FORTEAN TIMES UNCONVENTION 1996

1. EVOLUTION OF THE VAMPIRE (Tina Rath, the Vampire Society)

Tina Rath loves vampires. And werewolves and ghouls. And puts great emphasis on the word 'blood' when she says it. The Vampire Society is full of these people.

In her lecture she put out various ideas as to where and when the concept of the 'vampire' may have originated, apart from the Romanian stories (Interestingly, in Romania the vampire had no visual existence. All that stuff about it having no reflection in the mirror was because it was invisible). Some Scottish legends of female fairies are similar to vampire stories. This Scottish fairy was the equivalent to the Irish Banshee. So it’s not quite a vampire, really, even though it craved blood. Montague Summers once claimed that there were Irish legends of vampires but this was unsubstantiated rubbish. On the other hand, British fairies and 'witches' behaved very like Romanian vamps: they were said to take the flavour from bread, milk from mothers and beauty from women. Not only were vampires to fairies, but to ghosts: the European legends of 'mori' and 'strigoi' translate into English as 'ghosts'. Perhaps the 'vampyr' was no different - just the Romanian word for 'ghost' . Many European ghost stories and Romanian vampire stories have the same plot, involving a dead lover summoning the surviving lover.

Rath went on to talk about the Romanian vampires themselves. They had hooves and tails. If a vampire got its tail wet, it would rain. Some vampires were born rather than made, such as the seventh child of the same sex. Others became vampires after death, such as bad people, or corpses whose gravestones were jumped over by cats. There were no stories about becoming a vampire through being bitten. Undead vamps obtained hooves and tails, because this associated them with both the devil and animals. This half- animal state symbolized their role as guardians of the threshold between one life and another. An example of this is the common modern horror movie story about a group of teenagers (over the age of consent, under the age of marriage) at a party who get killed. What is happening here on the symbolic level is that their 'former selves' get killed. These films originate in older tales. There is a story of young women spinning thread in a room with young men. One young man just happens to be a tailed murderer who comes from a tomb. The only survivor of the ensuing bloodbath is a young woman, who becomes a vamp herself. The half-animal vampire guards the threshold between youth and adultdhood.

Onward to the 18th Century. In 1732 there was a letter from Vienna in an English newspaper about a 'story from Hungary' involving dead bodies sucking. The story went like this: there were deaths in a village, graves were dug up, the corpse of a man called Arnold Paul seemed 'fresh' , a stake was driven through his heart, then later on people diead from eating dead cattle which had died mysteriously. All the corpses were exhumed and staked, apparently. In Montague Summers’ version of the story included a screaming vampire, in other words, his (well-known) account is embellished.

The next bit added to the vampire legend comes from 1819, the result of time spent between Lord Byron and a young doctor called Polidori. The time they spent together was chaotic - Byron was what we would call bulimic, Polidori threatened to kill Shelley, he physically attacked Byron, Byron was having an affair with a woman who was pregnant by Shelley.... It was Byron who suggested to his chums that they all write horror stories. Mary Godwin (aka Mary Shelley)’s FRANKENSTEIN and Polidori’s THE VAMPIRE were the only finished works from this idea. In THE VAMPIRE, Byron was the main character. Byron himself knew many vampire stories and had told them to Polidori. Was this the reason why when Polidori’s book was published in 1819, it was attributed to Byon? In any event, the peasant vampire was now replaced in the popular imagination by the lord (Byron). Byron’s public image was to dress in black to show his paleness. He was well aware of the attraction of sex and death. He would look interesting dying, he had decided. He lived in a ruined abbey, had a weird diet, etc etc. Also, Polidori and Byron had fallen out. This was another possible reason why Byron was the vampire. Anyway, the new articulate vampire displaced the redfaced or hooved variety.

In 1904 A. Osborne Eaves wrote about 'psychic vampires', which were discarnate entities that could possess people. They could be avoided by using garlic against them, and this is the first mention of that vegetable in the context of vampires.

UnConvention '96 reviews

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