#vampire fact

Much like werewolves, vampirism is sometimes referred to now as a "disease" rather than a "curse" (although let's face it, werewolves face that far worse and more often than vampires do; they're often little more than a plague now). How accurate is that to folklore?

Well, it isn't if you're referring to the curse of vampirism itself, but vampires being associated with illness and disease in general - such as plagues of rats, illnesses spreading mysteriously, diseased air, swarms of flies, and many more examples - does indeed have a much older basis... Let's dive right in.

Firstly, just to get this off the table, no, being a vampire was not considered a "disease" in folklore, generally speaking. In fact, vampires in folklore generally came in two types: people who were cursed to rise from death - or demons, individuals that were never human in the first place. Neither of these were considered "diseased" in a traditional plague or illness fashion. The former were, however, considered cursed or even possessed in some way.

However, scholars often like to speculate what caused a belief in vampires in the first place, and much like they do with werewolves, this - especially in the mid to late 1800s - caused an uproar of the belief in vampires existing being attributed to individuals with certain diseases, like porphyria, among many, many others.

It, of course, isn't uncommon for scholars to point to diseases to "explain" and "justify" a belief in monsters and other legends. In later historical periods, especially starting around the 1500s and gaining more traction in the following centuries, perhaps reaching its height in the 1800s but still going on today, it became wildly popular for scholars to come up with all manner of "new" "explanations" for assorted legends and beliefs therein. Vampires are no different; same with werewolves and many other things.

Naturally, if you see an overwhelming amount of scholarship and publications linking something like vampires with disease, you're going to see that leak over into popular culture. That does not, however, make it "folkloric," if I may use such a term. That is to say, during the time periods in which they were believed in according to the legends we're drawing from, being a vampire was not associated with having a "vampire disease" or any disease at all.

Vampires in folklore, in fact, often couldn't "reproduce" or spread their curse. This was not always strictly the case, but by and large, that's a very modern pop culture concept.

That being said, however, vampires in folklore were not infrequently associated with causing disease (unrelated to causing "vampirism") or associated with the presence of disease or the concept of it in general. This doesn't mean a "vampire disease," as in spreading the state of becoming a vampire to others through disease, it means illness.

There are several examples of this...

Firstly, Montague Summers offers some examples in his book Vampires and Vampirism. Summers is one of the foremost scholars on vampires, but more on him another time. He mentions the fact that vampires are often associated with turning into mist, and he draws a connection between them such as...

all mists and gaseous marsh-lights are connected with the belief in vampires and spectres which convey disease. Since the effluvia, the vapour and haze from a swamp or quaggy ground are notoriously unhealthy and malarial fevers result in delirium and anemia it may be that in some legends the disease has been personified as a ghastly creature who rides on the infected air and sucks the life from his victims. [...] Of the same nature is the notion that vampires can command destructive animals and vermin such as flies, and, in the East the mosquito, whose bite may indeed convey some fever to the veins" (198, Summers, Dover Occult; I am not arsing with proper MLA citations for this post)

There are other cases in which vampires are associated with spreading illness, such as Summers mentioning that several vampire victims were killed by the same illness, some becoming vampires, themselves. He also mentions many other cases in which vampires were blamed for causing illness, including in some patients in whom doctors could find no real illness at all - yet the patients still claimed to be sick, sometimes blaming a vampire, and then even wasting away and dying from their mysterious disease.

Matthew Beresford also mentions several other vampires and disease instances in his excellent work From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, a work I highly recommend. He mentions multiple cases throughout the book, such as how vampires were often blamed for various illnesses and conditions, such as diseases and even less identifiable conditions such as general lethargy.

Something else Beresford mentions is that Dracula, as in the historical Vlad the Impaler (now irreparably associated with vampires, especially in the Western mind), is sometimes speculated to have used "germ warfare." According to Beresford, it's rumored that Vlad paid people infected with illnesses to dress as Ottomans and enter their camps, spreading their diseases. This is just another potential connection between vampires and disease, given popular culture has turned Vlad the Impaler into the infamous Dracula, and we all know how important Dracula is to our modern day vampire concepts. Talk of Vlad using disease in warfare easily could have retroactively led to yet another link between vampires and disease.

