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162: Vampiric Lore
47 Plays2 months ago
Welcome to spooky season cryptic cuties, we hope you enjoyed the darkcast takeover ep last week. Join us as we take a dive into the vast world of vampire lore, for what is sure to be the first part of a series.
Kelsey has the down low on how to avoid becoming a vampire, from different things to avoid, to anti-vampire burial methods. We discuss rules from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (we are both team Spike btw), and other common vampire myths, like aversion to garlic, holy water, sunlight and crossing running water to escape.
Alanna shares a collection of vampiric creatures from around the world and how they are turned, along with a couple supposed cases of the undead rising from their graves. We had lots of fun this ep so tune in! You might learn something about vampires you didn't before, and take a shot every time we talk about a bag of rice.
Come back next week as we continue our spooktober episodes!
Darkcast promo of the week is the true crime pod Burnt Marshmallows!
Gather round the campfire for today's cozy mystery. We'll keep you company with a little mystery to solve by the end of each episode.
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Darkcast Network. Indie Pods with the Dark Side.
Introduction to 'Castles and Cryptids'
00:00:26
Speaker
You are listening to Castles and Cryptids, where the castles are haunted and the cryptids are cryptic as fuck. And I'm Elena. And I'm Kelsey. And that's corner in the corner, where you can't hear him. Yes. Don't even worry about it. I think he's put himself down for a nap. It's perfect. It's perfect. We never did get him to record his purr on the mic on that last patron. I tried. Though we did try.
00:00:56
Speaker
He wasn't ready to make his on-air debut. That's fine. I think he's shy. I think he's done it once before either for a Patreon or a regular episode where we caught it. I was like, oh, that was cute. Normally it's just his irritated rar! As he gets like, funted off the desk. Throw him across the room or pick him up and carry him out of the room and then lock the door behind him.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yes, he's being jettisoned from the yeah equation. Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah, we're coming at you.
Sister Show and Spooky Season Prep
00:01:31
Speaker
And we hope you missed us last week, but also enjoyed our little offering from our Darkcast sister show. Hands off my pot. That's what it was. OK, because I did. Yeah. Anyway, there was a moment where I was like, I'm going to do this one. Oh, no, wait. It's not going to work. I'm going to do this one. Oh, cool. It's a Canadian case. So that worked out well.
00:01:53
Speaker
um Nice. Yeah, and we needed the time, so we hope, yeah yeah, don't mind. Yeah, that we're, in we're gearing up for spooky season. We're watching horror movies, we're writing notes about horror movie crimes. We are.
00:02:11
Speaker
in it right now yeah ah i don't know if you've actually watched any horror movies lately we haven't even talked about it we've been keeping a lid on it i should say i've watched a few i've watched a few yeah we can't spoil too much I'm trying to get through all the ones I have, you know, Disney Plus, Prime and Netflix, trying to trying to focus on the horror movies and the ones I have on my list and be like, oh, yeah watch enough of these and then we can talk about some of them. I know you guys are buying like some of the newer ones. You guys rent like online when they come out. So I don't normally do that. So I won't. I've watched some of those, but
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, we'll have to do a shortlist and you can let me know if you can come over to watch. Maybe we still have a couple on there, like cuckoo he bought or downloaded. Okay. And I think we watched Be Afraid. I could be wrong, all the names start to sound the same after a while.
00:03:12
Speaker
right yeah We watched that one rain picked out like ah with the stop motion and it was kind of wild. Yeah, there's there's a few out there right now, yeah as always. but Yeah, that'll be bull announce that and let you guys know more when when we have it finalized for our Patreon. Yeah. Yeah.
Exploration of Vampire Lore
00:03:35
Speaker
What are we talking about today, Kelsey? I think, that did I pick this episode? I don't know. It was vampire lore.
00:03:45
Speaker
I think you must have because i I didn't write it down and then I hadn't even remembered what the topic was and I had to ask you. I think we were talking about oh it's been a while since we did like a lore episode. It's like vampires. Scary. so Like how can you not do some vampire lore and not just the same old stuff that I don't know everybody talks about it or whatever. Some different stuff.
00:04:10
Speaker
yeah this was fun i thought so there's a lot of stuff on freaking wikipedia like holy yeah it's kind of crazy yeah i'm sure i'll have to make a generous donation to them for all their hard work like hundreds of movies then that have their own different lore and yeah books uh all that stuff their own sets of rules and things it goes back so far that you get like crazy stuff from historical to all around the world and then like the modern yeah all the modern takes all the sparkling vampires i was just gonna say the sparkly which if you're casually talking about the last twilight movie to pat he'll be the
00:04:58
Speaker
interrupt you to be like not vampires and i was like whatever for the purpose of the story the vampires were all fighting because i did want to rewatch that they were talking about it and i was like oh yeah they didn't have a big fuck off vampire fight at the last twilight movie that's right i don't think i watched any of the breaking dawn ones i'd watched the other the other three i think nothing really happens in the first half of the last movie. So you're better off just watching the last one. I find that so rarely anything does when you have to split a movie. It's all like, this is the build up and then everything cool is gonna be in the second one. I mean, you could argue with Pat about that on his Lord of the Rings trilogy. I'm not sure if he agrees, but
00:05:47
Speaker
Then he puts on those movies because he's seen them 10 million times and he falls asleep. So what does he have to say? Call out. It's like his go to. I'm going to have a dad nap because this is a comfort movie.
00:06:02
Speaker
ah Did you guys ever watch what we do in the shadows? That one's hilarious. I have seen some of it, but I wish I saw it. I love it. I recently binge watched it. ah Okay. I was watching it at my friend Michelle's house. Yeah, they really like it too. Yeah.
00:06:24
Speaker
um it's like ah yeah Dark humor and sarcasm. Am I trying to say sarcasm or sarcastic? I don't know. One of those. And like almost like a workplace comedy. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool when they do different like things like that through a a different take a modern lens or a screwball comedy or like you know the yeah the pirates one too that rasa likes so much that they need our fight means death yeah will our net i'm like okay yes there's so many good people in it and pat's just like i just don't like that one guy i'm like well i don't care i'm gonna watch it anyway but yeah you can't close yourself off man just because you don't like that one actor
00:07:12
Speaker
yeah especially if they aren't like a main main person in the show like you can you can put up with them for a series arc or whatever yeah because he didn't like one or two of the actors are just not very much on the umbrella academy and i was like there's like six of them you're barely gonna spend much screen time on each one really yeah exactly i'll have to give him a whole segment where he just talks about about Pat's problem. No, it's like that modern family where Jay has his um a blog online where he grumbles about stuff or like, what the fuck is it? You know, what really grinds my gears? It's something like that. oh gee Yeah. It's like, give them a little outfit and they'll just go with it. Yeah.
00:08:00
Speaker
oh like me on this podcast and
00:08:06
Speaker
uh i'm excited i know i was gonna talk about some different history and vampires around like lore around the world and then i know you're gonna cover like some ways to banish and free yourself of these vampy creatures yeah yeah i don't know do you want to go first or do you want me to go first i mean i thought about that but then i was like i don't think it's really gonna matter because probably not most people know yeah in general what we you consider to be like a vampire creature and yeah right if you don't know where where have you been yeah so mine will just be kind of like a deep dive into some
00:08:52
Speaker
origins and stuff which i find fun oh my god there's like so many different ways that people believe you can become a vampire it's funny yeah i ran into ah some of that stuff just because they're talking about like how to prevent it um by doing these things like this doesn't happen yeah yeah it's two sides of the same coin yeah um nice yeah okay so i think i kind of kept these a little bit it should start off with more like ways to ward off vampires or kind of protect yourself from them oh nice yeah those are fun folklore too yeah garlic anyone
00:09:34
Speaker
That is, I think that's my first one.
Garlic and Vampire Myths
00:09:37
Speaker
Well, I was just you picking up like stuff at the liquor store for today and tonight or whatever. And then they had like this freaking vodka Caesar. Garlic. Garlic. And like the lady said it was really good, though. They also had something that looked like it came instead of a a can, it came in a blood bag.
00:10:00
Speaker
it was like really red oh it was so wow was it a bloody mary no i don't know wild berry and vodka it sounds delicious oh okay like pomegranate much yeah pomegranate or something something like that oh my god they're so on point ah for the season uh maybe we'll taste test some of those oh that could be a fun patreon when There's like oh my god we could okay so if we get together and watch horror movies we need to look up creepy ah cocktails to make yeah like I'm sure there's one brain hemorrhage shot and don't know what that is it looks to be fun weird it's like ah if you make it with like a clear liquor and then like a
00:10:52
Speaker
more of a baileys or something on top so that it kind of like doesn't mix and then it's like a drop of grenadine or something that makes it a little red so then it looks kind of like a weird brain floating in formaldehyde is the idea oh that would be fun i like that yes oh my god okay i'm writing it down cute signature cocktails provided by bartender alana Oh, they did a similar series on the Drinking the Kool-Aid Patreon. I actually thought it was really fun. Yeah, they would like make up different cocktails and stuff. Ooh, I love it. Well, around the world, obviously, there's different cultural practices that are intended to prevent a recently deceased person from turning into an undead revenant. Revenant. Yeah.
