Were werewolves and vampires actually serial killers?

[JoeTheJuggler]

Thats not how myth making works, theres no origin present in that example

No one familiar with death would on seeing something they had seen countless times before, jump to the "Vampire" conclusion unless the Vampire mythos already existed for them to base that assumption on, likewise in the case of a lunatic who killed someone on a full moon there also needs to be existing mythology to base an accusation on, The belief in wandering undead was pretty rampant in the ancient world where anyone who didn't receive the correct burial procedure was believed to wander the world looking to do those responsible a mischief.

with werewolves the same is also true, Peter Strupp for instance was not as claimed by "True Horror" (chillzero) the origin of the werewolf mythos but a bit player contributing to it

True, but the exact same thing can be said about serial killers. The myth had to exist before someone would attribute an unsolved murder to vampires.

I think that's the real point: as you say, these myths go waaaay back.

I guess I was thinking about what might have triggered specific scares. I don't think they typically started because of unexplained murders. But even in the stories I'm thinking of, the exhumations obviously had to happen after the people were already attributing their misfortunes to the un-dead.

 

[Marduk]

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151178&highlight=carmilla
previous thread

(filled with lesbian vampires)

 

[Vortigern99]

The Wolfman or disheveled man as werewolf is actually rather new.

No, unless you consider the Holzschnitt woodcut from the 16th century "rather new" -- for which I suppose a case could be made.

 

[Vortigern99]

theres definitely a connection there with pre pubescence and liking vampires)

What are you trying to say here?

 

[Moss]

This one by Cranach?
Yeah, that is earlier than I thought. Still most of the stories refer to a hunt in wolf form and some magical item to change form.
I think it's kinda interesting that the Lykaon story is kind of a reversal. First eating human flesh and then getting turned into a wolf.

 

[Marduk]

What are you trying to say here?

Hmmm, 1 Corinthians 13:11 possibly


Thesedays of course I tend to like those type of Vampire films where the women all look like this

rather than like this

and I'm pretty sure I'm not in the minority with that

 

[Vortigern99]

If you plan on "putting away childish things", you should probably start with the leather-clad gun-maven and work your way up to the angst-ridden high school chick. Neither is especially mature, IOW.

 

[shadron]

I'll add to this one oddity: Victorian England (and elsewhere?) had a fetish and a fear with being buried alive. This was expressed the in building of small bell towers atop the lid of a casket with a bell attached to a string which was threaded through a hole in the lid and placed in the hand of the deceased, so they could ring the bell upon a happy occasion.

I found this out and researched it further after reading Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. One of the ploys used to get a thief in the railway car with the gold was to ship a corpse. The box was actually inhabited by an accomplice in grotesque makeup and a dead cat. At the train depot the bell rang and the distraught "wife" screamed for them to open the lid, and the stench and sight that faced them caused them to slam the lid back down and give it no more thorough inspection before stowing it on the railcar.

It turns out Crichton was making up details, as far as I could find, but his research was good - there was indeed such a fear, and the cute towers did indeed exist (and probably for no more than an extra £20 ($1300 equiv), either. The undertakers were no less mercenary then than today).

 

[Big Les]

If you plan on "putting away childish things", you should probably start with the leather-clad gun-maven and work your way up to the angst-ridden high school chick. Neither is especially mature, IOW.

Well, though both are teenage fantasy, only one is also an adult sexual fetish.

 

[Marduk]

Well, though both are teenage fantasy, only one is also an adult sexual fetish.

Mwahahahahah

 

[RobRoy]

I'll add to this one oddity: Victorian England (and elsewhere?) had a fetish and a fear with being buried alive. This was expressed the in building of small bell towers atop the lid of a casket with a bell attached to a string which was threaded through a hole in the lid and placed in the hand of the deceased, so they could ring the bell upon a happy occasion.

I found this out and researched it further after reading Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. One of the ploys used to get a thief in the railway car with the gold was to ship a corpse. The box was actually inhabited by an accomplice in grotesque makeup and a dead cat. At the train depot the bell rang and the distraught "wife" screamed for them to open the lid, and the stench and sight that faced them caused them to slam the lid back down and give it no more thorough inspection before stowing it on the railcar.

