Every month, the editors of the kids’ magazines write to me and ask for pitches. I go through my mental rolodex of neato things I’d like to write about. And, since I am essentially a twelve-year-old in a slightly taller, defiantly chubbier, and a vastly achier body, this is great fun. Weird history, horror, our cool and scary planet, and the unbelievably cool things scientists are doing.
It’s a great job.
And so it is that I am writing about vampires and zombies. Research takes me deep into the topic, as it should. The facts have to be straight, correct, and relevant. This means digging deep, finding several sources for a single fact, and oftentimes being frustrated when something really cool ends up being fake or apocryphal. It also brings me down a rabbit hole of interesting and – sometimes – terrifying facts.
In my research on vampires this week, I have found that many vampire scares throughout history have been a result of bad verification of death, or misunderstanding illnesses and the process of decomposition. The third one wasn’t so bad. I mean, sure, witnessing the exhumation of your recently deceased sister by a band of literally-pitchfork-wielding locals, then watching her heart getting torn out of her chest, burned, and then fed to you, is probably something you’d be working out with a therapist the rest of your life (if the heart ashes didn’t kill you). But at least you could always go back to the fact that 1. she was (hopefully) already dead, 2. at least she wasn’t an actual vampire, and 3. this gives you a pretty solid excuse for rampant alcoholism.
But it’s more brutal in the first and second cases. The two leading illnesses confused for vampirism were porphyria and tuberculosis. Porphyria is a blood disease that makes your gums shrink, your body sensitive to light, and thus your skin pale. Not only does this make it clear why these poor people were confused for vampires, but drinking blood relieved the symptoms of this illness. So, try to explain your way out of that one to a band of crazed and terrified locals who drink alcohol all day because it’s healthier than your water system. Tough gig.
Tuberculosis was another. This joyful little attack on your body involved coughing out your lungs so hard that it scarred your ribs. This coupled with the vast amounts of weight you lost and the attending withdrawn features procured as you coughed your way to a harrowing death. On top of this, people were kicking in your door and claiming you were a son of the devil. And the third manner was a little nightmare known as being buried alive. Since the methodology for checking whether a person was alive or dead was to shout insults about your mother at you and seeing if you reacted, it happened sometimes that a person was put in the ground before he had had a chance to actually perish. Villagers would later dig them up and note the desperate scratches on the inside of the coffin and movement of the corpse and determine that they couldn’t have been wrong – the person had been dead, but had sprung back to life in the coffin. Sure. Thus, they were besmirched throughout the village as vampires. This, my dear readers, is the clearest case of insult to injury that I have heard today.
I write this on my couch in my flat. The easy summer morning coming in through the windows, a little music on the ole Spotify. I am not terrified; I am reading history. This couldn’t happen now, could it? Not so fast, Van Helsing.
Let’s fast forward a couple hundred years to Malawi and Zambia in 2017 and 2020. A group of medical officers were doing surveys in a region and drawing blood from people to test for certain diseases. Rumors exploded that these people were vampires, using technology, chemicals, and of course magic to steal people’s blood. Nine people were killed in lynch mobs and dozens injured. There was a similar event in the early 2000s in the same areas when a governor was killed along with other local political operatives when rumors that they were vampires propelled a lynch mob to attack them too.
We live in weird times. The boundless information on a massive accessible space has left it up to us to critically assess that information and to be reasonable. And the only flaw in that plan is the ‘us’ part. Not to mention the fact that a new brand of global leaders not only disregard the truth, but also propagate falsehoods for personal and political gain. There is no rebuke for this anymore. One of the two candidates for the US presidency (the orange one, if you haven’t guessed) has half the brains of an orangutan and almost the verbal dexterity of one too. His speeches – which even in his political heyday didn’t make sense and consisted of monosyllabic chants interspaced between vast oceans of rambling idiocies – have now become so ridiculous and filled with random words that one wonders if he’s trying to contact his mothership. If you think for a second that this person wouldn’t claim his opponent is a vampire, you are nuts. The only thing more insane than that statement and its truth is this one: his followers would believe him. Ah, the frustration.
If by writing about vampires and zombies and pointing out hysteria and mistakes can help kids avoid doing something similar in the future, then this would be CV worthy and something I would take to my grave, hopefully after I’ve died. So, if these kids don’t go attacking medical professionals for stealing their blood, that’s a win in my book.
