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Nov. 25, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:00:27
Edition 498 - A. P. Sylvia

A. P. Sylvia in Boston on the worldwide folklore and stories about energy-sapping vampires...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is definitely Howard Hughes and this is definitely the unexplained.
Well hope you're doing all right here in the United Kingdom halfway through the latest lockdown and kind of getting there.
But I have to say, as a lot of you are telling me, we're all praying for this to end as soon as possible and maybe the vaccines that we keep reading about are going to hold some hope.
And I have a feeling, you know, I said, didn't I, human ingenuity will be the thing ultimately that gets us out of this mess.
But what a terrible year.
If I look back at it, I was quite optimistic at the beginning, but, you know, for me, 2020, and it's coming up on, you know, towards the end of November now, 2020 is the year that time forgot.
All of the plans that I had, sure, you must be the same.
All the stuff I was going to do, I was going to try and improve my living conditions, which need it, you know, and make some positive steps while there's time to do it.
And I just didn't do it.
And so, you know, all we can do, isn't it, is wait for 2021 and hope that things improve.
Thank you very much for sharing your stories of how life is with you.
It's very kind of you.
A couple of thank yous, as ever, Adam, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot.
Thanks, Adam, for the work that you do on the website, and Haley for booking the guests.
Thank you.
Including the guest on this edition.
Now, here comes a warning, okay?
We're going to be talking about vampires.
Vampires in mythology and folklore, vampires as they might impinge upon reality, with a man called A.P. Sylvia, not very far from Boston in the USA.
It's bloodthirsty stuff.
We'll be talking about corpses and blood.
And if you are made squeamish by those things, please skip this podcast because it ain't for you.
But if you're fascinated by this, join me on this journey.
AP Sylvia coming soon.
What else?
A few emails to get into.
Just a couple of shout-outs.
Carmen in Indianapolis.
Thank you for your very kind email, Carmen.
Nathan in Minneapolis.
Nice to hear from you.
Gary.
Oh, Jerry, rather, working through the back catalogue.
Sorry, Jerry, got to get some...
My eyesight's worse.
Jerry, who's working through the back catalogue.
Dan, thank you for telling me about your work.
You might be listening to these words now on a ship off West Africa, where your job, as you know, is in security for vessels in a dangerous part of the world.
So, Dan, please take care.
Thank you for telling me about yourself.
Jeff wants to know when Stephen Greer is coming back on the show.
I guess the answer to that question is, as soon as we can nail him down, is the truth of it, as soon as we can book him.
I can't confirm a date yet.
Depends a lot on his availability, but watch this space, Jeff.
Spencer enjoyed the show about the phenomenon that we did, which I continue to believe is an absolutely wonderful, definitive documentary about the UFO phenomenon and everything around it.
Spencer tells me that his wife was one of the pupils at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe, where pupils in the schoolyard came into contact with something that may have been an extraterrestrial.
Spencer would like me to know that his wife was there on that day, but didn't encounter anything and didn't experience the things that the people talked about.
And there were others who didn't experience anything.
Now, I don't have any answers for that, Spencer.
I just have to say that, you know, with things like ghosts, I know that sometimes two people can be standing together and one will see the ghost and the other one won't.
Maybe that explains it, but I don't know.
It's worth more research, and thank you for that.
It was good of you to get in touch.
Katie, thank you for your communication.
Katie enjoyed Anthony Peak recently, as a lot of you did.
Thank you for that.
Katie says, you were working in a busy sports center in the cafeteria.
You were standing there, there were no customers, and you felt a weird sensation, a premonition that a particular person, a staff member, would walk through the door.
And he did, exactly the way that she'd experienced in the premonition.
He did exactly that, your staff member, friend, colleague.
And then there was another strange experience, along with other deja vu's that you've had.
When you were 20, you were in a car accident and you were knocked unconscious.
In that time, a vision of your grandmother appeared.
She died three years before, and told you that you would be okay, which you were.
I think that happens a lot, Katie.
Thank you for sharing that.
And finally, Gary Gaz in Howarth, West Yorkshire.
Nice to hear from you.
Gaz basically says, you enjoy a lot of the topics that we do here, which is good.
But you say one thing that has been said before, and I take this on board, you would like to be able to buy unexplained merchandise, you know, mugs and calendars and keyrings and t-shirts and stuff like things that radio stations that I've worked for.
A lot of them don't do those things these days, and I wish they did because I used to collect them.
But, you know, those sorts of things.
It is something that we're going to look at, you know, when and if this show is able to expand.
You know, at the moment, I see it as a small show and I concentrate on the podcast, but I would like to be able to expand.
You know, there are lots of other shows around the world, you know, the big ones in America, for example, that sell merchandise.
So there's no reason why I shouldn't look into it.
And we've got a nice logo, so I need to be getting to it.
You know, the logo, I have the trademark on all of that, so we can crack on and do that.
So, you know, good suggestion, Gaz.
That's all I can say.
And I will be looking into it, along with many other things in this coming new year, let me tell you.
All right.
Now, just to give you the warning again, we're going to be talking about bloodthirsty things with A.P. Sylvia, who's written a new book about vampires.
Vampires around the world and vampires through history.
I have to say that I'm not a vampire convert, particularly.
It was never a subject that I was massively interested in.
So A.P. Sylvia's got to convert me to being interested in vampires, and maybe you too.
Let's see if he can do it.
I have a feeling he might, but let's speak to him now.
