Hello, it's Richard McLain Smith here, not the impostor you've been listening to on the podcasts the real one. Join me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com Forward Slash Unexplained pod. You're listening to Unexplained Season eight, episode twelve, The Dark Banquet, Part two. When Bram Stoker's Dracula, the story of an undead Eastern European count who rises zombie like from a coffin, feasting on the blood of the living to survive, was first published in eighteen ninety seven,
it became an overnight sensation. Today it is considered the quintus viential vampire novel, spawning a reverence and fascination for this most alluring of creatures that has persisted for over one hundred and twenty five years. Though many of the characteristics we associate with vampires, such as having no reflection or not being able to enter a building unless they are invited in, were invented by Stoker, he also borrowed a great deal from the ancient folklore and even real
life history of Eastern Europe. There the vampire phenomenon can be traced back to at least the ninth century Historians have surmised that many of the folk tales likely evolved from peculiar or inexplicable deaths that people may have witnessed, combined with a lack of understanding of the symptoms of
certain diseases and the decomposition process in general. In the Middle Ages, people who became infected by the plague often developed ulcers and lesions around their mouths, which would bleed, making them appear as though they had been drinking blood. There was also the medical condition known as porphyria, a disease of the blood resulting from the faulty production of hemoglobin.
Symptoms include abdominal and chest pain, vomiting, and fever. One form of the disease, known as porphyria cutanee tardia, concentrates the porphyrins, organic building blocks that help create hemoglobin in the skin. Exposing the affected skin to sunlight causes the abnormal pigments to damage surrounding tissues, resulting in severe skin
rashes and blistering. It may also lead to severe anemia, giving sufferers a pale spectral appearance, along with receding gums, which leads to the teeth becoming more exposed and causing canines to take on a fang like appearance, all symptoms that likely contributed to the stories of why vampires avoid sunlight, burning up and being destroyed if they are exposed to it. When people are buried, if the soil is especially acidic or temperatures are low, the decomposition process can be very slow.
If grave robbers were to dig up a corpse under such conditions, they might find the body still looking eerily lifelike. In other cases, uneven rigor mortis sometimes caused corpses to sit up in the grave, churning blood up the esophagus which issued from the mouth. People could be forgiven for thinking that such bodies had come back to life and
were feeding on blood. On occasion, it has been known for wooden stakes or metal rods to be driven through the chest of these seemingly errant corpses just to make absolutely sure that they were dead. In recent decades, a slew of medieval vampire burials have been unearthed across Eastern Europe. Bulgaria alone is home to at least one hundred. In two thousand and four, archaeologist Peta Balabanov discovered six nailed down skeletons at a site near the eastern Bulgarian town
of de Belt. According to Balabanov, the pagan rite was practiced in neighboring Serbia and other Balkan countries too, and that wasn't all. An alternative to staking a corpse lest it returned from the dead was to behead the body, then place the head between the knees. Sometimes huge stones were placed on the corpse too to weigh it down, or the corpse was buried surrounded or pierced by sharp
agricultural implements. Incredibly, these methods haven't been completely consigned to the history books, with some regions continuing to harbour these long held beliefs and practices. In Romania, in two thousand and four, reports emerged of a woman who'd become strangely ill after a farmer relative of hers named Toma Petrie
had died. Believing her illness had something to do with Tom, it fell to six of her family's menfolk to remedy the situation, and so it was that, in the dead of night, together they went to the village cemetery and proceeded to dig up Thoma's corpse. Once unearthed, they removed its heart and burned it. The ashes were then mixed with water and given to the sickly relative to drink it said that after downing it all, she reportedly made
a swift recovery. However, when the news gone out, the six men involved in tomas exhumation were promptly arrested, prosecuted, and jailed for six months. Though Toma Petrie was most likely not a real vampire, the animal kingdom are there's many vampiric creatures, most being very small by comparison to humans, though potentially no less intimidating, such as bed bugs, leeches, fleas, ticks, female mosquitoes, and the especially unsettling lamprey. Only one bird