We also can look at Nosferatu for another connection between vampires and disease, as in the film, Nosferatu is associated with swarms of rats and plagues heralding his arrival. Of course, Nosferatu is popular culture and even a massive takeoff of Dracula, but it did have some of its own concepts too. Even Nosferatu's appearance can be argued as almost rat-like, with his teeth.

Otherwise, in popular culture, we now associate vampires with bats - specifically vampire bats, of course - also due to Dracula, wherein vampires were popularized as having fangs (not a trait in folklore), like their vampire bat counterparts. Bats are also associated with disease, so there are a lot of things pointing back to the disease association.

So, were vampires in folklore ever directly associated with disease? Absolutely. However, it was not really the disease of vampirism that they spread - it was other illnesses, often linked with plagues of flies, rats, and other vermin, as well as diseased air or mysteriously causing diseases through other means. Being a vampire in itself was not an illness. Like with werewolves, however, labeling vampirism itself as "a disease" is a very later-age concept recently put upon vampires by popular culture. Vampirism was not a disease vampires were spreading - but plenty of them spread other diseases.

In folklore, as with werewolves, becoming a vampire was generally considered a curse of some kind (if the vampire was human in the first place, anyway) or even possession. If the vampire was human, the person would have to die before they could become a vampire, rather than catch a particular illness and not technically die at all.

That's all for this time! See you again next month for more folklore, this time about werewolves once again!

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I’m back with another vampire fact! In fact, all folklore facts are now back, so expect to see more of these!

The winner of the last vampire fact’s Patreon poll was “how to identify a vampire” (that was a hot minute ago because I had to take a break from these), very much like my previous werewolf fact on how to identify a werewolf.

I won’t be covering pop culture vampires in detail/providing a list of how to identify vampires in pop culture. I’m not so deeply versed in vampire pop culture as I am werewolf pop culture; I only study vampire folklore, not their modern media, unlike with werewolves. I familiar with some of it, for sure, but I’d never pretend to be any kind of expert on broader vampire pop culture.

Please note the following is not to be considered a 100% complete list, as there are many, many vampire legends out there! This is just several of the more “popular” methods of identification and perhaps some of the better-known.

Some Folklore Vampire Identifiers

Pale - There are some stories in which vampires actually are pale in folklore, and in which being particularly pale might be a sign of vampirism.

Reddish or purplish skin - Conversely, vampires can also be identified - especially in Eastern European regions - by having “reddish” or “purplish” skin and perhaps even a swollen appearance. All of this comes from drinking too much blood. It’s basically the opposite of being pale: they look flushed and reddened instead of pallid. This one was not uncommon.

Red eyes - This didn’t always mean red eyes as in red irises, like in a lot of popular culture. Often, it could also mean similarly to the flushed appearance: it meant bloodshot eyes, eyes full of blood. But some might also be interpreted as having red irises, and let’s face it, red irises are very cool.

Unnaturally beautiful - This one isn’t uncommon in legends, either: unnatural beauty. Vampires in many stories seduced their victims, and it wasn’t too unusual for things to get steamy, either. Again with the conversely, though...

Unnaturally hideous - Vampires can also be unnaturally hideous. We’re talking like really nasty, because they’re monsters - often these are the monster vampires, demons, not vampires that were ever actually human. However, sometimes signs of being a vampire could also be just human traits that are considered hideous, such as having a caul, being exceptionally hairy (judgmental much?), etc.

Only comes out at night - This is an obvious one in both popular culture and folklore. Often in folklore, however, vampires also only came out at night because it was the only time they actually left their graves. Vampires didn’t come out only at night because they were burned by the sun in folklore (they actually weren’t!), but because they were nocturnal.

Signs of undeath in coffin - Often, vampires were identified via actually unearthing the coffin and taking a look at the corpse. There were many signs that might show a corpse was actually leaving the grave as a vampire, such as growth of the hair or fingernails, the eyes being open or partially open, blood around the mouth, reddened eyes, or a swollen reddish or purplish appearance, as if the corpse is engorged with blood.