A.P. Sylvia in the United States, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Now, I know absolutely zero about you apart from the fact that you're not very far from Boston, USA.
That's correct.
So what else do I need to know?
Well, you know, I've always had kind of an interest in the supernatural beliefs and the paranormal and that sort of thing ever since I was a boy.
And I've always kind of, you know, followed it to a certain extent, you know, read about things and watched documentaries and that sort of stuff.
But a few years ago, I got particularly interested in vampire beliefs.
And so I started, I kind of went on this journey of reading old books about them and learning more about what people actually believed about vampires versus kind of what we think of vampires and TV shows and movies and that sort of thing.
And I sort of arrived at my book, Vampires of Lore.
I occasionally read GeeWiz and scare stories in newspapers over here about so-called real-life vampires.
Do such things exist?
Well, you know, I suppose it depends on what you mean.
There are, you know, there are, you know, communities of folks who like the vampire aesthetic and dress as vampires.
And there are some people who believe that they need to consume maybe like small amounts of blood from willing donors to kind of feel normal.
And there are even some folks that think that they need to sort of absorb psychic energy like psychic vampires.
So there's those communities, which my book doesn't really focus on.
That wasn't necessarily my research interest.
I was looking more at the beliefs of the past, the folkloric beliefs.
And so these beliefs were held to be true by various people at various times in the past.
And even today, I talk about one story in my book, was in the 2000s in Romania where people believed that a vampire, a corpse of a once living person, was attacking them and they actually took action against the corpse.
So there are folks that do believe these kinds of things, especially in the past, but even to a certain extent today.
From my personal research, you know, do I believe that the corpses of dead people are rising out of the graves?
I have yet to be convinced of that, but it is a big world.
You never know.
But some of the scariest stuff in movies, in popular fiction over the years, has been about vampires.
You know, I would be the kind of kid who would be hiding.
I was hiding behind the sofa if an old Vincent Price movie came on featuring a vampire and one of the undead rising from, you know, wherever and going on a reign of bloody, literally bloody terror.
So I tend to think of Vampire Central as being, you mentioned Romania, but, you know, in the similar sort of region, Transylvania.
Is that so?
Do most of these stories come from there?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
There certainly are a lot of beliefs from Romania, and if you start researching vampire folklore, you're going to run across material from that region.
But it was actually much more widespread than that.
I was finding accounts from Russia, Germany.
Greece has a strong tradition of vampires.
They're known as Vricholakis.
There were accounts, beliefs from the Nordic countries, China, the Qiangxi in China.
And even I found tales that I would consider to be vampiric in nature from the UK.
Really?
I've never heard or read, I've heard werewolf stories from the UK.
The very famous werewolf of Camberwell story that some people swear is absolutely true, but never vampires.
That's fascinating.
We must work in then some of the stories from some of the countries that you've researched on this.
I think that would be more than useful, AP.
Okay, let's start this off with a definition.
To the best of your ability, and I know that different cultures and different eras define these things differently.
But as a ballpark, all-embracing definition, if you could come up with one, what is a vampire?
Sure.
So that was actually one of the first things I had to tackle when I was writing the book.
Because when you start researching mythology and different supernatural beliefs, there are a lot of different creatures that sometimes get associated with vampires, right?
Like, oh, this was a monster and it lived in the woods and it drank the blood of its victims.
And people go, oh, that's kind of like a vampire.
But when you cast too broad the net, I feel it kind of obscured some of maybe the psychological roots of vampire beliefs and stuff like that.
So I actually came up with three criteria that I used to say, for the purposes of my book, this is what a vampire is.
So the first criteria is that the vampire is the corpse of a once living person, right?
So this was an actual person that lived and was a member of the community or something like that and has subsequently passed away.
So by saying that, I kind of discount monsters and supernatural entities that are non-human, right?
Like demons and that kind of thing, that were never human to begin with, right?
So the vampire used to be a real life human being.
Secondly, the corpse is harming the living in some way.
So I actually broaden this out a little bit from what people associate with vampires as purely the blood drinking.
But when you look at these accounts, vampires were thought to do other things, attack people, strangle them in the night and stuff like that.
Blood drinking was certainly present, but it wasn't the only thing that people were scared of when it came to the undead.
Okay, just before you finish that point, you know, blood drinking is bad enough, and we'll talk more about that.
I'm sorry if any of my listeners are made a little squeamish by that, but it just happens to go with the trade.
It goes with the terminology.
What else would they do then, apart from the blood drinking?
Well, there are a number of accounts where they believe that the dead person was coming to them in the night and strangling them, lying on top of them and strangling them.
There are other accounts where it wasn't necessarily blood drinking.
It was just the dead were causing illness or plague or something like that.
There's even one account I ran across where they thought a dead person was causing a drought.
So really there could be a sort of a number of things, but oftentimes it was some kind of plague or malady that had descended upon a community and they were looking towards the dead as the person or entity responsible for this illness.
Right.
So they're looking for, you know, in days when we weren't as enlightened as we are now, and we didn't have technology and science like we do, then, you know, life is very scary unless you can explain something.
Even if you come up with an unpalatable explanation, it's better than none.
Absolutely.
I think a lot of these vampire accounts, I think, relate to people trying to make sense of the world around them and some kind of calamity or tragedy that had befallen them.
And I think depending on the time and place, suspicion may turn towards the dead.
And I think it sort of empowered people in a way to be able to sort of take control of what was going on.
