The Origin Of Count Dracula! (Supernatural Documentary)

ah, in the age of science, a

supernatural

story continues to seduce us the legend of the vampire, pale, elegant, aristocratic, he is embodied in

count

dracula

, his bloodlust is both repulsive and irresistible during the day, he hides his face of the sun at night, escapes from the The velvet confines of her coffin and the flaps that open to drain the blood of helpless damsels in cemeteries and archives around the world. Scholars are discovering the uncomfortable truth about vampires and are realizing that ancient people had compelling evidence for the belief that the dead could return to their prey. on the living when the disease runs rampant the vampires stir don't die like the bee when it stings once he is stronger and being stronger he has even more power to do evil this vampire that is among us is in itself so strong in person about twenty men.

He approaches more than mortal by his cunning will be the growth of the ages he can direct the elements the storm the fog the thunder he can control all the baddest things the rat and the wolf can grow and become small and sometimes he can 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 and has spawned some 200 films, all very similar to the legend blended by stoker 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 real history of vampires agree that the facts are more convincing. that fiction are found following very different paths. The historians who store the real Dracula have more than enough evidence that he existed. He was one of the world's great sadists, perhaps, but not a vampire. For the glorists who follow the trail of vampires, they are discovering that As long as they are human, memory extends. People have gone to great lengths to ensure that the living dead remain in their graves and archaeologists sometimes unearth evidence too, like this 200-year-old corpse excavated from the Greek island of Lesbos.

Eight stakes have been driven into his neck, and Groin Scholars are finally pulling vampires out of their graves for closer examination. They are discovering that the vampire of folklore bears little resemblance to his dashing Hollywood counterpart, folklorist Paul Barber. There are tremendous differences between vampires in folklore and vampires in fiction, for starters, he's a peasant, uh, he's dark instead of pale, he's puffy instead of thin, nothing is reported about canine teeth, much less that they grow. like 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 the old law only in modern fiction vampires change shape so if you look for vampires you will not find the light for fear of the bat lovers caped aristocrats who are old sometimes vampires don't even drink blood vampires are believed to be the untimely dead who return from the grave to bring death and disaster to family, friends and neighbors, even though they look like ordinary people , they are extraordinarily restless.

Peace comes to the vampire only when his corpse suffers one of the thousands of gruesome mutilations, so they would 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 are many ways to deal with vampires, the only one that appears in fiction is to stake them. Within the decomposing remains of a coffin with the initials jb on the lid lies a very unusual corpse, perhaps the only known vampire skeleton yet unearthed. The Americas

origin

ally from Connecticut JB now resides at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington D.C.

Their sorry remains came to light in 1990 when a forgotten cemetery in Griswold Connecticut began to erode into a gravel pit from which the state archaeologist excavated two dozen normal burials. Around the 18th century and very strangely, it was clear that the occupant had not rested in peace. Forensic anthropologist Paul Sledczyk was called in to take a closer look. Someone had entered after the body decomposed and mixed up the chest bones. two mayflies which are the upper leg bones and they crossed them over the lower chest and took the skull and placed it in the middle of the chest so you essentially have the look of a skull and crossbones on top.

Chest bones scrambled to sledge This post-mortem mutilation proves that JB was believed to be a vampire and written accounts of such treatment are found with surprising consistency around the world, but physical evidence on JB's scale is a rare prize when People ask me The question is JB a vampire. I always ask what your definition of a vampire is. If you believe Bram Stoker, Bella Lugosi, then no, it certainly isn't. If you know anything about European and American vampire folklore, then he is Sledzik's colleague, Rhode Island state folklorist 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 tomes and discovering tragic and seemingly incredible stories near the At the time of the American Revolution, Stukeley Tillinghast's life was full and fertile, his Rhode Island farm prospered, his children were 14, but then came the dream in which half of his garden withered and died, then his children began to die, his daughter Sarah, 19 years old and beautiful, was the first. to go then one by one another five fell ill and died another languished the last three had told stukley tillinghast something awful before he died in the night sarah returned and pressed her hands against them as they slept when anna, stickley's wife, began to experience sarah's nightlife- grueling visits, they knew that to save the rest of the family they had to stop their dead daughter and one god-fearing family made an unholy decision as dusk fell, carving the established paths along the two roads family members towards the cemetery in daylight, Stukley had already buried six of his children under the cover of darkness, he dug them up again one by one and as they exhumed the bodies they discovered that they were all decomposed until they reached Sarah, who was the first to die and they discovered that she looked fresh and more beautiful than ever.