species is known to drink blood. It lives on the Galapagous Islands, and far from being a scary predator, it is an actuality. A diminutive song bird, The vampire finch is closely related to the sharp beaked ground finch and normally eats seeds and insects, though it will occasionally peck at the skin of other birds for nourishment. There's only one group of mammals that have evolved to live a
life completely on a diet of blood. The creature moves slowly with a stealthily tread across the bare ground in the warm, humid blackness. It stops, raises its head and sniffs the air. It listens intently to an almost imperceptible sound up ahead, the steady breathing of a person lying on a bed sleeping deeply. The creature recognizes the exact pattern of those breathing sounds it has fed on this
victim before. It raises its nose into the air, once more, sensing the faintest hint of warm air drifting through the darkened room. Then steadily it moves in closer towards the sleeping victim, using the minute changes in air temperature to navigate through the darkness the sleeper's body heat. With surprising agility, The creature hops up lightly onto the person's chest and
begins moving inexorably towards their neck. Once there, it licks at a small patch of exposed skin, its saliva, dispensing a painkiller, a skin softening agent, and an anti coadulant at the same time. Then, finally, the creature sinks its strikingly white raisor sharp teeth into the flesh of the victim's neck. The puncture wound is so small and the bite so gentle that the victim senses nothing. As the
creature begins to extract its blood. It does not suck. Rather, the blood flows by capillary action along a pair of grooves in its tongue, which moves rhythmically unceasingly in a piston like motion. When it has finally drunk its fill, the creature simply withdraws as quietly as it came and vanishes silently back into the moonless night. It's certainly easy to see how the humble vampire bat provided such rich inspiration for bram Stoker. Despite its obvious influence on the writer.
The common vampire bat is in fact not found in Europe at all, but South America, in parts of northern Mexico and south into Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. The bats roost in caves, hollow trees, old mine shafts, and abandoned buildings, emerging after dark to hunt for blood. In common with other bat species and their fictional human vampire counterparts, vampire bats are most decidedly lunophobic, which is say, only active
when there's no moon or on a cloudy night. Contrary to popular belief, vampire bats feed mainly on domestic livestock, typically cows and goats, and to a lesser extent, on wild mammals and birds. They are thought to have become common in the early fifteen hundreds, when there was an influx of Europeans to the continent, bringing with them a wealth of domestic animals for the bats to feast on. Biologically speaking, life as a vampire is tough, and that's
why all known living vampire bats are small. The larger species, Desmodu rotundus, weighs just under one and a half ounces, the same mass as a large grape or a small sachet of sugar. However, a giant vampire bat, appropriately named in Latin Desmodus straculi, has been found in the fossil record, with some believing it might yet still be alive, living
undiscovered deep within the Amazon. As it happens, blood is not a very nutritious food, comprised mostly of water and proteins with no fat, vampire bats can't store energy like other mammals, which means they have to consume around fifty percent of their body weight in blunt each night. Failure to feed for three days in a row could mean starvation and death. So how would this all play out in a real life human vampire transmuted into human form?
That character would be a far cry from the fictional portrayal of human vampires as terrifying and sadistically sexy, like Edward Cullen in the Twilight series or the Start From Interview with a Vampire, for example, due to physiological constraints, your vampire lover would far more likely be short, barely five feet tall, and very slight. He wouldn't want to go out until after dark and only on moonless or
cloudy nights. He need to drink around half his weight in blood every day or two, and while feeding, the stomach would swell to such vast proportions he'd be forced to urinate while drinking. If in line with modern vampire fictional tradition, you'd chosen to be bitten and had become
a blood drinker yourself. If you weren't able to feed for two or three days, your vampire compatriot might share some of the most recent meal with you via the perhaps unromantic or romantic method depending on your kink of mouth to mouth regurgitation Vampire bats in the wild commonly share food this way, both with their young but also with unrelated adults, in an example of naturally socialist behavior.