00:11:42
Speaker
the causes of turning into a vampire vary around the world and even from modern to more traditional folklore, folklore. It's the lair where the folk dragon lives. Yeah.
00:12:00
Speaker
In Slavic and Chinese traditions, a body that I guess was jumped over by an animal, particularly a dog or a cat, was likely to become undead. I thought that was interesting. I think that was interesting too. I came across that and was like, but why? I know. I didn't hear the dog part. yeah A dog or a cat.
00:12:23
Speaker
And do they have to jump? A cat, I feel like, is more likely to jump. A dog's just gonna wander by, sniff and maybe take a pee. Maybe. Just like anybody with a... ah Okay, another way is anybody with a wound that had not been treated with boiling water, I guess, is also at risk. That sounds painful.
00:12:48
Speaker
Okay, but also, at least Auntie, antibacterial to wash it out with some water that's at least been boiled back in the day. Right? Yeah, there's some fog behind it. Maybe that had something to do with the but theory behind it, I don't know. Yeah. In Russian folklore, vampires were said to have once been witches or people who rebelled against the Russian Orthodox Church when they were alive. Okay, convenient Russian Orthodox Church.
00:13:20
Speaker
I feel like that was maybe scapegoating. Like witch trial type stuff. Ooh, did you see the sun just totally get covered by a cloud? I went like totally dark just for a minute. It was weird. Okay, nevermind. Oh. Nope. Castles and cryptids after dark. Got like cat hair all over my drink. Grootie. Oh no. Was he nuzzling it? I don't know, it's floating in the air somewhere.
00:13:48
Speaker
oh yeah they do be doing that yeah so some of the well-known ways to protect yourself include garlic so I thought this was interesting.
00:14:04
Speaker
ding The odor from garlic is believed to deter vampires, and this belief may have originated from epidemics of rabies that occurred in the past. okay I guess ah individuals with rabies have hypersensitive olfactory senses, so like sense of smell, and the pungent sent from garlic would be very bad to them, so it could repel them that way.
00:14:30
Speaker
oh a little bit of something like that came up in mind too like the the blaming of the rabies because of the oversensitivities and different things that you like also overt like aversion to water i think you develop it yeah some weird symptoms i think i've heard that too and they're older thing that kind of makes sense i guess but There's also I guess two other things to do with garlic that may be one of the reasons why this is such a common thing. um Garlic apparently contains the chemical compound allicin.
00:15:09
Speaker
<unk> Because then it sounds like they made Allison right. They talked about this on Keep It Weird. Okay, I remember this. Yes. kids and really It's found inside garlic and is a powerful antibiotic and the belief that the vampire disease could be cured by a powerful antibiotic such as that Allison. Okay, so they knew it had those properties. They knew that Allison had those properties.
00:15:40
Speaker
right and so That's amazing. Yeah, I guess there's also a blood disorder.
00:15:53
Speaker
Porphyria. Okay. and This blood disorder can cause paleness. It can make a person's gums, like their gum line shrink, that can cause and that can cause their teeth to look bigger.
00:16:08
Speaker
um And people that have porphyria, garlic will make their symptoms worse, so people that have it typically tend to avoid eating or being near garlic. Oh, it's interesting. I had never really heard of these two things before, so I thought that was kind of cool. I like the gum shrinking and then it causes paleness. I was like, interesting, because those seem very vampire-like.
00:16:36
Speaker
okay i had also not heard of that one and it cropped up briefly in my research also right i didn't think i was gonna learn so i was like oh ways to kill vampires do do do right you assume you know all the general lore then you're like okay it's kind of like learning about Yeah, why we maybe believed that the gods did this to us when it was like, no, it's called a plague. But you know, you had to believe something. Just go to sleep at night. Yeah. o
00:17:08
Speaker
ah Bibles, crucifixes, rosaries, and holy water are also very common ways to repel vampires. ah These religious symbols can be used to protect yourself, as well as making magic circles, ah standing inside churches or on any sort of consecrated ground. Okay, which is yep, yep, that tracks. Heard of yeah some of those, yep.
00:17:34
Speaker
Mirrors are also commonly used, I guess, placed facing outwards, ah on like or inside a doorway. uh this came from they believe because most mirrors a long time ago some still today but more so back in history mirrors were backed with silver which was said to repel evil spirits and may account for vampires not having reflections um which is so cool it's like okay that's where that comes from you know
00:18:09
Speaker
yeah it was like interesting there's uh also a said to be a branch of wild rose or hawthorn uh are said to harm vampires uh i don't really know what hawthorn is oh yeah but it came up a couple times i think i have it one other time about hawthorn and i was like interesting like but No, but that's all good because we live in wild rose country. We do! Stay back, Vamps. You can also use ah holly around the house or some people keep a log of juniper in their house to repel vampires. Juniper also makes a cute name. I do like that name. Christine's Cats just named that, and and that's why we drink.
00:19:05
Speaker
yeah It is a cute name, I like it. And ringing bells are also said to keep vampires away. I think I'd heard that before too. I don't know if it's to do with like church bells or what, but... Oh yeah, okay. That's what I thought maybe. There is also the very popular tradition that vampires can't enter your house unless invited in by the owner.
00:19:30
Speaker
As evidenced by many a horror film, let the right one in. And TV show, yeah. Ah, yes. That's an interesting one, yeah. I've always found that to be a weird quirk. I think Bocky does it the best, I love it. Oh, I guess they could never play with that. Yeah, you can invite them in and then you can de-invite them and then... She invites Spike into her bed and then she's like, BANISH!
00:20:00
Speaker
I go to sleep now. I always thought Spike was really hot. Yeah, I do not fuck with Angel, but Spike does. I love Spike. More Spike stans, oh my god. Absolutely, 100%. Sorry David Borneas or however you say his name, I always said it Borneas, so that's how I say it now. Not boney ass, no.
00:20:26
Speaker
oh it does so oh no i Just know that in the comics that they're writing after the TV shows takes place is by the same people. I think Joss Whedon is still involved in the comic books. Her and Spike are together, but they travel in a pirate ship through space. So that's the direction the comic books went after the show, but they're still together, okay?
00:20:49
Speaker
I think going to space is the new, we jumped the shark. Yeah. as the Yeah, the the Fast and the Furious. And then, oh, what was I listening to? I don't know. I've been listening to a lot of that. How did this get made movie podcasts? Yeah. And there was a Christopher Walken movie where he gets probed by aliens, but maybe that wasn't the one I was thinking of. Nevermind. We'll come back to that.
00:21:17
Speaker
I can pick up my ADHD thread. Alright,
00:21:26
Speaker
all right so we can't be invited in. There's also a lot of stuff talking about them um being more active at night, ah but not not typically are they generally considered vulnerable to sunlight. I guess that's more of like a modern thing that they've been adding. um hu They're day walkers. Yeah, it wasn't really something that's in a lot of like traditional folklore, um but it it was the whole thing about them being more active at night at least. right Not necessarily that like sunlight would kill them though. ah Crossing over running water is also said to stop a vampire from following you.
00:22:12
Speaker
So I mean, I never understand that one. I don't know. I could have looked into that one. I feel like I've heard it a few other times. and Yeah, not really sure. They might not all have a really cool yeah origin. Yeah. Sometimes it doesn't.
00:22:33
Speaker
Uh, so what do I have? Oh, these are ways to stop your, stop somebody from turning into a vampire. Uh, these are kind of cool.
Preventing Vampirism in Folklore
00:22:44
Speaker
So there's, uh, burying a corpse upside down was very common. Okay. So like face down, you think? I think so. I think that's what they mean. It it just said upside down, but I think they mean like face down.
00:23:00
Speaker
right because it didn't say like facing south or something that i yeah i think we talked about that before ah about like ah facing a certain direction i've heard of in whatever history if i can book i was reading or like maybe it was vikings or who knows and like people being yeah buried upside down and with also like a heavy stone in their back maybe if they were thought of being like a witch so okay it could be a similar i can see that for this too yeah because they do they do some crazy shit here that's supposed to stop people from being able to leave they're they're great so yeah oh times were wild and and some of these i'm like god i hope these people were already dead when you did this shit to them because this sounds horrible
00:23:50
Speaker
oh yeah yeah you know what and some of that was almost like an extra way to tell if they were dead back then because people would like yeah look very unresponsive and then they'd be like i was just resting yeah poke you with the stick yeah give you a little kick see if you respond Well, they did the thing where they wrapped the people in the shrouds on the ships and then with the final sewing needle thing, they'd stick it through their nostrils to make sure that it stayed with them and that they were really dead. Yeah, and a grim wild. Yeah.
00:24:31
Speaker
So I guess they also used to bury people with earthly objects. Felt very Egyptian to me. Oh yes. Burying people with like scythes or sickles um near the grave. And this was said to be done to satisfy any demons entering the body or to appease the dead so that they would not arise from their coffin. So we think the demons want the sickles? I guess so.
00:24:59
Speaker
It comes up again, but the other explanation for it made a little more sense than this one did. The ancient Greek used to place an obelisk in the corpse mouth to pay the toll to get across the river Styx in the underworld. Okay, just a tiny little obelisk. Yeah, ah the coin may have been put there to ward off evil spirits from entering the body.
00:25:26
Speaker
I don't know what obelisks look like. Dicks! I had to. Right? And placing it in their mouth.
