The Gruesome History of Real Life Vampire Hunting

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the part about medieval dead people getting up to do chores is killing me, imagine rising from the grave and the first thing you do is laundry

I can't believe you forgot to mention the legendary vampire hunter, Abraham Lincoln. I mean they made a whole documentary about him and everything, I highly recommend it.

Quick explanation from me, a medievalist, about how these stories travelled. Contrary to received opinion, medieval people were really quite mobile. They went on pilgrimage (hundreds and thousands of them), trade routes, diplomats, crusades, etc. There were lots of story tellers moving too: trouveres, bards. Even preachers would travel, picking up folk stories and wrapping them into sermons. Word may still go slow, but it absolutely went! Medieval people LOVED a good story and were hot on for necromancy.

I'm romanian and find anything surrounding Dracula very ... difficult to engage with but can I say how brilliantly you handled this. And well done for pronouncing moroi like you did!

When my dad was a teenager in the 1960s, he left Portugal to be able to provide for his sisters and to get away from the dictatorship. He ended up living in France in a cramped apartment with a group of other Portuguese young men. There was an elderly French woman who constantly snarled at them, accusing them of being "vampire goats" (🤷‍♀️) - partly because they worked all night and slept all day in a cramped dark apartment, and partly because.. you know... foreigners.

I recently read in the book 'A Taste for Poison: Eleven deadly substances and the killers who used them' by Neil Bradbury, that arsenic may have contributed to the Vampire Myth, arsenic kills the bacteria that breaks down a body after death so corpses what take much much longer to break down if there was enough arsenic in the body

This was a fantastic video! I joke that I'm a vampire - I am literally allergic to sunlight. 🧛🏻‍♀ I have Solar Urticaria, a rare allergy to UV-A, UV-B, and probably Infrared and Visible light. I get itchy red hives when I expose my skin to sunlight (or fluorescent lights) along with other fun anaphylaxis symptoms: nausea, headaches, feeling weak, hand tremors and elevated heart rate. Basically, there is no safe level of sun exposure for me. I now have a large collection of vintage gloves to go with my late Victorian/Edwardian style shirtwaists. Sadly, this disorder does not give me the power to turn into a bat. 🦇 It makes so much sense that photosensitivity disorders like Solar Urticaria, Porphyria, and Polymorphous Light Eruptions are the basis of the idea that vampires burn or combust in the sun. My hives appear within about 2 mins of sun exposure. It certainly feels like my skin is sizzling even if it's not actually producing smoke. 😂

It’s ILLEGAL how beautifully cinematic the beginning is ❤

The Vampyre, a short story by Dr. John William Polidori, predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by nearly a century, and is considered by many to be the inspiration for that novel. Fun fact: it came into being over the same weekend of debauchery that spawned the novel Frankenstein, when the Shellys came to visit Lord Byron.

Absolutely loved this video. The New England vampire 'crisis' slash tuberculosis epidemic is a fascinating time in world history and it's so easy to see how those thoughts and beliefs have become our 'popular' vampire lore today. Especially when you look at how Bram Stoker influenced popular culture and how Dracula is still our go to for vampire lore. Ask a Mortician has a video on the New England Crisis as well for anyone who wants to learn a little more about it in particular

This was honestly a lot less grim than I was expecting. "real life vampire hunting", I was really worried this was going to be a history of innocent people being murdered under suspicion that they were vampires or something.

now i know this might sound stupid, but when you gave Rroma the representation we need by talking about the racial background of europeans associating rroma/ jewish with Dracula and vampires i nearly cried. thank you :)

I am laying here recovering from a motorcycle accident involving a deer and this made my day so much better. Always look forward to your content!

The thinly-disguised replacement theory of "Dracula" has always bugged me. Stoker was true-blue Irish and supported Irish independence, but spent pretty much the entirety of his [non-literary] career living and working in England. That the Irish had been horribly mistreated under English rule, and blamed for the oppression their overlords lavished on them, cannot possibly have escaped the consciousness of anyone in Western Europe with at least two working brain cells. So... why the stereotypes about the poor oppressed people of Eastern Europe? Was Stoker trying to shift homicidal bigotry off the shoulders of his own countryfolk onto the immigrant population? Did he think Eastern Europeans were muscling in on the jobs in England that the Irish had taken half a century to haul their way into? Did he want to look more English than the English? Kapo? Enforcer? Consigliare? Wannabe? What gives here, Bram?

To anyone who’s not seen it yet I fully recommend Caitlin Doughty’s “The American Vampire Panic” as a great accompanying video to this one, it goes into more detail about the New England cases, as well as having additional information on the role played by decomposition in these stories. One little titbit it had that didn’t come up here, Mercy Brown died during winter, so not only was her burial much more recent than the other women, she had basically been held in cold storage within a stone tomb to wait for the ground to be soft enough to bury her at all.

Absolutely WILD to me that people are passing off those vampire hunting kits as genuine antiques. I've only ever seen them as novelty/decorative items at steampunk craft stalls. Even funnier when you consider that, in Dracula, none of the characters have or use a vampire hunting kit. The closest equivalent is Van Helsing's medical bag, which is essentially a first aid kit with a hammer and stake hastily stuffed inside.

Someone PLEASE make a horror short film around Mercy Brown! Not just because of the horrifying thought that these people believed she was a vampire, but I don’t think we dwelled enough on the horror of her brother LITERALLY EATING THR ASHES OF HER HEART AND LIVER!! I can’t even imagine how horrifying it is to not only be dying, but then have your dead family exhumed by your paranoid town, your sister being pinned as a vampire sucking your life force, and then you have to eat her remains as a cure for the illness. WTF!!

Kaz has been producing so much lately, I hope they're not overworking!

13:45 This tangent has made me think of a hypothetical story where some unlucky medical students end up with a stolen body that turns out to be a vampire. That'd be interesting.