It's done on a reciprocal basis. Bats who don't share eventually become nosferatu non grata in the colony and are more likely to die from starvation in lean times. Some more attractive aspects of fictional vampires are biologically accurate, though,
like being amazingly athletic and fast. Some species of vampire bats can make spectacular acrobatic jumps in any direction, using powerful pectoral muscles along with elongated thumbs which they use to push off from the ground, and they can run up to two meters per second scaled up to small human size, that is impressively fast. Vampire bats can also effectively see in the dark, too, using leaflike structures in their nose to sense differences in temperature, an adaptation that
helps them approach warm blooded prey in complete darkness. This ability is so sensitive that once a bat gets within around six inches of its prey, its thermo receptors can detect the minutest temperature variations on the surface of the skin, which allow it to locate where the blood vessels lie just below the skin's surface. Your vampire lover, should you choose to take one, would also have the most extraordinary
sensitivity to specific sounds. In a two thousand and six paper published by Udo Gurger and Lutz fe Greep on the common vampire bat, they explain how they solve the puzzling problem of how vampire bats have been observed to relocate and feed on the same human host night after night. Incredibly,
the bats can hear and recognize your breathing. The researchers found that the bats were able to discriminate between the breathing patterns of three different human subjects, even when mixed with additional random breathing sounds, a distinction which human subjects hearing the same sounds couldn't make. When vampire bats find a source of blood that tastes good, it appears that they remember the unique ultrasonic components of that individual's breathing pattern,
using it to repeatedly relocate their favorite supplier. Human vampires would also have an impressive immune system. Bats have hyperactive immunity needed to repair the frequent micro injuries to cells and DNA from having to ramp up their metabolism every night for flying. In the wild, vampire bats typically live for around nine years, although in captivity they've been recorded as surviving to the grand old age of thirty, a very long life equivalent to roughly one hundred and twenty
human years for such a small mammal. Vampire bats don't age the way they should by controlling inflammation and slowing down the aging process, so although your vampire bow would not be immortal, they would be long lived. Watching a vampire bat feed can be a compulsively gruesome sight. The species Deemus young guy typically approaches a bird from below its roosting perch, moving like a stalking cat, one limb at a time, taking care to keep the branch between
itself and its prey. Once beneath the bird, it picks the potential bite sight, usually on the bird's big toe. After licking the site, it bites gently and begins to feed. The vampire bat is even more crafty when it feeds on a chicken. It's been seen hopping onto a hen's back, imitating the behavior of a mating male chicken, assuming she
is being mounted for another purpose. Altogether, the hen instinctively adopts a crouching posture while the vampire bat contentedly feeds, but not all vampires, it seems, are bats or bed bugs, or works of fiction. It was early evening in the French quarter of New Orleans, and John Edgar Browning was feeling apprehensive. Things began as if it were a medical procedure. Asked Browning to take off his top, then took out an alcohol swap and wiped a small patch of skin
on Browning's upper back. Next, he made a small puncture wound with a disposable hobby scalpel and squeezed the flesh around it until the blood started to flow. Browning's companion lowered his lips to the wound and began to drink. He lapped at the blood with his tongue briefly before cleaning and bandaging the cut. When Browning asked why he drank so little, the man explained that the blood was not quite to his taste. It was not as metallic
as he usually liked, the vampire said. He explained that many factors, including diet, hydration, and blood group or make subtle differences to the flavor. Browning later reported that he'd been relieved to get the experience over, especially since he was a bit of a needle fobe who preferred to avoid sharp objects. But why had he subjected himself to such a situation in the first place. John Edgar Browning has made a career studying and writing about horror, in
particular works of vampire fiction. Currently a professor of Liberal Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia, Browning often works as a consultant on TV documentaries and films depicting vampires. While a graduate student at Louisiana State University, as part of his doctoral dissertation research, Browning embarked on a two year ethnographic study of a community of self
described vampires in New Orleans. He decided that the only way to conduct genuine research was to immerse himself in vampire culture. His field notes document how on the eve of the second Tuesday of every month, he would become a diligently observant bystander. Strolling around the Bourbon Street neighborhood in the French Quarter, Browning would often see bats darting about in the twilight sky above. As he walked the streets. He began to home in on places where vampires seemed
to hang out typically goth clubs. In terms of personal safety, it helped that Browning was six foot four and two hundred and twenty pounds, but he was more concerned for his study subjects than himself. Outing a vampire could potentially put their personal and professional lives in jeopardy. After several nights of observations, the owner of a goth clothing shop he was visiting subtly pointed to a woman standing with
her two children in one of the aisles. Sidling up to her, Browning began to tell the woman about his study of vampires. She told him that she might know a few, then smiled, revealing two fanglike teeth, which to Browning looked atrociously sharp. John Edgar Browning managed to make friendships with a large group of vampires, whom he interviewed repeatedly before he began his study. He assumed they'd simply be delusional types who were enamored with vampire fiction and
merely fetishized the lifestyle rather than lived it. Certainly, there were a few who wore fangs and slept in coffins, for they weren't the majority. Instead, most of the vampires he met had little or no belief in the paranormal at all, and often had only a passing knowledge of vampire fiction and TV shows like True Blunt. He certainly didn't expect to find individuals who actually drank human blunt.