At least that's what they thought they were doing.
And thus, you know, there's an explanation and then there's a resolution to it, which actually gets to my third and last criteria, which was to destroy a vampire, action has to be taken against the corpse itself.
So there's a physicality to vampires.
They're not like ghosts or untethered spirits or something like that.
They're physical, they're real.
So, you know, there's some kind of calamity befalling a community.
There's a physical, real cause to it that you can look to at the graveyard and you can take action against this thing and save yourselves.
And the physical action, of course, as we know from the movies, which is all I do know, is driving a stake through the thing's heart.
Yes, yes.
So that certainly was part of folklore.
There were other methods employed as well.
But, you know, when it comes to stakes, it's kind of interesting because one of the things I did find in my book, and basically in my book, I kind of go, I sort of take, I go trait by trait, all the traits that we normally associate with vampires, modern vampires, I kind of look at each one and try to dissect it and determine, did this come from folklore?
Are there folkloric precedents?
Or did this come from movies or fiction or what have you?
And so even when I did find there was a precedent like stakes, many times there was like nuance to it that has been lost over time.
So when you look at the staking of a vampire, oftentimes the type of wood used was considered to be important by the people.
So different places preferred different woods, hawthorn, blackthorn, oak, different woods.
Usually the argument for why they potentially believed that the wood was important was that they associated that wood to have been used in the crucifixion.
So there would have been like religious significance associated to that wood.
So you're talking about the triumph of Christian right over undead evil.
Yes, right?
It's good versus evil here.
So there's sort of spiritual power associated to that wood, let's say, holy power.
But also when you look at some of these accounts, the wording they use for how they stake the vampire is very telling.
In some of them, they basically say that they drove a stake through the vampire or the corpse or whatever, pinning it to the ground.
And so that actually, it sort of suddenly shifts from kind of a magical thing, right?
Oh, this sort of stake kind of magically kills the vampire, like we think about it in a movie or something, to, well, actually what the stake was doing in some of these beliefs was that it was actually holding the vampire in its grave.
It was pinning it to the ground so it couldn't rise up anymore.
So there's sort of an interesting interpretation there.
Also, you can also look at it from the point of driving the stake through the heart destroys the heart.
And some other vampire destruction rituals would involve removing the heart and destroying it.
So there was a lot of different stuff going on with the stake, where I feel like nowadays with movies, you sort of just, you have this vision of the vampires kind of lunging at the person and they stake them.
And then that's kind of, the vampire turns to dust or something like that.
And what about stuff like holding the cross, holding the crucifix before the vampire, which you sometimes see in horror movies?
Sure.
Is that universal?
Is it international as a thought?
Well, I think it would have been present in places that were Christian in nature, right?
So that was held by, you know, if they believed that that would be used to repel evil, then that would be incorporated into their supernatural beliefs surrounding vampires.
You know, there's accounts where people were using holy water to put it on doors to protect themselves from the vampire.
There was one interesting account where this man's driving past a graveyard at night and picks up a hitchhiker on his wagon or whatever.
And it turns out that the hitchhiker is in fact a vampire.
And so the vampire has the man drive him into town.
And they come to the houses.
And each house they go to, even if the doors aren't secured or locked, the vampire says, oh, the door is shut tight.
And that's because there was a cross carved into the door.
But they get to this one house where there's this immense lock on the gate, but there's no cross.
And suddenly the lock magically opens and the gates open themselves up and the vampire goes in and attacks the people.
So yeah, so absolutely the sort of, you know, different kind of aspects of Christianity, whether crosses or holy water, that kind of thing, would get featured in vampire beliefs.
But in every case, it seems to me from what you said, there's a playbook for dealing with them.
It might vary a little from country to country, but there's a sort of playbook for dealing with a vampire when you have that problem.
And this also assumes that the vampire, which they always do in the movies, plays by the rules, so that if you put a cross in front of it, it's going to be repelled by it.
And, you know, if you drive a stake through it, then it is going to die.
You know, they always seem to be compliant in that way.
Yeah, I mean, I think there absolutely was a set of rules that the vampires were thought to follow.
Certain behaviors that they enacted, I mean, You know, they were compelled to go out and, you know, and sort of take the lives of the living and thus preserve their own vitality.
And so, a lot of the beliefs, some would be, you know, spiritual in nature, like we're talking about crosses and all that.
But other times, it very much got down to kind of the physicality of the vampire.
So, you know, we talked about staking the vampire.
You know, you're keeping it in the earth, right?
Like you're preventing it from rising up.
But there were other approaches where, you know, they would cut off the head and things like that.
And ultimately, the ultimate way to get rid of the vampire in a lot of these stories, if other things weren't working or they would do a few different things in a row, would be to burn the body.
And thus you're destroying the body and rendering it to ashes.
So now there is no more corpse to rise up and attack people and preserve its own life in the process.
You've destroyed it utterly.
And that was often kind of the last resort for people in this.
So you can kind of see how they were trying to make sense of something that was going on in their lives, in their community.
And they sort of, using their own system of logic, arrived at these things.
But there are many explanations for stuff that goes wrong in life.
I read a story from Ireland, contemporary story, about a man, I think with a farm in Ireland, who had a run of extremely bad luck that he put down to, I think he disturbed something ancient or something like that.
But the vampire thing is a pretty extreme, it's a pretty extreme thing to come up with as an explanation for the bad things that happen to you, your community, or whatever.