Well, there’s a few, at least! There are so many vampire legends I won’t cover “all” of them until, you know, I write the Vampire Facts book someday (maybe? Werewolf Facts the book is definitely on the way, though). At any rate, be sure to tell all your friends how to find vampires today by reblogging this post!

Oh, and no, fangs are not included in folklore.

Also, if you are curious about vampire weaknesses, be sure to check out my post on that, too, as well as the vampire masterlist (linked at the bottom of this post)!

Until next time!

( If you like my blog, be sure to follow me here and elsewhere for more folklore and fiction, including books, especially on werewolves! And please consider donating and/or supporting me on Patreon - not only will you help me keep this blog running, but patrons get cool stuff and rewards in return! You’ll find lots more cool stuff over on my personal website.

It's another vampire fact this month! Next month will be a Werewolf Fact again for October, of course, in time for Halloween.

But for now, let's talk about a very important topic when it comes to vampires... the importance of everyone's favorite count: Dracula.

Much like my Werewolf Fact "The Importance of The Wolf Man," this Vampire Fact will discuss the importance of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, published in 1897, and the almost-impossible-to-overstate importance of how it shaped all popular conceptions of vampires afterward - and even retroactively affected vampire legends through scholarship and study.

I want to open by saying that this post is not setting out to discuss the historical context of Dracula itself as a literary work, neither in terms of when/how Bram Stoker wrote it (and to what degree it was influenced by things like Varney the Vampire and John Polidori's The Vampyre), nor in terms of how much it relates to Vlad the Impaler. I am aware of the conversation around Bram Stoker and his work and the many discussions thereof, but that isn't what I'm here to cover today. Right now, I'm focusing only upon the undeniable, massive influence the novel Dracula in itself has had upon vampires in popular culture essentially from the moment it was published all the way until today - and it will continue, as well.

I may, however, talk about all those kind of things in a separate post, as I have spent a great deal of time studying them and even publishing upon them (including an article diving deep into how Polidori doesn't get enough credit overall in vampire study). But more on that later! For now, let's talk about what Dracula did for vampires.

First off, for those unfamiliar with Dracula, you should be. If you enjoy vampires at all and haven't read this book, that's a big blind spot! First of all, you'd enjoy the heck out of it, and second of all, it's the vampire book. That's possibly even worse than having not seen The Wolf Man if you love werewolves (although it's rather hard to say; they're pretty much on par, even if Dracula is considered more important historically, as it's a work of classic literature and movies don't often get that level of respect, which I disagree with).

Tangent. Anyway.

In Dracula, we see the foundational aristocratic, blood-sucking, pale, red-eyed, fanged, clean, finery-wearing vampire with civilized manners (until he suddenly lacks them because he's turned into a monster) - plus he's a count, of course. He lives secluded in his grand castle high in the mountains of Eastern Europe, and he is seeking to rejoin society. Many vampires are/were also influenced by the romantic - twisted or not - angle in the story and Dracula's obsession with one woman. Not everything of Dracula's was picked up by popular culture, of course - primarily what was reused, appearance-wise, were the elements later found in film adaptations. For instance, his white hair and mustache (the latter no doubt influenced by Vlad the Impaler) from the book are generally turned to black hair and clean-shaven, thanks to films that followed. But still, it all started with this book.

The character of Dracula would impact literally all vampires to follow, in some fashion or another. The influence is all-encompassing and undeniable.

Please note that not all of this influence came from the novel Dracula alone - it also comes from ripoffs and adaptations thereof, especially in film, as mentioned. I'm talking things like Nosferatu and all the many Dracula film adaptations thereafter. Some concepts didn't originate in Dracula itself - but they did come from things created from or otherwise heavily influenced by Dracula, so without Dracula, one can easily argue we wouldn't have any of those things, either. Like werewolves with The Wolf Man (1941), a lot of these influences also come from film. Obviously it all originated with the novel and adaptations thereof, however, so the novel deserves the credit, ultimately.

Your average Halloween vampire has the classic Dracula concept; whether one wants to argue it was popularized directly from the book or from later film adaptations, you can't deny the high-collared, well-dressed, tall dark and handsome pale vampire that became ubiquitous in recent decades. You know them, you love them - you've seen them every Halloween and on every bit of vampire merch afterward (except perhaps a few things after the Twilight renaissance, which I also won't cover in this post).

