What is it with Vampires?

One of the most famous vampires of all time is, of course, Count Dracula.

The name Count Dracula was inspired by a real person, Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler). Tepes was a notorious Romanian prince of the 15th century, also known by as Vlad III Dracula. Unlike the historical personage, however, Stoker located his Count Dracula in a castle near the Borgo Pass in Transylvania, and ascribed to that area the supernatural aura it retains to this day in the popular imagination.

In nature there are all kinds of vampires. Mosquitoes, tick, fleas, bedbugs, and a species of bat that drinks blood, named most aptly the vampire bat.

The vampire myth as we know it is most strongly rooted in East European folklore. Here, vampires are usually revenants of suicide victims, criminals or evil sorcerers, though in some cases a vampire could pass his vampirism onto his innocent victims. It was also thought that a victim of a cruel, untimely or violent death was susceptible to becoming a vampire. Vampires were accused of killing people, often by drinking blood, but also by throttling, or sitting on them to prevent breathing. In this folklore, a vampire could be destroyed by cutting off its head, by driving a wooden stake into its heart, or by burning the corpse.

Belief in vampires persists to this day. While some cultures preserve their original traditions about the immortal, most modern-day believers are more influenced by the fictional image of the vampire as it occurs in films and literature.