By Stephanie Moore
A vampire is a blood-sucking, undead thing of the night that comes after people in their nightmares. Many cultures have vampire myths. In the past, folklore was a means of explaining what people didn’t understand. Widespread vampire mythology reflects the uncertainty about death that we all face.
People in the past had little understanding of the decomposition process.If an exhumed body looked “plump”, how did they know it was the natural result of gases in the body? To them, blood leaking from a corpse’s mouth meant that the dear departed had been feeding.
It must have been a disturbing sight.
Africa
In Southern Ghana, the Ashanti people tell of the the sasabonsam orasanbosam, which drinks human blood and clings to the branches of trees with iron talons. Another African vampire myth is that of the adze, a creature that takes the form of a firefly and sucks human blood. After it sucks their blood, the victim falls ill and dies. This myth is probably based on malaria infested mosquitos. Myths about the adze belong to the Ewe people of Ghana and Togo.
The Americas
In Trinidad, the soucouyant is an old woman who lives on the edges of villages. At night, she pulls off her wrinkled skin and puts it in a mortar for safe-keeping. She flies through the night in the form of a fireball and sucks the blood of human victims. If you need to get rid of a soucouyant, you have to find the mortar with the old woman’s skin and sprinkle coarse salt on it. Then, she can’t put it back on.
In Chile, the Mapuche fear the peuchen. In Aztec mythology, your life force could be sucked out by the souls of those who lost their life in childbirth. In the United States, the most recent documented vampire killing involved the corpse of young Mercy Brown.
In 1892, nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis. Soon after her death, her younger brother contracted the disease. Believing that the child’s illness was caused by the undead Mercy, her father, along with people from their small Rhode Island town, exhumed the girl’s body.Allegedly, the body had changed position and the corpse still had blood in its heart. They took her heart and burned it, mixing the ashes with water for her little brother to drink. Sadly, the child died anyway.
Asia
When in China, beware of the jiang-shi, which is a corpse whose soul hasn’t left its body. Jiang-shi suck out your life force (also known as chi). They are said to have greenish, furry skin, a detail that probably comes from the sight of mold growing on a corpse.
The Phillipines has two malignant vampires. One is the blood-sucker (mandurugo in Tagalog), which looks like a beautiful woman but has wings and a long thin tongue that she uses to slurp people’s blood while they sleep. The other vampire variety is called a manananggal and can split herself in half at the torso. She flies around in the night sucking fetuses out of pregnant women.
Europe
Vampire hysteria has swept Europe at various times in history. Eastern Europe is the home of Dracula- the place where the modern Western concept of the vampire originated. In Greece, they fear the vrykolakas. In fact, thevrykolakas was so feared that people sometimes took preventive measures.
Three years after death, they would exhume the bodies of their loved ones. The remains would be placed in a box and a priest would read from the scripture. If, however, the dead looked “undead”, it would be dealt with.Vrykolakas were often dispatched with an iron stake to the heart.
The Romani people tell of the mullo (”one who is dead”). They believed that female vampires could look like normal women but would wear their husbands out with their sexual appetites. The children of male vampires were called dhampirs.
Fear of vampires originates with the fear of death. Our ancestors had a lot of contact with the dead and some of the things that we now understand were completely unknown to them. This is why vampire myths are so widespread. It is a scary thing to be reminded of your own mortality.
Source: HotFact.com
