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The Sad Truth About Bloodsucking Demons

There are many tales about vampires, but almost none of them are true. So why are there so many books about vampires? Why do so many different cultures have their own vampire stories?
The truth is, vampire legends are based upon actual fact. Vampires were (and are) real, as I shall prove in the following:

Most of the modern ideas about vampires come from a book by Bram Stoker titled Dracula. Count Dracula (according to the book) was a vampire who lived in a castle in Transylvania and drank blood to stay alive. He could turn into a bat, and he was hundreds of years old. He was superfast and super strong and 100% evil. Bram Stoker got many of his ideas from Romanian folk legends, and from reading about a real historical person named Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler. Impalement is an interesting punishment that was quite popular in the Middle Ages. The way you do it is you insert a sharpened pole into a person’s rear end and then stand the pole upright so that he squirms on top of it like a living shish kebab. This was Vlad Dracula’s favorite way to punish his enimies. It was said to be very painful.
But Vlad Dracula was not a real vampire (as far as we know). He was just a sadistic sicko, much like Elizabeth Bathory, who liked to bathe in blood collected by murdering local maidens. She also liked to bite them and torture them.
Basically, Bram Stoker was just a writer who cobbled together a few folktales and some twisted history into a kind of ghost story. But ever since, the vampire legend has grown to become a huge force in modern literature. The true story, however, was lost in the mists of time-until now.
Most myths and legends are based on real events. For instance, the story of Noah’s Ark might have been inspired by a real flood, and the Abominable Snowman is probably a rare species of bear.
This is also true of vampires.
First, you have to realize that when the vampire stories got started there was very little knowledge about diseases and medicine. People treated cancer with leeches and rubbed dirt into cuts to make them heal. Ignorance was even greater then than it is today.

Even thousands of years ago there was some knowledge of diabetes. Not that they could do anything about it, but the ancient Greeks knew that diabetics had too much sugar in them and that no matter how much they ate, they would soon waste away to nothing. But that was all they knew.
Since my dad is almost insulin-dependant himself, I have read a great deal about the disease. Today, diabetics like him have to take insulin and test their blood glucose (sugar), and most of them do okay. Some of them worry about blindness and kidney disease and heart disease and neuropathy (terminal numbness), but that’s only after years of having the disease. But before insulin was discovered, things didn’t go so good for diabetics. Without insulin to turn glucose into energy, the body’s cells literally starve to death. The untreated diabetic would get hungry and thirsty, but the more they ate, the sicker they got. The sugars would build up in their blood until they were so sweet that their body would start burning up fat and muscle and eventually there would be nothing left. But it wouldn’t happen right away. An untreated diabetic might take weeks or months to die, and their body might go through some very peculiar changes on its journey from life to death.
Untreated insulin-dependant diabetes is pretty much extinct today. When a person starts getting thirsty and ravenous and feeling sick and peeing all the time, they go tot a doctor. The doctor gives them some insulin and a syringe and modern medicine triumphs again. So it’s hard for us to imagine what it was like before, when diabetes was incurable and fatal as an electric chair. So I have made a list of some of the symptoms of advanced, untreated diabetes. This is what might have happened to a diabetic teenage girl in the Middle Ages.

The first thing is, she starts getting very hungry and thirsty. She can’t get enough water. She devours bowl after bowl of gruel (whatever that is). At first, her parent’s are angry at her because they are poor and gruel is not free. But she can’t stop herself from eating everything in sight. Soon, she starts loosing weight. She is eating like pig, but the food is going right through her. Her parent’s are afraid that she might be possessed. They hide her from their neighbors because if word gets out, their daughter could be burned to the stake.
Weeks go by. The girl has lost a quarter of her body weight. She is pale and she smells sweet, like honey. She sleeps most of the day, but it is a restless sleep, tossing and turning and whimpering. When she awakens she is hungry and thirsty.
She wets the bed repeatedly, and after a week of that her mother stops bringing her fresh straw and simply lets the girl lie in her own filth. The girl doesn’t seem to care. She talks to herself in her sleep, crazy garbled conversations with imaginary people. Her skin becomes pale and beaded with sweat, her lips are ruby red, and she had a peculiar, acrid odor.
One day the mother brings the girl a chicken leg. The girl sits up on her soiled straw pallet and snatches the chicken leg and tears into it with the ferocity of a starved wolf. The mother recoils from what she sees-the girl’s teeth have grown longer, and her mouth is bloody. She gobbles down the chicken leg, crunching the bone between her long, bloody teeth. Her breath reeks like a stew of rotten fruit and fetid meat; her eyes are so dilated that they look like black holes in reality. The mother, terrified, flees.
The next day, the girl staggers out of the cottage, looking for food. As the midday sun strikes her she screams and covers her eyes and crumples to the ground. Her parents are shocked to see her this way, in full sunlight. Her skin is white as a fish’s belly, her hair has fallen out in patches, her limbs are thin as broom handles. The father carries his wasted daughter back to her pallet and lays her down.
The next morning the girl is still and unresponsive. Her forehead is icy cold. There is no sign of life. The mother tells the father that the girl is dead. They cover her with a sheet. They tell the neighbors that their daughter has died. Tomorrow they will bury her in the graveyard by the village church.
But that night a strange thing happens. The girl awakens. She throws aside the sheet and climbs to her feet. She dose not know where she is, but she is ravenous. She staggers through the cottage, confused and terrified. The mother sees her and screams in horror. The girl clasps her hands to her ears. Too loud! The terrified father grabs a knife and waves it at her. She runs from the cottage, runs from the screaming and the flashing blade. She sees a flickering light in the distance. She hears voices. She smells cooking! She heads for the light, bursts into her neighbors’ cottage, grabs a chunk of pork from their stewpot and crams it whole into her mouth. The neighbors run away and the girl gobbles down their supper. She wanders off onto the countryside. The next day some village boys find her lying motionless in a beet field. The village elders are called. The local tooth-puller pronounces her dead; the priest says that she is possessed. They decide to burn her quickly. A pyre is erected on a hilltop. The girl’s body is placed atop the enormous pile of dry logs and branches. The priest throws a torch onto the pyre and within a few seconds the flames are roaring and the villagers’ faces are orange with reflected firelight. Then something inside the tower of flames moves, and they see the shape of the girl. She erupts screaming from the pyre into their midst, her entire body is on fire. She twists and turns and leaps in a dance of death as the villagers run shrieking. Then she dies-for real, this time.
That is what might have happened to a diabetic a few hundred years ago. Imagine the stories the peasants would tell! All of the symptoms I described are possible symptoms of untreated diabetes: the sweet smell of too much glucose in the blood, the strange, acrid reek of advanced kectoacidosis, the rotten smell of bacterial infection. Madness, ravenous hunger, extreme sensitivity to sunlight and sound, bleeding, receding gums (that make her teeth look longer), cold, clammy skin, and deathlike coma-all resulting from untreated diabetes. Even the spontaneous, repeated revival from a deathlike coma is possible.
It seems clear to me that diabetes in the Middle Ages led to the folktales that led to Anne Rice’s novels Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all the other vampire stuff. Diabetics were the original, the real vampires. They weren’t evil or super powerful or immortal. They were just sick. Like my dad. He’s actually proto-vampire. When he takes an insulin shot now, I think of it as a vampire vaccine. If he stops taking insulin altogether he would become a starving vampire guy from the Middle Ages.