00:25:43
Speaker
That's interesting that I haven't heard that one. Yeah. I've seen this stuff like putting it ah putting coins on people's eyes, that kind of stuff. Right to pay the toll, pay the fairy man. Yeah.
00:25:57
Speaker
um Modern Greek folklore about the Vrykolakas requires you to pay a whack or to place a wax cross and a piece of pottery with the inscription Jesus Christ conquers on the corpse to prevent it from becoming a vampire. So that's like a modern Greek.
00:26:22
Speaker
or more modern Greek. Oh yeah, yeah, post-Christ, yeah. Yeah, I should have looked up what the wax crosses typically look like. That'd be kind of interesting. Wax, yeah, specific. Yeah, I would have thought metal or maybe wood, but this is wax.
00:26:43
Speaker
Then we get into some... help Yeah, now we get into some like gory, weird stuff. all right Other European methods included severing the tendons at the knee.
00:26:59
Speaker
and one a alex stop yeah like again I hope these people are already dead. this Oh yeah, this is very desecrating a corpse territory. Absolutely. I felt that when you said that.
00:27:13
Speaker
um oh i guess i could have put this one with the other things uh there's sprinkling mustard seeds on your roof to keep vampires away um yeah take all the mustard seeds i don't want them um in poland and russia in the 19 or 19 i knew i was gonna do that the 1690s oh my god in the different centuries i'd be like the eighteenth century and then i'd be like
00:27:45
Speaker
or did i mean the eighteen hundreds because those sets are very close together and it gets confusing. All right, so this is in Poland and Russia in the 1690s. Citizens who identified a vampire's grave could protect themselves by eating bread that they had made ah by mixing flour with that person's blood, like I think the person that had passed away. Okay, yeah, I guess it couldn't just be eating bread. That would be too
00:28:19
Speaker
yeah or simply drinking the blood by mixing it with brandy or other alcohols i guess and others claimed that eating dirt from a vampire's grave would protect you from that person so like it was very specific to like each person yeah yeah the dirt thing yeah that's a weird one too yeah But like bloodborne pathogens don't drink other people's blood. I find it funny that it's like, yeah oh, you're going to protect somebody from drinking your blood by drinking their blood first, I guess. Right. The little money. It's that really pathetic belief that cures like
00:29:06
Speaker
maybe yeah I thought it was a little ironic it was like oh so when are you supposed to be getting this blood from this deceased person to protect you from memorizing from their grave and killing you okay but crazy aside though with the ah homeopathic that I just read a book where it was a theme um and
Counting Compulsion in Vampire Myth
00:29:27
Speaker
it's like they treat it like like cures like and we're gonna treat this thing by giving you something that might give you that make it worse um that you're having right but they're like what make it worse so right well one of the what it but it's like super super diluted but like one of the uh cure things that they put in that's like super super diluted is like arsenic and this is like this just seems weird i mean it's supposed to be like so diluted it can't do anything really but
00:29:59
Speaker
I see like the thought process because that's kind of what vaccines do like that's right the flu vaccine and stuff it's like a yeah a more muted version of it and it like triggers your immune system so that if you catch that strain again or something that your your body already knows what to do to fight it off her so I can see that the almost thought process but it's like guys don't use poison though It's interesting, yeah, because that is the idea. And then yeah, I'm just not sure how much I know about the rest of it. Yeah. Yeah.
00:30:40
Speaker
ah Another common protection was placing this is funny because they do do this in
00:30:49
Speaker
um What we do in the shadows, they have a little thing where they're testing all these little vampire lore things to see if they actually affect them, and they do this. It's by placing things like ah poppy seeds, millet, or sand around the gravesite intended to keep the vampire occupied all night by having to count like all the little grains or pieces of whatever spilled. Tiny, tiny grains.
00:31:18
Speaker
ah Yeah, the scene in the show is really funny because they're like, we're gonna, ah Guillermo is like a horizontal bag of rice. And it's like, yeah, we're testing to see if you guys have to count this or are compelled to count this. And they're just like, no, no, like, I don't feel anything. And they're like, okay, moving on. And then all, I think there's two or three of them in the vampires in the scene. They go, hold on, we're just gonna clean this up first. And you just hear them go one, two.
00:31:45
Speaker
three like the scene cuts away and i was like oh so funny because they're like oh this didn't affect us but hold on we're just gonna clean it up and they're counting they're all counting it it's like oh love it so they really were just making fun of people with OCD no just kidding maybe you're a compulsive yeah yeah man ah Similarly in China, vampiric beings would be compelled to count all grains of in a sack of rice. ah Vampires, I guess, in Slavic coastal towns were also said to be compelled to count holes in fishing nets. um So it's said to protect yourself. Like some people would put like spill stuff on their doorstep to keep them from like entering your house and other things said that they were drape fishing nets over their entryways.
00:32:37
Speaker
uh so that a vampire wouldn't be able to enter because they would be yeah they're trying to like untangle the gnats to count all of the holes and that if they kept them occupied like long enough the sun would kill them in the morning um or they would just leave in the morning yeah plus you can just pretend it's part of your like Like I'm from the Maritimes where you'll see a lot of like, yeah, like the outdoor decorations will include little mini lighthouses at the end of their like driveway and stuff. So yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised to see someone's like lobster trap or like something displayed around their door.
00:33:17
Speaker
ah Pouring boiling water over the grave or incinerating the body are also really common. things um This might be the most common and some of the like creepiest stuff.
00:33:32
Speaker
um hook so this is like staking the vampire um but i didn't really see stuff about like after they rise this is more about like them still in their graves oh yeah yeah it's most commonly used to prevent them from rising in the first place uh potential vampires were often staked through the heart through the mouth in places like russia and then in northern germany uh in this
00:34:05
Speaker
Or no, through the mouth in Russia and norman northern Germany and then through the stomach in northeastern Serbia. Very specific. Wow. That is a graphic image. Yeah. Okay, I might have like something that touches a little bit on that.
00:34:26
Speaker
superstition i guess but yeah there was like pretty crazy um different ways they did this they're uh piercing the chest was a way of quote-unquote deflating the bloated vampire and it would become popularly known as an anti-vampire burial so oh i thought you were gonna say they became like popped because like You're just taking, they're gonna be like inflamed with some gases, you know? Yeah, like...
00:35:02
Speaker
It's weird because ah they did this but then there's different things like um methods varied but they sometimes involved burying the bodies with sharp objects such as sickles um with the corpse so that the object would penetrate or pierce the skin if the body if the body bloated enough um while transforming into a vampire. So sometimes they were like already impaled and sometimes they were just buried with it thinking that like if they started to transform, the vampire her body would float enough that it would pierce the skin at that they would be killed as a vampire again, I guess.
00:35:48
Speaker
yeah there's a lot of forethought uh yeah i had those machines that you know it sets off that's next part which sets off the next part i forget uh julberg machine yeah yeah those ones yeah very waltz of grommet no Yeah, like I didn't even run across stuff that was talking much about staking vampires like Buffy style like they raised from the grave and now I stake them and they turn into a cloud of dust. It was more about them being buried already staked or like with a sharpen of object that would like stake them.
00:36:27
Speaker
if they started to rise, which was interesting. They could just be like, ah, I have to take myself. Yeah. It's creepy though. I have to say they did the thing on the traders where they have their team had to get like buried alive in these coffins and they had to walkie talkie to the rest of the team to find them. Yeah, a little creepy. Yeah.
00:36:54
Speaker
ah So the Romani people, they would drive steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart ah or even just place bits of steel in the corpse's mouth over the eyes, ears, and even between the fingers ah for burial. Yeah, to like cut the skin, I guess. They would also place hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drive a hawthorn stake through the legs.
00:37:22
Speaker
Um, to keep them horizon. Oh, right. Yeah, everywhere for good measure. Um, they just like looking like that pin cushion head guy or whatever. Yeah.
00:37:38
Speaker
Scary. I don't like him. No. I guess in like Bulgaria and stuff other places, I assume too, they've found, um,
00:37:50
Speaker
Like, evidence of these anti-vampire burials were in Bulgaria, specifically over 100 skeletons have been discovered discovered with various metal objects embedded in their torsos. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's a lot. Because it it seems to be something they didn't do with everybody. It was just like suspected vampires. So it's not everybody was buried this way.
00:38:16
Speaker
that's right and there's apparently a few different reasons they might suspect they were vampires which we'll get to like not liking garlic come on i'm in no danger i mean i don't always use it but i definitely don't mind it yeah
00:38:39
Speaker
ah There was also like different places I think and around Europe where they would kind of after your death in burial they would like dig you up I think it was about six weeks later um and they would place like a brick stone or a vine between your teeth ah between your teeth okay yeah like they would force it into your mouth in between like your upper and lower jaw and There was a 1679 book describing the German named after Devourer. Crazy Devourer. what i'm so hard to say So he's not ah named after someone named Devourer? No.
00:39:28
Speaker
it's describing the German after devourer. So I think it's like after death devourer kind of thing. um In this book, this entity was described as quote, um a kind of mindless vampire like corpse that chews its shroud in the grave but court before consuming its own fingers.
