Vampires

Vampires are modernly one of the best known, and least understood, monsters on earth. Least understood? After two-hundred years of fictional novels, plays, movies, and games, coupled with extremely loose criteria for what counts as a vampire, almost all trace of the original monster is gone.

        So let's clear a few things up: I am here concerned with legends and claimed factual accounts of vampires... and by 'vampire' I mean a person who has died and returned to kill others with a wasting disease. When I add accounts of live people who drink blood to Anomalies, they don't end up here; they'll be under "Crimes of an Unusual Nature!"

        What may be surprising to see here is that vampires are only a small sub-set of a larger problem -- the 'Undead' -- and that there were surprisingly very few actual vampire accounts that all of the modern ideas evolved from.