful than ever, so they cut out her heart and burned it in a nearby rock pit as As a result of exhuming the bodies and burning Sara's heart, one more died who was too sick to recover, but the rest of the children survived and the rest of the family survived, so somehow it seemed to work out for the family, The account of the Tillinghast tragedy was not written down. until almost a hundred years after the American Revolution and seemed like a horrible fairy tale.

Belle decided to see if she could trace the family historically and found records showing that Sara Panting died of consumption, but she died in 1799. Not at the time of the Revolution and also that a total of four, the five youngest children died. , not seven, but of course, it makes for a much better story when you have a dream where your orchard dies and then half of your children die. She has discovered more than a dozen of these sad tales in the oral and written history of New England, tales of families forced to stem waves of death by digging up their loved ones and mutilating them like a folklorist.

You could call me a vampire hunter when I come across a practice. So what we're talking about now, but I'm not the kind of vampire hunter you might imagine from the novel Dracula Dr. van Helsing, who did all his work whether in bedrooms protecting vampires or in tombs searching for vampires, strange tails of New England do not mention bats or vampires, but American rituals closely paralleled tales of vampires around the world. The word vampire has its roots in The Hungarian word vampire and the phenomenon has its cousins ​​throughout Eastern Europe and the Balkans the upir in Russia Poland and Czechoslovakia the Lac voting code in Serbia the remember us in Greece and the NOx era in Germany a vampire It has deep roots in ancient times the ancient Romans spoke of evil blood-sucking ghosts called stragglers and ancient Greece drank blood.

Lamia, a Canadian student of vampire folklore and historical Dracula. Benjamin LeBlanc points out that the phenomenon goes back even further, for example, there is a Babylonian entity that we call lilith or lily, who in Judaism The Judaic tradition was the first wife of Adam, this entity was sucking the blood of small children and babies. Even before that, in Persia archaeologists found a cup with a drawing and in this drawing we can see a man fighting with a monstrous being trying to suck his blood. We know that the Chinese six centuries before Christ also had some kind of beliefs and that type of beliefs of

supernatural

beings that sucked the blood of people the sanctity of blood in almost all cultures and religions seems to have given rise to a gallery of supernatural entities that die by sucking the blood of the living in fiction, the A vampire lovingly sinks his teeth into his victim's neck in European folklore, however, the vampire bites the person somewhere on the chest, usually over the heart area.

Ways to dispatch the vampire vary from place to place. Staking through the heart is traditional throughout Eastern Europe, but sometimes cutting out the heart and burning it or burning the entire corpse or skeleton were the preferred methods. Vampires were sometimes buried face down with a stake. wedged between the lid and the chest or a sickle over the neck, in Germany some vampires could be buried with a net of thousands of knots, since the vampires could not resist untying the knots and kept busy in the grave for eternity , the question remains why people continued to believe in the life of the living dead.

Part of the puzzle can be attributed to a misunderstanding of the line between death in a coma and what comes next, a line that still sometimes defies medical analysis. People declared dead have come back to life in the morgue. the wake during the funeral and almost certainly after the burial, when there was a plague, people were buried very quickly, we buried people as quickly as possible because they were contagious and sometimes we buried people who were not clinically dead, for what there were still people. alive sometimes buried and when we opened the caves to bury people from the same family we sometimes found corpses that were well preserved and covered in blood, but today we understand that it is possible that those people simply were not there and must simply have tried to escape. of their coffins sometimes the dead are restless contracted muscles in their new corpse can cause the body to move or even feel causing great consternation among witnesses at the grave Decomposing bodies can move or make noise which can be equally disturbing More recent Scientific research hopes to explain the existence of the vampire.

In 1986, to the delight of the media, a biochemist proposed that a chapter of the vampire law could have its

origins

in a rare blood disease. A few years ago there was a theory that a disease called porphyria affects people. causing your skin to turn a little whitish than it would normally appear my eyes are bloodshot some people say it will make them afraid to go out in the sun things we associate with the vampire myth that Bram Stoker and Bela Lugosi helped establish in the United States Mental porphyria can cause extreme sensitivity to light and depression.

It can also make the eyes and teeth glow with pink fluorescent deposits and deform the nails, but the porphyria hypothesis, in addition to offending modern victims of this now-treatable disease, describes the wrong vampire. The unfortunate thing is that the theory does not. I can't stand it because what you really have to do is compare the porphyria with what is against the real vampire folklore of Europe, which has no coherence. There is no aspect in vampire folklore that talks about bloodshot eyes, that talks about whitening of the skin. skin and living individuals, there is none of that, none of that happens in the vampire folklore of Europe, but now a fuller explanation of the true law of vampires is coming to light.