And yet, as you say, it seems to be such an international thing, even my own country.
Yeah, so I think there's a few reasons why that's the case.
You know, I think, first of all, especially in times gone by, people thought that the supernatural world had a very kind of real presence and impact on their daily lives, right?
So if things were going bad for you, your cow stopped giving milk or whatever, there was very likely a supernatural cause for that.
And depending on the time and place, suspicion would fall towards different possibilities.
With vampires, suspicion would fall on the dead.
But of course, we know of other accounts where suspicion would fall on the living.
And then you have witchcraft hysterias and stuff like that.
So it's just how the people were interpreting how their supernatural beliefs were affecting their lives.
Now, the thing about vampires is that when you look at some of these accounts, especially the ones, the actual documented accounts, so there's, you know, there's a number of incidents where people believe this was happening and they exhume the corpses and stuff like that.
And it actually got written about in newspapers of the time and stuff like that.
So they're actually, some of these accounts are well documented.
And they often kind of follow a certain pattern where, you know, somebody in the community gets sick and dies rather unexpectedly, let's say, something like that.
And then another person who seems healthy or something like that gets sick and passes away.
And then another person.
And so this doesn't make sense to the people, right?
This is years and years before germ theory and stuff like that.
But they see these people who are seemingly healthy getting ill and passing away.
And everyone's sort of scared for their lives, right?
And their families.
So they think about it and they go, well, this all started when that first person died.
Let's exhume that person and let's see what's going on.
Let's see if there's anything suspicious here.
So what would happen?
They would exhume these corpses and they would look at them and they would see things that to them didn't make sense and were evidence of the corpse being a vampire.
Now that's interesting.
Would they be things that perhaps were to do with what we would understand now to be part of, I mean, it's not very pleasant to talk about, but the process of decomposition.
Correct.
Yes.
So, and that's, and, you know, apologies for the folks that are squeamish, but yes.
And even today, oftentimes when we think of decomposition, we think of someone just sort of slowly turning into a skeleton, right?
They're going from how they were in life, you know, sort of decaying to decaying.
Well, we think of it as a kind of gentle fading away, don't we?
From what I understand it, it isn't like that.
It isn't necessarily like that, no.
So it can be depending on things.
It can do a lot of things, depending on the environment and stuff like that.
So when the people would exhume these corpses, they would see a corpse that perhaps didn't look decayed.
It looked fresh.
The person looked as if they were alive, which that can happen, especially if someone had been buried in the winter or cold months, something like that.
They might look at this dead person, and it might appear that they've gained weight.
They might actually look kind of bloated, like they've been gorging themselves, which also can happen during the decomposition process due to a buildup of gases.
It might look like they have fresh fingernails or fresh skin, which it really isn't the case, but that's how it looks.
And one thing that can happen, and there are accounts that talk about this, the people would see blood around the mouth.
I read about that.
Is that where the whole idea of blood sucking came in then?
Yes, I believe so.
And this kind of whole theory around misinterpreting decomposition to indicate vampires actually was written about, kind of proposed and written about a number of years ago by a scholar named Paul Barber.
And he identified some of these things.
But yes, there's one account in particular dates from the 1720s, I believe, that this man by the name of Peter Pogojiewicz passed away and he was thought to be causing illness and death in the people and people were saying oh he came to me in the night and he strangled me that kind of thing you know before they before they were they passed.
And so when they exhume the corpse, they see the blood around the mouth and they go, oh, that's the blood that he was sucking from his victims, which no one was really talking about that until they saw the blood.
But it fit into what they thought was going on.
Right.
So they worked it back into their narrative.
That's what's the story seems to be.
And somebody said, you know, they put their hand on their hip and they said, aha, I see here is the explanation for all ills here.
We have this thing that is draining our very lifeblood from us.
Absolutely.
They saw this.
It didn't make what they thought was natural sense.
There was something supernatural something going on like that.
And so they see this blood around the mouth, which can happen during the natural process, but they don't know that.
And they're just putting, to their minds, two and two together.
How can that become an international phenomenon, though, from Transylvania to, I don't know, Texas?
Well, I think it deals with people grappling with death, disease, and the nature of decomposition.
I think there was often an association where there was a fear of the dead, where the dead, unless you were careful, could make you like them.
They could bring you towards the grave.
So I think there was in various cultures, I think kind of the situation was sort of ready for this kind of notion because there was this fear of death.
They weren't sure what was happening.
And so the dead could be causing it.
They might bring us towards that.
And so then anytime that a body was exhumed for whatever reason, they might see these things and thus interpret it, misinterpret it as something unnatural was going on.
And thus, you have different interpretations depending on the place and time.
But it often came down to people feared that the dead could cause others to die.
And in every case, is it true that just like the English horror movies that I remember from when I was a kid, that when a vampire chooses a victim, that person, once he or she has been vampired, becomes a familiar or an acolyte?
Oh, so like sort of the servant to the vampire and that.
Yeah, they become almost enslaved to it.
Sure.
So that's much more of, I think, a kind of a modern notion about vampires where you have these kind of servants to the vampires.
And I think that tends to fit in in movies and stuff where the vampire is like living kind of a normal life in some ways.
Like the vampire has like a mansion or a castle that needs to be maintained.
And, you know, they're meeting people at parties and stuff like that.
Right.
You think of like, you know, you know, Dracula showing up at, you know, like the, you know, this, the English manor and chatting with people and stuff like that.
