¶ Intro / Opening
Last week, we discussed the history of vampires and the legends and stories behind them.
¶ Vampirism Unveiled
Today, we are going to talk about an interesting side effect of vampires, Vampirism. Join Sophia and I on our morbid time machine, and let's get into it. Welcome inquirers, new and old. Have you ever wanted to go down a rabbit hole of morbid history, but you don't know where to start? Then you are in the right place. Our Grand Past is a podcast where each week we explore messed up history.
From shipwrecks and spooky places to morally questionable people and practices for sofia and maya join us in our morbid time machine and let's discuss history's most fucked up hi maya hi sofia how are you today i'm good yeah it's been it's been a day it's been a day it's been a day can we can we reveal the fact that we're recording four episodes literally literally like like we're we're not i guess we're not fake it's like we could be like oh everything's like happening
in different times it's not no no it's not we we We definitely stock up. Yes. We try to. We haven't been for a while because we've been so busy with finals. Now we finally can, you guys. Yeah. No. It's going to be so cool. We are going to get, like, the old versions of us while you're listening. Yes. You're going to get, like, a month of us in four episodes? Yeah. Like, I'm going to get a haircut soon. So right now you're listening to the Maya with her old haircut. Ooh.
But by the time you listen to this, she might have a new haircut. Yeah. Isn't that so cool you guys you're listening to the history while talking about it it's crazy.
Slowly losing it low key saying no still want to break we're recording at Sophie's house today, so like no weird dorm noises today no people walking by and not respecting that people live here too guys did i tell you that the other day it was like 2 a.m and i went out of my dorm to like go to the bathroom and i get to the hallway and these guys are playing ping pong in the hallway i was like oh my god that's like kind of funny though yeah no like dorm shenanigans
wrap me up have you seen that meet or like that thing i don't know if it's a mean tumblr post thing where this like group of guys are like just playing cards in a dorm elevator. That's funny. Have you seen the, like, the dorm? I haven't. But have you seen the elevator challenge? No. Where it's, like, you're either on the floor in the elevator and, like, when the door. No, you're on the floor and you press for the elevator and then you'll, like, do a move.
Like, a lot of people, like, fit their middle finger and, like, it's, like, a Russian roulette. There's someone in there and you're just slipping along. Which reminded me of that. Yes. Born life is crazy, y'all.
Yeah the other day i found this guy sitting in front of his door he was in a towel like he was shirtless and he had like a shower bag next to him and he had his like head in his hands like did he walk himself out i don't know he was just like in that position for like at least 20 minutes in front of his door but like you can go to the office man and get a key well but we only have so many walkouts that we get for free yeah i don't i got mine without being like registered because i locked my
key in the dorm but i was like i know my key is in there yeah because i left i just i still left my key in there i was like i know it's in there she's like no for sure i was like yeah i can picture where it is she's like okay you go like get it and then you can just bring this back to me and so i did and she was like yeah so i'm like yeah no i had a friend who locked himself out i didn't want to say why you saw on the first day oh my god so for a while we just had a picture of his like.
Or like a drawing of his id because his dorm was like right by our lounge window so we had a drawing of his id and we're like don't forget your id don't forget your id it's funny and we can always tell when he forgets his id now because he'll like he'll shut his door turn around and that's just hit his head on the door like oh how do you forget your id right yeah because we have we have the locks where it's they're like magnetic locks or whatever where you have to like put through
our eds yeah we're beeped into our dorm rooms so it's like yeah no it's like you just do with the phone wallet key pat down yeah phone wallet key water bottle literally like i call it the pocket pack down because i'm just like slapping all of my pockets like do i have what i need real yeah i for my dorm it's different we have kiki yeah but still they're attached to my ID. Exactly!
¶ Tangents and Tales
Like, anyway. Yeah, okay, anyway. We've gone off on a little bit of a tangent here. That's so far different than our topic today. Literally. Vampires. Well, I mean, vampires, isn't it like a thing where like they can't come in unless they're invited? That is a thing. So like doors. Now it's related. Now it's related. You guys, everything is always. Just like the. We didn't talk about this last time. What? The 9-11 to Twilight Pipeline.