Yes, beautiful, so she cut out her heart and burned it in a nearby rock pit. As a result of the exhumation of the bodies and the burning of Sarah's heart, one more died who was too sick to recover, but the rest. The kids survived and the rest of the family survived, so in a way it seemed to work out for the family. What happened in the farmhouse tragedy was not written down until almost a hundred years after the American Revolution and it seemed as if a terrible fairy tale bell decided to see if it could trace the family historically and I found the records that show that Sarah Tillinghath died of consumption, but he died in 1799, not at the time of the revolution, and also that a total of four of the five youngest children died, not seven. but of course it makes the story so much better when you dream that half your garden dies and then half your children die.

Bell has uncovered more than a dozen such 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. As a folklorist, I might call myself a vampire hunter when I come across one. practice like this one we're talking about now, but I'm not the kind of vampire hunter who could Think of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, Dr. Van Helsing, who did all his work in bedrooms protecting vampires or in tombs looking for vampires Bell's strange New England tales make no mention of bats or vampires, but American rituals closely parallel vampire tales 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 vood codlach in Serbia they merge in Greece and the noxzera in Germany the vampire It has deep roots in ancient times. The ancient Romans spoke of evil blood-sucking ghosts called stregas, and ancient Greece had blood-drinking lamia. A Canadian student of both 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 lilitu, 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, a drawing about it and about this.

In the 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, those kinds of beliefs about

supernatural

beings that sucked people's blood, sanctity. 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, which is why in fiction the vampire lovingly sinks his teeth into the neck of his victim in folklore. European however the vampire bites. the person somewhere in the chest, usually over the heart area, ways of dispatching 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 burn the corpse or the entire skeleton. were the chosen methods, sometimes vampires were 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 would stay busy in the grave for eternity, the question remains why people continue to believe in the life of the undead. Part of the puzzle can be attributed to a misunderstanding of the line between death by coma and what comes after a line that still sometimes defies. medical analysis people declared dead have come back to life in the morgue at the wake during the funeral and almost certainly after the burial when there was a plague people were buried very quickly we were burying people as quickly as possible because they were contagious and sometimes we were bury people who were not clinically dead, so there were still living people sometimes buried and when we opened the caves to bury other people from the same family we sometimes found corpses that were well preserved and covered in blood, but today we understand it . that those people may simply not have been dead and must have simply tried to escape from their coffins.

Sometimes the dead are restless. Contracted muscles in a new corpse can cause the body to move or even be felt causing great consternation among witnesses at the decomposing grave. Bodies may move or make noises that can be equally disturbing. More recent scientific research hoped to explain the existence of the vampire. In 1986, to the delight of the media, a biochemist proposed that a chapter of vampire law could have its

origin

s in a rare blood disease. A few years ago it was theorized that a disease called porphyria affects people causing their skin to turn a little whitish from what would normally look like bloodshot eyes some people say it will make them afraid to go out in the sun things we associate with the vampire myth of which Bram Stoker and Bella Lugosi help establish themselves in the American mind.

Porphyria can cause extreme light sensitivity and depression, it can also cause the eyes and teeth to glow with pink fluorescent deposits and deform the nails, but the hypothesis of porphyria besides offending modern victims of this now treatable disease describes the wrong vampire, the unfortunate thing is that the theory doesn't hold up because what you really have to do is compare porphyria to what goes against actual vampire folklore of Europe, which has no coherence, there is no aspect of the vampire. folklore that talks about bloodshot eyes that talks about whitening of the 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 is coming to light of vampires oh my friend, our theory of glandular stimulation through electrical impulses was correct in the early 1730s, a group of Austrian doctors reported havingwitnessed the execution of a vampire in the serbian village of medvedja.