00:39:50
Speaker
As it nibbles away by some occult process, it also slowly kills the surviving members of its family, and may then begin gobbling corpses in neighboring graves." Oh my gosh. Hungry, hungry ghost, yeah. Yeah. cha Yeah, so they would like... Yeah, they would dig these people up and then like force a brick or like a stone or a vine between their teeth so that they couldn't like bite anything. It's like, that yeah. so a There was also i funny you mentioned it before about like rocks, but there's like ruined, like Viking ruined grave markers that were also used as like headstones to kind of prevent vampires from rising from the grave.
00:40:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting.
00:40:46
Speaker
um Okay, a couple of more ways there for killing vampires. ah There was decapitation, come on. That's also very common. It was...
00:40:59
Speaker
the preferred method in germany and western slavic areas it's messy right so much desecration in yeah although i guess they're not gonna bleed if they're already dead but yeah like again i hope all these people are already very much dead when you're doing the shit to their bodies they definitely are So we don't have one of those safety coffins or whatever, we can just ring the bell. Oh yeah. also ah sorry So for like decapitation, it seems that the head was removed after death and buried either between the feet, behind the buttocks, or away from the body like altogether.
00:41:51
Speaker
So for all time you get your head up your own ass. ah Yeah. Or down smelling your own feet. yeah Lose, lose. If you're rising from the grave, you can eat your ah eat your own butt cheeks. I don't know what's that thing. Like just weird.
00:42:09
Speaker
oh ah The vampire's head, body, or clothing could also be spiked or pinned to the ground to prevent it from rising. Yeah, spiked. No. Spiked.
00:42:26
Speaker
um What else? In Southeastern Europe, a vampire could be killed by being shot or drowned, or even just repeating the funeral service, sprinkling them with holy holy water. I can't talk anymore, Jesus. Sprinkly them. Sprinkly them with holy water. ah Or performing an exorcism.
00:42:55
Speaker
oh yeah okay I hadn't heard about repeating the funeral service like back to them as a way to kill them. That was kind of different. one In Romania, garlic was placed in the mouth um like when they were buried. and I love to put things in the mouth. I don't know.
00:43:21
Speaker
ah In the 19th century, they started the common practice of just simply shooting a bullet through the coffin as a precaution. I think that one's also very popular. Just like shoot ya. Just be sure. I'm looking to see if it got you through the coffin. Yeah, they're just like, we're just gonna line up all the coffins and just shoot at them. Damn.
00:43:48
Speaker
yeah in like very resistant cases i guess where the vampire just won't die the body could be dismembered and the pieces burned uh it also said that at this point they could be then also mixed with water and given to the family members as a cure I really hope it was just given to them and not like they had to ingest this weird mixture of the dismembered burned remains fixed with water of their family peppers, but I have no idea. Sound of gross. Well, maybe we'll get to it. Okay. God, I'm on my last sentence. Leave me alone.
00:44:30
Speaker
He was sleeping behind you and his head was down. It looked like he was looking at the ground. I don't know. He was being so good. ah This one also kind of weird. i I should have looked up more. In Saxon regions of Germany, a lemon was placed in the mouth of suspected vampires. Just a lemon. Lemony fresh!
00:44:50
Speaker
like the and that's a weird one yeah um yeah i'm sure there's a lot more out there but those are kind of the ones that i i ran across first off so well that's funny though i just have to say that one's funny that it was in germany because yeah the girl on the christine from and that's why we drink her family is originally from germany and then They have this whole long-standing, like, she found a weird lemon in one of the hotel rooms on their tour, and then, like, oh took it home. She was like, oh, petrified lemon. And that's become this, like, long-running joke. They're like, yeah laugh lemon and, like, all this. So I'm just like, wait, what yeah but why? Why German? Why the lemon? It's set in Saxon regions of Germany. So, yeah.
00:45:45
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot more out there. I could have gotten into the whole Twilight sparkly vampires of it all, but... I mean, they're killed basically the same way. Yeah, decapitation, fire. A lot of decapitation. Making him account grains of rice, I don't know. I thought those were funny.
00:46:09
Speaker
Yeah, those ones are one of the weirder ones that are always like, yeah, it makes them seem more like bumbling and inept than these crazy creatures with these, you know, powers of persuasion and whatnot. It's like, just what? Yeah, they're like, spill a bag of sand, they they need to count it, they'll have to clean it up, and then you're you're safe. It's like, really? They should have tried that in 30 days of night. With those terrifying vampires. But wait, I found something I could so rice Surely they had some like sand nearby for the yeah the icy roads. Like, come on. it's It was in Alaska, that one. Yeah. All right. That was awesome. Thanks. I had fun. It was it's cool. There was some stuff I wasn't expecting. Like when I got into staking, I was like, oh yeah, this is going to be like through the heart. and
00:47:07
Speaker
um That kind of stuff. And I was like, oh, no, wait. It's like the bodies and they're still in the so casket or coffin. and Right? Yeah. Yeah. We just don't do it the same everywhere. There's all these different traditions that come up. Yeah. It's kind of neat. All right. Well, I have some more to piggyback on that. so Lovely. So I'll take a short break, I think. Yeah. Hopefully we both come back dead and not, wait, dead, not undead. I was going to say.
00:47:39
Speaker
No. No. Hopefully we won't come back. No. We'll die and come back after this prank. Oh, we we're going to do this podcast even if we have to do it as spirits. No. As zombies. Oh my God. And on that note. Oh.
00:48:05
Speaker
Grab your marshmallows and sleeping bags for the Burnt Marshmallows podcast where cozy mysteries come alive around the crackling campfire. Picture yourself wrapped in a warm blanket, sipping hot cocoa as we share spooky tales that will whisk you away to a world of mystery, ghosts, and perhaps even an occasional monster. Crime-solving spirits, urban legends, Bigfoot, we've got it all.
00:48:31
Speaker
Join Burnt Marshmallows every Tuesday wherever you listen to podcasts for cozy mysteries.
00:48:39
Speaker
all right we are back and i have some more superstition and some stuff that's go to touch on but we are too cause va for a very long time pair yeah
00:48:59
Speaker
so probably lots peter Everybody out there phone us. I know. it's like It's funny because sometimes, yeah, I'll see something on someone's podcast feed and I'll be like, do I want to listen to something about vampires? But then it's like sometimes you do because people will find stuff in research that like you never come across and I find I always learn something new. I don't know. Yeah.
00:49:23
Speaker
exactly y'all's um i literally came across some of the same things you did like the porphyria disease yeah came up never heard of it before weird no um and and like to expand on what you had said about it people Uh, notice that it caused a sensitivity to sunlight in people. That's what I had read. and Okay. I mean, let me tell you, we, I didn't have a time to deep dive into really a lot of things because it's just like so much. I know. Same. Same. There's like, Oh, you want to talk about like so many different things, but then yeah, each one of them, you could do like a deep dive on really exactly. Like.
00:50:18
Speaker
I mean, hey I've used a lot of the the one big Wikipedia page that had, you know, from histories to all the different, you know, folklore around the world. It was like, oh shit, all right. I barely have to open up another site. Yeah, I had some stuff. God, was it? I had something. It was like a free article from something and I was like, oh, cool. Must have reset whatever I had used up before.
00:50:46
Speaker
come Oh. A couple other things. I was like, oh cool, like these are interesting. Oh yeah, the rabbit holes are...
00:50:57
Speaker
Literally endless. Um, I'll try not to bore you guys too much. Um, the one cool thing I've read about that Porphyria or however, I don't know if I'm saying it right or, uh, but it, right. I was like, that sounds like right. when Yeah. I was like, I'm gonna guess. Yeah. But it like, um, it had the sensitivity sunlight apparently. And.
00:51:26
Speaker
Did you say this, that like, yeah, the ah blood, like blood drinking seemed to have a positive effect on it? Like, I don't know whether it's oh iron in the blood or maybe that came up in one of the other diseases you talked about or something, but it's like curing the disease with the disease, that thing again. Maybe, maybe they just need a fucking blood transfusion, y'all. I don't know if this one's a modern one that we understand.
00:51:54
Speaker
a lot. But I can see how back in the day things like that would definitely lead to these superstitions. Oh, Yeah, we gotta explain it somehow. Yeah.
00:52:08
Speaker
um Yeah, I would probably definitely all know this the the modern sort of more European, I guess. bloodsucking bone to suck your blood vampir they all typically have yeah like the aversion to sunlight or like just like you said more activity at night i guess yeah the fangs, etc. The sleeping in the coffin or in an actual grave sometimes, sometimes has to contain their native soil, which I was like, oh, that reminds me of some of these paranormal romance ones I've read where they're like, they heal if they sleep in there, like grave dirt, ah which just sounds so unfundly.
00:52:56
Speaker
ah They kind of do that in what we do in the shadows. They have, they can't sleep unless they have some of their ancestral, not dirt from their grave, but like from their ancestral home. So there's an episode where they go on, they get invited to their neighbor Sean's wedding, like we're renewing his vows or something. And they go,
00:53:24
Speaker
uh on holidays and they each bring like their one little bag they have of their dirt that's left over because some of them are like 500 years old so they have like just a little bit a little bag of dirt and they have to like sprinkle it under their bed or keep it under their bed so that they can sleep in the hotel And they forget to put the do not clean sign up for the maid so the maid vacuums up all the dirt and then they can't sleep and they get sleep deprived and then they all get like super loco and like ah very very tired but they can't sleep and
00:54:04
Speaker
It's like they can't just, I don't know, put it in their bedside table or something, yeah. I don't know, it was weird. And I thought it was kind of funny. The modern problems of being a vampire. Yeah, they're like, we forgot to put the sign out for the housekeeping, and she she vacuumed up all our dirt. guess We all know this problem, yes. I lost a good shirt.