Oh my god. Bro, this was my final for my oral communications class this year. It was how 9-11 caused the downfall of Ellen DeGeneres. It's a real thing if you guys... Which it is a real thing. I love the... This is one of my favorites. The My Chemical Romance Pipeline. I love it so much. And there's another thing to be added to it. I sent you this. Oh, I'm sorry. I haven't looked through all of it. I'm pretty sure you also liked it. Did I?
Oh no. No, no. like you liked it on instagram and i sent it to you anyway let's see it is this one the luigi mangioni yes that's the guy who shot the health care ceo by the way if those who don't know but no he has been added to the my chemical romance pipeline anyway so brief summary the creator of My Chemical Romance draw our way, witnessed 9-11 and decided, you know what, I'm going to do something different with my life. So he then created the band My Chemical Romance.
My Chemical Romance was one of the inspirations to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. And for those who don't know, there was a lot of Twilight fan fiction back in the day. And one of those was Fifty Shades of Grey.
¶ The Fascination of Renfield Syndrome
Yes. Which was? It was called Masters of the Universe, which is like such a fan fiction title yes and then that got published into a book got popular then got turned into a movie and then the actress dakota johnson dakota johnson went on the ellen show and ellen joked that like she didn't invite her to a birthday party i think and she was like in dakota was like yes i did ellen stop lying because the year before ellen was like giving her all sorts of crap crap because she wasn't invited
to dakota johnson's 29th birthday party and coda was like well i didn't even know you wanted to be invited so like maybe use your words so then when she was 30 the next year she was like well i did invite you you were busy actually, and a bunch of stuff came out i just feel like they'll be used to her like workers well and then that just like turned public opinion away from ellen so yeah yeah anyway we were talking about vampires and twilight and i completely forgot about
it and then i remembered it's okay well Well, now it's out. Now it's out in the world. Okay. Oh vampirism oh okay vampirism let's get into it so start off with clinical vampirism it's like the big fancy title and it's also known as renfield syndrome and it's the condition in which the person affected believes themselves either to be a vampire or they find it necessary in alluring to drink human blood or it's also just simply an obsession with blood.
It was named renfield syndrome in 1990 by richard knoll a prominent researcher on clinical vampirism who is also a writer and he's written like different books about it and done a lot of research on.
It and it was named after the character r.m renfield in bram stoker's dracula and renfield is this little guy that lives in the castle who like eats like bugs and spiders in order to try to become undead interesting and noel basically compared him like he's like this is the human equivalent of a vampire i was like what okay weird thing he compared it with run run filled in human so is that and so noel worked with patients diagnosed with clinical vampirism and
saw that a majority of people diagnosed with this are actually male male yes like there isn't as off many female people diagnosed with clinical vampirism maybe it's like a power thing maybe yeah i'm not sure maybe women are just like i'm not crazy i'm not attracted but like that but like because like the other thing is like maybe it's a power thing bro yeah yeah so they believe blood has like magical or mystic powers and depending on the case they believe it does certain things so sometimes
they believe that they have to drink blood or else they'll like go crazy because a lot of them also are schizophrenics and don't have enough blood so they need it to like refill their own yeah there's a bunch of different reasons behind why they want to. And in an interview, I found Noel claims that the first stage of clinical vampirism stems from a traumatic situation of blood injury or ingestion of food, not food, ingestion of blood at a young age.
And then as they grow older, a person becomes like attracted to blood because of like the situation in which it happened. Yes. Yes. And so then after that, they will resort to auto vampirism. So they'll drink and consume their own blood to, like, fulfill the need for blood drinking. And then after that, they usually will turn to consuming the blood of small animals or the like. And if it gets really bad, then they would turn to other humans.
Isn't there, like, I know, like, there are some people who, like, cook with animal blood, like with pig's blood. Isn't there a way to, like, buy pig's blood?
Yes. could they just do that yeah but it's also like the mentality okay all right but also like what are what are the like health ramifications of like drinking blood well like with drinking human blood you could probably get like blood borne stuff like that so like wild animals there's gonna possibly be something sussy in there but if you're healthy you're like fine because like meat has blood in it yeah that's true so it just depends on what it is like i assume if
you can just like buy pig's blood is out of market or something it's gonna be fine because it has different like things right now i don't know you guys i don't drink blood sorry anyway so he no described this renfield syndrome as being something very compulsive so a person can't necessarily control it like it's just a compulsive need to drink blood and as i said before sometimes a person thinks they're running out of blood and they need other blood to like refill
their own and things like that other things is that they feel like they have to drink blood.