Dracula's castle.
You know, so the, you know, and even in, you know, the novel where Dracula had a number of servants who kind of did his bidding, right?
Because he was like the count and he was the nobleman of the area.
In folklore, vampires usually, they didn't have any kind of alter, say, alter ego or other life or anything like that going on that needed someone to help them or support them in any way.
You know, they were essentially, they were either sort of in their grave or they were out terrorizing people.
And that's about it.
They weren't necessarily like buying property in England, right?
Like in like in Dracula.
So usually the people that are, in any of these stories, the people that are kind of helping the vampire, like I mentioned, the man with his carriage driving past the cemetery, they're often like unwilling participants in some of these stories where the vampire is like, you're going to take me into town.
And, you know, what can they say?
That kind of thing.
So when that does come up in stories, it's usually for kind of a brief period where the vampire needs something kind of immediate.
And those people are helping, you know, against their will necessarily.
They're not sort of enthralled to the vampire or worshiping him or something like that.
I was fascinated by the Dracula stories when I was a kid.
Of course, I mean, what kid isn't?
You know, they used to be fairly scary on a Saturday night on the TV, the midnight movie.
But I dimly remember the hunt, the hunt to vanquish, remove this threat to the community was always interesting.
I'm sure there was in one case where Dracula was identified by the fact that his name, the person, this was a member of the aristocracy, I think, was Dracula spelled backwards.
It was Count Alucard.
I don't know if you ever remember that story.
Yeah, that was Son of Dracula.
Okay.
Yeah, that movie.
That was Son of Dracula.
That had Lon Chaney Jr. playing Alucard, who, you know, famously, Lon Chaney Jr. played the Wolfman.
Yeah, so the anagram of Dracula spelled backwards.
That's kind of a fun thing.
There's nothing like that in folklore of a vampire switching their names or doing that.
They might have actually gotten that notion a bit from there was, I believe it was the 1870s, there was a vampire novel called Carmilla where the female vampire had actually would use an anagram of her original name, which I think was Mercalla or something like that.
I might be mixing this up a bit.
But that was actually a feature of that Victorian story of the vampire.
She would change her name by just doing an anagram of it.
Is it all mythology?
Is it all folklore?
Or were there cases that may have been or had some tinge of reality to them?
Well, I suppose that would depend on who you ask, right?
I mean, it was, there are, you know, I even mentioned that account from like the 2000s in Romania, that kind of thing.
Talk to me about that one then, if it illustrates it.
Well, I mean, and there's, there's, there's a number of them, but like, like, like any of them, like those people believe that they were being, that they were being sort of terrorized or made ill by someone who was recently deceased.
You know, other people, I think the man's daughter who had moved away found out that they had exhumed the corpse and such.
And actually, I think she called the police because she did not believe it.
So, you know, there's, you know, the people who, the people in the village who did the exhuming believed in this thing, but other people did not.
And I think that's sort of how that's how it goes.
Even hundreds of years ago, you know, there were some towns that were kind of gripped by this vampire fear, but maybe someone like the government or say like the bishop or something like that wouldn't go along with it.
They were like, no, no, no, this isn't, you know, this isn't anything.
So it sort of just depends on, I think, the spiritual or supernatural beliefs of the people.
You know, I've read a number of accounts.
You know, as far as I'm concerned, the accounts, the things that I've read, I think they all can, for the most part, be explained through this misinterpretation of decomposition and things like that.
I'd say by and large, especially when you get to the real kind of vampiric core of it.
Of course, the notion of dead relatives coming and visiting people and stuff like that obviously extends beyond vampires to spirits and stuff like that as well.
So I suppose it depends on the angle.
Okay.
So there's a bit of, in some instances, there's a bit of a gray area, you think?
Well, as I said, for me personally, from what I've read, I don't think that corpses are climbing up out of the ground and attacking people.
So I don't think anyone needs to worry about that.
You know, when you get into these wider things of, you know, life after death and spirits and stuff like that, well, now there's a whole other kind of, you know, sort of, there's a whole other array of things you can get into there.
And that sort of really depends on your spiritual beliefs.
The church, traditionally, over hundreds of years, has taken a view and has sometimes done things to defeat things like evil spirits and demons and bad ghosts and presences and those sorts of things.
We have people who practice exorcism.
What has the church's view of this very powerful mythology and folklore of vampires in different places been?
Well, it depended on the time and place.
There are some accounts where a priest was present and performed kind of an exorcism ritual on the corpse in addition to staking it.
There are other accounts where maybe the local priest was on board with it, but then the bishop kind of, I remember one account where the bishop was like, you know, all right, no, you're not doing this.
No one's doing this anymore.
This isn't a real thing.
That might have been in Greece.
So that probably would have been, that, depending on the timeframe, might have been Greek Orthodox at that point.
You know, it's varied.
Probably one work of sort of vampire scholarship that I should mention was written by an abbot, Dom Augustin Calme.
He wrote in the 1700s about various supernatural beliefs and he wrote quite a bit about vampires.
And his take on it was, I think he kind of felt the church had kind of just sort of summarily dismissed it, you know, by and large.
And his view was that, well, we need to take a look at this because either there's nothing to it and we need to sort of educate people that there's nothing to it or there is something to it and then it must be the work of the devil.
So we have a whole other mission there.
So he wrote quite a bit about it.
I think he was fairly skeptical about the whole thing, but he went through a variety of tales.
