mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
With Halloween just around the corner, let’s take a look at some real-world events that may have inspired the creation of vampires, werewolves and zombies. And if you’re in the market for Halloween-appropriate clothing, consider our “Vampires Are a Pain in the Neck” shirt (available in men’s and women’s).
Vampires
One dark and stormy evening, Spanish neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso was watching a vampire movie when he realized something strange; he noticed that vampires behave an awful lot like people with rabies. The virus attacks the central nervous system, altering the moods and behaviors of those infected. Sufferers become agitated and demented, and, much like vampires, their moods can turn violent.
Rabies has several more vampire-like symptoms. It can cause insomnia, which explains the nocturnal portion of the legend. People with rabies also suffer from muscular spasms, which can lead them to spit up blood. What’s stunning is the fact that these spasms are triggered by bright lights, water, mirrors, and strong smells, such as the scent of garlic. (Sound familiar?) After watching the Dracula movies a few more times, Dr. Gomez-Alonso felt compelled to continue studying vampire folklore and the medical history of rabies. Eventually, he discovered an even more profound connection between the two phenomena: Vampire stories became prominent in Europe at exactly the same time certain areas were experiencing rabies outbreaks. This was particularly true in Hungary between 1721 and 1728, when an epidemic plagued dogs, wolves, and humans and left the country in ruins. Gomez-Alonso theorized that rabies actually inspired the vampire legend, and his research was published by the distinguished medical journal Neurology in 1998.
The Madness of King George
Dr. Gomez-Alonso wasn’t the first scientist who tried to pin vampirism to a real illness. In 1985, Canadian biochemist David Dolphin proposed a link between vampires and porphyria—a rare, chronic blood disorder characterized by the irregular production of heme, an iron-rich pigment found in blood. The disorder can cause seizures, trances, and hallucinations that last for days or weeks.
As a result, people with porphyria often go insane. (Britain’s King George III, the one who inspired our founding fathers to start their own country, is thought to have suffered from it.) Porphyria sufferers also experience extreme sensitivity to light, suffering blisters and burns when their skin is exposed to the sun. Another symptom of porphyria is an intolerance to sulfur in foods. Which food contains
a lot of sulfur? That’s right, garlic.
Werewolves
In addition to explaining away vampires, medicine also has some answers for werewolves. In The Werewolf Delusion (1979), Ian Woodward explains that rabies may have also inspired the werewolf myth.
Rabies is transmitted through biting, and the dementia and aggression of late-stage rabies can make people behave like wild animals. Now, imagine that you are living in a village in medieval Europe and you see your friend get bitten by a wolf. A few weeks later, he starts foaming at the mouth, howling at the moon, and biting other villagers. Suddenly, that story your grandmother told you about the Wolfman sounds like a decent explanation for what’s going on.
Zombies
Zombies may also be creatures of science, at least according to Costas J. Efthimiou, a physicist at the University of Central Florida. In 2006, he attempted to explain the mysterious case of Wilfred Doricent, a teenager who died and was buried in Haiti, only to reappear in his village more than a year later, looking and behaving like a zombie. Efthimiou concluded that Wilfred was not the victim of a curse, but of poisoning. In the waters of Haiti, there is a species of puffer fish whose liver can be made into a powder, which has the ability to make a person appear dead without actually killing him. Wilfred may have been poisoned with the powder and then buried alive.
According to one of Dr. Efthimiou’s theories, once underground, Wilfred suffered from oxygen deprivation that damaged his brain. When the poison wore off and Wilfred woke up, he clawed his way out of the grave. (Graves tend to be shallow in Haiti.) Brain-damaged, he wandered the countryside for months until he ended up back in his village.
After Dr. Efthimiou published his explanation of the case, Dr. Roger Mallory, a neurologist at the Haitian Medical Society did an MRI scan of Wilfred’s brain. Although the results were nonconclusive, he found that Wilfred’s brain was damaged in a way that was consistent with oxygen deprivation. It would seem that zombification is nothing more than skillful poisoning.
This article originally appeared in mental_floss magazine.
More from mental_floss…
10 Technologies We Stole From the Animal Kingdom
*
13 Bizarre Stipulations in Wills
*
The Mojave Desert’s Airplane Graveyard: A Photo Tour
*
7 Crafty Zoo Escapes
*
What Is Catnip & Why Are Cats Crazy For It?
*
A Brief History of Fad Diets
*
The White House Gift Guide: 13 Unique Presidential Gifts
*
15 Famous People Who Used to Teach
*
31 Unbelievable High School Mascots
Comments (16)
Comment
- Follow mental_floss
Legends of werewolves predate the 18th century by a longshot.