¶ Obsessions and Bloodlust
That's where the compulsiveness comes in it's like if they don't drink blood something bad will happen and like it's basically it's kind of like if someone's like addicted to drugs and they like they'll go through like withdrawal yeah kind of they go through blood withdrawals and like they like will crave it as well and they think they need it okay and also like we talked about this back in our i said our body like our kid now our kidnapping episode oh we talked
about how people would drink like eat mummies and drink blood oh yeah as like something they think could cure you so that also can sometimes tie into it for some people they think drinking blood will like heal or cleanse them yeah well and i also know there is this female serial killer she's known most often as the blood countess she like would bathe in like her the blood of her young female female servants in order to like preserve her youth but it was like
i feel like it was also said that elizabeth barthory yes oh my god yeah she was a hungarian countess yes she was publicly accused of killing 80 young girls but she probably killed around 600 yeah but like and i think there was like another thing where it's like oh yeah like if you drink the blood or bathe in blood of like if you had epilepsy if you drank or bathed in the blood of a non-epileptic person. Then you'd be cured of your epilepsy yeah like eating organs was also a thing.
Like if you eat the organ that like if like you have like health problems yeah. If you eat different organs it'll like heal you yeah well Well, and we'll get a little bit more into that and consumption in our Mercy Brown episode. Okay, sorry. That was so abrupt because I'm going crazy. Back to what I was saying. So there's Brentfield syndrome and clinical vampirism.
And then there's also been research to prove it as not like a compulsive syndrome or something, but worse as a personality disorder.
So that would also encompass like killers who are motivated by blood lust and they have like this like thirst for blood like not technically like physically they want to drink it but like they need to see it okay which that just relates to the obsession with blood yeah and it would also include people who harm others to fulfill vampire fantasies and delusions so there's cases where people like would fight their partners or stuff like that or they,
would want to become a vampire so like they will go around and like fight and kill people but it's not because they necessarily want blood they just want to be like a vampire yeah which is kind of goofball yeah.
Kind of interesting too yeah and then something else interesting that i found was that clinical vampirism and renfield syndrome was actually originally different oh nowadays it's like the term it's like renfield syndrome is a very common term but it's not actually recognized as a medical condition you can have and clinical vampirism is but only on some lists i don't think it's always recognized because a lot of the time people will have other things like a
lot of them will have schizophrenia or personality disorders and so it's usually just like a weird offset of that and so before renfield syndrome so before 1990 clinical vampirism was really just a deep obsession with blood it often had like a sexual connotation to the obsession but then renfield syndrome was specifically like the desire and compulsion to consume blood okay so those diagnosis clinical vampireism didn't necessarily have to like have a desire or need
to consume blood they're just like really obsessed with it and that oftentimes caused them to like yeah or like kill small animals or things like that and they would probably resort to not exactly auto-vampirism but maybe a little bit and so similar yeah.
¶ Wrapping Up the Vampire Saga
Very interesting isn't it yeah i tried to find like specific cases and it's kind of hard to obviously because like patient information yeah yeah more so controlled but i wanted to try to find like a killer but like yeah but if you guys want to if you're interested about it there are a few criminal minds episodes about it i can't remember what they're called exactly but there's one in which a man is trying i think to kill himself and so he offers the blood of people he's killed to an
angel statue at a church and then there's another one where there's this like emo punk singer rock star guy yeah and there's a woman who's his fan who she starts killing other people and like sucks them of their blood and then there's another isn't there also the one where he like paints the pictures of them yes their blood yes and then there's one where he paints with blood yeah very interesting yeah it is i love all right so that is the end of our two-parter vampire, vampirism episodes.
I hope you guys enjoyed it. I love vampires. If you ever see me out in the wild, you can ask me about vampires. I'll go way more in depth than I need to. All right. So join us next week as we talk about the famous Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary. Ooh, exciting. Thanks for listening. Stay curious. Bye. Thank you for joining us today. As always, all sources will be listed in the show notes below. Be sure to subscribe so you won't miss out on our upcoming discussions.
Join us next week as we delve into the intriguing depths of our grand past. Stay curious. There's so much more to uncover.