And so when you read his book, you kind of get a lot of different stories that he was talking about.
And he sort of made some conjectures about kind of the nature, if vampires are real, what their nature could be, and could they be caused by demons or something like that.
Okay, what about in the modern day, where sometimes I dimly recall that you might get some kind of account that refers to blood drinking cult?
Or in fact, I think there are some cultures who are known to drink blood.
I think in Nepal, I don't know whether it's human blood.
I don't think it is.
I think there is something that goes on there.
Does any of that tie into your research?
Well, I would say that there have long been associations between blood and kind of life energy, right?
So even if you go back to ancient times with the epic of the Odyssey, right?
There's one part in the Odyssey where Odysseus goes to like the gates of Hades and he has his men dig a trench and they fill it with sheep's blood.
And all these wraiths from the underworld come up to the trench.
So they're attracted to the blood.
And he keeps many of them away, but the race that he wants to speak to, he allows them to drink the blood.
And thus they kind of gain their ability to speak and interact with him.
So this notion of blood having this kind of life-giving energy is very ancient in origin, and I think gets interpreted by different cultures and practices in different ways.
Okay, in Nepal, I've just done a little bit of research while you were talking.
It is the blood of the yak, apparently, that's part of a ritual.
And I think for precisely the reasons you've just said.
Yeah, I mean, I think that makes sense, and I think that's very much a cross-cultural thing.
Okay, vampires around the world, then.
You told me this was a truly international phenomenon.
I am fascinated, especially at this time of year.
I have this romantic and spiritual view of Scandinavia.
I love the thought of the darkness, sometimes the endless days, depending on how far north you go, the northern lights, the fact that there may be spooky things happening in the dead of nights, but you can't see what they are because there's not a lot of light around.
What kinds of vampire traditions, folklore, tales do they have in Scandinavia?
Yeah, so there there was a creature there known as, I'm probably going to mispronounce this, but a drauger.
And this was kind of in Norse mythology.
And I should probably just take a step back and say, just because people don't call it a vampire doesn't mean that I didn't consider it a vampire from my book.
There's many, many names for the undead that are causing harm to the living.
So it walks like a vampire, talks like a vampire, it's a vampire.
Exactly.
Don't get hung up on the actual word vampire because that was kind of used in specific places and cases.
So basically the Droger was an undead corpse and it had large claws and it was known to have superhuman strength and it would eat people.
And so they would be found either in or kind of by their burial mounds.
And they would sort of like protect their mounds from like grave robbers and that kind of thing.
And so the way to kill the droger was cutting off its head and putting it under the body, or it would be to drive a stake into it or burn it.
So basically it fits the mold sort of perfectly with these other vampire accounts of sort of mutilating the corpse in some fashion or burning it and it's undead and dangerous and that kind of thing.
But this is far from Romania.
And is that something that's died out, presumably, you know, in the last like hundred years or so when people have got more sophisticated and there's more mass communication?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I would presume most of the beliefs that I've covered in my book have probably died out by and large due to, you know, just, you know, sort of availability of information and stuff like that.
So you probably only get it kind of in, it might still exist in certain ways in sort of very rural areas that kind of have a stronger tie to the beliefs of the past.
But I think, you know, by and large, people don't necessarily believe in these things that much anymore, or maybe don't believe in them in the same way.
But, you know, you never know.
I mean, you know, in the 1970s, there was a vampire panic at Highgate Cemetery in London.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
What happened there?
I'm shuddering to ask you, but what happened there?
Oh, yeah, sure.
There was quite a bit's been written about it.
But, you know, sort of generally speaking.
So I don't know if you've ever been to Highgate Cemetery.
Highgate Cemetery is famous for one thing in the main, in that it's the burial place of Karl Marx, isn't it?
It is, yeah.
Yep.
So Highgate's a very, very beautiful cemetery, Victorian Cemetery, very elaborate, you know, grave art and stuff like that.
Very, very nice.
I, a couple of years ago, went on a tour of it, and it was very, very picturesque.
But so back in like the 70s, people were finding animals drained of blood around the area, and people had reported seeing this kind of like shadowy figure moving around.
And essentially, it was thought that there was a vampire lurking in the cemetery.
And there were a few different kind of people who were kind of talking to the media about it and stuff like that.
But ultimately, it kind of all came to a head when a lot of people sort of descended upon the cemetery one night in this sort of big vampire hunt, which ended up causing kind of a lot of damage and vandalism and that kind of thing, which was unfortunate.
But it got a lot of news coverage and some of the main figures in the series of events have published books with kind of their explanations and claims on the matter and that kind of thing.
But so, you know, that was like the 90s, it was like the 1960s, 1970s.
So, you know, you never know.
Okay, I'm just looking here.
Again, while you were talking, the old research facility jumped into action.
And according to Wikipedia, which we know is not always the most reliable source, but it says here, a group of young people interested in the occult visited the cemetery in the late 1960s, a time when it was being vandalized by intruders.
According to a report in the London Evening News, a newspaper that doesn't exist anymore, of that year, 1968, on the night of Halloween 1968, a graveyard desecration by persons unknown occurred at Tottenham Park Cemetery in London.
These persons arranged flowers from graves in circular patterns with arrows of blooms pointing to a new grave which was uncovered.
A coffin was opened.
The body inside was disturbed, but their most macabre act was driving an iron stake in the form of a cross through the lid into the breast of a corpse.
Gee, I hope those people were rightly brought to justice for that.