Other than obvious design influences, Dracula and its film adaptations of course influenced the vampire "lore" afterward. Perhaps the biggest impact on vampires is simple: fangs. Vampires in folklore didn't actually have fangs! Dracula completely popularized that. Many more details in the linked post as to where the fangs came from, etc.

What were some other things? Well, other than what I already mentioned, Dracula popularized the association of vampires with various kinds of animals (based in folklore), and it even popularized many concepts about vampire hunters, thanks to the ever-popular Abraham Van Helsing.

What else did it influence? Everything. Weaknesses, as well as how to become a vampire and vampires being a curse that the creature could spread to others, to humans, instead of a demonic being - and even the term "vampire" itself certainly saw a rise in the public eye from Dracula.

In truth, Dracula didn't just influence vampire concepts - it influenced all vampire stories to follow and the entire worlds built around their concepts, both vampires, vampire hunters, the general feel and setting of the stories, the plots themselves - absolutely everything.

Please note too, of course, that Bram Stoker was not a slouch on research. He was very heavily influenced by folklore and elements of history, even if he put his own spin on it and made many additions. The fangs in particular have become just a part of vampires as a whole, concept, image, everything. Without fangs, is a vampire even a vampire these days? Not really, especially in the modern mindset - and let's face it, vampires are made a million times cooler by the fangs.

If you want to read one of Bram Stoker's biggest folkloric inspirations, check out a little book called Transylvanian Superstitions, Scripta Minora by Emily Gerard and Agnes Murgoci. This is a good publication of it, and the one I have always used.

So what do I mean when I say that Dracula retroactively affected vampire legends, study thereof, and scholarship on such matters? Well, it's similar to what happened to werewolves over time. By creating interest in a particular "brand" of vampire, scholars began to scrape and search for legends that fit that "brand." Did they really exist? How many "legends" were retroactively twisted around to suit a scholar's needs/desires and/or how many were just created on the spot from thin air in order to say that the scholar "discovered" a legend wherein, for instance, a vampire has fangs?

This isn't unheard of in scholarship, by any means - especially when it comes to folklore. It's widely known that scholars will do such things, especially when it comes to academic argument. Am I saying I know of any in particular that were spawned from an interest in Dracula?

Not necessarily, but it's certainly true that a lot of scholars and certainly most people in general assume things about Dracula or its spinoffs and adaptations that followed come from folklore, and some even use that when writing their academic work, when in fact they did not. It still pervades across the internet that vampires that don't die in the sunlight are immensely silly and untrue to the folklore. Gosh, how ridiculous! Well, I hate to tell you, but that didn't even originate with Dracula, either, nor did it come from folklore. For more details on where the "burning/dying instantly or quickly in the sunlight" concept for vampires came from, see my previous Vampire Fact on Sunlight.

And that gives you a nice overview, I think! There's so much more to say, but an internet post isn't really the place. I do plan to write some nonfiction publications on this and other topics, because werewolves won't be my only nonfiction books, lemme tell you. Hope you enjoyed the post!

Until next time! But wait, there's more (yes, I really just said that)...

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Welcome back to vampire facts, this time with a very burning question...

In folklore, can vampirism be cured?

Firstly, I will give the very simple answer to the cure question...

No, in folklore, vampirism cannot really be cured.

If you want to “cure” a vampire, you kill them. How do you kill them? I covered a few possibilities in my post on Weaknesses, so check that for more info.

So why can’t it be cured, per se? Because, in folklore, being a vampire isn’t really an “infection.” Much like werewolves didn’t start out as a “disease” and lycanthropy only became thought of as such much later (I have so many posts on that; see the Werewolf Fact Masterlist), vampirism also has a different tale. Unlike werewolves, however, many vampires are no longer even considered human, to the point that they aren’t always really considered “cursed.” Not in the fashion of “we must lift the curse, so the person will be okay.” Lifting the curse of the vampire in folklore is, simply, destroying the vampire, so that the people the vampire was terrorizing will be okay.

This boils down to something I have mentioned before: in folklore, many vampires are not considered in any way “human” or the person they were before (if they were ever a person).

