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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dagredhel" data-source="post: 1406530" data-attributes="member: 3421">Thanks, Andrew.I actually wrote a paper in college on the origins of our current ideas about vampires.  Obviously, literature--- and more recently other mass media, movies, television, comics, etc.--- has shaped our popular conception of the creature.  But I think its really interesting to trace the origin of popular stereotypical vampire traits to the two other main sources, one of which would be folklore, and the other would be the pre-scientific lack of understanding of what happens to a body after death.Looking back to the folklore, the lines blur between ghosts, vampires, witches, and werewolves, which are pretty well defined in the modern imagination different types of monster.  The distinction has been largely a result of their popularity in literature--- they have become archetypes.  But if you go back to the sources, the variations and confluences are fascinating.As to forensics, one can look to historical, documented cases of supposed 'vampirism' where post-mortem pathology was taken as definitive proof of vampiric activity.  Lack of visible decay (during frigid winters, usually,) supple limbs (rigor mortis is only temporary, as dissolution progresses further,) liquid blood in the mouth or veins (not unusual, and again the result of degenerative processes,) and the apparent growth of teeth (the gums receding) or of hair (the follicles loosening) were all taken as proof that a corpse was indeed a vampire. The predations of such a creature  offerred an explanation of a series of deaths actually due to infectious illness.  Those afflicted might report visitations by very recently departed loved ones or neighbors--- easily attributable to fever-induced dream and delirium, especially in a culture in which vampirism as an explanation for epidemic was prevalent.  The folk belief actually survived in the American Northeast into the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.</blockquote>

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