I'd no idea about this.
I don't know whether that's what you were talking about.
It's a similar sort of area.
This is the Highgate Vampire.
So I don't think this is Highgate Cemetery per se, but it's the Highgate Vampire.
Well, I mean, definitely stuff did happen at Highgate Cemetery itself.
Ah, yes, no, you're right.
No, Highgate Cemetery.
I think this is something separate.
So there was another incident in the 60s.
And yep, though the identities and motivations of those responsible were never ascertained, general consensus at the time linked the desecration to events surrounding the Highgate vampire case.
Then, in a letter to the Hamstead and Highgate Express in 1970, a man wrote that when passing the cemetery on the 24th of December 1969, almost 1970, he glimpsed a grey figure which he considered to be supernatural and asked if others had seen anything similar.
On the 13th, a number of people replied describing a variety of ghosts said to haunt the cemetery or the adjoining Swain's Lane.
These ghosts were described as a tall man in a hat, a spectral cyclist, a woman in white, a face glaring through the bars of a gate, a figure wading into a pond, a pale gliding form, bells ringing, and voices calling.
Gee, where's?
I'd no idea about any of this stuff.
So, you know, it's a bit tangential to what you're researching, but, you know, those things, those things happened here.
You don't see reports.
I mean, who knows what's going to happen, but I haven't seen a report quite as frightening as that one in a newspaper in London for a very long time, if ever.
Gee, okay, so we talked about vampires around the world, and we said that, you know, there are various places like Scandinavia that have these things, that you wouldn't expect them.
Did you mention Russia at the beginning of this?
Yes, there were some beliefs about vampires in Russia.
There was one account where there was this, he was like the governor of the province or whatever, who was kind of a violent man who, I think he had used his kind of power and authority to claim a bride if she had been in love with someone else.
But he died and told her never to remarry.
And when she did decide to remarry her original true love, the vampire, the governor sort of rises as a vampire and goes to the castle every night and attacks her and that kind of thing.
And so apparently they place soldiers out in front of the gate and his sort of spectral carriage, I think, knocks them all over.
But eventually they exhume the corpse and they stake it and I think they perform an exorcism.
And I think that was one where it had to be an oak stake, if I recall.
And then his nightly assaults cease.
So there's a story there from Russia.
And does the vampire phenomenon extend to countries like Japan and say Thailand?
Interesting.
I didn't run across specifically vampire related things.
There are some other creatures out there that sometimes get discussed sort of in the vampire realm, but for me, they didn't necessarily meet my criteria.
It could very well be that, say, Japan or Thailand has something like that.
I mean, in China, there was a belief of a vampire known as Qiang Shi, which was an undead person who in these stories, the vampire could fly around, but that would kill people in the village and stuff like that.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there were tales surrounding them.
I didn't run across any as I kind of just sort of followed the path that kind of got laid out as I as I sort of found reference after reference to things.
And you've looked at a lot of countries, a lot of stories.
They're all weird in their own way.
Which one do you think is the weirdest, in your opinion?
Well, I would say one that probably people find a little kind of gruesome, maybe.
There was an account from the 1890s in New England.
So this is in America where this, it's a very, it's kind of a famous account, and Bram Stoker apparently actually knew about this account of Mercy Brown.
And she had passed away, she passed away at the age of like 19, died of consumption, which is now known as tuberculosis.
Her older sister and her mother had died of the same disease sometime before her.
And her brother, Edwin, was also, her grown brother was also suffering from the disease.
So at this point, sort of the medical community couldn't do anything to help Edwin.
And so Edwin's father, George, is kind of faced with this decision of he's lost his wife and two daughters, and now he's going to lose his son.
And some of the members of the community go to him and say, well, there could be something that could help.
It could be that the dead are causing your son's illness.
And at first, I think he kind of doesn't want to go along with it, but eventually he agrees to have the bodies of his wife and two daughters exhumed.
The bodies of the wife and the oldest daughter have decomposed to the point that they're beyond suspicion, right?
But Mercy, who had only been dead a few months and had died in the winter, her body looked very fresh, very lively and well-preserved.
So right there, people are like, oh, that's an indication of something.
And so they wind up removing her heart and her liver to check it for fresh blood because they believed that there was heart in the organs, then, excuse me, if there was blood in the organs, then that was a sign that the dead were kind of draining the life of the living.
So the blood they find is kind of like coagulated.
The doctor who was there but didn't believe any of it was like, that's to be expected.
But the people had, that was good enough for them.
They had made up their mind.
So they actually, they take the heart, and I believe the liver, and they burn it on a rock in the cemetery, reducing the heart and liver to ashes.
They take the ashes and they Mix them with water, and then they give it to Edwin to drink as a cure.
It does not work, and Edwin passes away sometime later.
The newspapers kind of catch wind of this story, so there's a number of articles about it, and there's, you know, it kind of gets sensationalized.
And people are often surprised by the story because of that practice.
And it seems very singular and unique, but actually I found references to the exact same practice in Romania of consuming the ashes.
So it actually had made its way sort of across the world.
But, you know, with these kinds of stories, you know, it's easy to kind of get caught up in a lot of these, in kind of the gruesome nature of things.
But, you know, it's important to remember, like, you know, these were real people.
And they, you know, you can only imagine the fear and desperation that they were feeling to resort to something like that.
You know, this wasn't like, you know, this wasn't like, you know, option number one that they were going for, right?