00:54:31
Speaker
I lost a good Deathly Hallows shirt in a hotel room and I swear the housekeeping took it. I don't know else what could happen to it, the coast. Yeah. Yeah, so I've heard that. but Interesting. yeah That's where the dirt comes up. um they Like you said, they ah no reflection. They usually have no shadow. They can't be captured on film.
00:55:00
Speaker
all that yeah and then the the different ways that they like just in general that you could become one just range from like that the one list was like bitten sorcery suicide contagion cats jumping over your grave it's just like just one word answers it's all the different ones and they're also different yeah but there's even superstitions that people like with different yeah uh births or whatever like uh if they're born with like some sort of not even birth defect but like babies born with teeth some cultures that babies born on christmas day or between christmas day and epiphany or babies born too early just like all of the things yeah i they've done some stuff yeah i think those have been different like creatures or
00:55:58
Speaker
stuff too that i think we've talked about yeah it's it's interesting that they give them these attributes i don't know why maybe because they had like babies dying and they wanted an explanation yeah something there had to be something but going back to like ancient origins such as good old mesopotamia where they had legends of blood drinking demons um yeah and the persians had creatures that uh like like to drink blood that were featured on their pottery. I guess we found it on there the pot shards and whatever.
00:56:35
Speaker
And like even ancient Babylonia had the mythical, I think it's pronounced like Lily too, Lily too, who morphed and inspired the myth of Lilith. Ever heard of her? Oh, okay. So cool. This is from I guess like Hebrew demonology. So cool.
00:56:58
Speaker
Um, I definitely heard of Lilith as being called like the mother of dragons, not dragons.
00:57:06
Speaker
Wow. Are you thinking about Game of Thrones too much? Apparently. Good God. I'm not even reading it. I'm reading some stupid historical book where I hate all of the people in it.
00:57:23
Speaker
Anyway. well why Why do you keep reading it? ah I don't know. I started it. Her other books have been okay. She wrote The Other Berlin Girl. She's a good history writer, but the people in history are not always good, and I didn't i don't like- We're compelling. and and Yeah, it's about like Elizabeth I's lover. He's like a married guy, so he's just a piece of shit. Anyway, it's great. It's great.
00:57:53
Speaker
um so yeah lilith the mother of demons is often shown drinking baby blood and the blood of new mothers how nice oh yeah just praying on them poor babies and their mothers like yeah so they don't have enough to worry about i know this is how back through history we are typically shitty about the stories we have about different female figures yeah why do they all suck um in medieval folk traditions she can be found and like in some ah different jewish checks and i've heard that je jewish jewish texts jesus christ checks right now she's said to be the first wife of adam sometimes so okay i don't know but hebrew law definitely forbids the eating of human flesh so parents would like hang annulates around their cradle to keep her away
00:58:54
Speaker
Yes, cannibalism, other than we're in Germany, isn't it? Or where's that place where that dude was a cannibal and wasn't convicted for anything? Oh, gosh. That one. You know, I don't remember because there's a couple of cases where people, like, questionably consented, quote unquote, to their... Yeah, it's like a willing victim. In other places, it is frowned upon, it is.
00:59:20
Speaker
those are tough ones you can get guys you can get diseases from it and like brain disorders and parasites and stuff yeah and there's a whole question of if someone says they want to be eaten is it okay that you did it and I'm just like I don't like these cases yeah it's like rough sucks that there's enough of them that we have to have the conversation to begin with it's not just a one-off where you can be like that person isn't be crazy yeah i'm like i don't know which one you're talking about but yeah yeah there's too many to know which one oh damn um uh so another version is from ancient sumare is that how you say it
01:00:04
Speaker
of Sumeria so I feel like it's said that way but I think so Lilith is and depicted as a infertile maiden of great beauty but also a harlot vampire who latches on to her chosen lover never to let him go so pretty shitty yeah not great either way no the Leetu or the Leetu spirits were quote anthropomorphic bird-footed wind or night a demon and were or yeah was often described as a sexual predator who subsisted on the blood of babies and their mothers again with the great babies yeah um another one i guess from this ancient times was called lamash too a blood sucker blood sucking daughter of heaven with a lion's head and the body of a donkey oh i might have heard of that one before for some reason that's
01:01:02
Speaker
yeah lion the donkey yeah weird yeah weird combo it's like a liger yeah lion tiger from was that napoleon dynamite or something right yeah there's just a lot of those half this half that kind of yeah a spank so this yeah um this one also loved to stick around young you know babies and women in labor to have babies to steal babies why can't it be like likes to prey on men everything is babies and women who've just given birth like leave them alone ancient patriarchy yeah fuck uh ancient greece had the lamp
01:01:51
Speaker
Lamia or Lamia I don't know really sure but and the impusa which evolved more into like modern witches and sort of demons I guess. um And Pusa was the daughter of Hecate, who was demonic, bronze-footed, and slept with men to get close enough to steal their blood. Huh? Men? I approve. Finally. I approve this message. Yeah. ah Lamia was a secret lover of Zeus, who wasn't, and a daughter of King Belus. Was it a secret? Yeah. Not once Hera found out. Ooh.
01:02:30
Speaker
She caught them shagging on the counter. It wasn't me. um So she killed all Lamia's offspring. I assume her offspring was Zeus, but either way, woof. And Lamia's revenge was to torment and prey on young children at night. Because take it only on kids that didn't do this to you. Damn. Not on Zeus. Take it on my fucking Zeus. That's right. It's always, it takes two to tango.
01:03:00
Speaker
yeah um don't know how to say this one there but it's a similar names in other cultures but the stridges or strigas maybe were ones that fed on kids in the form of crows um that just sounded cool i don't know Yeah. I can't remember where that was from, but sorry. ah In Homer's Odyssey, the undead can only be heard by the living if they drink a fortifying cup of blood first. Oh, I want to read Odyssey. I have it on my Kindle. It was part of like Amazon's free classics thing. So like you can download and then you technically own like all these classics.
01:03:50
Speaker
So I have a bunch of them, and that's one of them. I really want to read it. But some of them are so long. I mean, it does sound kind of fantastical, yeah. Some of them are so long, and I, yeah. Audio book in the car? No, I don't know. She's like, I don't even have a commute, man. Yeah. My drive isn't even a kilometer. I could sometimes listen to a song and a half. Oh, first world problems. Do all your vacuuming.
01:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, my problem is is like a lot of times I want to watch something that's like a little more like mellow. I don't have to think so hard to like follow or like read something like that, where it's like, oh, am I down? How do I really want to make my brain work that hard? It's like you're throwing on a show because you're going to bed at night. You don't want to start something new. Yeah. Yeah. You're very much like, don't don't start like a new podcast or something unless you really are into it.
01:04:50
Speaker
you yeah i just can't i can't okay um india had ghouls called the vitalas i'm gonna say that are undead and they hang upside down in cemeteries oh that's creepy right and the only instance i found of ones that actually hang upside down interesting yeah um The Jewish lore, again, has the Hebrew word aluka, I guess, which means liege, and they also had one that I'm also going to probably butcher, motet's dam, which meant blood suckers. And the most detailed appearance in the Jewish texts, I said it right that time, appears in the tome, the Sefer Hasidim, an account of the life of Jews in medieval Germany, including daily life and their beliefs.
01:05:46
Speaker
um The vampire creatures in this text can change into a wolf and can fly in human form by letting down their long hair. What? Just picture it flying up behind them, like long black hair. Everything that's creepy is long black hair. Yeah, like stringy, greasy. I'm sorry if you guys have black hair. I love it. It's probably glossy and beautiful. Yeah.
01:06:14
Speaker
um if it died from a lot of sustenance you could keep it from becoming a demon by burying it with earth in its mouth so that rings reminiscent of all your burying it with shit in the mouth yeah like yeah i never knew all those ones yeah no it's it's weird um apparently by medieval times lilith uh
01:06:46
Speaker
her story is going to make over and she can also turn into a cat, which I just thought was fun. Cute. Yeah. I love the cat theme. The cat over the grave is a, that's an image. I don't know. Black cat, of course. Come on now. Yeah. Gotta be.
01:07:05
Speaker
um uh quote other jewish stories depict vamps in a more traditional way uh then we would think of them now of course in the kiss of death the daughter of the demon king ashmo dies snatches the breath of a man who has betrayed her strongly reminiscent of a fatal kiss of a vamp interesting yeah um just a ah random one that you don't hear too much about. Fatal kiss of a vampire, but I thought it was kind of interesting. um and This one sounds like it comes from a comic book just because they said a rare story found in Saphir Hasidim number 1465, which sounds like an issue. Yeah.
