Vampire Forensics by Mark Collins Jenkins Read Free Book Online Page B

some are said to occasionally decapitate their victims. But the primary culprit responsible for vampire-bat legends is an unprepossessing little fellow called Desmodus rotundus, found from Argentina to Mexico.
    Measuring little more than a foot from wingtip to wingtip, Desmodus generally settles on the necks of livestock for a midnight meal. But it is a stalker, too, quietly alighting near slumbering humans and stealing up to an exposed toe or nose. Its bite, at most a slight tingle, rarely disturbs a sleeper, and from the tiny puncture, a long tongue laps up the blood. Although only rarely a killer, Desmodus can weaken horses and cattle by repeated bloodlettings. It can also carry rabies—though that would not be discovered until the 1920s.
    What the bats lacked in size, however, they made up for in conjured ferocity. Probing the same Brazilian highlands that Burton had two decades earlier, British explorer James W. Wells was warned by Indians in the 1880s that “vampire bats…were said to exist in such numbers in a part of the valley of the Sapão, about sixteen miles away, that it is there impossible for any animal to live through the night.”
    Those must have been the fearsome creatures Quincey Morris had in mind. The Vampyrum spectrum of the American tropics hunts only rodents, small birds, and insects. The spectral vampire bat, however, still haunts our nightmares, still beats at our bedroom windowpanes. Before Bram Stoker, cartoonists had occasionally used bats to depict political vampires, and as we shall see in the next chapter, sensationalistic “penny dreadful” novels had likewise employed them as vehicles. But not until Dracula, and that grimly flapping stage prop that dominated its 1931 incarnation in film, did the bat become the symbol it is today: the most widely recognized iconographical emblem of the vampire.
    D RAGON OR D EVIL?
    And finally there is the matter of that name.
    Had Bram Stoker not come across a copy of William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, in which he learned of a 15th-century Romanian prince named Dracula who fought the Ottoman Turks, we might today have a forgotten 19th-century novel about a Count Wampyr—the author’s original choice for his main character’s name. Happily for literary posterity, however, Stoker responded positively to the name Dracula: Drakul is Romanian for “dragon,” but it also means “devil,” as in those distinctive Romanian landscape features Gregynia Drakuluj (Devil’s Garden) and Gania Drakuluj (Devil’s Mountain).
    That may be all there is to it. Stoker might never have known about Dracula’s other Romanian sobriquet, Vlad Tepes, or “Vlad the Impaler.”
    A portrait of Vlad Tepes hangs in Ambras Castle, Austria, alongside one of a man so hirsute he resembles a were-wolf and another of a person who lived with a lance sticking through his head. Vlad won a place in this notorious “Chamber of Curiosities” because he was considered the archetype of the bloodthirsty ruler. This reputation had been fostered by a series of best-selling German pamphlets that depicted him, in one case, dining serenely while severed limbs covered the ground and all around him bodies hung from sharpened stakes.
    Over the past several decades, a fierce debate has erupted about whether Stoker knew of Vlad’s bloodthirsty reputation. If so, did he model his Dracula directly on that historical figure? The debate is not merely academic; many, if not most, tourists visiting Romania today equate Count Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. And many, if not most, Romanians object to this misconception, for Vlad is a national hero as the defender of their country. Celebrated in poems and ballads, his statue gazes over Romanian towns, and his visage has appeared on commemorative stamps. Under no circumstances, therefore, should Vlad be associated with the world’s most famous vampire. Some locals, perceiving a business opportunity, shrug their