Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [11]
In hindsight, the function of the bat nose leaf was one more bit of misinterpreted information for early naturalists, who used the presence of this structure to mistakenly categorize over a hundred species of non-blood-feeding bats (e.g., Glossophaga) as vampires. Along these lines, it should also be noted that nose leaves occur in two additional (and only distantly related) families of Old World bats, the Rhinolophidae and the Megadermatidae (the latter is now commonly known as false vampire bats). This is yet another example of convergent evolution, and although neither of these groups have any blood-feeding members, the presence of a nose leaf probably contributed to claims of vampire bats inhabiting Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Indo-Pacific.†15
Even though the identity of the three vampire bats was not fully known until the 1890s, bloodletting bats have been referred to as vampires since the mid-1700s, and although vampire folklore did not begin with the discovery of vampire bats, it was clearly strengthened by it.
According to folklorist Stu Burns, the word vampire has its somewhat hazy roots in the Slavic proper name Upir, first recorded in an eleventh-century Russian manuscript. Vampire (or vampyre—used hereafter to denote the mythical bloodsucker) is a westernization of Upir (or Upyr) and the word appears to have been coined in English in a pair of 1732 publications. Vampyre refers to a corpse that has returned from the dead to drink the blood of the living. Similar creatures were said to haunt the rural villages of nearly every Slavic nation. Not surprisingly, each culture gave their monster its own name (e.g., vukodlak in Serbia, strigoii in Romania, eretika in Russia, insurance salesman in…well, never mind). It should also be noted that stories of vampyrelike creatures have a worldwide distribution. Bloodsuckers inhabit the folklore and literature of ancient China, Babylonia, and Greece, as well as the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica (most notably as the Mayan bat god Zotz or Camazotz).
Vampyre hysteria ebbed and flowed throughout Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, reaching its peak in the 1730s. At this time it became quite popular to dig up dead bodies, accuse them of crimes, and then smash a stake through their decaying hearts. According to legend, those corpses hoping to avoid skewering often chose to transform themselves into something not quite so corpselike. Although Slavic vampyres never actually took the form of bats, popular transformation destinations included animals or inanimate objects such as fire and smoke. Fear was an important component of most vampyre legends, but some of these creatures would have had a hard time striking terror into your average toddler. For example, Muslim gypsies in the Balkans won’t keep pumpkins or watermelons for more than ten days (or after Christmas) for fear that they’ll transform into vampyres. Thankfully, these vampyre veggies have no teeth—so they’re reduced to pestering people by rolling around the ground, growling, and dripping blood.
Descriptions of how vampyres attacked their prey are almost completely absent from the early folklore, but there is some general agreement that previously healthy victims began wasting away before ultimately succumbing to the vampyre’s supernatural powers.
Some scholars have attempted to explain the multicultural obsession with vampyrism from a criminal standpoint—as gruesome acts committed by individuals exhibiting actual medical conditions ranging from schizophrenia to rabies. On rare but memorable occasions, criminals turned up who were actually obsessed with blood. These “vampyrists” were psychotic rather than supernatural, obtaining gratification by consuming or otherwise coming into physical contact with the blood of others. The most infamous vampyrist may have been the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory. Apparently the countess was quite fond of brutalizing her servants, and after slapping one young