01:07:54
Speaker
um It tells of an old vampire named Astrea. sorry uh who uses her hair to drain the blood from her victims don't know how but i would like to see that in action uses the hair is it like a whip does she whip people with some hair out with my hair back just like cuts them and then just like wraps it around like a freaking snake and squeezes yeah like a boa constrictor
01:08:29
Speaker
Interesting. A similar tale from the same book describes sticking a witch through the heart to ensure she does not come back to haunt her enemies. So it's just another instance of kind of an ancient thing that sounded very vampire-like, yeah.
01:08:44
Speaker
um Bopping ahead several centuries to like 17th, 18th century, all that. There's been lots of plagues and diseases and other devastating things we can't explain. A little guy known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad drug fuel in Romania. Bloodthirsty little guy. um People wanted the comfort of the answers or explanations, you know, so they have all these supernatural superstitions.
01:09:18
Speaker
Which I find funny, because they like are like, we this thing is unexplainable, so let's create a terrifying supernatural creature that's going to haunt our nightmares. Because that's better than just being like, we don't know. Like fairy tales, yeah. it's ah There's a lesson, there's always an enemy to make you do the right thing. They can't just be like, there's bears in the woods that could eat you. They have to be like, there's a terrifying cryptid.
01:09:43
Speaker
once There's three bears and they have different types of soup.
01:09:50
Speaker
Exactly. um Yeah, there was different illnesses that left behind things like bleeding mouth lesions, so they would blame that on blood sucking, I guess. Yeah.
01:10:04
Speaker
And like you mentioned rabies, but also goiters and tuberculosis were all kind of associated with vampirism, just cause I guess they weren't as understood and all that. Interesting. Some of the, yeah, symptoms or whatever. And medical advances would of course eventually just prove they were caused by vampirism. Vampirism, for now there's a real panic. Oh dear.
01:10:34
Speaker
and like to be fair between 1786 and 1800 tuberculosis took the lives of over 2% of New England's population so it was a lot yeah yeah they're like everyone's dying and um so they also call it consumption so they said of the tuberculosis tuberculosis patients that um quote, consumptives lost weight, coughed up blood, their skin turned ashen, and sometimes died a slow death, almost as if something was sucking the life out of them. Like a succubus.
01:11:11
Speaker
Yeah, so they're like, something's doing it, or whatever. So an actual mass vampire panic took hold in the 18th century. Not surprising.
01:11:23
Speaker
like the witches are out the witch trials yeah now vampires are in um yeah witches are out vampires are in it's all the rage they called it the 18th century vampire controversy yeah that's light but when someone was suspected of being a vampire they would as you mentioned dig them up often times and examine them then for like signs of life like receiving cuticles hair lines and things that made it look like things were still growing but it's just the shrinking of the skin yeah i was gonna say doesn't that happen to everybody i think yes they're just like no they must be still alive it's like no that's decomposition and stuff ah yeah damn
01:12:19
Speaker
yeah oftentimes it was when someone's like whole family had been sick they would then take up one of the people and blame it on them like an illness wouldn't go through the family first if it's super contagious like oh my god yeah exactly that's every disease ever oh my god the things we didn't know about disease the things we didn't know i should say and listen to some of the history podcasts like the the constant had a really good episode or two about like how we knew nothing about where how babies were made even though we knew like you know like yeah together and then like maybe sometimes nine months later it shit happens but how does it happen is it all the guy do you need the girl there they didn't understand if it was like an actual combination
01:13:08
Speaker
They did experiments where they put little frogs in these little boxers to see if they would inseminate the eggs or not. There's like so many things. yeah yeah Bizarre. I'm telling you. Anyway, it's really good. Check it out. We've spent so much of history just forcing animals to fuck. so we It's for science! It's for science! Sure it is, but... The crazy things we did for religion. I mean, at least we could do something for science. When they're trying to find mates for like animals in the zoo and they treat it like a dating show, they're like getting applications. They've been like, what was this? Is this gorilla attracted to this gorilla?
01:13:54
Speaker
It's like how? Oh my god. Isn't that like what they used to call animal husbandry I think? Yeah! Yeah, just insane. Insane. Hilarious. I'm gonna be at some comic relief because this one's kind of dark. Oh no.
01:14:13
Speaker
There was the case of a lady named Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island, who was the daughter of a George Brown before she fell ill and died. After that, she was suspected of making her whole family sick. So they dug her up, you know, like she's a vampire. And they dug her up in the winter in New England. So it was not easy. What the hell? And they found her heart, burned it and fed the ashes to her brother who died.
01:14:45
Speaker
ah oh yeah like you talked about it didn't work it's not good I'm sorry yeah really spanish i was already sick but like yeah that didn't help I'm sure no that did not help I ran across a couple cases and I was like, oh, maybe if you weren't going to talk about them, I was like, maybe we could revisit these. And it was like cases in history, they have like that kind of where it's like, oh, they believe this person so strongly was a vampire that like people in towns are doing all these crazy shit to protect themselves. Oh, yeah. And everything I ran across a couple of them and I wrote their names down. I was like, oh, if Atlanta doesn't cover these, maybe we'll have to like revisit this and like we can talk about these. Like a true vampire case.
01:15:30
Speaker
yeah it's like yeah yeah just like weird yeah yeah there's a few in mind that i didn't look into but that i mention later that definitely yeah that bill i think yeah similar um oh yeah that's my next bullet um There were two very well-recorded, well-documented cases in Serbia of people dying and then seemingly coming back to life and like showing back up at their own like son's door or at their own family home or whatever. So yeah, that could... Like when we said that about the episode, I was like, oh yeah, I could look into those ones. I'm sure we can get a couple. Oh, yeah.
01:16:16
Speaker
um so exciting so around the world I guess I don't know if these are more modern but just different variations right so we've got some different types of vampires type creatures um Albania has the striga and the dump here okay from like maybe video games yeah the thing I think
01:16:49
Speaker
The Dom Piers are like half vampire, half mortal, aren't they? Ooh, Mamie, I didn't dive into them. the I think this was just literally like the Wikipedia snippet that said they can turn into insects. Oh.
01:17:07
Speaker
I know. I was like, okay, why would you want to, but to be a fly on the wall, I guess. I mean, maybe I want to be a dragonfly, but there aren't many other insects I think it would be cool to be. like They're not as pretty. Yeah.
01:17:27
Speaker
um
01:17:30
Speaker
I would definitely want to be one of the flying ones though. Oh yeah, not a little ant. It can be stepped on. No! A bug's life. Not a dung beetle. They're not the sexiest of insects. No.
01:17:50
Speaker
um Oh, they had a fun list of some Greek folklore. ah beliefs of what turns you into a vampire like being excommunicated desecrating a religious day committing a great crime cat jumps over the grave we should just have a drinking game every time someone says cat jumps over the grave also eating meat from a sheep that was killed by a wolf and being cursed eating meat from a sheep that was killed by a wolf
01:18:25
Speaker
It's very, very special. You're just supposed to let it go to waste? Come on! Why didn't the wolf eat it? People are starving. Why are you finding this? Yeah, that's so weird.
01:18:41
Speaker
Don't eat wild meat that you find, PSA.
01:18:47
Speaker
I just feel like that's that was like farmers like a farmer's sheep flock one of them was killed by a wolf and then they eat it and it's like oh fuck now you're a vampire or they eat some of it yeah and you're like oh there's some good mutton right here i'm not gonna let this get away damn um so Iceland funneled Iceland has the draugr They are usually called a ghost or the the translation is more like ghost.
01:19:20
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like I've heard of those too. but Their undead are typically thought to kind of have a body or be more corporeal than your average ghost, I guess.
01:19:33
Speaker
um And some Icelandic scholars say they have more in common with the Eastern European european vampires, so I guess they're very similar. They are driven by greed.
01:19:44
Speaker
dragon-like in the that they are unwilling to part with their worldly belongings. So I don't know, I'd like to look more into them and just Iceland in general, because like, oh, it gets crazy. They have these Tilbera Frogger. I hope I wrote that right. But or they're called parasitic ghosts that try to kill or drive humans insane and drag them to their graves to make more Draugr. So they're perpetuating the undead thing. ah And they said, ah so that was the Tilbera Frogger, but the Tilberry is a type of undead thing in Icelandic folklore made from a human rib given life by drinking the blood of a witch and then sent out to steal milk and money. What? That's too many things. Just a human rib given life drinking the blood of a witch and all.
01:20:41
Speaker
That's so very like Adam and Eve. So bad. I just look so crazy. I love it. Yeah. Um, you don't have too a few more fun ones from around the world. Romania has the more, more ROI.
01:21:04
Speaker
I don't know if you say every letter like, you know, Hawaii. Moroi. M-O-R-O-I. However you say that. From the remaining word for dead and the Slavic for nightmare. And they have this strigoi. I don't know. I feel like I've heard of them too, but I don't know how to say it. Strigoi.
01:21:28
Speaker
live strigoi were witches with two hearts and or two souls that then sent their souls out to drink animal blood and the dead strigoi were more like zombie-esque style blood suckers just your typical shambling undead nice
01:21:48
Speaker
um oh and it was fun because in the Romanian culture they have the different causes of vampirism being like all these different babies babies born with any like call an extra nipple a tail or extra hair got a superfluous third nipple boom vampire yeah or a witch oh i think that was a common witch thing too wasn't it oh my god the way that they can make anything a witch's mark you're like it's just a mole yeah oh gosh when you didn't look up the Celtic stuff pronunciation well here we go in Ireland and Scotland I think the second word is like a like banshee like
01:22:40
Speaker
Booban she from the Highlands and the Lianan she of the Isle of Man, Scotland and Ireland apparently have very vampiristic characteristics. And they said that the stories here may have inspired right writers such as Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker himself. oh <unk> and I guess Sheridan is a gothic writer of mystery tales. So I was like, Ooh, sounds cool.