It turns out Crichton was making up details, as far as I could find, but his research was good - there was indeed such a fear, and the cute towers did indeed exist (and probably for no more than an extra £20 ($1300 equiv), either. The undertakers were no less mercenary then than today).

You’re quite right about the Victorian fear, although the same could be said of any generation when the thought of premature burial was considered. If I recall correctly, Edgar Allen Poe and George Washington were both deathly afraid of being buried alive, along with a host of other notables. The Victorian-age inventors were reasonably ingenious when it came to tackling this problem, providing breakable glass panels, pulley systems, internal hatches, along with paying undertakers to stand vigil for a certain period of time in case any of these systems were employed. In most cases, though, the preparations would only have worked until the coffin was actually inserted into the ground. After that, the limited amount of oxygen in the coffin would have caused quick suffocation.

The device you’re talking about is actually one in a series patented by a Belgium inventor. I can’t recall his name, but it did a whole number of things, including ringing a bell, turning on a lamp, allowing fresh air into the coffin, and waving a flag. But I’m sure all that was too much to be shown in The Great Train Robbery, which might have rendered it a bit unbelievable, enough though it’s true.

 

[Frying Dutchmen]

I think the answer is yes. I read about were wolves on wikipedia that some of the acts attributed to these mythical creature were often committed by human serial killers. Do the legends of these creatures actually indicate this?

I listened to an interview with a author who wrote a book about Serial killers are actually Werewolves and Vampires. Can't remember his name although.

 

[Marduk]

I listened to an interview with a author who wrote a book about Serial killers are actually Werewolves and Vampires. Can't remember his name although.

Its not a new idea

Many authors have speculated that werewolf and vampire legends may have been used to explain serial killings in less rational ages. This theory is given credence by the tendency of some modern serial killers to indulge in practices commonly associated with werewolves, such as cannibalism, mutilation, and cyclic attacks. The idea is well explored in Sabine Baring-Gould's work The Book of Werewolves.

link to the book at sacred texts
http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/bow/

 

[Frying Dutchmen]

Its not a new idea

link to the book at sacred texts
http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/bow/

Thanks, it should be an interesting read.

 

[quarky]

Now I'm hungry.

 

[Cainkane1]

I'll add to this one oddity: Victorian England (and elsewhere?) had a fetish and a fear with being buried alive. This was expressed the in building of small bell towers atop the lid of a casket with a bell attached to a string which was threaded through a hole in the lid and placed in the hand of the deceased, so they could ring the bell upon a happy occasion.

I found this out and researched it further after reading Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. One of the ploys used to get a thief in the railway car with the gold was to ship a corpse. The box was actually inhabited by an accomplice in grotesque makeup and a dead cat. At the train depot the bell rang and the distraught "wife" screamed for them to open the lid, and the stench and sight that faced them caused them to slam the lid back down and give it no more thorough inspection before stowing it on the railcar.

It turns out Crichton was making up details, as far as I could find, but his research was good - there was indeed such a fear, and the cute towers did indeed exist (and probably for no more than an extra £20 ($1300 equiv), either. The undertakers were no less mercenary then than today).

I bet this fear is what caused so called vampires to be beheaded and their hearts cut out. Not much chance of being buried alive after that.

 

[Marduk]

I bet this fear is what caused so called vampires to be beheaded and their hearts cut out. Not much chance of being buried alive after that.

I can't but help think youre not quite grasping the chronological order of the facts here. The cutting off of the head and staking of the heart is an eastern european tradition traceable back into the middle ages whereas the Victorian fear of narcolepsy is much more likely to be an artifact of the drug culture of the time and completely unconnected with mythical vampirism.