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 medical officers it seemed the villagers had their man when they got nervous his corpse just didn't look good enough dead in their report the medical officers described the event in In detail they discovered that he was quite complete and undamaged and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears, that the old nails of the hands and feet along with the skin To prove that he was a true vampire, they drove a stake into his heart according to their custom, so that he made an audible moan and bled profusely.

Dozens of such tales survive in Eastern Europe in the 18th century. Folklorists and historians have long agreed that these documents provide a fascinating glimpse into the superstitions of the time, but Paul Barber sees something else when I began studying these documents. One of the things that kept me from taking them seriously was that they very often told how they dug up the body and drove in a stake. in it the body came to life and was fixed and whatever else I was willing to believe, I was not willing to believe that a body that had been in a grave for a month had come to life and moaned because someone One day I staked it and started I realized that I had never dug up a body and staked it and I started to wonder what would happen, so I went to several medical examiners and asked them and they told me.

I'd moan, but what about the other scandalous details in these vampire slayer tales? Can a corpse get fat? His lips shine with fresh blood. Can new skin and nails grow or remain intact months or years after burial for Paul Schlesic? The gory details of the vampire. The accounts hit close to home, particularly interesting features I have found while reading them are aspects of nails growing after death, the appearance of new skin, hair growth, teeth appearing as if they have become whiter and longer, things like that and then in a frame of decomposition of If you look at those things, what you're actually seeing is tissues starting to recede, it makes it look like nails and hair are growing, new skin is actually just the old skin that is shedding off and it's a new type.

From the appearance of fresh skin to the skin underneath during decomposition, the body becomes fat and the gases in the lungs can expel blood from the mouth, so at night, by torchlight, a decomposing corpse would appear almost exactly as the vampire hunters reported if they told me 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 you just throw out the entire account and it turns out that the descriptions in these accounts They are and this is not an exaggeration. They are clinically accurate, the interpretations of the events are not our interpretations, that is, it indicates that the body was sucking blood from the living.

Ironically, Transylvania, the Romanian province that has always been linked with vampires, is one of the places where the vampire didn't always suck. blood a suspected vampire could be staked or decapitated even if his mouth wasn't bloody uh Romania got into vampire lore mainly because of Bram Stoker, not that they don't have that tradition there, in fact they do, they just have a version different. of this, say, the Slavs and the Greeks, but when Bram Stoker put Dracula in Transylvania, this made us associate vampire tradition with Transylvania. In fact, the model of the character from whom I was borrowing the epithet Dracula was a character from Romanian history who was a prince, it does not count that he was from Wallachia instead of Transylvania and the population never thought that he had anything to do with the vampire lore, so this was strictly something Bram Stoker created, you can't blame him for writing a novel that wasn't writing history, but it is a rare example of a novel that many of us have taken for history.

Bram Stoker may be loved in the rest of the world, but in the homeland of the historical Dracula Stoker's name and creation are universally seen as a plague. about the reputation of a national hero in the year of our lord 1431 a boy was born here in sigiswara a city in transylvania he 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 dracul the Sol Dracula, True to his name, Vlad Dracula would grow up to be no vampire but a ruler whose cruelty, it is said, made Machiavelli gasp in amazement.

Vlad had many favorite punishment techniques, for example, he boiled people, skinned them alive, and cut them up. noses and ears, but his favorite method was impalement, hence his nickname the impaler, which is zepesh 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 Wallachian aggression his father Vlad the Elder ruled an uneasy buffer zone between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the terrified Christian Empire of Europe. In the treacherous atmosphere of the Turkish court, the young Vlad Dracula learned that life was cheap and that the ways of dispatching enemies were limited only by the imagination at age 17 after the murder of his father and brother Vlad was free to leave Turkey and eventually fought his way back to the throne of Wallafia knowing that the local aristocracy or buoys had conspired in the death of his father and brother, invited them to a great party to celebrate the blood of Easter.