There are, generally speaking, two “types” of vampires: “living” and “unliving” vampires. This is what folklore scholars will tell you. But to get into all that in a lot of detail, we would have to get into a whole lot more, some of which I discussed in this post.

Basically, there are “undead human”/revenant vampires (or “dead vampires” in folklore studies) and the demon vampires (or “living vampires” in folklore studies).

The first category, the “dead vampires,” are those vampires that were once human and rose from their graves to haunt the living. These vampires were people once, then they fell victim to the vampire curse.

The second category, the “living vampires,” were never human. They are called “living vampires” because they aren’t undead - they are living because they are demons that are alive, instead of people who died and came back as vampires. They were never people. They are, indeed, demons - through and through. These are pure demons that come to haunt mortals, hunt them, and cause them pain and suffering, feeding off blood or vitality or something else humans have (generally something that’s integral to life). Believe it or not, the majority of legends that scholars now group as “vampire legends” actually fall into this category of demons.

There are a few vampires in folklore that stray outside of these two categories scholars have created, but it is true that many of them do fall into one camp or the other, generally speaking. This is especially true of Eastern European vampire folklore, which, of course, is one of our primary inspirations for our modern pop culture vampires, thanks to Bram Stoker writing Dracula.

The vampire types are something I really need to do a separate post about...

I feel the need to point out yet again, as an aside, that folklore is never a clean bill of what is and isn’t a legend about a “vampire” or “werewolf” or “dragon” or whatever else. Most all folklore study looks back on sets of folklore and legends that have no simplistic D&D-style monster systems. This is why many scholars (such as myself) will argue some things shouldn’t be considered a werewolf legend, for instance. In a lot of legends, the exact term we think of is never actually used. And this is also how sometimes the line between werewolf and vampire legends can become blurred, like with the vrykolakas. Nothing in folklore is clean-cut like modern fantasy books with their magic systems or something.

Anyway!

So, when we see “dead type” vampires, we are dealing with someone who died, was probably buried (maybe even for days), and then hauntings occurred to their family and loved ones. The vampire rose from their grave physically or spiritually - and, more often than not, this type of vampire will also return to their grave or else they never physically left it.

But these vampires cannot be “cured,” because they are dead. You can’t “cure” what is dead. The only way to “cure” a human vampire in folklore is to kill them, to destroy them, and thus end the curse’s existence altogether. Given the person in question has already died, that’s the only means of lifting the curse.

With the “living type” vampires, the demons, they are different creatures altogether - and you can’t “cure” a demon of being a demon. That’s what they are. So also with those kinds of vampires, you cannot cure them, and if you want to put an end to their evil, they must simply be destroyed. These were never human.

Folklore didn’t really draw many shades of grey with vampires very often, especially in the most popular of legends. I will, of course, provide lots of more specific examples and situations of various legends in different posts, but as far as a general overview is concerned... yeah, in folklore, you can’t cure the vampire. The vampire is simply something that needs to be destroyed.

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Time for something incredibly important - something that, today, most people immediately associate with vampires and will think of first the moment you say “vampire,” maybe even as quickly as or before actual blood.

Fangs! We all love fangs. Well, I do, anyway. But did vampires actually have fangs in folklore? The answer will surprise you - and it all comes down to the story behind vampire bats.

The answer is... No.

In folklore, vampires did not have fangs.

Although there are many elements to what we think of as vampires today that were popularized by pop culture but have their roots in folklore (more on those in later facts!), fangs stand out incredibly as something that came 100% from pop culture, not from folklore at all.

Vampires in fangs did not always physically drink blood: many folklore vampires take ethereal forms instead of corporeal: mists that drain the life-force or blood from their victims. Others, it is not really specified how they retrieved the blood, only that they did. Still others bite the neck/throat, but they don’t have fangs, they just use their teeth. Still others were a little more like cannibals than what we think of as vampires today.

So where could the fangs have come from?

The vampire who popularized fangs was, of course, Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897.

There are several instances where Dracula is specified to have “sharp teeth,” though the word “fangs” is never actually used in the book. “Sharp white teeth,” in particular, is a very common phrase...

The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips [...]