In the early 1730s, a group of austrian doctors reported witnessing a vampire execution in the serbian village of medve gia. A series of mysterious deaths in the village were attributed to arnold powell, a man who had been dead for years, The villagers decided to dig him up to the surprise of the doctors, it seemed like the villagers had their man. whenThey dug up his corpse, he just didn't look dead enough in their report, the doctors described the event in detail and found that he was quite complete and intact and that there was fresh blood from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears, but from old nails. on his hands and feet along with the skin had fallen off and new ones had grown and as they saw from this that he was a real vampire, they drove a stake into his heart according to their custom, for which he let out an audible moan and bled profusely. .

Dozens of such tales survived in Eastern Europe in the 18th century. Folklorists and historians have long agreed that these documents provide fascinating insight into the superstitions of the time, but Paul Baba sees something else when I began studying these documents. The only way to take them seriously was that they often told how they dug up the body and put a stake in it, the body came to life and groaned, and whatever else I was willing to believe, I wasn't willing to believe that a body that had been in a grave for a month had come back to life and groaned because someone had staked it.

One day I started to realize that I had never actually dug up a body and staked it and I started to wonder what was going to happen, so I went to several coroners and asked them and they said it would have grown, but what about the Other scandalous details of these tales of vampire slayers? Can a corpse get fat? His lips shine with fresh blood. Can you grow new skin and nails? or remain intact months or years after Paul Slezak's burial the gory details of the vampire stories are close to home the particularly interesting features I have found in reading them are aspects of nail growth after death new skin appearing hair that grows teeth that appear as if they have become whiter and longer, things like that and then, in a state of mind of decay, if you look at those things, what you are actually seeing are the tissues that begin to recede, it gives the appearance that the nails and hair are The growth of the new skin is actually just the old skin that is shed and a new type of fresh skin appears on the skin underneath during decomposition, the body becomes fat and the gases in the lungs can expel blood from the mouth, therefore, at night by torchlight.

A decomposing corpse would appear almost exactly as the vampire hunters reported if they told us that they dug up a body and it turned out to be a vampire, which is a little hard to believe, so what happens is that throughout the entire account it turns out The descriptions in these accounts are, and this is not an exaggeration, they are clinically accurate, the interpretations of the events are not artistic interpretations, that is, it indicates that the body was sucking blood from the living, ironically Transylvania, the Romanian province that It has been linked forever. With vampires it is one of the places where the vampire does not always suck blood, a suspected vampire can be stabbed or decapitated even if his mouth is not bloody.

Romania has gotten into vampire lore mainly thanks to Bram Stoker, not that they don't. they have that tradition there, in fact, they have a different version of, say, the Slavs and the Greeks, but when Bram Stoker put Dracula in Transylvania, this made us associate the vampire tradition with Transylvania, in fact, the model of the character that was. To borrow the epithet from Dracula, he was a character in Romanian history who was a prince, not a count, he was from Wallachia rather than Transylvania and the population never thought he had anything to do with the vampire lord, so This was strictly something that Bram Stoker cannot be blamed for the fact that he was writing a novel, he was not writing history, but it is a rare example of a novel that many of us have taken for history.

Bram Stoker might be loved in the rest of the world, but in his homeland. of the name and creation of the historical Dracula Stoker are universally seen as a blight on the reputation of a national hero in the year of our Lord 14 31 a boy was born here in cig Ishwara a city in Transylvania inherited the name of his father Vlad as well as the diminutive of this father's nickname the dragon in the Romanian language dragon is Dracula the son Dracula true to his name Vlad Dracula would grow up and not be a vampire but a ruler whose cruelty, it is said, made Machiavelli catch his breath in everything Vlad had many favorite punishment techniques, for example, he boiled people, skinned them alive and cut off their noses and ears, but his favorite merit was impalement and his nickname of the Impaler, who wore his sash in Romanian, while a teenage Vlad Dracula spent six painful years as a hostage to the sultan in neighboring Turkey his life was an insurance policy against Malaysian aggression his father Vlad the elder ruled an uneasy buffer zone between the Ottoman Turkish empire and the terrified Christian empire of Europe in the treacherous atmosphere of At the Turkish court young Vlad Dracula learned that life was cheap and that the ways of dispatching enemies were limited only by the imagination.

At the age of 17, after the murder of his father and brother, Vlad was free to leave Turkey and finally He fought his way back to the throne of Lafayette knowing that the local aristocracy of boyars had conspired in the death of his father and brother invited them to a great party to celebrate Easter. Vlad Dracula took rather brutal revenge on the boyars of Tioga Vista for the murder of his father and he and his brother Machiya II on Easter Day impaled the eldest while taking the other coined a V, which is a 50 mile walk, many died in the process and the eldest had to build a fort in the river Ardèche for Dracula.