01:23:08
Speaker
um would like to look more into those guys i tried reading dracula but it's like oh is it like written in the style of like journals like it's like journal entries so everything's like first person eye kind of stuff and ah after a couple weeks. Oh, the book Dracula you said? Yeah like the after a couple weeks trying to read it at work during lunch breaks I was like I can't handle this, nope. I was like this is not something I'm gonna be trying to read while I relax on the lunch break after hectic days at work. Yeah that's tough when it's not necessarily in a driven sort of plot
01:23:52
Speaker
kind of style. I don't know if it's all that way, but I remember when I was younger, I tried reading it too. I had checked it out from my school's library and it was the same thing. I just couldn't keep with it. I never read that one. Yeah, Victorian stuff. It was right. We should try Frankenstein. That one was written by a girl. tell Yeah. Yeah. OG for um like super What is it? Like science fiction? Isn't that what it is? color her like yeah Yeah. Yeah, she gets credit as like the OG science fiction writer or something. I think so. I was going to say, yeah, like you hear about that as being like.
01:24:34
Speaker
Well, let's invent horror fiction or whatever. They were just done. Yeah. And it was a woman. Thank you very much. I'll thank you.
01:24:46
Speaker
yeah
01:24:50
Speaker
So something else said that the Slavic in Turkic? Europe and areas had some other causes in beliefs for vampirism, again, not unnatural births, but unnatural deaths such as suicide and improper burial rituals. So, respect your dead, y'all. Or dig them up so you can desecrate their bodies in a semi-respectable way, like impaling them. That's tough. It's so bad. Right?
01:25:23
Speaker
like all
01:25:27
Speaker
And then there's cultures that like dig them up every 10 years or so just to say hi. I can't remember if it was in Asia or where, but I was like, that's pretty nuts. Yeah. Cultures, man. They'd be crazy. Yeah, we could, I'm sure we could do a whole episode about like funeral and burial practices around the world. Death rites, death rituals. That'd be interesting.
01:25:56
Speaker
And all the modern ways you can supposedly get involved and, you know, natural bear, whatever, all the different ones. Yeah. There's a lot. Um, okay, a few more. We have Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have a type of vampire called the Pi-javica, or the leech. Probably said that wrong.
01:26:23
Speaker
But basically it was like an evil person becomes an evil vampire or something like that. Okay. Yeah. Bad. You're just bad. Yeah. You're bad to the bone.
01:26:37
Speaker
and down island This one was funny. Sort of. Sort of. I don't know. Is it funny? But Spain has the Oh god. Guwah-ha-guwaksa?
01:26:55
Speaker
G-U-A-X-A. Tell me how to pronounce that. I have no idea. But he's an old vampire who bites with his single tooth and sucks the blood of his victims. Aww. His single tooth. Is it in the middle or is it a one octopus? It's got to be in the middle, right? um So weird.
01:27:19
Speaker
I don't know but I was reading this historical fiction book about these different Viking kings and whatever and um there was this guy who's called Melvin Tooth or something stupid and he was going I don't know his nickname was because he had this weird like tooth that kind of stuck in. Snaggle tooth. Yeah basically and then like when they finally behead like someone beheads him and they're like oh we got him he was like a Scottish Viking or something from like those crazy Scottish islands out in the north and then like the guy was carrying or who beheaded him was carrying around his head for a while and then i was like oh he just the tooth scratched my leg it's nothing and then like the scratch became infected and then killed him and I was telling my oh I heard about that Viking guy and I was like oh okay like he was a real guy I think yeah damn I thought you were gonna say he pulled out the tooth and put it on a necklace like a shark shark tooth
01:28:19
Speaker
Spoils of war. Yeah. No, but it was still pretty grim like pretty gruesome. I don't know I i mean, I would imagine you can't run a dead head literally like With the gross old tooth in it Yeah, that's teeth teeth can be disgusting. Oh your mouth bacteria. Oh, I would imagine. Yeah, I know my dad worked with a ah lady who um what her her cat had bit her on her hand and uh like right in the knuckle joint of one of her fingers and then the tooth it got like far enough in between the knuckles that like i guess it like left behind bacteria or something and she needed it got so badly infected it was like in her bones she had to get her finger amputated yeah just for my cat bite blood poisoning for sure yeah crazy
01:29:20
Speaker
You must think about that when Gordo scratches your hand, holy shit. Yeah, anytime I, when I was younger, got like a cat scratch or anything, my dad's like, go like wash, soap, everything, the whole area immediately.
01:29:36
Speaker
Dang. Yeah, you have to be really careful with pets. Mm hmm. I i Can't I can only vague group vaguely recall but I think I had a lady if I sold travel insurance to who Whose husband he had something happened to him when they were in the state snowboarding and then I Don't know. I thought they thought he was on the mend But then he had like it infected toenail and I don't think he didn't make it it was just she was she was clearly traumatized because she was like telling the story like she couldn't I
01:30:12
Speaker
not get it out but like that would be that would be traumatic you don't expect like someone to die in a minor wound yeah yeah like a pet bite in your finger like that's not right and it wasn't a crazy bad bite ah or anything like that just wrong place yeah yeah that's scary
01:30:37
Speaker
um Yeah, so that was the, I don't know, the guaxa or the guaja? Yeah. The old vampire with his little single tooth. His one tooth!
01:30:50
Speaker
um And a different region, ah Spain, I believe, the cattle Catalonia region has the dip legend, which is a vampire dog, so he sounded kind of cool. Like the... Oh my god, what is it?
01:31:06
Speaker
but you book operabra or something but like so li don know he's like sucker yeah Yeah, that's true. Yeah, we do have some in the Americas really when you think about it.
01:31:20
Speaker
Yeah, one of my lists listed like a bunch of animals that we have that are known to drink people's bloods, like leeches and, uh, vampire bats. Yeah. Vampire bats. It said there's like three types of bats in the world that drink people's blood or animals blood. I was like, Oh, it's so creepy. We have legends then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So creepy.
01:31:47
Speaker
Um, so not to leave out Africa, they had West Africa, the Ashanti people has the asan bosan, which are like iron tooth tree dwellers, I guess. Cool.
01:32:04
Speaker
Sorry. Um, the you people and it's spelled like a, like a female sheep. The you people, people.
01:32:16
Speaker
you be
01:32:19
Speaker
I hope pronouncing it right, but they have the ads which shifts into a firefly and hunts kids, don't you know? But fireflies are so cute. Right? I was like thinking about that with the other one that turns into insects. I'm like, but you're so small. I'm not scary. Yeah. What the heck? Maybe that's how they lure the kids in.
01:32:47
Speaker
shift back yeah kids go out to catch fireflies you're just like oh what if they're catching you uh south africa has the impundaloo which can shift to a bird and summon thunder and lightning uh don't know he does but that was cool yeah um yeah i wish i had time with deep dive on all them i have a little bit more on some of these last few ones because some of them they didn't have much in the the main wikipedia article i was perusing um the madagat scar the that sealio have the oh i guess it's the name of the people they have the romanga an outlaw or living vamp who drinks the blood and eats the nail clippings of nobles
01:33:43
Speaker
ah right Why? Oh, that's disgusting. Nothing else I came across was like that. It was so bizarre. oh Okay. You just try to take in all their DNA as much as you can. Yeah.
01:34:06
Speaker
I think this is my finally in the Americas, would you believe? Oh, Trinidad has something cool. It's the Sucuyant. And Colombia has the tanda, and Patzasola and Chile has the Mapuche. So I have a little bit more in each of these, because I was like, what do they do?
01:34:28
Speaker
um The Sucuyant, sometimes also known as the Lugaru, Lageru, is a woman by day, but in the night, she can shed her skin and transform into a fireball. A fireball. Why not?
01:34:44
Speaker
In this form she can fly and she feeds off the blood of other animals, human and non-human.
01:34:52
Speaker
This is a very popular character and there are many different versions about her origin and behavior. So in some stories she is an old haggard woman by day and in others she is a beautiful woman who leads men astray. Yeah. all right I think we've talked about her before either you did or I did. Oh really? She sounds like a similar type of creature yeah than what I've heard before.
01:35:15
Speaker
ah Some theories suggest that a woman becomes a sukuiyont when she was bitten by another sukuiyont. Others suggest that the victim of the bike dies or just becomes very weak. Some theories suggest that the sukuiyont only attacks people who have done evil to others. And other theories portray her as being able to charm her way into her prey's houses where she then attacks them. It also has a compulsion to count rice grains so you can fling those out for her. oh She's one of those. I find that so funny. Brought low by a bunch of spilled seeds. Yeah. Yeah. um Then there was that tanda from Colombia. Apparently one of the most quote evil beings that can exist in the jungle. This ugly and monstrous woman has one foot of a pinwheel or tingoo tingoo.