100 years ago hard core narcotics were freely available to the general public and misuse of them allied with what by our standards was a piss poor medical understanding frequently led to people being diagnosed as dead who were simply in a narcoleptic type fugue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcolepsy
There are many accounts of people waking up on the morturary slab due to a poor diagnosis. The resulting paranoia was spread by the written word of the tabloids to the wealthy who then in their fear created a market for the above mentioned coffins. Most of the poor at that time could not afford real coffins, making do with a hastily constructed box or simply a shroud. It was a fad for the rich, which was entirely unneccesary as generally the rich had Doctors who knew how to tell if someone was dead or not

 

[Akhenaten]

I'll add to this one oddity: Victorian England (and elsewhere?) had a fetish and a fear with being buried alive. This was expressed the in building of small bell towers atop the lid of a casket with a bell attached to a string which was threaded through a hole in the lid and placed in the hand of the deceased, so they could ring the bell upon a happy occasion.

I found this out and researched it further after reading Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. One of the ploys used to get a thief in the railway car with the gold was to ship a corpse. The box was actually inhabited by an accomplice in grotesque makeup and a dead cat. At the train depot the bell rang and the distraught "wife" screamed for them to open the lid, and the stench and sight that faced them caused them to slam the lid back down and give it no more thorough inspection before stowing it on the railcar.

It turns out Crichton was making up details, as far as I could find, but his research was good - there was indeed such a fear, and the cute towers did indeed exist (and probably for no more than an extra £20 ($1300 equiv), either. The undertakers were no less mercenary then than today).

I bet this fear is what caused so called vampires to be beheaded and their hearts cut out. Not much chance of being buried alive after that.

Not much chance of being saved by the bell either.

 

[blutoski]

I've actually tried to specialize on the difference between vampire folklore and fiction. I have a couple of presentations that I should put on the web. I'm thinking of making it a formal show, actually.

I was asked this serial killer question the very first time I did the lecture, and I drew a complete blank. I had simply never heard it before, despite all the resarch up to that point. I've since invested some time exploring the narrative.

In a nutshell: no. There's very little chance that vampire/warewolf myths originated with serial killers.

The folklore that relates to vampires or werewolves is not very recognizeable to us in this post-Bram Stoker culture. Vampires and werewolves were examples of 'revenants' which included ghosts. Basically "Hey, you're supposed to be dead." They visited in dreams, or meandered about their village as noncorporeal spirits. They were thought to transform into pretty much any animal. When they took human form, they were always plump. Exhumed remains would verify their plumpness. Anybody who understood decomposition didn't believe in the folklore, but such people were very rare, and would not be locals.

Wolves probably became prominent transformation animals in Europe because they literally hung around cemeteries and tried their best to dug up remains. The equation: missing corpse + evidence of wolf = corpse turned into wolf. Don't laugh: it made sense at the time.

And that's assuming the remains were even buried. Digging in the ground is a lot of work. Customs varied quite a bit, and many bodies were left to skeletonize in the open, which only made it easier for the body to 'mysteriously disappear'. Google the Sedlec Ossuary, Kaplica Czazek, Santa Maria della Concezione. They still believed in vampire revenants, even though the physical remains were in clear sight at all times.


I agree with Vortigern99's thoughts about the connection to serial murder probably being fallout from Stoker's fiction. Marduk is correct that revenants and animal transformation is abundant in antique cultures, far predating the Central/East European variants. Further: there are New World legends about revenants and animal transformation that predate Contact. JoeTheJuggler is correct that exhumations played a role in reinforcing the more recent East European folklore. But be mindful that even those who were not buried were accused of being vampires in this region, so it's also unlikely to be an 'origin'.

My take: people didn't understand decomposition, and people believed in life after death. Since people die and bodies decompose everywhere, similar narratives seem to have emerged. Multiple origins that roughly converge simply because humans are similar enough.

 

[lisan23]

If you get the chance to, go over to the History Channel's website and search for video's about vampire origins. I've caught a couple of specials they've done about vampires and their origins and it's pretty interesting stuff.

For instance, back in the day they didn't embalm bodies. When someone thought they were seeing a dead person basically walking around (revenant or ghost) they would check their grave and actually stake their body to the ground. Since the bodies weren't embalmed and the body typically already started to decompose, the head and body would be bloated and the mouth would typically be leaking blood. This gave the appearance that the corpse was full of blood which ended up leading to the idea that they drank blood.