Vampire are said to be humans who once cheated death by drinking the
blood of others and must therefore continue to drink the blood of the
living in order to remain immortal. Consequently, they are believed to
have become creatures with supernatural powers, such as amazing strength
and the ability to hypnotize potential victims. In some fictionalized
accounts of vampires, these creatures can also fly, sometimes after
turning into a bat. There has been no physical evidence that such
creatures are real, and indeed most people believe that vampires are
figments of the imagination whose characteristics are largely based on
the vampire in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Some, however, insist
that vampires are real creatures, who hunt alone or in bands that roam
the streets of large cities looking for lone victims who will not be
missed. These creatures, believers say, die when exposed to sunlight,
cannot enter churches, and have an aversion to religious symbols such as
crosses and to holy water. In addition, they are said to be repelled by
garlic. (Some say that these things can kill a vampire, but others
believe they only drive away a vampire.)
During the 1970s there were several cases in London of people insisting
to police that they had encountered vampires in cemeteries, and one man
was so afraid of a vampire attack that he protected himself with a
necklace of garlic—and accidentally choked to death when one of the
garlic cloves somehow became lodged in his throat. Similar reports are
still made today. Vampire lore goes back much further than the late
nineteenth century, when Bram Stoker was writing, however. In ancient
times, people sometimes reported seeing vampires. For example, the
ancient Greeks spoke of there being numerous vampires on the island of
Santorini (now Thera). Believers say that such early accounts are
particularly credible because they predate vampire novels. Some
scholars, however, argue that early stories about vampires—at least
those that come from Western cultures—can be attributed to the fact that
until modern times, people were sometimes accidentally placed in
coffins before they had actually died, which resulted in documented
cases of “dead” bodies rising from their coffins.
0 yorum:
Yorum Gönder