Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [12]
Some researchers seeking to explain our fascination with the vampyre phenomenon looked to the deaths themselves rather than the crimes surrounding them. They related fatalities that resulted from supposed vampyre attacks to diseases like anemia, tuberculosis, or the various plagues (such as the Black Death) that spread in wavelike fashion across Europe and much of the globe.†17 Additionally, given the general population’s ignorance about medical conditions like comas, it’s no shock that there were numerous reports of what may have been premature burials and encounters with “dead” people who had suddenly and inexplicably come back to life.*18
Clearly, though, once word of the existence of real vampire bats began to circulate, a new supernatural emphasis on these mysterious (and as yet unidentified) creatures began to take shape. Bats living in Europe, where blood-feeding species had never existed, were gradually implicated as being vampyres. Hysteria and storytelling outpaced reason and science (although to be frank, science had done a lousy job of getting its vampire bat stories straight). Gradually, the folklore of vampyrism began to incorporate the bat and batlike characteristics into its lexicon. Unlike the birds, bats were mysterious and barely glimpsed creatures of the night; they resembled rodents (at least superficially) and flew on leathery wings. Bats were prime candidates for superstition and unwarranted fear, and they would become forever linked to vampyrism in 1897 with the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula.
Inspired perhaps by similar stories about how Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson had come up with their ideas, Stoker (an Irish theater manager and critic) joked that the literary inspiration for his most famous work came from a nightmarish dream that followed a late evening meal of dressed crabs.
Stoker derived the title of his novel from a real-life, fifteenth-century Romanian voivode (warlord or prince). Vlad III, from the principality of Wallachia, became infamous for the means by which he slaughtered his primarily Muslim enemies. Although he utilized a wide variety of tortures (“He blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, boiled, skinned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, and…stabbed”), Vlad’s favorite torture method was to have victims impaled through the heart, chest, or navel on sharpened wooden stakes. Mothers were stabbed through their breasts before having their babies thrust onto the jagged shafts. In other instances, victims were pierced from the buttocks, upward, by a stake that had been rounded off and lubricated to prevent the impaled from dying too soon.
Slaughtering on a massive scale, the prince reportedly covered the landscape with thousands of staked bodies in various stages of decay. These “forests of the impaled” instilled fear in Vlad’s enemies and eventually earned him the moniker Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler).
How did a murderous Romanian prince lead Bram Stoker to his famous title? It’s quite simple. Vlad’s father (Vlad II), who was also a prince, had been indoctrinated into the Order of the Dragon*19 around 1431 and was thereafter known as Vlad Dracul. Those who knew Vlad the younger could avoid the embarrassing “Impaler” title by instead referring to their prince as Dracula—literally, “son of the dragon.” It should also be noted that since Dracul has a dual meaning in the