The Count smiled, and as his lips ran back over his gums, the long, sharp, canine teeth showed out strangely; he answered:— [...]

noticing his quiet smile, with the sharp, canine teeth lying over the red underlip [...]

I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. 

When Lucy is described as turning into a vampire, her teeth too become sharp...

In particular, by some trick of the light, the canine teeth looked longer and sharper than the rest. 

Lucy, after becoming a vampire, is continually described as having such sharp teeth, like Dracula. So where did he get the idea?

Vampire bats. Another passage from Dracula...

Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them, and then—and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?” 

Something to bear in mind: vampire bats are not native to Europe. Vampire bats were discovered in the New World in 1810. Bats in Europe did not include any “vampiric” species.

The newly-discovered bats were named “vampire bats” because of the fact that they drink blood, not because they have fangs. Thus, while the bats got their name from vampire legends, the vampire legends got their fangs from the bats.

Something else interesting: although Dracula certainly popularized vampires with fangs, it’s debatable if Bram Stoker was the first to have the idea. In 1819, John William Polidori published The Vampyre. In it, the vampire is not actually specified to have fangs, but someone does see the mark of the vampire on the victim’s throat, from “teeth opening the vein,” and we do know that Bram Stoker took great inspiration from this book when writing Dracula. There was also Varney the Vampire, but he’s like the weird cousin, and he didn’t come before Polidori’s vampire, though he did exhibit almost all the same popular modern vampire tropes that Dracula does.

But Dracula was the more successful (and better-written) novel, so it is the one that became incredibly famous and timeless. It is to Dracula that we owe the overwhelming majority of our concepts of modern pop culture vampires - and greatest among those aspects is the fangs, which originate from pop culture alone.

Now, you may have heard that vampires in folklore do in fact have fangs - because so many modern books that claim to be on folklore about things like vampires and werewolves have plenty of false information in them and will make claims like werewolves that are weak to silver - and vampires that have fangs or some other relation to bats. Why is this? Because they don’t do good enough source checking and they believe whatever they read.

The trouble with these is that they are simply inaccurate. This really shows when you go back to older sources that were published well before these concepts arose in pop culture - and you find that, back then, even just a little bit closer to when people had many more widespread and truly believed concepts of these things (and certainly in the primary sources: the actual stories about them at the time of their belief), they didn’t talk about things like silver in relation to werewolves or fangs on vampires at all. Why? Because it was conceptualized entirely by modern or relatively modern popular culture, not folklore.

So there you have it! One of everyone’s favorite aspects of vampires comes from pop culture alone, not from folklore. Hey, I’m not saying folklore is always better. Just usually and in most aspects. Pop culture has some good ideas, too!

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It’s time for a big one: let’s discuss what was and wasn’t a weakness for folkloric vampires.

(I mean look I might use a lot of Lestat gifs in these posts, okay?)

Please note that this post will not include every vampire weakness as found in folklore and pop culture, as that would be absolutely massive; it will cover the most common ones. I’ll save the full list for when I publish my own book on vampires in folklore.

So, like I did in my post on werewolf weaknesses, let’s break them down.

Appeared in folklore

Stake - The trusty stake, the old standby. Yes, vampires were very often staked in folklore to finally end their nightly rampages.

Needles - Less common than the stake concept, but still a thing: pin a vampire’s body to a coffin using needles and you won’t have a vampire problem anymore. Sometimes it was through the heart, sometimes through the palms or fingers, sometimes various other places and sometimes lots or sometimes just one or two.

Obsessive counting - Kind of funny that this makes Sesame Street fairly folklore-accurate: a lot of vampires in legend were obsessed with counting. Spill a bag of beans behind you as you run away from a vampire, and that vampire will just have to stop and count those beans. Can’t resist.

Garlic - Yes, garlic - along with various other types of herbs and some types of wood - warded off vampires. This wasn’t a pop culture creation. It was, however, often the garlic flowers that warded them off.

Holy symbols - Although some modern media backs off this one, but it was definitely a thing in folklore. You can ward a vampire off with a holy symbol. The symbol in question was, generally, a cross, as many of the stories from which we draw our primary vampire concepts are Christian.

Holy water - Also a thing.

