Vampires (15 page)

The local newspaper, not surprisingly, published several articles on this phenomenon, including a sighting of ‘a King Vampire of the Undead’, who was said to be a medieval nobleman. This man had apparently practised the black arts and had travelled from Wallachia to England in a coffin during the eighteenth century. In addition, foxes with throat wounds, whose bodies had been drained of blood, were reported to have been seen lying around the cemetery.

A much publicized ‘vampire hunt’ then ensued, led by two local men, David Farrant and Sean Manchester. The pair offered claims and counter-claims as to the supernatural goings-on in the churchyard, until Farrant was jailed, in 1974, for vandalism and desecration of graves. He claimed that these crimes had been committed by satanists. Manchester later wrote a book on the subject entitled
The Highgate Vampire
. Today, the feud between the two men continues, each claiming to tell the definitive story of what remains an urban legend.

Other urban areas in Britain have also yielded tales of vampirism, including an area of Birmingham known as Ward End. The stories began in 1981 when stones were thrown at houses in the area during the night. Although police set up infra-red cameras to survey the streets there, no human beings were ever seen. In 2004, reports came in that a man had been biting people. The local hospital and police station were not alerted, however, and there was no trace of the victims. In the end, in the absence of hard information about the so-called ‘Brummy vampire’, the case was dismissed as an urban legend, and the short-lived panic surrounding it subsided.

It would be reassuring to imagine that all tales of vampirism in our time are the product of myth and superstition, and have no basis in reality. This usually appears to be so, as in the cases of the Highgate vampire and the Brummy vampire. Sadly, however, there continue to be instances of real vampirism, that is, dreadful crimes committed by extremely deranged individuals who believe themselves to be vampires and who act accordingly; murdering innocent victims at random to eat their flesh and drink their blood.

One such was Richard Trenton Chase, a serial killer from the city of Sacramento, California. Between 1977 and 1978 he killed six victims, drinking their blood and eating parts of their bodies. When he was caught, it emerged that he was seriously deluded. Under interrogation, he said he believed that Nazis were plotting his death by planting a certain kind of poison underneath his soap dish, which would turn his blood to powder.

Chase was born on 23 May 1950 in Santa Clara County, California. His parents split when he was a child and by all accounts, his early years were difficult. By the time he was an adolescent, he was abusing drugs and alcohol. During this time, he visited a psychiatrist complaining of sexual impotence. The psychiatrist diagnosed that he was suffering from repressed anger, but nothing further was done to improve the situation, and Chase went on to exhibit increasingly bizarre behaviour.

After leaving home in the belief that his mother was trying to poison him, he rented an apartment with college friends. He alarmed them by holding oranges to his head, thinking that the vitamin C would enter it that way. Other strange behaviour included shaving his head so that he could see how his bones ‘moved around’, and reporting that someone had stolen one of his arteries. He was frequently high on a cocktail of drugs and took to walking around the apartment naked. One by one, the friends moved out, until he was left there alone.

He then began to catch small animals, kill them, and eat them raw. In some cases, he mixed their organs in a blender with Coca Cola and drank them. He believed that, like a vampire, this would prolong his life, preventing his heart from shrinking. Not surprisingly, before long, he became ill and was admitted to hospital after injecting rabbit’s blood into his veins and contracting blood poisoning. In hospital, he was nicknamed Dracula after being found with the remains of a small bird smeared over his mouth. He was treated for schizophrenia and drug-induced psychosis, and released into the care of his mother. Not long afterwards, his mother took him off his medication. That was when the nightmare began.

Chase went on a rampage lasting almost a year, killing a total of six innocent people. He began with a 51-year-old engineer, Ambrose Griffin, shooting him with a rifle. Next he shot Teresa Wallin, who was three months pregnant, mutilating and fornicating with her corpse before bathing in her blood. He then visited 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth, killing her, her six-year-old son Jason, her baby nephew David, and her friend Danny Meredith. After engaging in his usual necrophiliac and cannibalistic activities, he ran off to his apartment, where he drank the baby’s blood, ate parts of his brain and other organs, before leaving the body in a churchyard.

It was not long before police caught up with him. His apartment was full of gruesome evidence as to his hideous activities, but he maintained his innocence, telling police that he had merely killed some dogs. Fortunately, the police did not believe him and he was arrested. At his trial in 1979, despite an insanity plea, he was found guilty of first degree murder on six counts and sentenced to death. A year later, while awaiting his fate, he committed suicide, overdosing on a hoard of anti-depressants prescribed to him by the prison doctor.

In recent times there have been other reports of murderers who believed themselves to be vampires, such as the case of Manuela and Daniel Ruda, who killed their friend Frank Hackert ‘for Satan’, drank his blood, and then had sex in a coffin. They both denied having any personal responsibility for the murder. At their trial, they were declared to be suffering severe personality disorders, and were sentenced to be held in secure psychiatric units.

Unfortunately, these are not isolated instances. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Ruda case was that the couple received a great deal of fan mail from vampire enthusiasts. Today, there is speculation that the satanic cult of the vampire is increasing, especially in economically depressed areas where serious mental illness, especially among the young, can go untreated. Thankfully, however, the cases in which individuals believing themselves to be vampires actually commit murder, continue to be relatively few.

Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula, as he was also known, was a fifteenth-century Romanian prince who has gone down in history as one of the most bloodthirsty rulers of all time. His preferred method of torture was to impale his victims on a sharpened wooden stake, not only ensuring them a slow, agonizing death, but also encouraging onlookers, both soldiers and civilians, to surrender immediately to his troops. He was utterly ruthless in his desire to dominate, and stories of his cruel treatment towards mothers and children, as well as adult men, abound.

There is no doubt that Vlad was an extremely barbaric ruler, but some believe that the stories about him being an insane devil worshipper and sadist, who revelled in his bloodthirsty crimes, are exaggerated. It is certainly true that his many enemies, especially those among the supporters of the Ottoman Empire which sought to rule Romania at the time, feared and hated him. He is reputed to have impaled thousands of ordinary men, women and children, in the course of war, or for any kind of resistance to his draconian edicts. However, among his own people, he was revered as a courageous freedom fighter, who for decades defended his country against the Turks. Be that as it may, his reputation as a mass murderer gave rise to many legends and myths, and his name, if not his actual historical existence, inspired Bram Stoker’s novel
Dracula
, written many centuries later.

Vlad the Impaler is thought to have been born in the city of Sighisoara, which is now in Romania but in those days was part of Transylvania. He was the second son of a Wallachian Prince, Vlad ‘Dracul’, who was living there in exile from his native land at the time. Vlad ‘Dracul’ was a warlord who had been initiated into a royal society, the ‘Order of the Dragon’, which accounted for his nickname, ‘Dracul’. Significantly, in medieval times, the dragon was synonymous with the devil, and in the Romanian language, the word ‘Dracul’ also means ‘devil’. Vlad Dracul’s son became known as Dracula, meaning ‘son of the dragon’ – in other words, son of the devil. He certainly lived up to his name, as history recounts.

Vlad ‘Dracul’ and his family were being hounded by the Ottoman sultan, forced to work for him as vassals, and to live in exile away from their homeland. In addition, Vlad was made to surrender two of his sons as hostages. Another son, little Vlad’s older brother, was put to death in the most agonizing way, blinded with iron stakes and buried alive by his enemies. Not surprisingly, Vlad the younger grew up with an intense hatred of the Turks, and also of the boyars, high-ranking Russian, Moldavian, and Wallachian aristocrats who were often disloyal and competitive towards Vlad ‘Dracul’ and his family.

When young Vlad’s father was finally assassinated in 1447, the years of waiting were over, and his turn came to rule. He resolved to do so with a vengeance, paying his enemies back for all the humiliations the family had suffered in the past.

Vlad Dracula assembled an army and fought the Ottomans, invading Wallachia (now Romania) and managing to gain back control there. Despite his hideously barbaric methods of fighting, he was feted by his people, having ousted the Ottomans and once more taken up the throne in his native land. However, he still had a Herculean task to accomplish. After many years of misrule, Wallachia was a miserable, poverty-stricken country where the economy had completely collapsed and crime was endemic. Vlad set about restoring order, which meant, first and foremost, wiping out any possible threats to his power. To curb the boyars, he knighted lowly individuals and appointed them to important positions in the government. He also cut off trade between the boyars and the Saxons who had settled in Transylvania. When the boyars resisted, he responded by having Saxon officials in the city of Kronstadt impaled, as a warning to others not to flout his authority. Vlad was equally hostile towards other royal Romanian clans, capturing and murdering two of their princes, and murdering ordinary citizens who had sheltered them. There were stories that thousands of citizens had been impaled, earning the new ruler the nickname of Vlad Tepes – Vlad the Impaler; but although there was undoubtedly some truth in these accounts, it seems that the numbers were exaggerated by his many enemies.

Whatever the truth of the matter, there is no doubt that by now, Vlad was gaining a reputation as a ruthless, bloodthirsty fighter. In 1461, having made an alliance with the Hungarians, he marched into Ottoman territory south of the Danube and laid waste to the population there. He later boasted that he had killed over 20,000 Turks and Bulgarians, burning them alive in their houses and chopping off their heads.

Not surprisingly, the Ottoman Sultan responded by sending a huge army of 90,000 men to fight back. Nothing could have prepared the soldiers for what happened when they arrived at the region to do battle. They were greeted by the sight of thousands of dead and dying Turkish prisoners impaled on stakes, ranged across the countryside like a gruesome human forest. Dracula’s reputation as a mass murderer was sealed, and from this time on, he was feared across Europe as a man who would stop at nothing to retain his power and position.

However, ruthless as he was, Vlad’s army was no match for the might of the Ottoman Empire, and the Turks eventually marched into Romania and attacked his castle. During the siege of the castle, his wife threw herself from a tower into the river below, vowing that she would rather have her body rot in the water and be eaten by the fish than fall captive to the Turks. When the castle was taken, the sultan threw Vlad into prison, and put his half-brother, the more compliant Radu the Handsome, on the throne of Wallachia.

Vlad languished in prison for a time – there is some dispute as to how long for – but, by forging further alliances with the Hungarian crown, he was finally released. He converted to Catholicism and married a Hungarian countess, with whom he had two sons, and set about reconquering his native land, enthusiastically supported by his countrymen. In 1476, he was killed fighting near Bucharest. Afterwards, the Turkish soldiers cut off his head and sent it to the Sultan, who displayed it prominently in Istanbul – fittingly enough, on a stake.