Over time, Browning began to feel a great degree of empathy with people he described as often highly intelligent, who more often than not, were pursuing the lifestyle because of a medical condition. Many claimed to suffer from frequent fatigue, headaches, and excruciating stomach paint, which they believed could only be treated by drinking another human's blood. They called themselves medical
sanguinarians or medsancs for short. As it happens, there are many cases in history where human blood was once considered a bona fide curative. It is claimed that at the end of the fifteenth century, Pope Innocent the eighths physician allegedly bled three ten year old boys to death and fed their still warm blood to the dying pope in the hope that it might pass on their youthful vitality,
but the treatment failed. Although the story is most likely apocryphal, there is little doubt that in medieval times, blood was viewed as enhancing connections between the physical and spirit world, with the ability to confer strength. People suffering from ailments would sometimes gather around gallows and collect the warm blood dripping from recently executed criminals, believing that by drinking the blood of healthy young men, they would imbibe their youthful
spirit and cure whatever afflicted them. Such practices only fell out of favour following the Enlightenment, when more prudish sensibilities took hold. In modern times, real life vampirism has conjured horrible images, and the practice is seen as taboo in much of mainstream society, partly through association with gruesome acts, like the case of Richard Trenton Chase from Sacramento, California, who in the late nineteen seventies reputedly began his vampire
habit by killing rabbits and drinking their blood. He was sectioned and spent time in a psychiatric facility, where he allegedly bit the heads off live birds. He went on to commit murder, after which he was said to have drunk his victim's blunt. He later apparently told a fellow prison inmate that he believed it would improve his health.
In nineteen ninety eight, Rod Ferrell became the youngest person at the time to be consigned to Florida's Death Row after being convicted of the double slaying of a couple. Ferrell had been the leader of a cult that centered around a teenage gang in Murray, Kentucky, known as the Vampire Clan. Ferrell claimed to be a five hundred year old vampire named for Sago, a character he created for himself after becoming obsessed with the role playing game Vampire
the Masquerade. His death sentence was subsequently reduced to life imprisonment. Despite its grisly associations, vampirism has persisted among small groups of people, who, in the Internet era, have built thriving underground networks for the medsas who John Edgar Browning questioned the hunger for blood seems to strike around the onset
of puberty. One interviewe told Browning that as a teenager he felt weak all the time until one day, while fighting with his cousin, he drew blood, tasted it, and felt a sudden rush of vitality, which turned into a compulsive hunger. Another reported being plagued by irritable bow syndrome. Which only got better when she consumed around seven shot
glasses of blood. While one young, self confessed female vampire told Browning that following a blood meal, she feels instantly more mentally alert, and that any joint or muscle pain she has disappear for up to two weeks at a time. Browning also learned that the donors for these modern vampires are most often sympathetic, close friends or relatives, who are said to understand the perceived need. Both donor and vampire will first get tested for potentially transmissible diseases such as
HIV and hepatitis before any blood is consumed. He also learned that vampires make sure to clean their lips, brush their teeth, and gargle with mouth wash before drinking. One British vampire described the act of feeding as an impersonal one, much more like taking a pill than a scene from Twilight. It's rumored that thriving underground vampire communities exist in most major cities across the world today, all comprised of everyday
ordinary people. Perhaps the person next to you right now in the office, on the bus or train, or in your bed is one of them. Thank you, as ever for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so. You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok dot com, forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by me Richard McLean Smith. Diane is an
audio producer and sound recordist in her own right. You can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in The Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard mcclinsmith. Unexplained The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon,
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