Running water - Vampires, whether we count them as spirits or not, have something in common with a lot of different kinds of spirits in that they cannot cross running water. This appeared in several stories.

Invitation - Can vampires really not cross the threshold without being invited in? Yes, that did actually appear in some folklore.

And under “not really a weakness but was still a thing,” I will file...

Fire - I wouldn’t really consider this a vampire weakness, seeing as how - more often than not - it isn’t actually used against vampires that are currently up and about feeding on people, at least as far as folklore is concerned. However, it is used to burn parts of immobile vampires, such as to burn their corpses/bodies and to burn their heart, after it’s removed from the body, so it does work in that capacity, of course. It’s often important to dispose of the ashes properly, as well.

Mirrors/Lack of reflection - Vampires in a lot of folklore had no reflection at all, and mirrors are of course the most obvious way of showing that. It was a way of revealing a vampire, and vampires often tried to avoid mirrors as a result. This has nothing to do with any quality of the mirrors themselves. They just have no reflection, because they have no soul (i.e., they are often demons, in folklore).

Wine - Corpses and corpse parts, such as bones, were often washed in wine to cleanse them of evil and protect them from curses. Wine often had holy connotations and purification abilities in various cultures and religions, including but not at all limited to Christianity.

May or may not have appeared in folklore, but probably didn’t

Any water (varied by vampire legend) - This varies a lot. Some vampires are burned by all water, really, as if it’s acid. Others, not so much. Others only care if it’s running water. Some actually live in swamps and will drown people. So this is very much a variable thing.

Decapitation - The most commonly seen method for finally destroying a vampire and making sure they don’t come back isn’t decapitation, though we see that occasionally - but it is almost always accompanied by cutting out and destroying the vampire’s heart, which is more important than anything related to their head.

Did NOT appear in folklore

Sunlight - I covered this one in much more depth in this post here, but nope, it wasn’t a weakness for vampires in folklore.

Corpse blood - Vampires in folklore never really encountered problems with drinking blood from corpses, as their solution was simple: they didn’t do that. This is a modern pop culture vampire hunter thing about somebody tricking a vampire into drinking old blood somehow, and it didn’t really come up in folklore. It is, of course, implied in folklore - obviously - that a vampire has to drink living blood, but we don’t see vampires being defeated by corpse blood somehow.

Silver - I’m not convinced this one appeared in folklore until someone actually shows me the source for it, because I can’t find one. Werewolves, of course, are not sensitive to silver in folklore and that comes from Hollywood. It seems to me that this was put on vampires because of the weird often-muddied nature of werewolves and vampires in some media. Now, some people say vampires are associated with Judas Iscariot and that silver is associated with said vampires because of the silver coins he was given to betray Jesus, but I can’t really find much about that other than people mentioning it, so where exactly are the legends where vampires are associated with Judas? Until I find some definitive primary sources about this, I’m going to leave silver on the “no” list, especially because it feels like such a product of pop culture.

So there you have it! As I mentioned, this obviously isn’t every single potential weakness in everything ever, but this covers most of the major/more common ones you see around.

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Remember the handy post on ways to become a werewolf in folklore vs pop culture? Here’s one of those but for vampires!

Please note, as usual, that this is not going to cover the full range of possibilities, but it will cover the most common/most popular ones. This applies to both folklore and pop culture. And of course, again, I’ll save a full list for when I write my book on vampires, you know?

Please bear in mind that a lot of these come from Romania and other regions of Eastern Europe, which are rich with vampire folklore that is some of the best-preserved that scholars currently have for study. It is essentially the baseline of what we consider “vampires” today.

Something to think about before we enter into this list, of course, is that I want to re-emphasize - and I will do this several times in this post - that vampirism was not a “disease” like it sometimes is considered today. Although vampires were often associated with disease in folklore, vampirism itself is not a disease. It is either a demonic being that is a vampire, or else it is a curse. Vampires have this in common with werewolves of pop culture today that being a vampire is some kind of infectious disease they can pass on to others (here is how lycanthropy isn’t a disease at all in folklore, ever), but that isn’t really a thing in folklore.

