Vampire Legends From Around the World
Say the word vampire and most people picture a pale European count in a black cape. The truth is a lot older and a lot stranger. Nearly every culture on earth, split apart by oceans and centuries, cooked up its own version of the blood-drinking dead. The vampire is not a local monster. It is a human one.Eastern Europe: The StrigoiThe vampire we all know grew up in the Balkans and the Carpathians. Here the restless dead were the strigoi, corpses that climbed out of the grave to torment the living and drink their blood. Villages took it dead seriously. They drove stakes through suspicious graves and scattered garlic to keep the dead where they belonged. Bram Stoker planted Dracula in exactly this soil.China: The JiangshiFar to the east, Chinese legend gives us the jiangshi, the hopping corpse. Stiff with rigor mortis, it moves in eerie little hops with its arms stuck out in front, draining the life force, the qi, out of its victims. You do not fend it off with garlic. You use sticky rice, mirrors, and sacred paper charms.The Philippines: The ManananggalFew vampires are as nasty as the Filipino manananggal. It splits its own upper body away from its legs and takes off into the night on bat wings, hunting sleepers with a long, thread-thin tongue. Find the abandoned lower half and destroy it before sunrise, the story goes, and the thing dies.The Americas: The ChupacabraEven the New World has its blood-drinker. The chupacabra, the "goat-sucker," is a newer legend out of Latin America, blamed for draining livestock dry after dark. Beast or myth, it proves the vampire is still getting reinvented right now.One Fear, Many FacesWhy does the same monster keep showing up everywhere? Probably because the vampire feeds on our oldest fears. Death. Sickness. The dark. The dead who will not stay buried. Every culture ran into those fears and handed them a set of fangs.At Immortal Night you can step into that worldwide legend yourself, roaming the globe as an immortal predator while you dodge the hunters on your trail. Want to know what makes these creatures so deadly in the first place? See our guide to vampire powers and abilities. |