Dracula took rather brutal revenge on the Tilgovich boyers for the murder of his father and his brother Mercia. On Easter day he impaled the elders while he was taking the other to Poinari, which is a 50 mile walk and many died in the process. and the eldest had to build a fortress on the argesh river for dracula the castle that vlad dracula had the aristocrats build on a ridge in the carpathians is now in ruins most of the boyars who built it were literally worked to death or fell into plunged off the cliff in the process and Vlad was free to install a new, more loyal breed of buoys in one of his most infamous and best-documented acts.

Vlad Dracula built a banquet hall on the outskirts of his capital, Tegoviste, and invited all the poor, old and sick to a lavish banquet. When they were satisfied, according to the stories, Vlad ordered the room to be closed from the outside and set it on fire. According to the historian Eonel Bauman, the guests at Vlad's banquet were not who they seemed to be, we know this from documents of the time and from those of Vlad the Impaler. that those so-called lame people were actually thieves, those thieves or robbers had become a public danger and threatened the trade that was developing in the country after having rid his own country of the problematic upper and lower classes.

Vlad turned his energies towards the infidels the turkish muslim empire had its eyes on europe and vlad stood in the way with the blessing of the pope vlad made daring raids into turkish territory and captured thousands knowing that the sultan would not allow his actions to go unpunished vlad dracula poisoned wells ruthlessly and burned their 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 Czech the massive Turkish army approached Tega Vista determined to take revenge, they were greeted by a terrible sight the corpses 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 casiglu bay the lord impaler the news of the monstrous spread. Dracula's cruelty towards his enemies and his countrymen by monks traveling from Wallachia to Central Europe Dracula cut off noses, ears and genitals, beheaded people or stuck hats on their heads, allegedly ate human flesh and drank human blood, forced others to dine with it on the wounds of his prisoners, then he would pour salt or honey. he let the animals lick them, dispensing the most exquisite agony the name of vlad dracula took on a second meaning dracula the dragon dracula the devil in the end not even his European allies could withstand the excesses of vlad he spent 12 years imprisoned in the castle of the king of hungary Afterwards he was freed and reinstated on the throne of Wallachia, but was soon assassinated.

Legend has it that his head was brought to the sultan as proof that the impaling prince was really dead. He was buried here, in a tomb in a monastery on Lake Snagov in the 1930s. Archaeologists opened the tomb in front of the altar and reported it empty today. Vampire fans and Romanian tourist brochures highlight this deliciously vampire trivia, but to the young monk who guards his tomb this is just a scandal inflicted on Vlad's memory by Bram's fiction. revived vlad the impaler was primarily a man who loved his country and his people a protector of the church and its ideals he justly impaled those who betrayed his country yes yes his body is buried here just a few years ago he was allowed to be Dracula by Bram Stoker published here in Romania and only then did most Romanians discover that their former impaling prince had been turned into a vampire by the audacity of an Irish writer who in all probability had never set foot in Romania if the historical Dracula were not a vampire then could this legend has other roots the dracula that we know today uh was not known to the romanians there is a vampire folklore in romania but it is quite different from what we know of bram stoker's dracula we are more talking about a monstrous vampire a no -dead we fear which is not beautiful, which is ugly, a condition 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, but in the castles and museums of romania, the caretakers of the memory of prince vlad dracula are ready to disabuse them of such notions castle curator maria marco moderation i am very concerned that the image of vlad the impaler, also called dracula, has been so distorted that they have turned him into a fighter for law and order, justly punishing those who betrayed him and turned him into a vampire, a creature that does nothing but suck the blood of its fellow men, makes us very angry and we try to show our foreign guests the real version of vlad the impaler there is no connection between the historical figure of vlad the impaler and the character portrayed by Bram Stoker, the novel has a grain of truth in the sense that there was a real historical figure, Vlad the Impaler, who was a chief of the Romanian country.

Some of his contemporary German chroniclers described his activities, but the description. by bram stoker a vlad as a vampire is a product of his fantastic imagination in the same decade that bram stoker's fantastic imagination gave life to the immortal fictional character of dracula america was burying the last of its real vampires this is the tomb of new england last known vampire Mercy Lena Brown Her story is typical of the many New England tales in which folklorist Michael Bell discovered that members of the Brown family were dying and the doctors could do nothing to stop it, desperate, they went to the cemetery as they the Tillinghasts had done. and dug up the dead members, most had rotted into skeletons, but mercy had not decayed, its heart contained fresh blood, the family cut out the heart and burned it, then they mixed the ashes with water and drank it .