The Greek historian Herodotus passed along a legend that the people populating the North (I think) coast of the Black Sea turned into wolves and other wild beasts for one day a year.
Of course, Herodotus also reported that Egyptian women pee standing up, so he wasn’t exactly Walter Cronkite.
posted by Ben on 10-8-2009 at 1:35 pm
Awesome article! I love these kinds of stories!
posted by mor on 10-8-2009 at 1:43 pm
Ben, who’s to say that the Egyptian women didn’t pee standing up? It’s very possible for a woman to do so. I’ve never read anything about Egyptian history stating such but there are modern women who do this.
posted by nihil on 10-8-2009 at 3:00 pm
Scott Westerfeld wrote two books — Peeps and the Last Days — based on the concept of vampirism as a real parasite. Its still sf, but there’s a lot of science in it.
posted by Lorin on 10-8-2009 at 3:48 pm
The egyptian thing was about the urine of a virgin being able to cure some disease or maybe used as a contraceptive but it was also a joke that no egyptian women were virgins. Egyptians were very advanced in their notions of gender ideas compared to other ancient cultures.
posted by Hopper on 10-8-2009 at 4:10 pm
Actually, some researchers believe that vampirism more closely mimics porphyria. Aversion to light/light sensitivity, neurosis, and paranoia.
reCaptcha today matches my mood!:
glumly worse
posted by the creature on 10-8-2009 at 6:23 pm
Drat, sorry, didn’t read second paragraph. D’oh.
nevermind…
posted by the creature on 10-8-2009 at 6:26 pm
Really? Someone couldn’t be bothered to read a whole blog post before commenting on it? I might just die of shock.
posted by Dan on 10-8-2009 at 7:54 pm
I took a Biochem class last year and my professor briefly mentioned some other similarities between porphyria and vampirism.
Sometimes the teeth of people with porphyria glow red under an ultraviolet light.
He also said that it is thought that people suffering from this disease crave the heme in blood, though this is not proven.
posted by Beth on 10-8-2009 at 9:32 pm
… I’m surprised by the rabies tie in. That much more closely matches the modern zombie thing than old world vampire stories. Until only really recently, vampires were hideous monsters who slowly sapped the life from young healthy people in the night — until the modern homo-erotic authors vampire thing, then the teen soft porn author variety took over.
The better model to match for vampires is actually tuberculosis. There have been a number of really good research papers on that in fact.
posted by Andrew Pollack on 10-8-2009 at 10:56 pm
I dunno, the only evidence of zombies being from 2006?
I am not saying that there are *true* zombies, however, Hatian lore often mention zobmiesm.
And there is the whole lack of salt thing.
posted by Zelda on 10-10-2009 at 11:21 pm
Wo wo wo…Are you telling me that teen wolf isnt a true story? My day is ruined! Anybody else think Bobby Finstock is the man?
posted by CJ on 10-11-2009 at 2:26 pm
I would highly recommend the podcast or article from Howstuffworks/stuffyoushouldknow about zombies.
posted by Sarah on 10-12-2009 at 3:47 pm
Re: porphyria, this very real and potentially life-threatening disease does not parallel the vampire myth very closely, and fortunately Prof. Dolphin’s speculations have been pretty thoroughly debunked by medicine. Light sensitivity and mental symptoms are usually found in different types of porphyria (there are eight). And the mental symptoms are episodic — they resolve when attacks, are treated. Please visit the American Porphyria Foundation website for more information from medical researchers in the porphyrias.
posted by Mira Geffner on 10-12-2009 at 5:43 pm
The modern age has a mania for this speculative mental fluff, but all “rational explanations for vampire beliefs” totally miss the mark. Vampire beliefs are culture-specific and arose when flaps of paranormal phenomena were filtered through a specific cultural worldview informed by orthodox Christianity. The “rational explanations” tend to “explain” traits of vampires in *fiction* that never existed in folklore beliefs. As Mira points out, Dr. Dolphin’s porphyria argument has been resoundingly debunked (but he’s still lecturing on it!). It’s better to understand past cultures than to rationalize them.
posted by Inanna Arthen on 10-12-2009 at 8:37 pm
Since no readers seemed to have noticed and Mental_floss didn’t mention it , I feel compelled to point out that this article first appeared on the site last year around Halloween. The print magazine version you’re looking at here is missing whole paragraphs of material and the original acknowledges 1) that there are several types of poryphyria and symptoms can be episodic and 2) that werewolf and werebeast myths predate the 18th century and popped up in various disconnected geographies.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/19790
posted by Dan on 10-14-2009 at 6:19 pm