Who Is Bram Stoker's Dracul Fact, Fiction, And Folklore?

Vampires; Fact, Fiction, and Folklore Vampires. Our favorite Halloween costume. The scariest folk tale. But behind all this scary fun, there is some history. And this history, for some people, is exciting. Let’s look behind the veil of Halloween costumes and take a sneak peak at the origins of these blood suckers. Of course, the most famous vampire is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, whom was based on Vladimir Putin- sorry, I meant Emperor Vladimir Tepes (1431-1476) nicknamed Vlad the Impaler (y or Shish Kevlad by comedians since he put people on stakes and burned them). The vampires most people are familiar with are revenants — human corpses that are said to return from the grave to harm the living; these vampires have Slavic origins only a few hundred years old. But other, older, versions of the vampire were not thought to be human at all but instead supernatural, possibly demonic, entities that

Interest and belief in revenants surged in the Middle Ages in Europe. Though in most modern stories the classic way to become a vampire is to be bitten by one, that is a relatively new twist. The folklorist Paul Barber noted that centuries ago, potential vampires were identified at birth, by some defect, some abnormality, like if a baby was born with teeth. Though, in different countries, there were different signs. For example, it was an extra nipple in Romania, a split lower lip in Russia. However, in most of Europe, a child whom is born with a red caul covering its head is destined to return from the dead. The belief in vampires stems from superstition and mistaken assumptions about postmortem decay. The first recorded accounts of vampires follow a consistent pattern: Some unexplained misfortune would befall a person, family or town, probably a drought or an infectious disease, was explained by a vampire visiting. Vampires were the presumed answer to why bad things happened to good