01:36:15
Speaker
the root of a tree and the other like that of a baby that's a bizarre combination for a grown woman to have she's uneven yeah like what does that even look like one pinwheel leg and then a baby foot or root of a tree hell what do her footprints look like
01:36:44
Speaker
She's like, I want pictures. Yeah, like that makes no sense. I remember my brother one time telling me that him and his friend had gone out rollerblading, but his friend didn't have rollerblades, so they had each worn one of the my brother's rollerblades, and then life just kicked with the other foot, so that's all I could picture her doing, but it's just a baby butt.
01:37:15
Speaker
it's like you're yeah like fascinating kind of on a skateboard and yeah yeah but it's just one rollerblade fascinating i would love to see pictures it's a bizarre choice you guys yeah say so
01:37:34
Speaker
Travis, I have questions. Yeah, well like it's no fun to go from one place to another when you got one friend that's just walking and you have rollerblades and you're what going? Yeah. It's like so it's so hard to go slow on rollerblades like you gotta to do something. Right. One person has the bike they can walk it but yeah I don't know.
01:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, and my brother had rollerblades but no shoes, so he wore his friend's other shoe, and then the guy wore one of my brother's rollerblades, and then the problem solved, but now they're each at the same speed. Well, sometimes it's at the least worrisome of his questionable decisions.
01:38:15
Speaker
oh Sometimes, yeah.
01:38:21
Speaker
okay so this lady the tenda she takes disobedient children and those who did not receive baptism well there's religion there's really she also lures late night and unfaithful husbands and young men or women into the woods and holds them captive there i don't know what it means but just late night partiers oh no You must curfew! Snatch. Yeah, that's the lesson here. She deceives her victims by taking the form of a loved one. When she has them in her domain, she feeds them with prawns and crabs to keep them alive in a kind of trance known as entendamiento.
01:39:10
Speaker
But prawns and crabs? What a diet. That's nice. That does sound kind of good, right? Right? Like of all the things you could feed these captives, that sounds great. Coconut shrimp?
Entendados and Rituals
01:39:24
Speaker
What? Crab dip? Oh, crab cake? Yeah, damn. Oh, this is crazy. The Entendados learn to love this woman and reject humans. Well, she's plying them with prawns. Have you ever had crab legs? Come on.
01:39:47
Speaker
Unlimited supply. God damn. In order to rescue them, it is necessary to form a family commission and a priest. Okay. This is all quoted. All of them go into the forest playing drums, canoonos and face drums, burning gunpowder, firing shotguns, saying prayers, and saying foul words so that she disappears.
01:40:14
Speaker
Supraires and swearing. Sounds like a good time. Into the forest. That sounds hilarious. Careful where you're firing your shotguns because you're all drinking. Yeah!
01:40:29
Speaker
This horrendous creature is dedicated to the consumption of human beings since it has a ferocious appetite. It hunts many victims in the span of a few days. She keeps them tame with her bad smells.
01:40:42
Speaker
oh And they allow her to suck some blood to satisfy her vampiric urges. Not sad. How do you keep somebody tame with your bad smell? It's the oddest sentence I've heard. They pass out.
01:41:04
Speaker
yeah its an or breath A ah few times they're like, the tenda is black. oh well some some sources say the sun is black and then it smells bad that feels weird to say but it also like experiences human feelings falls in love complains oh especially children she's a complicated figure um
01:41:32
Speaker
oh my gosh despite her human feelings and actions she has superhuman power since it is she who produces the conjugation of sun and rain and when this happens the people of the pacific say that the tunda is giving birth bizarre it is oh okay more on maybe the keeping them tame.
Patasola and Lugaru Legends
01:41:56
Speaker
Sometimes it takes the form of a loved one such as resembling the mother of a child which manages to attract the child to the forest. There it feeds them with prawns that it has developed in order to keep its victims docile in a kind of trance state. This is called grounded and a person is said to be grounded. Well, okay, I sorry that didn't explain much more.
01:42:23
Speaker
um the communities are very fearful of this vision as it is called in order for them to return the children who were laid they perform afro rituals meet with godparents and carry the hype with happy songs that makes the thrashing go away and leave its victims free that's the time
01:42:45
Speaker
I think this is my final one from this Caribbean region, which is also very bizarre and has a weird leg. The Patasola, or single leg, is one of the many legends in South African folklore about female monsters from the jungle appearing to male hunters or loggers in the middle of the wilderness when they think about women.
01:43:10
Speaker
Well, good luck with that. I haven't seen a woman in weeks all year this one-legged creature. It's just a tree stump.
01:43:23
Speaker
I'm gonna go fuck that stump. There's a knot. Oh my god. Anyway, um, the pedestal appears in the form of a beautiful seductive woman. no often like a loved One tricksters. They lure their companions away, deep into the jungle. There, the padizola reveals her true, hideous appearance as a one-legged creature with ferocious vampire-like lust for human flesh and blood, attacking and devouring the flesh or sucking the blood of her victims. Ouch. Yeah.
01:44:04
Speaker
Oh, I lied. The last one is the Lugaru, which is interesting in that it's kind of a werewolf-y, but I guess they come from a mix of French and African cultures, African voodoo. Sometimes the term comes from the lugaru, which is the French for the werewolf. So I think I have heard of the lugaru as like a cryptid creature.
01:44:34
Speaker
oh um Yeah, mostly in I think it was yeah either North America or they say it comes up in Mauritian and other African and Caribbean cultures. So it's a mix. But um this one said that from the Isle of Haiti come the Lugaru legend goes back to the 14th century when most of the island's population were ex-African slaves. So I guess that's how the cultures kind of mixed.
01:45:02
Speaker
um According to them, the Lugaru was a part wolf and vampire combination. Preferring to drink the blood of innocence, the Lugaru would take on the pleasing form of a young and beautiful girl, if the victim was male, hetero, or that of a handsome man if the victim was female. Upon draining their unfortunate prey of their blood, the creature's beast state came out.
01:45:25
Speaker
The wolf form would continue the rest, capable of being killed by either wooden stake or blessed bullet. um A trick to stopping a lugaru was to throw a small sack of rice in front of them. Because if you don't have a silver bullet, maybe you got a bag of rice, I mean.
01:45:44
Speaker
ah Okay, yeah, that was basically the rest. There's a few in India that are like a creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood. The Brahmakarashasa.
01:46:00
Speaker
Gross. i know i love the gross ones um but and i think ah these are their flying ones from like malaysia and other parts of uh asia like the philippines i think we have touched on some of them because i've been obsessed with one of them since we had a vampire lore book when i was a kid um they have the panangalon and the philippines they have the manduro and the visayan Mananangal, they all have really long names, but that means the self-segmented ones, because they're the ones that can just be like a flying torso,
The Mananangal and Horror Movie Crimes
01:46:40
Speaker
basically. Oh yeah, creepy. Yeah, it says, the Mananangal is a Philippines mystical creature described as scary, often hideous, usually depicted as female, and always capable of severing its upper torso and sprouting huge bat-like wings to fly into the night in search of its victims.
01:46:59
Speaker
Those ones will always be some of the scariest ones for me. Just like yeah creepy torso. Yeah, with like entrails dragging out of them in some of the pictures. You're just like, oh, great. Yeah, that would be horrifying that flying towards you. It's half a body and it's coming for me. Yeah. Yeah. But that's all I got on vampire lore, so. Damn. Wow. That was crazy.
01:47:28
Speaker
I enjoyed it. I hope you guys did too, but yeah, there's a lot so Appreciate you sticking with us Yeah, yeah, I think we'll revisit and maybe find some some cases or something to share with you guys about oh hell yeah i mean spooky Season is not over. So yeah definitely What do we have next week?
01:47:51
Speaker
Oh, one I still need to pick my exact case for. A horror movie inspired crimes. Horror movies inspired by real crimes, I guess.
01:48:04
Speaker
I can't remember what we picked mine and mine is ah a crime that was inspired by a horror movie so I think you could go either way either way you could you really could there's so many don't limit yourself one or one way or the other that's fine misunderstand the assignment go balls to the wall yeah like I couldn't remember which we had settled on either and then when I was looking up cases I found one I was like ah and so It's kind of open to interpretation, because my notes just say horror movie crimes. So that's really... I know that's all I had put too, and then I couldn't remember what you talked about. Ooh, that's really good. Okay, I'm excited. Yeah, should be fun. All right, well, I guess they'll catch us next week with that. Yeah, thanks for tuning in. Keep watch, we'll be doing some other things this spooky season, but we'll let you know. And keep it crimped.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:49:24
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Castles Encrypteds. We love all our listeners and appreciate every subscriber, every new review, every listen, rate, and download. Our music is by Cobie Affair and our cover art is by Antonio Garcia. We are also a proud member of Darcast Network where you can find the best and spookiest of all indie podcasts. Follow us on social media where we are at Castles Encrypteds on mostly all of the things, now including TikTok. Check out our bonus content on Patreon.
01:49:55
Speaker
Cryptic clashes, video mini-sodes of your host making asses of themselves, Ask Me Anything, quizzes, other special episodes and more. Starting at just $2 a month you can get 1-2 extra episodes depending on your level. We produce, edit and research everything ourselves and any support you can lend helps us to keep it cryptic.