You know, they had to arrive at this after, you know, after time and, you know, kind of watching people pass away.
And you can sort of put yourself in the mind of the father and go, you know, well, does he want to be left for the rest of his life wondering, well, was there more I could have done to save my son?
So this brings us back to then, as we come to the end of this, the kernel of the book, as you indicated at the beginning of our conversation, I think, AP, that this is an interesting phenomenon and is a worldwide phenomenon.
And it's interesting because of what it tells us about us, about our propensity of when we don't have an explanation for a thing, we need to create one.
For example, if coronavirus had been a thing, I don't know, 300 years ago and there was no science like we have it now, then perhaps people would have come up with some kind of strange mythological explanation for it.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I think, you know, people, you know, all of this is just evidence of people trying to make sense of the world around them.
And they didn't have the benefit that we do today of the knowledge repository that our civilization now has, right?
They just, they didn't have that at their disposal.
And so thus, they were trying to make sense of the world around them.
And, you know, I think there's this drive to arrive on something and thus you feel more in control of your world.
And by taking action, you know, there's this kind of catharsis that happens.
And I think that, you know, that's part of what they were being drawn to.
So when you look at these accounts, you know, these were probably people who were scared, who were desperate.
And this was the best that they could come up with at the time, given their level of understanding of the natural world.
And we have to forgive them because it is in the nature of human beings to, if you do not have an answer to something, you've got to do something.
You can't just do nothing.
If you've got a problem.
You're just going to sit there and just wait for it to take you to?
Like, no, you need to feel like you're taking action, you know?
So you've got to.
Yeah, you can.
Even if it's wrong, and that kind of stuff is still happening today, I think.
Okay, now there are conversations that I have with people where I ask them a particular question that could be asked at the beginning or the end.
This time I've picked the end for this one.
This is a tremendously bloodthirsty and intense thing to investigate.
Why have you done this?
What's the fascination for you?
Well, you know, I've always been interested in sort of, you know, supernatural and things like that.
What got me really on the trail of vampires was when I visited a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum some years ago in New York City where they had on display what was labeled as a 19th century vampire killing kit.
Oh.
Yeah.
And so, you know, according to the label, I think, you know, people took this to Eastern Europe when they were traveling and stuff like that.
And it was kind of this antique looking box filled with, you know, vials and a stake and a cross and whatnot.
And it just had this amazing aesthetic to it.
And so afterwards, after that trip, I kind of kept thinking about that kit and I was like, I'd like to learn more.
So I started looking it up and I found that there was a bit of controversy surrounding them in regards to when they were actually made.
Some people argued that they were actually assembled in the 20th century using 19th century pieces, right?
So, you know, you took a box from the 1800s and some vials and you kind of put them all together.
And one of the arguments for this was that, well, these kits reflect, you know, movie vampires and not folkloric vampires.
And I was like, oh, that's, you know, that's an interesting distinction.
You know, I knew from different, from documentaries and stuff I've read that there were differences between, you know, what we considered vampires in movies versus what the folklore held.
And so I started looking around for kind of a breakdown.
Like I wanted to, I wanted someone to go through all of all of the traits that we associate with vampires and tell me where they came from.
And I just couldn't find that anywhere.
So I started researching it a bit more and I actually ended up writing a book about it.
And that's sort of how it happened.
Well, I'm glad you did because I knew about the movie kind and I knew nothing about the mythological folkloric kind.
So I'm very pleased that you did it.
A very comprehensive piece of work and you clearly know your stuff to be able to talk off the bat like that as you did.
Oh, thank you.
So AP, thank you very much indeed.
What's the title of the book?
How do people get it?
Sure.
So the book is called Vampires of Lore, Traits and Modern Misconceptions.
It's available on a variety of online booksellers, on Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com and others.
If you want to buy it from your local bookstore, you can go there and ask, and I think they should be able to get it in for you.
I also have a website called locationsoflore.com where I write about some of the places I've visited.
Many of them are vampire related.
And also on that site, you can find out a bit more about the book.
And I have links to the different places where you can buy it.
Well, very nice, thorough piece of research.
And thank you very much for spending time talking with me about it, AP.
I wish you every success with it.
Oh, well, thank you so much.
I really enjoyed speaking with you.
AP Sylvia, your thoughts about him?
Please send me an email.
Go to theunexplained.tv, my website.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show, and give me some thoughts on the show, maybe this edition or anything, really, a guest suggestion, whatever you want to do.
And if you know how to contact a guest you're suggesting, then contact details, you know, always gratefully received.
Thank you very much for being part of this.
Thank you for sharing your stories and thank you for coming on the strange ride that 2020 has been with me.
These are strange.
Everybody says this, but they are.
Because I don't think we have any other phrase for it.
They're strange, weird, unpredictable days.
But, you know, I do have that faith that we're coming through it.
I had an astrologer on my radio show.
Now, I know some of you don't like astrology and astrologers, but I had Milton Black on from Australia.
Got a lot of calls and texts for him and tweets.
A very popular man.
And the general consensus, certainly from the astrological viewpoint, is that 2021 will be better.
Now, you know, I never, you know me, I'm very superstitious, so I never predict anything about a new year.
I just don't do it from past experience.
So I hear what he says, and we will see what unfolds.
But I will say one thing.
I think I'm allowed to say this.
We deserve better, don't we, in the future?
So let's see and hope and pray together that we're going to get it.
Okay, that's enough philosophy and gazing into the future from me.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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