The roots of this unpleasant folk remedy lie in Eastern Europe. vampire tradition where the ritual included drinking the blood of the vampire directly, people believe that you can avoid being attacked by a vampire if you drink the blood of a vampire and what is so strange about this is that we have much stronger evidence that the people drank the blood of the dead so we have that the dead drank 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 and the practice is more common in Eastern and Northern Europe.

Europe in Germany Transylvania Romania Greece how it got here is another question and for those unfamiliar with its parallels around the world it may seem like a stretch to call the stories of Sarah Tillinghast and Mercy Brown vampire stories, but they clearly resonate with a definition that is at the crossroads of folklore, history and science, the grayish notion of vampires and the most gruesome methods of eliminating them, have crossed cultural and political boundaries for centuries, taking root wherever they were introduced, which could cause a fascination so morbid that it endures. Paul Barber believes that sometimes the living have a goodreason to blame the dead on a vampire is an unusual corpse that comes to light in a time of crisis, that is, usually people are dying from an epidemic of some kind of epidemic and come to the conclusion that the first person that died is the cause of the other. deaths in europe often the epidemic was a mnemonic plague, but what was the disease that made the new english people turn to such strange and horrible medicine?

The final clue is found in Washington with JB's scrambled bones, the position of his skull and crossbones. The corpse marks him as someone who people considered a vampire and his ribcage marks him as a man with a disease that fits perfectly with the perceived symptoms of vampirism, but what is very distinctive about his skeleton is that he had suffered from tuberculosis during his life and those lesions are observable here near the articulation of the vertebrae. These white lesions are very distinctive of tuberculosis. The common thread that unites all of these cases is tuberculosis because it was consumption that was killing people and it was consumption that people didn't understand and it was consumption that people wanted to stop.

This still leaves the puzzle of the position of JB's skull and crossbones. In most cases, a vampirism in New England was a fresh corpse that was dug up and torn apart, not a skeleton, perhaps JB was just a local variation. According to folklore, perhaps the people involved in JB's case had previously attempted to kill his corpse, but consumption continued to claim victims. What has always caught my attention, especially in the New England tradition, is that there are fathers, brothers, daughters digging up the bodies of their mothers' children. Daughters, what do you have to think that I could 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. Does it make sense from your point of view? In the end, vampire folklore was not a scandalous phantom of the illiterate imagination; it was an attempt to make sense of a terrible contagion like tuberculosis in the US, the mnemonic plague, and other diseases around the world. We know that Mercy Brown was the last of her kind when her family removed her heart. Modern understanding of disease transmission had banished vampires to the most remote parts of the world, just when vampires seemed doomed by the arrival of medical science.

Bram Stoker's Dracula. become a world bestseller: vampires possessed the public once again, you can even get close to yclub, I mean, touch her and she is real and all this is real, one of the films full of vampire passion starring Theater Barra in 1915, but These vampires hardly resemble the historical prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler or the vampire of folklore following his example. From Stoker's novel, people bought vampire hunting manuals and vampire slaying kits complete with hawthorn stakes to drive through the hearts of the undead, but would-be vampire slayers were on the lookout for pale earls, beautiful damsels, or evil night bat shifters.

The true vampire story. and its scientific foundation still languishes under that long, elegant shadow cast by the fictional Count Dracula, so for some Dracula may be the source of deadly inspiration, but in remote parts of the world, far from the hype and image of Hollywood, The original folklore still lives on in the people. It's not a visit from a hooded aristocrat, but from a disheveled undead neighbor or a once-beloved sister or something, and they still hang garlic from their doors just in case. For most of us, he's just an object of terrifying amusement. time when I was giving my alphabets.

Dracula tried to catch me, oh no, would you? I hate him, well he had my alphabets, eh, you.