Appeared in folklore

Being a demon - A lot of vampires in folklore were not humans at all. They were demons taking the shape of humans (sometimes; they didn’t always maintain that shape, sometimes appearing as mist). It’s important to mention this one because I cannot emphasize enough that vampirism in folklore is generally a demon, demonic possession, or a curse, not a disease like it so often is today.

Demonic possession - Plenty of times, a vampire in folklore is the result of a demon possessing a corpse, and again, they aren’t really humans at all, per se.

Being born cursed, becoming vampire after death - There are all sorts of reasons for this (see the last entry in this “appeared in folklore” list, though even that doesn’t cover all of them). One could be born with the curse of vampirism - but that would only manifest after the person died.

Being cursed - Sometimes somebody just straight-up doesn’t like someone else and then they curse them. After that person dies, they’ll return as a vampire because of the curse. This often didn’t require some complex ritual, because in the olden days, even saying “damn you” was literally considered a curse - this is why it’s called a “curse word.” If you say that to someone, you are literally cursing that person, wishing them to be damned.

Violent life/violent death - Someone who lived a violent life - if they were a killer, if they mutilated others, whatever - and then also died a violent death, such as if they were murdered, would rise again as a vampire.

Incest/born out of wedlock - What it says on the tin. The child would be cursed and then become a vampire after death.

Incorrect burial rites - Gotta get those burial rites correct. Mess them up, and the person will rise again as a vampire. You don’t just stick a person in the ground. Extra measures might be taken to prevent the person becoming a vampire, too, like burying the corpse face-down or sticking needles or a stake in it, as mentioned in this post on weaknesses.

Ignoring traditions - You may have heard of strigoi or the similar word striga from a certain popular fantasy game - or maybe you never played the first one; you should - but it isn’t what you think. A strigoi is a spirit, and if one does not properly undertake the right funerary feasts in the right time period after a person’s death, then that person might rise again as a strigoi - in other words, a vampire of sorts. This basically falls into the same category as incorrect burial rites, but it’s slightly different because these traditions may need to be held more than once, such as once a year, in order to keep the spirit pleased.

Animals jumping over corpses/graves - Cats, dogs, horses, you name it. Animals jumping over graves was not a good thing, especially for the recently interred or those in the process of being buried. They’d probably return from the dead as a vampire.

Suicide - There are some stories in which committing suicide can result in a vampire, such as one tale of a man who hangs himself, becomes a vampire, and then still pursues his girlfriend, who spurns his advances because he’s an evil spirit now. He does not, however, want to drink her blood, because not all vampires actually wanted/needed to do that (more on that later).

Many strange and specific happenstances - These include but are not limited to: not eating garlic during life, a pregnant woman not eating salt during her pregnancy, if the mother of a child is a witch and/or uses spells and incantations, if someone lives an amoral life (such as obtaining money falsely, for instance, as well as being violent etc. as mentioned before), if a pregnant woman is seen by a vampire (and given the evil eye; a big deal in folklore)... all of these would result in the person and/or the child in question becoming a vampire after death, but they would not be born this way. All of these emphasize that being a vampire is a curse, often put upon those who do not live moral lives. Or, I guess, those who don’t eat their proper anti-vampire diet.

Did NOT appear in folklore

Almost any case of a vampire “creating” another vampire - This wasn’t really a thing in folklore. Much like how lycanthropy wasn’t considered a “contagious disease” in any fashion in folklore, being a vampire was a curse, and it wasn’t something they could pass on. Events in a person’s life, whether in or out of their control, determined whether they would become a vampire; this is especially true of Romanian folklore.

Blood transfusion - They didn’t really do blood transfusions back when - though drinking blood was a thing, actually, and not just for vampires; more on that later, though - so obviously there’s no vampire folklore where you put a vampire’s blood into someone else and then that person becomes a vampire, for so many reasons.

Drinking vampire blood - Nope. In fact, a vampire’s heart was sometimes eaten or the ashes of the heart drank by someone in order to destroy a vampire.

Biting a human - Nope. First of all, vampires in folklore didn’t really have the signature fangs to leave those fang marks that means someone will turn into a vampire. Vampires drank blood from their victims all the time and no one ended up becoming a vampire from it, really.

And that’s all for now!

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