The castle that Vlad Dracula had aristocrats build on a hill in the Carpathians is now in ruins. Some of the boyars who built it literally worked themselves to death or fell off the cliff in the process and Vlad was free to install a new, more loyal class of boyars in one of his most infamous and best-documented acts. Vlad Dracula built a banquet hall on the outskirts of his capital. of Tegel every day and invited all the poor, old and sick to a splendid banquet after having eaten their fill, according to the stories. Vlad ordered the room to be closed from the outside and set fire to, according to historian Ian L.

Bauman, the guests of Vlad's house. banquet were not who they appear to be Dinka second our state clearly considers the winner of kurama aku we know it from documents of the time and from those whom Vlad the Impaler let the so-called lame ones were actually thieves those thieves or robbers had become public danger and threatened the trade that was developing in the country people now under 32 years of age medical activity in America Reseda special attention Sara Ramona having read in her own country the problematic upper and lower classes Vlad directed his energies towards the infidels that the Muslim empire Turk had his eyes were set on Europe and Vlad stood in the way with the Pope's blessing Vlad made daring raids into Turkish territory and captured thousands of people tonight Ottawa organized apartheid.

We just support him on camera. The Italian novena Gustavo del o spied, knowing that the sultan would not allow it. his actions to go unpunished Vlad Dracula mercilessly poisoned Wells and burned his own villages while the Turks could barely eke out a living in the countryside, but Vlad had more tricks up his sleeve, as recalled in this 1978 Romanian film Vlad Tepish when the huge Turkish army approached to take Avista bent on revenge they were greeted by a terrible spectacle the assemblies of some 20,000 Turkish prisoners on wooden stakes a forest of impaled from then on the Turks would call him with a mixture of contempt and admiration because the igloo Bey the Lord Impaler the news of Dracula's monstrous cruelty towards his enemies and his countrymen was spread by monks traveling from Valhalla to Central Europe Dracula cut off noses, ears and genitals, decapitated people or nailed hats to their heads, allegedly He ate human flesh and drank human blood, forcing others to dine with them.

He poured salt or honey into the wounds of his prisoners and then let the animals lick them, dispensing a more exquisite agony. Vlad Dracula's name took on a second meaning trakula the dragon Dracula the devil in the end, not even the European allies could withstand Vlad's excesses, he spent 12 years. Imprisoned in the castle of the king of Hungary, he was later freed and reinstated on the throne of Falaka, but was soon murdered. Legend has it that his head was brought to the sultan as proof that Prince Impaler was really dead. He was buried here in a tomb in a monastery on the cozy lake in the 1930s, archaeologists opened the tomb in front of the altar and reported that it was empty.

Nowadays, vampire fans and Romanian tourist brochures highlight this delicious curiosity that the vampires asked, but to the young monk who guards his tomb, this is just scandal inflicted on Vlad's memory by Bram Stoker's unofficial fiction. in Jumanji on Thursday's party Vlad the Impaler was primarily a man who loved his country and his people, he was not only a protector of the church and his ideals, he impaled those who betrayed his country Vlad the Impaler is buried in front of the altar sacred yes yes his body is buried here just a few years ago Bram Stoker's Dracula was allowed to be published here in Romania and only then did most Romanians discover that their old prints of the Impaler had become a vampire thanks to the audacity of a Irish writer who in all likelihood had never set foot in Romania.

If the historical Dracula was not a vampire, then this legend could have other roots. The Dracula we know today was not known to Romanians. There is vampire folklore in Romania, but it is very different from what we know of Bram Stoker's Dracula; We are talking rather about a monstrous vampire, an undead that we fear, that is not beautiful, that is ugly, a condition that we do not envy, to the dismay of Romanian historians. The post-communist regime has welcomed the influx of tourists clamoring to see the places where the vampire Count Dracula lived and ruled, but in Romania's castles and museums the keepers of Prince Vlad Dracula's memory are ready to disabuse them of such notions. .

The curator of the castle Maria Marku It bothers me very much that the image of Vlad the Impaler, also called Dracula, has been so distorted that they have turned him from a fighter for law and order justly punishing those who betrayed him into a vampire, a creature who does nothing but suck the blood of his companions. We humans became very indignant and tried to show our foreign guests the real version of Vlad the Impaler. Historian Raoul Mihai Disney essentially has no connection between the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler and the character portrayed by Bram Stoker.

