Real-Life Instances of Actual Vampires

While human attacks are especially rare (apparently, only when they are starving), lampreys are fish neither man nor woman would ever want to encounter. These animals use their jawless mouths full of razor-sharp teeth to latch onto prey and drain them of their blood as they swim.  

In a small village in Mberengwa, Zimbabwe, there occurred a rather bizarre incident in February 2013. Following a hit and run accident that killed four children, a group of people clad in black robes reportedly converged at the scene and feasted on the blood of the victims. Numerous people witnessed the group in action moments after the accident.  

Believing the people to be involved in some kind of cult, possibly Satanist in origin, the villagers brought in a man named Banda, who was a tsikamutandaa, or witch-hunter, to sniff them out. Banda was successful, and after giving the cultists a chance to turn themselves in, he named their names before the village and turned them over to the police chief.  

Also known as Blagojevich, this man is one of the earliest examples of vampirism and the so-called vampire hysteria that plagued Europe in the 1730s. Moreover, Plogojowitz's story is credited as founding many of the most commonly recognized aspects of vampire folklore.  

It seems likely that, through the passage of time, this tale has taken on elements of the fantastic, confounding the truth of the situation, but it is nonetheless an enjoyable and chilling tale. To summarize as concisely as possible, it is said that weeks after dying and being buried, Plogojowitz was seen walking around his village, looking healthy and decidedly not dead.  

His wife even attests to having had a visit from her husband, requesting his shoes. Around this same time, several villagers began suffering a bizarre 24-hour illness and dying. All of them swore that Plogojowitz came to them in the middle of the night and throttled them in their beds. His son also reported seeing his father in their kitchen - then he too died under mysterious circumstances.  

Afflicted with numerous mental problems, but never properly treated, and a drug and alcohol addict, Richard Trenton Chase began killing and drinking the blood of animals at a young age. He would go on to kill six people between 1977 and 1978. He would only enter homes with unlocked doors, believing - true to vampire mythos - that an unlocked door was an open invitation to enter. Chase drank the blood of his victims, as well as cannibalized their corpses.  

Part of the larger New England vampire panic of the late 19th century, the case involving Mercy Brown occurred in 1892 in Exeter, Rhode Island. As with all the other panic incidents, numerous cases of tuberculosis were attributed to the undead.  

The Brown family had already lost Mercy, and her brother Edwin was also afflicted. As such, the Brown family decided to exhume members of their family to determine if any of the previous dead were the cause of the problem. While two other deceased family members showed expected levels of decomposition, Mercy seemed unnaturally well-preserved.