The novel does have a There is some truth to it in the sense that there was a real historical character of Vlad the Impaler, who was a chieftain of the Romanian country. Some of his contemporary German chroniclers described his activities, but Bram Stoker's description of Vlad as a vampire is a product of his fantastic imagination in the same decade that Bram Stoker's fantastic imagination brought to life the immortal fictional character of Dracula. he was burying the last of his royal vampires this is the grave of the last known New England vampire merci Lina Brown her story is typical of many New England tells that folklorist Michael Bell discovered that members of the Brown family were dying and that doctors were not They could do nothing to stop it, desperate, they went to the cemetery as Tillinghast said and dug up the dead members, most had two rotten skeletons, but mercy was.

Her heart, intact, contained fresh blood. The family cut out the heart and burned it, then mixed the ashes with water and drank it. The roots of this unpleasant folk remedy lie in Eastern European vampire tradition, where the ritual included drinking the vampire's blood directly. I think you can avoid being attacked by a vampire if you drink a vampire's blood and the strange thing about this is that we have much stronger evidence that people drank the blood of the dead, so we have that the dead drink. the blood of the living I think it is strange that this practice occurred in New England because the settlers here were Yankees and were of English descent.

The practice is more common in Eastern Europe, in Northern Europe, in Germany, Transylvania, Romania, Greece, how it got here. It's another matter and for those unfamiliar with their parallels around the world it might seem like a stretch to call the stories of Sarah Tillinghast and Mercy Brown vampire stories, but they clearly resonate with a definition that lies at the crossroads of folklore, the History and science: The horrifying notion of vampires and the most gruesome methods of killing them have crossed cultural and political boundaries for centuries, taking root wherever they were introduced. Itthat could cause such a morbid fascination to endure.

Paul Baba believes that sometimes the living have good reasons to blame the dead. A vampire is an unusual corpse that comes to light at a time of crisis i.e. usually people are dying from an epidemic of some kind of epidemic and they come to the conclusion that the first person who died is causing the many other deaths in Europe. Sometimes the epidemic was pneumonic plague but what? It was the disease that made New Englanders turn to such strange and horrible medicine. The final clue is found in Washington with JB's jumbled bones. The position of the skull and crossbones of his mangled corpse marked him as someone whom people considered a vampire. and his ribcage marks him as a man with the disease that fits perfectly with the perceived symptoms of vampirism but was very distinctive from a skeleton is that he had suffered from tuberculosis during his life and those lesions can be seen right here near the joint The vertebrae are these white lesions, they are very distinctive from tuberculosis, the common thread that unites all these cases as tuberculosis because it is the consumption that was killing people and it was the consumption that people did not understand and it was the consumption the one that people wanted to stop. still leaves the enigma of JB's skull and crossbones position in most cases of vampirism in New England it was a recent corpse that was dug up and vandalized not a skeleton perhaps JB was just a local variation of folklore such Once the people involved in JB's case had previously tried to kill his corpse, but consumption continued to claim victims.

What has always struck me, especially in the New England tradition, is that you have fathers, brothers, daughters digging up the bodies of their mothers, sons, daughters, what do you have to think that I? I can go to my mother's grave and remove her heart, burn it and drink the ashes as an antidote for some illness I have, it's completely strange, but what's very interesting about the whole tradition is that it makes sense from the point of view of she. In the end, vampire folklore was not a scandalous phantom of the illiterate imagination, but an attempt to make sense of a terrible contagion like tuberculosis in the United States.

Pneumonic plague and other diseases around the world, as far as we know, Mercy Brown was the last of her kind when her family removed her heart. Modern understanding of disease transmission had changed. Vampires were banished to the most remote parts of the world just when vampires seemed doomed by the arrival of medical science. Bram Stoker's Dracula had become a global bestseller. The vampires possessed the audience once again, they even came up close and looked at, I mean, touch her and she's real and all this. The thing is real, one of the vampire passion pact films starring 1915, but these vampires hardly resemble the historical Prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler or the vampire of folklore following the example of Stoker's novel, people bought manuals of vampire hunting and complete vampire killing kits with Hawthorn.

The stakes were high to pierce the hearts of the undead, but would-be vampire slayers sought pale earls and beautiful damsels for the evil shifting night bats. The true history of vampires and its scientific foundation still languishes under that long, elegant shadow cast by fiction. To some, Count Dracula may be a source of deadly inspiration, but in remote parts of the world, far from the hype and Hollywood, he became the original folklore. Even at home, people fear not the visit of a hooded aristocrat, but rather that of a disheveled undead neighbor or a once beloved sister or son, and they still hang garlic from their doors just in case for most of us it is just the object of good and terrifying fun.